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 In the public mind there is a simple sequence of polytheism being superseded by monotheism.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.]

 

Author

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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.

Remarks on the Telos (and other lost ideas)

There are many ideas from both the ancient world and from much more recent times which have died a death, so that it is virtually impossible for us to understand these concepts, even within their original contexts. Not all of these ideas are of equal value – some reflect only minor aspects of the world view of their time, or illustrate some particular application of a way of thinking in a single culture or place. Others however are of vital importance, not only for an understanding of the functioning of a culture in its own context, but also in establishing something of our own intellectual ancestry, and relation to our antecedents.

An example of one of the more important ideas which became lost, but mercifully has been recovered in modern times, is the neo-platonism which underpinned much of the thought of the  English renaissance. This was recovered largely by a single scholar in the 1920s (H Grierson), who rescued the metaphysical poets from the category of writers for whom (according to Dr Johnson’s understanding) ‘metaphor’ was the principal obsession. This discovery and re-evaluation stands behind the work of the Warburg Institute in London, between the immediate pre-war years, and the late 1950s, when the full extent of the importance of neo-platonism in the English renaissance was revealed by a number of scholars, including D. P. Walker and Frances Yates. Eventually the detailed understanding of these ideas resulted in the rediscovery of the importance of other related and interacting ideas in circulation within the same intellectual communities, including Hermeticism, pan-sophism, etc.

One of the reasons why ideas become lost is that they are so pervasive within a society that they remain largely unspoken, unarticulated, and undebated. It is not only the complextity of ideas, or their controversial nature, which may consign them to oblivion, but it might also be as a consequence of their success. At the point where an idea is no longer articulated, it is in grave danger of being forgotten, misunderstood, or translated into something quite other than its original shape and meaning.

An example of the latter, where a word undergoes a radical change of meaning, is the word ‘rational’. For us this word connotes thought free from an overarching body of institutional or religious ideas, yoked only to logical and methodical processes based at root on common sense and commonly agreed values which conform to a vaguely understood humanist agenda, which (it is believed) all reasonable human beings can agree on. 

But in Europe of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the word retained a quite different meaning. It meant that an idea or argument had a proper place within a philosophical or religious picture of the world (a notion at the core of the adoption of neo-platonist ideas by writers and artists in the English renaissance). Because it had its logical place, it could be considered rational, in a manner similar to the understanding of the rationality of a sequence of notes configured to belong correctly within the overall structure of a musical composition. 

In that sense Descartes picture of the world is a rationalist picture, in that it places its details within an overarching framework.  His principal innovation from the point of view of posterity is that he placed the idea of what is rational in a purely philosophical model of the world, rather than a religious one: God was effectively banished into a sphere of his own. 

By the middle of the eighteenth century the term ‘rationalist’ came to mean something quite different - it meant free-thinking, and required to be outside the confines of an essentially religious framework of ideas and preconceptions, relying on nothing more than the human capacity to think clearly, and to build on the work of other thinkers similarly untrammelled by what was now considered to be a wholly irrational pattern of thought. The mathematician Edmund Halley, for example, is reported to have said that the doctrines of Religion were unintelligible, and that Christianity itself was an 'imposture'. 

We can see the meaning of words and technical terms shifting around us all the time, if we take the trouble to notice. Sometimes these changes can cause real difficulties for our understanding when we find them in an unfamiliar context. We now find ourselves in a quandary when we are thinking about ancient Greek religion, which the scholar E.R. Dodds thought contained many expressions of the irrational (his most famous book is 'The Greeks and the Irrational’), since to the Greeks it is likely that the ‘irrational’ components of their religion were regarded as properly ordered, and in their proper place. The sacrifice of animals (for example) is clearly irrational within the context of a modern city-bound existence in which secular humanist values seem unquestionable. But I do not think it helps us to understand ancient Greek religion, or indeed any part of ancient Greek civilisation, to look at these in terms of a modern model of irrational and deviant psychology.

Again, the concept of humanism has undergone a certain amount of shape-shifting over the centuries. In the renaissance it indicated a complex of ideas opposed (to some extent, though not entirely so) to religious ideas of man and his place in the world, and a tendency to put the human (and the human experience) in the centre of things. However, this did not at the time imply any kind of normative agenda about what was truly human and what was not, or a rejection of a rational picture of the world.

This requires some explanation. In some spheres ‘humanism’ referred principally to a way of living and understanding, and belonging to the civilised tradition, rather than to any particular body of ideas which a humanist might hold. A humanist might therefore (for example) study the outward form of speeches of Cicero in order to take on the values and attributes of the great Roman lawyer and orator, on the principle that acquisition of the outward form of a thing has as its corollary the acquisition of its inner core. This procedure is in stark contrast to someone working within the expressly intellectual tradition which Cicero also belonged to, who would study the ideas in his works, rather than focus on the outer form in which they were expressed.

Other important concepts have changed radically over the centuries. The concept of the ‘soul’ is now almost unintelligible to almost all, except as a vague notion of ‘essence’. Whereas it used to be a term used with technical precision. (Plotinus is of course unread these days, except by a small band of specialists and some interested lay readers). The Egyptian idea of the Ka clearly bears some conceptual relation to the idea of the soul among the Greek writers, but it has been difficult for scholarship to draw out parallels between the two, since neither of the concepts is properly understood.

Mathematics and Geometry too, had, to the Greeks and others, a strangely intimate relationship with religion and theology, of which we have only the slightest glimmer of an  understanding. Worse, we are generally unable to tackle the problem, since we cannot easily bring ourselves to consider theology as something which has technical aspects. 

We might, for the purposes of scholarship, investigate some pointless minutiae of ancient cultic life, created and maintained by a priesthood with time on its hands, and little capacity for logical and practical patterns of thought (the Sumerians and the Babylonians sometimes referred to the Gods in their documents in terms of numbers, so that such and such a god would be ‘6’, another would be ‘9’ etc, which suggests a very practical relationship with their divinities). But we would not expect it to make any kind of sense to us. 

Yet another idea which we now understand only vaguely, denuded of its former technical importance, is the concept of ‘completion’. There has been very little study of this concept across cultures in the Ancient Near East and the Mediterranean during the past 150 years of scholarship, which is perhaps a little odd. This is because it is an idea which is found as part of a complex of related concepts in all of these cultures, and might therefore reasonably be considered as part of a framework for useful comparison between these cultures.

Another related idea, of equal importance, which has been completely passed over as a means by which the significance of ancient cultural ideas might be understood, is that of the ‘telos’. Like ‘completion’, the concept of the ‘telos’ is shared across cultures in antiquity, and should allow useful comparisons to be made between disparate cultures. However it too is hardly understood. In fact It is fair to say that it is not at all understood, except as a term deprecated by the sciences ever since the end of the seventeenth century.

But this idea of the telos too has undergone subtle and far-reaching changes in its long history. The concept of the ‘telos’ or final cause in science from the seventeenth century onwards is quite different from that understood in antiquity. In order to illustrate the pervasive and often unspoken influence of this idea in the ancient world, it is necessary first of all to explain what it meant to the ancients, rather than to nineteenth century zoologists keen to avoid (among other things) the final cause as part of the explanation for the variety of animal forms in the world.

Almost all modern discussions of the telos (where these exist) derive ultimately from Aristotle’s consideration of the subject. The telos and the final cause he discussed as part of a suite of explanation for why things are the way they are. So the final cause, the end to which something is moving, or what it is that has caused it to begin to move, is part of the explanation of why it is the way it is, why it is composed of the elements it has, why it is configured as it is, why it is functioning in the manner in which it does, why it has certain inclinations and appetites, and so on. The other components of the suite are the formal cause, the efficient cause, and the material cause. These should not be regarded as wholly distinct in character from the final cause as modes of explanation, since they depend on the same underlying idea. Understanding the other kinds of cause actually helps to understand the idea of the final cause, and so these causes will be discussed also.

Aristotle used the image of the house (oikos) to help illustrate the idea of the telos, though it is not a particularly good example with which to discuss this philosophical idea. The house is something which is built in order to achieve certain things: it has a final form, which, when reached, allows it to be called a house. It is composed of certain things, and when these are assembled and arranged in the proper order, the house is complete. Before it is assembled and its elements are arranged in the proper order, the house has only a potential existence. It might come to be, and will only make sense when it does come to be, but unassembled it has no existence.

In modern times the only cause we allow (at least in terms of ‘cause’) is the efficient cause. In other words the direct action of constructing the house and its elements – the labour of making the bricks, cutting the timbers, erecting the frame, putting on the roof tiles, etc. It is about work and energy: the kilojoules of effort necessary to complete the task

The other causes make more difficulties for the moderns. The formal cause seems to be drawn from another realm of explanation altogether, since it seems to imply that like gives rise to like. Thus a human being gives birth to a human being, and a lion gives birth to lions. This is probably the origin of the idea of formal cause. In the context of the construction of a house, this mode of explanation has to be reshaped considerably. Thus, a brick-maker is the creator and formal cause of the bricks which go to make up most of the fabric of the house. And likewise, the baker is the formal cause of bread. In both these examples, it is obvious that the craftsmen are also the source of the work involved in the making of bricks and bread. 

It is interesting to speculate that this very simple mode of explanation lies behind the creation of a large number of craft gods – when the human race began to engage in the creation of things other than offspring, this simple rule would necessarily be augmented to include human handiwork. The augmented explanation requires that the brick-maker, the baker, the weaver, be agents or vessels of the formal cause of each of the crafts. And so they become emblematic of their crafts in the abstract. In ancient Assyria, a number of religious officials had titles which were craft related, and the training of the crown prince for his future kingship involved the development of skills in various crafts ('with the bakers he did the baking' which we find in the annals of Ashurbanipal, who became king of Assyria in the late 7th century BCE).

Before the Classical period in Greece,  we have no evidence for the discussion of the four causes as causes. This absence of evidence however is not evidence for the absence of the causes as explanatory modes. For example, the four causes underpin the scene in Book xviii of the Iliad, where Hephaestus is working metal to create statues animated by the gods. He is a craftsman, and is depicted as highly energetic in the practice of his craft. Some of the objects he makes are by the very nature of their design able to enter the councils of the gods, and to return of their own accord. So the final cause (the telos), efficient cause, material cause, and the formal cause are all implicit in this scene.

Three of the four causes which refer to processes (the telos, the efficient and the formal cause) are implicitly attested often in the cultural record. The telos or the end is a common concept in ancient Greece, Egypt and Mesopotamia, most often expressed in the context of mythological, religious and theological texts ('the King is in his Horizon' is a not uncommon trope in Ancient Egypt). Both the material and efficient causes are ideas which have to be clearly known to any culture which has to muster, organise and calculate manpower and effort, and material resources. Also the organisation of agriculture, metalwork, glassmaking, breadmaking, weaving, and the other crafts. The fourth, the material cause, is also implicitly present in ancient writings, since the function of a thing is largely co-terminous with both the material with which it is made, and the form after which it is modelled.. All these things were part of the responsibility of kings in the ancient Near East and Egypt, and elsewhere. 

Since  much of the activity in the ancient world is about the amassing of materials, the creation of precious and sacred objects, the organisation of work, and the ritualised association of things created by means of the first three of the causes, with the fourth, the telos, or what is divine, we can see the material, the formal, the efficient and the final cause in nearly all aspects of ancient civilisation. 

These causes were understood, in essence as outlined by Aristotle, long before his time. We do not need to find texts in Assyria or Egypt which discuss these causes in the way that Aristotle did. We will not find them, because the structure of society was different in those places, with a much more stratified nature, with knowledge and esoteric thought at the top of the structure. Explanation was rarely written down (though ritual and liturgy sometimes were).  Instead, we need to interpret the evidence which is presented to us in order to understand what is actually there to be seen. 

Of the four causes, only the final cause absolutely requires philosophical insight for its understanding. Hence the idea of the final cause is the most interesting from the point of view of developing an understanding of the world of ideas in antiquity: if the idea of the telos is present, then philosophical discussion of the nature of reality is also present. The idea of the telos makes no sense unless it is understood, and it presents a number of problems for anyone attempting to understand the concept. Gaining understanding, and the solving of logical problems, is what philosophy was all about.