Pharaoh Akhenaten, the Aten, and the History of Ideas (II)

[Mail sent to a specialist in ancient astronomy on February 15, 2019. It is a response to a mail of the 28th January, 2019.]

[...]

I was a bit coy about Akhenaten - there are still things turning up. And some things need more thought. However, the 400 sacrificial tables at Akhenaten’s new city foundation at Akhetaten (the ‘horizon of the Aten’) isn’t new information, but often it is a detail which isn’t mentioned in discussions.

Unlike most Egyptian temple complexes, the temple is open to the sky. As you are probably aware, Akhenaten, at least towards the end, was in conflict with various priesthoods, possibly because his new religious dispensation made himself and his family the sole conduit to the bounty of the gods. Hence the hacking out of references to Amun by his followers, and the hacking out of representations of Akhenaten and the Aten by those whose hegemony was being threatened.

I think Akhenaten or his officials did a calculation about the number of sacrifices performed daily throughout Egypt across all the major priesthoods, and set out to perform the same number of daily sacrifices at Akhetaten. It could not be said therefore, that insufficient sacrifices were being made. This of course is a hypothesis, and is not so far supported by any texts. But to have so many sacrificial tables in one temple means that they served a real rather than a purely symbolic function.

I agree with everything you said about Hamlet’s Mill. And you are correct that academics have ways of disguising what they don’t know, or aren’t sure about, and there is plenty of that in the book. Having an academic career can often be like walking a tightrope over a bed of burning coals, if you are trying to open up uncharted territory. Most academics deliberately avoid risking their reputations with speculative work, and do more boring stuff instead. We should be grateful to Santillana and von Dechend for staying the course and producing a pioneering work, even if the result is difficult and a sometimes frustrating read.

Sometimes of course they know something, but can’t say it, because the insight is something beyond what can be supported by academic evidence, or is beyond what colleagues can accept as credible explanation. This happens more often than you might think. My most important Assyriological contact wrote a whole paper (72 pages) on a body of ideas shared by the scholars in the royal court in the 1st and 2nd millennia BCE, without overt mention of the most important implication of his discussion [...]. I wrote and told him what that implication was. He agreed in his reply, but is still coy about discussing the matter with his peers. It is not always possible for an academic scholar to say what he thinks in public. Sometimes reading academic papers is a bit like reading code.

The H A Rey book is probably as important as you say, but I have not yet read it. I will let you know when I have. It can be hard to know the forms of the constellations in the distant (and not so distant) past. Re-interpreting the shapes according to the details found in the related myths is probably the only way.

When I mentioned the image of an Egyptian god discussed at a lecture in Cambridge (after which I was nearly run down by Stephen Hawking – I had no idea his wheelchair could make around 15 miles per hour), I wasn’t referring to the question of whether an image of a god is a representation of it, or the god itself. What was strange about the image was that the statue was a representation of a representation of the divine, since it was mounted on a sled. I have no idea what significance that image was meant to have, but its existence is a mark of the sophistication of the Egyptian mind,
which saw the physical world in terms of representations (and sometimes representations of representations).

I take your point about the images of the divine in the constellations being representations of things which have a different (and transcendental) kind of existence – without physical form as we understand it. You refer to this as ‘the invisible realm’, which is fine. I generally refer to this realm as ‘the plenum’. I think we both mean the same thing, but we can discuss that as we go.

Representation is a serious business as you point out, and even now, in various places. I used to have difficulty with the humanist tradition in western scholarship, which encouraged the idea that if you wanted to have some of the qualities of Cicero (for example), then you should read the entirety of his extant work, and regularly. And learn to write text in his style. I never liked this at all, since my attitude was that you should read, interpret and understand an author. But I now understand this approach as stemming from the idea that to represent something is to be that something – to some degree at least.

I’ve taken on board your pointers to blog posts, and how to search for some of them. I’m now reading your stuff on a regular basis. And thanks for the chart, and clarification of the role of Ophiuchus. I’m sure you are right. I was struck by the coincidence of the image turning up when it did, and being such a great example.

The article ‘The Horizon of the Aten’ is one I’m still brooding over, but my experience is that it is likely to be written over a couple of days when I least expect it. But you can ask questions in the meantime. It is a partner to the article ‘Polytheism, Monotheism, and the Cult of the Aten’. At: http://shrineinthesea.blogspot.com/2018/04/polytheism-monotheism-and-cult-of-aten.html


Best regards,

Thomas

Pharaoh Akhenaten, the Aten, and the History of Ideas (I)

[An extract from recent correspondence with a specialist in ancient astronomy. Akhenaten's reign is not often considered to have been one concerned with a technical understanding of astronomy (though through his veneration of the Divine Aten, his interest in the sky is clear). There are interesting reasons for this neglect]

January 24, 2019

[...]

I’ll respond to your mail in order. First the Egyptian paper.

I had the opportunity to look at pharaoh Akhenaten in some depth at university. His reign was covered in the general course on Egyptian history, largely from the point of view that most scholarly writing on Akhenaten doesn’t fit very well with the evidence. I liked this aspect of the teaching of ancient history in London: a highly critical approach to what could actually be known, which sometimes isn’t very much. Other things I disliked, but I’ll get on to that later.

The title of the upcoming paper is ‘The Horizon of the Aten’ – the Aten being the sun disk, which is most associated with Akhenaten, though not exclusively. Most writing on Akhenaten suggests that his religious reforms were actually innovations, which the priesthoods – particularly the priests of the cult of Amun, probably the most important divine cult in Egypt in the 14th cent B.C.E – regarded as heretical.

At the least, the religious changes instituted by Akhenaten, threatened the power of the cult. It does not follow however, that such changes represented innovation and heresy, whatever the priests of Amun said.

After a little digging last year, I came across a piece of information, never mentioned in college, and which did not appear in any of the books on the reading list. It surfaced first in a book published relatively recently. It is evidence which appears in contemporary texts. It wasn’t deemed worthy of a mention in any of the many studies of the 18th dynasty, because it didn’t appear to make any significant sense in that context.

For me, it was like a bolt from the blue. It made sense of half a dozen other pieces of information rattling around in my head, almost simultaneously. Akhenaten now looked like the adherent of one of the oldest cults in ancient Egypt. This ‘new’ information, made sense of what he understood himself to be doing (it is hard to understand any ruler who builds a temple with 400 sacrificial tables, as he did). A reformer, but not an innovator or heretic at all. The evidence ties his reforms, and the concept of the Horizon of the Aten, with the equinoxes and the precession. A reform which was intended to restore a pattern of thought which was contemporaneous with the earliest of Egyptian dynasties. Several features of the Giza plateau would not otherwise be present. They set things up so they could not possibly have missed the precession.

The new paper connects texts, architecture and cultic evidence to make the case.

Thanks for the information about the King Den tablet, which I had not seen before. I think you may be right about the astronomical aspect to the image. One of the problems in studying ancient history, particularly in the ancient Near East, is that real events are often presented in terms of mythical images, since what happens on earth echoes what is in the sky. The sky is the more real. So sometimes it is difficult to tell whether an image represents a myth, or whether it represents a physical event dressed up in mythical imagery.

A similar issue of what is being represented occurs with images of the gods – when are representations of the gods just that, and when are they the gods themselves? I remember attending a lecture in Cambridge more than twenty years ago where the speaker spent twenty minutes talking about this question, and why the Egyptians would create a statue of a god standing on a sled (they did), which indicated that it was a representation of a statue of the god, and not a representation of the god itself.

I first read Hamlet’s Mill sometime around 1978, which is a long time ago now. I accept the argument, but the book is in many ways poorly constructed, though there is a mass of useful information in there. The fugal aspect of the structure was not likely to be appreciated in academia, and the text is very dense, so I think they did not give a lot of thought to who was going to read it (sometimes writing a book for yourself is the only way). I have read academic books which are much more difficult to read, but which have credibility among academics – I’m thinking particularly of Lynn Thorndikes’ eight volume ‘A history of magic and experimental science’. No points for style or clarity.

I’m not a mathematician, but I’m comfortable with numbers. I worked out pretty early on that the rate of precessional movement means that the intersection of the celestial equator and the ecliptic moves a degree in about 70 years. That is about two diameters of the moon as seen from the Earth. How blind do you have to be in order not to see that? Especially if those observing the sky belong to long-established professional priesthoods, with a background in astronomical observation and lore, and in possession of a temple library?

Why was Hamlet’s Mill shunned by academics? Because as far as the scholarly consensus goes, the argument of the book is faulty in conception, as well as execution. The book was not simply ahead of its time, but it argued outside the paradigmatic frame in which scholars were willing to consider evidence. That’s an important thing in academia: the field in which scholars operate has to have its limits defined. They study and write within a frame in which it is possible to make a case for this or that. It is a mistake to think that academics engage with what the whole range of evidence might have to tell us. It is not about understanding, but about developing an understanding of the subject under study.

This is not altogether a bad thing. Sometimes it is necessary to narrow a focus of interest in order to understand what is being considered. I’ve often engaged in this kind of process myself. It becomes problematic where the artificially constricted parameters ossify into the definition of an academic discipline or sub-discipline. When people talk about the value of interdisciplinary research, they actually mean that the nature of much contemporary research is too narrow to keep students supplied with interesting or useful Ph.D proposals…

Which is why I am working outside academia, and self-publishing my work.

Yes there is a reluctance to see the prevailing paradigm as untenable. But you are right that established paradigms are always difficult to overturn, just because they are established, and a lot of scholars have an investment in preserving the status quo. Is there another agenda? Yes there is. In fact, there are several. For the moment I’ll just pick out a couple of them here (we’ll get through all of them in the course of our conversation I’m sure!).

1} Not everybody who writes about human intellectual history has a practical grasp of astronomy. Or philosophy. Or theology. And sometimes their heads are filled with nonsense ideas, many of which first saw the light of day as late as the European Enlightenment. One of these nonsense ideas is that our distant ancestors were subject to a primitive stupidity, for which the Germans have an appropriately ugly word: ‘Urdummheit’. It is the myth of progress over time. If that notion is firmly
planted in a scholar’s head, then it is clearly straining the bounds of possibility to credit ancient peoples with any kind of understanding of precession. It is just common sense that they wouldn’t notice such a thing. Primitive stupidity is a scholarly presumption which is powerful enough to override the need to engage with facts and observation. There is less of this presumption in academia than there used to be, but it is still there, and not always hiding in the corners.

2) Historians in academia generally work within a paradigm which owes its character to the writings of Karl Marx, as mediated through the writings of Max Weber and other sociologists. This way of looking at things got its foothold in Britain through the London School of Economics in the early years of the twentieth century. What it means is that society is studied in material and economic terms. Ideas are deprecated as fundamentally irrelevant to the forces which have shaped history and human cultural development. This appreciation of the forces which underpin our society is assumed to be universally true, and so is equally applicable to the study of ancient societies. If ancient scholars did not know this to be the case, it was because they were victims of what Marx and Engels called ‘false consciousness’. In other words, history was to be explained in terms of power and propaganda, and ideological struggle between competing groups. All my teachers at university shared this point of view, to some extent at least, but some did allow that it might be too narrow a perspective.

From this point of view, if you are talking about priestly ideas, which you are if you are talking about ancient astronomy, you are talking about a subject which is irrelevant to our understanding of antiquity. The real history of humanity is to be teased out of a knowledge of priestly power and the propaganda developed to support that power. Religious ideas and iconography serve that priestly power, and are to be interpreted in such terms. So the detail of a concern with astronomy, and a knowledge of precession, is, for some historians, beside the point.

I describe myself as a historian of ideas. It is a scholarly discipline, working outside the Marxist-inspired model, which came into existence in the mid 1930s, specifically to deal with the materials and questions other historians were ignoring. The book which kicked-started the discipline was authored by Arthur Lovejoy. It was called ‘The Great Chain of Being’. It considered the concept of ‘plenitude’ from the Greeks up to the European Renaissance. My first book can be understood as an extension of the argument into more remote times.

Best, Thomas

Philosophical Thought in Greece and Babylonia (II)

The conventional wisdom, at least since the European enlightenment in the eighteenth century C.E., is that the phenomenon of monotheism is an idea which emerged from a preceding general inclination to polytheism among the human race. It is also conventional wisdom that we know of no instance of a monotheistic religion before the instances which are regularly cited to support this narrative. This emergence is short on evidence, and the evidence we have is less than clear in terms of context and implications, but is nevertheless a key assumption for historians of thought, and for theologians. It is assumed that the appearance of monotheism represents a negative and critical reaction to aspects of polytheism, and marks a great leap forward in human thought.

The evidence comes entirely from religious contexts, but this does not seem to matter. It is a great leap forward whether or not you are religiously minded, a professional theologian, a historian of cultural ideas, or even an outright atheist, because it marks the arrival of the ability to think in abstract rather than concrete terms. After this, it was possible for human beings to think in terms of universals rather than in assemblages of essentially unconnected particulars. It does not matter how the change is dressed: the human race was emancipated from an irrational concern for personification of natural forces, and the other ways in which a religious pantheon, or a sequence of genealogies, might have been built.

The two instances which are taken to show the emergence of monotheistic patterns of thought are:

 1):  the Hebrew insistence that Yahweh stands alone, and that ‘there is no other god beside me’. This insistence dates – in textual terms - back to the middle of the 1^st millennium B.C.E., since we know, largely from internal evidence,  that the text of the Old Testament was heavily redacted in the fifth century B.C.E., and reflects the views of what appears to be the victorious ‘Yahweh only’ faction in a long-running theological and political struggle concerning the nature of the Hebrew religion.

And:

2): The religious revolution which is supposed to have been wrought by the Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten in the 14^th century B.C.E., in which the plethora of divinities and the religious cults attached to them were replaced with the worship of the god ‘Aten’ alone.

I wrote extensively about Hebrew monotheism in the chapter ‘The Idea of Being in Israel’, in The Sacred History of Being (2015), and the influence of Mesopotamian ideas of divinity (principally Babylonian) on Hebrew thought. There are many clear references to Babylonian concepts in the Old Testament, often in the form of parodies. The Hebrews certainly encountered Babylonian religious thought and practice during their exile in Babylon. The extent to which this was a significant influence on their thought and practice before the period of exile is hard to determine however, since there is very little evidence to illustrate the nature of Hebrew religious thought before that time, both in terms of datable textual references, and archaeological remains. We do not know whether polytheism was a Hebrew practice in the first half of the 1^st millennium BCE, because there is no unequivocal evidence remaining for that period.  Other individuated Hebrew gods are unknown to us in the textual and archaeological records, though there are references in Hebrew texts to the worship of both foreign and Canaanite gods (Baal being one of the most conspicuous). Yahweh is however sometimes referred to as ‘El’, and occasionally with the plural form ‘Elohim’. Which might be taken to imply a multiplicity of gods.

There is a great deal of evidence however which shows that argument about the nature of the divine took place, and some of that may have been prompted by the importation of foreign deities and foreign cult practices. These arguments, and their potential implications for the nature of Hebrew thought about the divine, were also discussed in ‘The Idea of Being in Israel’.

This argument about the nature of the divine is rarely read by scholars in terms of a philosophical debate. There is no connected discussion available to us relating to these conjectural debates, if that is what they were, and scholars are disinclined to address the detail which does exist in terms of a philosophical understanding of the divine.

As for Akhenaten’s religious revolution, some biblical scholars have argued (over many years) that Moses brought monotheism to the Levant at the time of the Exodus from Egypt, and that there is a lineal connection (of some sort) between the supposed monotheism of Akhenaten, and the Hebrew conception of Yahweh. We are told in the Pentateuch that Yahweh is the one true god, but, as already mentioned, these are texts which were redacted in the middle of the 1^st millennium B.C.E. These texts reflect the interests and beliefs of the victors – the ‘Yahweh only’ group.  The truth may be quite different. Since we have no reliable evidence for Hebrew conceptions of the divine in the first half of the 1^st millennium, what can be said of their conceptions of the divine in the second half of the second millennium B.C.E.?

In any case, are we clear about the difference between monotheism and polytheism? To adherents of the idea that the passage from polytheism to monotheism represents a cultural evolution, the answer is obvious: monotheism is a move away from local and tribal gods, and a move towards a grander and more abstract conception of the divine. However imperfectly understood. This eventually led to the development of articulate discussion of the philosophical nature of the divine among the Greeks.

But this narrative is entirely based on the two examples discussed above, and our understanding of what was going on in both cases is very thin. It is possible to impose the narrative of a cultural evolution on these examples, and this is what is done. But there is no conclusive evidence that this narrative represents the actual cultural dynamics at play in the second and first millennia  B.C.E. 

I’ve already shown in my essay ‘Polytheism, Monotheism, and The Cult of the Aten’ *1 that Akhenaten did not set out to obliterate the cults of the traditional gods of Egypt, and that there is no evidence that Akhenaten’s worship of the Aten attracted early hostility from the traditional cults. This does not mean that there was no tension between the new cult and the other priestly establishments. We do know that in the end, both Akhenaten’s supporters, and the priests of Amun, were enthusiastically hacking out references to their respective divinities from the monuments. But we have very little unambiguous information about how this situation came to pass.

In fact there is another narrative available concerning Akhenaten’s religion of the Aten which has not so far received much attention. Why is this? The existing narrative supports the simple idea of the development of monotheism as a form of reaction to what had become unacceptable aspects of polytheistic belief.  This narrative has a great hold on scholars, even if not all the available evidence provides clear support for it. The other narrative about Akhenaten’s religious revolution suggests something quite different – that the worship of the Aten was not just a newly minted preoccupation of Akhenaten, and to lesser extent his father, but that his revolution was an attempt to restore a very old body of thought in Egypt.*2

If that is the case, then the modern narrative we have constructed, on the basis of a very partial understanding of the evidence, will necessarily collapse. For one thing, monotheism will have been shown to be very old, and indeed be an Egyptian way of thinking about reality which stretches back to the earliest dynasties. For another, the idea of a cultural evolution from polytheism to monotheism will no longer be tenable, if monotheism is an idea which is thousands of years old. And in addition, if monotheism has an extensive history in Egypt, alongside an equally extensive history of polytheism, we would need to ask, ‘how could this be?’

1 Polytheism, Monotheism, and The Cult of the Aten

2 Discussed in 'The Horizon of the Aten' (forthcoming). 

['Philosophical Thought in Greece and Babylonia (III)' will follow shortly]. 

Thomas Yaeger, December 26, 2018.

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.