Egypt in the Shadows

An interesting response from a doctoral student (Benjamin Murphy, studying philosophical theology, Oxford) on the question of whether or not the Greeks were the first to practice philosophy, or whether philosophy was first practiced by the Ancient Egyptians, and also in ancient India. The response, which appeared originally on the Quora site,  reveals a great deal about the presumptions western scholars bring to bear on such questions.

He begins by referencing Frederick Copleston on the question. Frederick Copleston wrote a voluminous History of Philosophy, the first volume of which was published in 1944. As he says, it was one of the most widely used histories of philosophy for decades. There was, and still is, nothing quite as comprehensive available to scholars, though the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is perhaps its nearest rival. Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy is short in comparison, and in some cases covers important subjects rather crudely, and with much important detail missing. All three are focussed on Western philosophy, and aren’t much concerned to establish connections with bodies of thought elsewhere.

Murphy tells us that Copleston ‘…considers the claim that Greek philosophy was derived from Egyptian, Indian or Chinese Philosophy and rejects it.’ He gives some reasons for Copleston’s rejection of the notion that Greek philosophy owed something to other cultures:

Copleston explains that the idea that Greek philosophy was derived from Egyptian philosophy originated in Alexandria during the Hellenistic era. (As I’m sure you know, Socrates taught Plato, Plato taught Aristotle, Aristotle taught Alexander the Great whose conquests inaugurated the Hellenistic era, and who founded the city of Alexandria in Egypt). As Copleston also points out, Philo, a Jewish writer who lived in Alexandria during the Hellenistic era claimed philosophy was a Jewish invention, because Moses was a philosopher, and the Torah is a work of philosophy. In other words, when the prestige of Greek philosophy was established, people from other cultures liked to claim “Of course, we invented that first”, and they could point to old writings and say “See, that is philosophy.” But of course, the Torah isn’t philosophy. 

The argument that Greek philosophy was a phenomenon which owed something to Egyptian philosophy, and perhaps Moses, is an old one, and it is true that there was a great deal of competitiveness between cultures during the Hellenistic era. The Babylonian priest of Bel, Berossus, wrote an extensive work, the Babyloniaka, in order to show the antiquity of Babylonian civilisation by means of a kinglist stretching back many thousands of years, and quoted stories to illustrate the sophistication of that civilisation.

Among these stories we find a description of the Babylonian myth of the Creation, and an account of how man came to acquire useful knowledge from a Divine sage (apkallum). Unfortunately the Babyloniaka has been lost for at least fifteen hundred years, possibly more, but the Christian scholar Eusebius made extensive excerpts from it. The general accuracy of the account of Eusebius is confirmed by the fact that we now have access to original Mesopotamian cuneiform texts which describe the Babylonian creation.

The Egyptian scholar Manetho also produced a chronology of Ancient Egypt during the same period, which covered a notional timescale of 432 thousand years, and the thirty dynasties he describes, which (apart from the earliest, which are regarded as entirely mythical) now form the basis of the chronology used by Egyptologists. Again, Manetho’s chronology has come down to us largely via the pages of Eusebius. This list of dynasties, at least in its later phases, also bears some relationship to the chronology as represented in papyri and inscriptions found in Egypt. The Persian invaders in the 5^th century (including Darius) are represented as pharaohs by Manetho, and also by the Egyptian records which survive.

In addition, Plato tells us in the Timaeus that his ancestor Solon visited Egypt, and spoke with Egyptian priests, who told him that the Greeks were very young, and did not possess knowledge ‘hoary with age’. Herodotus mentions that the names of some of the Greek gods came from Egypt. The philosopher Isocrates, a contemporary of Plato, refers explicitly to Egyptian philosophy in his Busiris. Pythagoras travelled around the Levant and the Ancient Near East collecting knowledge from priests and philosophers, including those in Egypt. Plato himself in his Protagoras describes philosophy as a very old practice, and tell us that it was practised in Sparta and in Crete - both territories which received an influx of people from north Africa and Egypt in the middle to late 2^nd millennium BCE.  

But intense cultural competitiveness is insufficient to explain the persistence of the idea that the Egyptians were philosophers. Copleston had not studied Egypt, and pulled this idea out of the air. 

Many Greek words have plausible etymologies from Egyptian. Some of the concepts used by Aristotle in his philosophical writing were known to Egyptians nine hundred years before his time, such as the idea of completion (it is connected with the idea of birth in Akhenaten’s Hymn to the Aten, which dates to the fourteenth century BCE).

As for the claim that the Jews practiced philosophy, this cannot be written off as an empty claim by Philo Judaeus. There is abundant evidence for the existence of philosophical thought among the Jews in the books of the Old Testament.  Yahweh is described as ‘the first and last, and beside me there is no God’. His name (minus the vowels) is a variant of the verb ‘to be’, which suggests that his isolation is due to the fact that he was understood to be Being itself. In the third chapter of Malachi, Yahweh says ‘I do not change’, which is a characterisation of the nature of Being which would have been familiar to philosophers and sages around the Mediterranean and the Near East. It is an explicitly philosophical description of Being itself, since Being cannot be what it is, if it is subject to change.

What we don’t have from Mesopotamia, Egypt and the Hebrew Kingdoms is recorded philosophical discussions which closely parallel the writings of Greek philosophers. There is nothing strange in that. What is strange is that we have philosophical arguments from Greece, since both Plato and Aristotle distinguished two forms of teaching: exoteric and esoteric. The exoteric teaching was suitable for anyone to hear, but the esoteric teaching was of a different nature, and was restricted to those who were capable of understanding it. Which means that they were discussing matters relating to the gods, and to divine things. So in the versions of these discussions which were circulated, there is often elision, obfuscation, misdirection, and alternative terminology. Plato does not refer to the ‘one true thing’ as god, but as ‘the good’, for this reason. Arguments which are not resolved in the course of discussion, are deemed to ‘necessarily’ be the case, for otherwise communion with the gods would be impossible, or motion would be impossible, etc. The genealogy of the gods is not discussed, as too complicated a matter, and those who claim to have divine ancestors (says Plato), should know the truth of the matter better than anyone else.

In the 2nd century CE, the Christian theologian Clement of Alexandria wrote:

Philosophy, then, with all its blessed advantages to man, flourished long ages ago among the barbarians, diffusing its light among the gentiles, and eventually penetrated into Greece. Its hierophants were the prophets among the Egyptians, the Chaldeans among the Assyrians, the Druids among the Galatians, the Sramanas of the Bactrians, and the philosophers of the Celts, the Magi among the Persians….  and among the Indians the Gymnosophists, and other philosophers of barbarous nations.

— Clement of Alexandria, Stromata 1.15.71 (ed. Colon. 1688 p. 305, A, B).

Alexander himself consulted the Gymosophists when he arrived in India, and we have what purports to be some of their conversation together in Plutarch’s life of Alexander. The idea that only the Greeks practiced philosophy was not what he had been taught by Aristotle. Aristotle argued that philosophy began when there existed a leisured class with time to think and conjecture (by which he probably had in mind the fully professional class of priests in Egypt). Diogenes Laertius also mentioned that there was a school of thought in existence which argued that philosophy originated outside Greece. 

One of the comments by Caleb Beers following the article,  articulates the important question:

…. define “philosophy.” Are alchemical texts philosophy? Is divination (an attempt at?) philosophy? Is a discourse on mystical states philosophy? Is mythology philosophy? You can argue that there are philosophical dimensions to all of these things. The Bhagavad Ghita certainly waxes philosophical, and some sections are oddly reminiscent of Parmenides (or Parmenides is reminiscent of the Ghita).

Is there nothing philosophical in this passage from a hymn to the Sun-God from Egypt?

Grant that I may come into the everlasting heaven and the mountain where thy favoured ones dwell. Let me join myself to those who are holy and perfect in the divine Underworld, and let me appear with them to behold thy beauties at eventide. I lift my hands to thee in adoration when thou the living one dost sets. Thou art the Eternal Creator and art adored at thy setting in heaven.

[From the Papyrus of Ani *1]

It is a passage which expresses a desire for union with the divine, the creator of the world. Union with what is holy and perfect. And expresses adoration for what is beautiful in heaven when it (the living one) meets the limit of what it is. Is that not something like Plsto's conception when he talks about the philosopher ascending to the Good via the Forms?

Murphy in fact redefines what he will accept as philosophy, in a manner reminiscent of James Frazer: he embraces what is practical and useful. Which is not how philosophy was understood in antiquity. Ironically the possibility of an Egyptian contribution to the development of philosophy is sometimes dismissed by modern scholars because they consider that Egyptians dealt in concrete practicalities and useful things, and were simply not capable of abstract thought. 

He says:

...Greece is the starting point for what would become a strictly logical philosophy based on reasoning and empiricism. There’s some stuff about gods and afterlives in Plato, of course, but by the time you get to Aristotle, you find elaborate theories on the external world using what is not yet a rigorously scientific method but still draws on observation of the world around us to draw general conceptual conclusions using reasoning.

He concludes
:

...Greece is credited - rightfully, in my opinion - with giving birth to the philosophy that would later become science. That, I think, is what ultimately makes us defer to the Greeks.

1. The Papyrus of Ani is a papyrus manuscript created c. 1250 BCE.  Egyptians compiled an individualized book for certain people upon their death, called the 'Book of Going Forth by Day', containing declarations and spells to help the deceased in the afterlife. The Papyrus of Ani is the manuscript compiled for the Theban scribe Ani.

This papyrus was (shockingly) stolen from an Egyptian government storeroom in 1888 by Sir E. A. Wallis Budge, which theft he describes in By Nile and Tigris, for the collection of the British Museum. Before he shipped the manuscript to England, Budge cut the seventy-eight foot scroll into thirty-seven sheets of nearly equal size, damaging its integrity.

Polytheism, Monotheism, and The Cult of the Aten

[This is one of twenty-one essays in the book Man and the Divine, published in August 2018. The book is available in ePub format from leading retailers of eBooks, such as Barnes & Noble, Blio, Kobo, Itunes, Inktera, Smashwords, etc. Information about Man and the Divine can be found here]

There is a scholarly view of Polytheism and monotheistic belief in antiquity, which is often quite subtly nuanced. And there is the public view, put about by popularisers, and in religious education classes. The latter view is a simple one, which provides support for the idea that modern religious belief is improved in some way. It suggests that monotheism represents an intellectual advance on polytheistic belief, and provided a basis for cultural unification which was not present before the introduction of the idea. In the public mind there is a simple sequence of polytheism being superseded by monotheism.

There are two candidates which appear to illustrate this transformation, for the argument requires something resembling evidence: the earliest being the supposed intellectual revolution undertaken by the Pharaoh Akhenaten. This revolution failed to the extent that great effort was expended by the other priesthoods in Egypt to obliterate all mention and memory of Akhenaten’s name and actions. He was referred to as ‘that heretic’ by succeeding generations.

The second candidate is the god of the Hebrews, and the supposed development of monotheism. The revolution is recorded in the Pentateuch as the work of Moses. The Hebrew god is shown as being more efficacious than other Levantine Gods (it is to be remembered that, according to the Pentateuch, Yahweh was introduced to the Hebrews before their migration into the land of the Canaanites). [i] This revolution was successful, even if it did not prove a happy transformation for the Hebrews, since later on, it led to the destruction of much of their cultural life, when they were in conflict with Rome. It provided a background for the development of Christianity. The Christian religion, particularly once taken over as the state religion of Rome, oversaw the final destruction of the great polytheistic systems of belief in Assyria, Babylonia, and in Egypt.

The scholarly view has long known that polytheistic belief in the ancient world is complex and much more than just a world of many gods. Divinities were not seen as entirely discrete, and it was possible for principal figures in a pantheon to embrace the lesser gods. Thus the Mesopotamian god Marduk embraced the other gods, and their properties. Gods could appear in the form of other gods – this is expressly described in Egyptian texts, where a god king could appear (for example) in the form of the warrior god Montu, slaying his enemies, whatever the King’s principal divine cult was. In Assyria, a priest possessed by a god might speak a few lines in the character of one god, and in succeeding sentences, speak in the voice of another god. This was conceivable if all of the gods were connected together in a kind of primordial monotheism, which we now describe with the term ‘henotheism’. As a consequence of this way of thinking, the worship of one god did not preclude the recognition of other gods, since they represented related aspects of the worshipped god.

The importance of this phenomenon is that it indicates that the concept of the gods was understood to some extent as a continuum, and that each of the gods represented a different characterization of the divine. The individual gods in effect offered different connections with divinity.

Rome under the republic consolidated its power over conquered territories and people through the assimilation of local gods. While Rome still worshipped its pantheon of gods, such assimilation of local gods in conquered territories was  common. After Rome embraced Christianity however, the former easy equivalence between divinities became impossible, since the God of the Christians could not be the equivalent of all local deities, as it was the universal deity, and by definition, one alone. The policy of the Christian church was to employ the tactic of declaring local and foreign gods as devils and their followers as heathens. They and their characters were not to be embraced, but emphatically rejected.

As justification for this, the god of the Christians became something which had been shown to man by divine revelation, rather than a matter of philosophical argument about the nature of divinity. Whereas in the ancient model of divine things there was an easy acceptance that the gods were in some way realisations of the properties and attributes they represented, and that they could be interchanged and adapted, Yahweh, was the one true god, without peer, and for all eternity.

A similar process - the demonization of Caananite and foreign gods and the forbidding of their worship - occurred among the Hebrews in the earlier part of the first millennium B.C.E. Through the books of the Old Testament we can gain a little understanding of the arc of development in Hebrew thought, and something of the essentially polytheistic nature of their intellectual system before the severe depredations of Hebrew culture by the Assyrians, particularly in the 8th century B.C.E.

The rise of monotheism in Egypt is particularly difficult to understand, but it is important to try and fathom its main aspects in order to gain a comparative view.  It is not clear in fact that what we take to be the development of monotheistic belief in Egypt in the middle of the 2^nd millennium B.C.E is any such thing. Before the rise of modern archaeology we knew little about Akhenaten, and there was a tendency among the first scholars to study the evidence, to read easy parallels with monotheism as represented in the Old Testament.  

Excavation at modern Tell el Amarna (Akhet-aten, or ‘Horizon of the Aten’/ ‘Limit of the Aten’), Akhenaten’s new city foundation, quickly revealed that here scholars were dealing with a king whose beliefs and cultural artefacts were significantly different from they had come to expect. [ii]  He seems to have annoyed the priests of other Egyptian cults in his own time, and he is still capable of acting as a lightning rod for uninformed argument even now.

An important clue to the intellectual background of the change in styling lies in Akhenaten’s former name: Amenhotep. At this time (the fourteenth century B.C.E.) the cult and the priesthood of the god Amun were powerful and prominent, and they had an important power base in Luxor. [iii]  Amun is the first element in the name of Akhenaten’s original name, and that of his father. The relationship of Egyptian pharaohs to the various priesthoods is undeniably complex, however the tradition in Egypt was that the king was a representation of the divine on Earth. He was a god king, and could appear in the form of any member of the divine pantheon. No-one however would be comfortable with a Pharaoh whose principle identification would be that of a lesser god. So the most important divine name in the Pharaoh’s name would be that of the divine cult which had the greatest power and prestige at the time. The cult would then be the cult of the King. [iv]

Amun is a strange god. He is unknowable and unseen. His shrine was kept in a darkened temple. He could be represented in one of his many forms, and through symbols. But his nature defies human understanding. He was regarded as an old god, though his cult did not have a history stretching back into the distant past. Which means that Amun was recognised as a primordial god, involved in the creation of the world, even if there was no ancient cult of Amun. This means that the God was understood to be theologically significant in the 14^th century B.C.E. Hence the incorporation of the Gods’s name in the names of successive pharaohs.

The significant point to remember is that, as Amenhotep, Akhenaten could appear in some divine form, but could not manifest as the god himself. That is, he was Amun, who appears as other things, but by his very nature, cannot appear directly in his principal nature. He transcends shape and form, and is the unknowable god. Clearly there is an abstruse theology behind the articulation of a divine nature which is invisible and unknowable. One might characterize the Assyrian god Ashur in a very similar way: he sits at the head of the pantheon, embraces the other gods, and manifests himself through presence and action expressed in terms of representation by other divine forms.

Akhenaten however had a very specific idea of what was divine. This idea departed radically from the complex and nuanced theologies of Luxor and Thebes. On the face of the matter, it used to be argued that Akhenaten represented the sun as divine.[v]  This has been presented as a heresy pure and simple, from the point of view of the other priesthoods in Egypt. The evidence however does not support the notion that Akhenaten forbade the worship of other gods from the outset, or that the priesthoods of other gods regarded the worship of the Aten as a danger. After all, the sun was a divine figure in the pantheon of gods, represented by Ra. But this was, at the time, a sun god whose essential nature was understood to be beyond its outward appearance. The sun was its symbol, and the good things which came to man from it were the product of its essential nature, rather than its appearance and physical properties of heat and light. We know this since at this particular period, the god Ra was often conjoined with the unknowable formless god, as Amun-Ra. In this way the representational and symbolic nature of the visible sun was emphasized.

It is useful to look closely at the name of Akhenaten’s god. We know it as Aten, and that is how it is given by most scholars. His full title however was ‘The Ra-Horus who rejoices in the horizon, in his/her Name of the Light which is seen in the sun disk’. We find this full rendering of the Aten’s name on the stelae placed around Akhetaten, which was Akhenaten’s newly founded capital. These stelae were placed to mark the boundaries of the new foundation. Sometimes the full name was shortened to Ra-Horus-Aten, or just ‘Aten’. Since two of the names of Akhenaten’s god refer to the sun (Ra being an older name for the sun god), it seems that some kind of intellectual synthesis of older ideas had taken place.

 

The Aten is first mentioned (to our knowledge) in the Story of Sinuhe, which dates at least as far back as the twelfth dynasty, where the dead king is described as uniting with with the sun-disk in the heavens. Akhenaten’s iconography never shows the god in anthropomorphic form – instead the Aten is always shown as the sun disk with rays of light extending from it, with hands at the end of each ray. Akhenaten and his family receive these rays, and stand between the Aten and the ordinary Egyptians. The Sun god was considered to be neither male nor female, but both simultaneously, an idea which was reflected in the depiction of Akhenaten in sculpture and reliefs.

Eventually the worship of the other gods was proscribed, probably after a period of struggle between the royal court/cult of the Aten, and the priesthoods, for which we have no direct detail – particularly the priesthood of Amun. This does not mean that such a proscription was always part of the intention of Akhenaten; he may have felt that he was forced to do this owing to the strength of political opposition. However his adoption of the worship of the sun disk, of which he was the representative on earth, as the supreme deity, is an idea which does leave the other gods as fundamentally irrelevant to the life of Egypt. Akhenaten’s Egypt however, was not monotheistic in any meaningful sense, as long as other gods were worshipped.

Was Akhenaten's reign a "revolutionary" period in Egyptian history?  The evidence we have for Akhenaten is puzzling in a number of ways: he changed the artistic canon of Egypt, moved his capital, changed the public forms of worship and ritual; and changed the design of temples. The reasons for these changes are not easy to understand. Consequently Akhenaten has been the victim of both modern conjectures by Egyptologists, and also the speculations of the lunatic fringe: the evidence is enigmatic, suggestive, and lends itself to speculation. However, such is the psychological power of the ”perceived” figure of Akhenaten that even the actual evidence is sometimes discounted.

It is easy, for instance, to characterize Akhenaten as in some way abnormal, as an aberration within his culture, by arguing from the evidence of the extant Amarna letters and the boundary stelae that he walled himself up in his new city foundation of Akhet-Aten; also, from his apparent refusal to go to the assistance of his Levantine dominions when under attack from the north; and, developing this notion further into Akhenaten as the first notable pacifist, arguing that he was not depicted in the traditional warrior pose of "Smiter of Asiatics".

As for the last assertion, it is untrue to say that Akhenaten is not depicted in traditional fashion: he is shown as a warrior in a number of kiosks; also, he initiated one campaign in Nubia, and in the Levant he "responded to the collapse of the Mittani before the Hittites with a mixture of diplomacy

and military action" [O'Connor, in Trigger, Kemp, O'Connor, Lloyd,  Ancient Egypt: A Social History, ch. 3, p.220.] The remains of the Amarna archive of cuneiform tablets are insufficient for us to determine the precise nature of Akhenaten's response to Levantine difficulties: most of the letters are from Byblos, and their precise chronological order is uncertain. They can be arranged to illustrate a continuous decline, but they might as well be arranged to show a series of ups and downs.

As for his supposed voluntary imprisonment in his own capital Akhet-Aten, this also is a conclusion which is not warranted by the evidence. Akhenaten identifies one of his stelae saying that it is the "southern stela which is on the eastern mountain of Akhet-Aten, that is the stela of Akhet-Aten, which I shall let stand in its place" [M. Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, vol. II, p. 50: the later Boundary Stelae of Amenhotep IV (Akhenaten)]. This can be literally understood to mean that he himself stayed permanently within its boundaries, but it is more likely that he meant that the stelae themselves would not be moved.  Later in the same text [op. cit., p. 51] he emphasises the importance he attached to the existence of the stelae in the places in which they had been made. Of the oath on the stelae he says:

It shall not be erased. It shall not be washed out. It shall not be hacked out. It shall not be covered with gypsum. It shall not be made to disappear. If it disappears, if it vanishes, if the stelae on which it is falls down, I shall renew it again, afresh in this place in which it is.

Why he regarded the precise limits of Akhet-Aten as a matter of great importance is not clear, though since the city was understood to participate in eternity it is easy to understand concern with the precision of its limits as an extension of Akhenaten's wish that the city abide.

The art of Amarna is, compared with the whole history of Egyptian art, distinctly naturalistic: is this an innovation by Akhenaten? A naturalistic style was already beginning to appear under Amenhotep III, although the precise chronology of this is difficult to determine because of the unsolved problem

of co-regencies. It may be safe to say that Akhenaten developed (or rather encouraged through patronage) a style of art already coming into existence. On the other hand, the characteristics of images of Akhenaten may be connected with a pattern of religious ideas specifically associated with him: modern scholars find the religious ideas to be the strongest evidence of his revolutionary character.

It can be argued that what Akhenaten did was to change the emphasis on the character of Re, who had been becoming increasingly important in the eighteenth dynasty, so that the religious focus of Egyptian culture shifted even more from the invisible aspect of Re (Amun in the yoking Amun-Re), to the visible aspect of the sun, the disk (the Aten). This by itself does not represent a great innovation, for "the identification of king and disk had become more explicit in the reign of Tuthmosis IV... and was to continue until Ramesses III... the cult itself survived"  [Trigger, et al, op. cit., p. 220.]

In the hymn to the sun from El-Amarna, the Aten is described as the living sun. But it is also spoken of as Re. Both terms refer to the sun, but they do not mean precisely the same thing. One of his titles contains "Re": i.e., "Nefer kheprure - Sole one of Re". "Shu" also appears in one of his

titles: i.e., "Harakhti that rejoiceth  in the Horizon  in his name Shu, which is the sun" [A. Erman, The Ancient Egyptians, pp.289-291; 292]. Therefore it is not legitimate to argue that Akhenaten rejected all forms of divinity save the Aten. What we can say from the evidence of Amarna art, the texts of the Amarna hymns, and the boundary stelae. is that he seems to have rejected all forms of divinity unconnected with the sun, or at least those not closely connected with it.

In focussing his attention on the sun's disk, what is Akhenaten doing? Is this a radical or reactionary change? One can argue from the hymns and the art that Akhenaten is locating his god in a very concrete way: worshipping the sun itself and its visible attributes and tangible properties (i.e., warmth and light; promotion of growth and vitality);with most other gods being ignored as irrelevant.

Two important facts require to be explained:

1. The suppression of Amun (associated with the sun through the yoking Amun-Re) by the quite literal obliteration of the name wherever it was found, and

2. the obliteration of references to "gods" in the plural ["Neteru"]. Amun (more accurately, Amun-Re) is described in other sources as “Greatest of heaven, eldest of earth, lord of what existeth who abideth in (?) all things. Unique in his nature... chiefest of all gods. Lord of Truth, father of the gods who made mankind, and created beasts... more immanent of nature than any god, over whose beauty the gods rejoice... thee who didst create the gods, raise up the sky and spread out the ground... the Lord of Eternity, who created everlastingness... thou whose chapel is hidden, lord of gods. [Erman, op. cit., "The Great Hymn to Amun", p. 283-4.]

The point here is that Akhenaten appears to have been suppressing the worship of a god whose very nature ought to have made it very difficult to conceive of such a worship in the first place, halfway through the 2^nd millennium B.C.E. The description of his nature indicates that it  is essentially a transcendent one. This is without question a philosophically based conception of a creator deity, the Lord of Eternity who created the other gods, who raised up the sky, and spread out the ground. In this hymn, Amun is the lord of an undifferentiated plenum, from which the physical world is generated.

Amun is one who remains forever unknown: "One falleth down dead on the spot for terror, if his mysterious, unknowable name is pronounced". That is, if we did know Amun, and could pronounce his name, it would breach every comfortable category of our understanding: "no god can address him by it, him with the soul (?) [i.e., the Ka which connects him with eternity] whose name is hidden, for that he is a mystery" [A. Erman, op. cit., p. 30]. In contrast the disk of the sun is a visible image of the divine, and is therefore a proper and publicly intelligible object of worship and adoration; and for the same reason the king is also a proper object of worship: since one is reckoned as the image of the other

.

As noted earlier, the identification of the king and the sun disk predates the reign of Akhenaten, which implies that his actions and beliefs ought to be intelligible – to some extent at least - within a pre-existing pattern of ideas in Egypt. One might speculate that the singular nature of this image is the reason for the suppression of the divine plurals, but I think that the matter is much more complicated. If Amun is intrinsically mysterious ("...none knoweth his mysterious nature..."), then to come to exist in the manifold of space and time, he must appear in a form which can be understood - as a manifestation or metaphor of his real unknowable nature.

Thus: "He who shaped his egg himself... the divine god who came into being of himself: all gods came into being, after he began to be”. Hence all gods can be understood as aspects of the unknowable Amun: "of mysterious form... the wondrous god with many forms". But Amun "hid himself from the gods, and his nature is not known" [A. Erman, op. cit., p.299]. To determine the intention of Akhenaten's actions, we have to gain a clearer understanding of the meaning and usage of theological concepts and terms, in both his own period, and in the preceding dynasties. This clarity is some way off.

Select bibliography:

Clayton, Peter A., Chronicle of the Pharaohs, Thames & Hudson, 1994
David, Rosalie, Religion and Magic in Ancient Egypt, Penguin Books, 2002
Erman,  Adolf, The Ancient Egyptians. A sourcebook of their writings. Translated by Aylward M. Blackman, Harper & Row, 1966

Lichtheim, Miriam,  Ancient Egyptian Literature, vol. II: The New Kingdom, University of California Press, 1976
Redford, Donald B. Akhenaten: The Heretic King, Princeton University Press, 1984; American University in Cairo Press, 1989

Shafer, Byron E., The Temples of Ancient Egypt, IB Tauris, 1998
Shaw, Ian, ed. Oxford History of Ancient Egypt, OUP, 2000
Shorter, Alan W., A Handbook of Egyptian Gods, RKP, 1937
Trigger, Kemp, O'Connor, Lloyd, Ancient Egypt: A Social History, CUP, 1983
Wilkinson, Richard W., The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt, Thames & Hudson, 2003

[This the first part of a two part examination of Akhenaten and the Cult of the Aten. The second part, 'The Horizon of the Aten', will be published on this website on New Year's day, 2019. We have much more information about Akhenaten (and his father) than is normally taken into account in the construction of theories about Akhenaten's intentions. 'The Horizon of the Aten' analyses this extra information, and looks at how it may change our view of Akhenaten and his understanding of his role as Pharaoh. The article also reconstructs the political and religious aspects of his reign, so far as we know them. 

The article will then become part of a separately published review of Akhenaten, This will be available as an ebook, with an extensive preface, and a bibliography. Further details to follow. TY, November 28, 2018.]

 

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[i] There is little attempt to describe the transition to monotheism in terms of a competition of ideas. I remember the competition between the priesthoods of Yahweh and Baal from bible class in school – Yahweh and Baal were invoked sequentially to ignite kindling. Baal failed, and Yahweh succeeded.

[ii] All further instances of ‘horizon’ as a term should be understood to connote ‘limit’ and ‘boundary’, unless indicated otherwise. ‘Akhet’ may also mean ‘inundation’, which ties together the importance of the limit and inundation for the annual regeneration of the world.

[iii] The temple at Luxor appears to have been built around 1400 B.C.E., and was dedicated to the Theban Triad of the cult of the Royal Ka (Amun, Mut, and Khonsu). The Ka is one of the two Egyptian conceptions of the soul, and it represents Pharaonic participation in divinity. The temple complex is not dedicated to one god alone, but to three related aspects of divinity.

[iv] The cult of Amun is not as old as other Egyptian cults, so its importance did not arise simply from its longevity. So it is likely that there was a strong intellectual component in the struggle between the cult of Amun and the cult of the Aten in the 14th century B.C.E.  

[v] We are familiar with Plato using the sun as an image of the Good in the Republic, where its character and nature illustrates a point about leading men out of intellectual darkness. But there was no attempt to argue that the sun was the good or the divine in actuality.

Philosophical Thought in the Neolithic (and why we cannot see it)

While responding to a mail from the managing editor of a scholarly magazine,  who I'd pointed in the direction of a couple of articles on my blog, I found myself condensing my project into the compass of just four paragraphs. This covers both what I am doing, and why. I reproduce them here:

Years ago I read Adolf Erman's collection of Egyptian Literature in English translation. One text in particular made me sit up, since it involved the use of concepts I associated with classical Greece. The text was Akhenaten's 'Hymn to the Aten'. Akhenaten lived some nine hundred years before Plato and Aristotle, yet he seemed to be comfortable with concepts which are supposed to have been first discussed among the Greeks. I looked for other 'anticipations', and found them.

That propelled me to study in London (in 1989). By that time I'd started to look at antiquity quite differently from the way I'd been taught by classicists. Instead of seeing classical Greece (and the work of the later philosophers all the way up to the closure of the philosophical schools in 529 CE) as the beginnings of sophisticated thought about abstract concepts, I began to treat major components of classical thought as the possible end point of a way of thinking, which might conceivably stretch back into the neolithic. The notion of excellence is one of those components, which as we now know was a concern for the megalith builders.

That's the basic hypothesis. The idea of Greece as the birthplace of philosophy is a modern construct. Plato himself said it was a very old discipline, but classicists don't bother to discuss what he had to say about that when they are writing about the history of philosophy. The evidence from around the eastern Mediterranean however, bears out what Plato said.

My focus so far has been mainly on Mesopotamia, and back to the 14th century BCE, because it is the area where I have the most expertise. It is now pretty clear however that the hypothesis that the presence of abstract ideas stretches back into the Neolithic is sound, and that this insight can deliver great riches. If only we can escape our enlightenment presumptions about the intellectual poverty of our distant ancestors.

Best regards,

Thomas Yaeger

The two articles the managing editor was pointed at were: Stone Circles, Phenomenology, and the Neolithic Mind, and: Frazer and the Association of Ideas, 

I introduced the first article as looking at the context and function of Stone Circles, particularly when looked at as structures which may have served a similar function to divine statues in both Greece and Mesopotamia. In Mesopotamia, during the installation of divine statues, the three day ritual necessarily involved pointing them at defined areas of the sky, because the heavens were understood to represent an image of the Divine - of Being and Reality itself. 

The second article I described as a review of J. G. Frazer's approach to the meaning of evidence from the ancient world. He was trained in Classics, and knew the works of Plato virtually backwards and his concern with the idea of Being, but chose to write his account of ancient thought entirely without reference to the idea of Being in antiquity. He suggested that since nothing could be predicated of Being, it was an entirely barren concept. So Frazer's voluminous output is really a species of fiction, replacing sophisticated thought about the nature of reality with the argument that ancient human thought was, more or less entirely, built on intellectual error.