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

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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

The Idea of Knowledge in the Ancient World

Ten articles on the idea of knowledge as it was understood in the ancient world, as they were tweeted:

Nick Zacharewicz @NickSCZach (Jan 9, 2017)

"A great source if you're wondering how ancient peoples thought."

Divination in Antiquity (and the sense it made) #Telos #Divination #Sacrifce #immanence https://t.co/leDJpoajDl pic.twitter.com/uTdNItBrGP

To know about important things in the ancient world it was understood you needed to have insight into the mind of God. The process of gaining that insight involved the technique of divination, and the paying of due honour in the form of sacrifice.

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'Whose right is it to make Gods?' The Idea of Being in Israel #Assyria #Israel #gods #images #idolatry #divinity https://t.co/WYnVhopYbt pic.twitter.com/1exc8TUhG7

How can man make gods, and know the will of the gods? This was a live question in the middle of the 1st millennium BCE, and it is still a problematic notion. It is a main focus of my book The Sacred History of Being, and this is a chapter from it.

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The Fifty Names of Marduk https://t.co/KOJyRtPEOv #An #Babylon #EnumaElish #Marduk #Mesopotamia #NewYearFestival pic.twitter.com/VQJsvB7jha 

How the gods were characterised in the New Year Festival liturgy in Babylon. The pantheon reflects knowledge of the Divine. A chapter extract from The Sacred History of Being.

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A Metaphysic beneath Theology? 'The Divine and the Limit' https://t.co/ofHvuTuQD6 #Janus #liminality pic.twitter.com/ba7T3miLvL

The Divine and its aspects does not have to be represented in the form of images, but can be represented in terms of abstract ideas (the end, the limit, the completed, etc).

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The Esoteric Conception of Divinity in the Ancient World https://t.co/zA6vAWRTEX

 #Assyria #Limit #Reality pic.twitter.com/WKGMVKDvbZ

How knowledge of the Divine was understood and represented in ancient Assyria (this extract points to the whole article which appeared in the Ritman Library Newsletter for December 2015. The article is freely available).

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Understanding Ancient Religion: Cultural Parallels, and False Narratives https://t.co/w2fVnj1S9t #Hindu #Rome #Janus #Religio #Temple

Is ancient religion in general about knowledge and observance, rather than belief? If the history of the meaning of the term 'religio' is explored, our modern understanding of it falls apart.

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Mesopotamian Polytheism, and the cult of Monotheism: Knowledge and Belief in Israel  https://t.co/nQMHZ1BQAt #Israel #Mesopotamia #Politics

It is possible to read the emergence of monotheism in Israel as a prolonged theological and philosophical controversy, in which the nature of a deity without form, colour, and shape, similar in nature to ‘the one thing’ that we should look to, as referenced by Plato, is debated.

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Post-Enlightenment Plato, and That Which Cannot Move. #Plato #Gottingen #Reality #Philosophy #Universe #gods https://t.co/UUhCycddjX

How we have misunderstood the real history and function of philosophy, which had its origins in the 'cultus deorum', and which was based on the idea that man should strive for an understanding of the Divine. Post enlightenment philosophy is about an understanding of the world apart from knowledge of the Divine.  Which is why the ancient world is so hard for us to understand.

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How Egypt lost Philosophy - in 'The Sweet Song of Swans' https://t.co/LdXfVSRIgG #AncientEgypt #Gottingen #Philosophy #Enlightenment

Egypt used to be regarded as the home of philosophy and the knowledge of Divine things. Not any more. Extracted from the chapter 'The Sweet Song of Swans' in The Sacred History of Being, published in November 2015. 

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Logic, Sophistry and the Esoteric in Ancient Education #Aristotle #Plato #Logic #Sophistry #Esoteric #Philosophy https://t.co/htJH3jMn0z

Truth and fiction in the education of the young. Finding those who could think for themselves.

TY, May 5, 2016