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Home > Magazines > Archaeology Odyssey > July/August 1999

Monotheism

The Egyptian roots

By James P. Allen

Among the many features of Western intellectual history that can be traced to the ancient Near East, none has been more powerful than the idea of transcendental monotheism—the belief in only one god who exists eternally and apart from his creation. The early Hebrews are generally given credit for this concept, and the Bible reflects their persistent, often painful attempts to maintain this belief in an exclusive god in the face of the ancient world’s dominant belief in its opposite, immanent polytheism—the belief in many gods who personify the forces 046and elements of the universe. Ancient Egypt has long […]

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Endnotes

1.

James Henry Breasted, The Dawn of Conscience (New York, 1933).

2.

See Herman Junker, Die Götterlehre von Memphis (Berlin, 1940), pp. 25–37; Étienne Drioton, La religion égyptienne dans ses grandes lignes (Cairo, 1945) and “Le monothéisme de l’ancienne Égypte,” Cahiers d’histoire égyptienne I (1945), pp. 149–168.

3.

Hellmut Bruner, “Monotheismus,” Lexikon der Ägyptologie IV (Wiesbaden, 1980), p. 200.

4.

Eberhard Otto, “Monotheistische Tendenzen in der altägyptischen Religion,” in Die Welt des Orients 2 (1955), pp. 99–110; and Siegfried Morenz, Die Heraufkunft des transzendenten Gottes in Ägypten, Sitzungsberichte der Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 109, 2 (Berlin, 1964).

5.

Wolfgang Helck, Die Lehre des Djedefhor und die Lehre eines Vaters an seinen Sohn (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1984), pp. 42–50.

6.

Erik Hornung, Das Buch der Anbetung des Re im Westen, Aegyptiaca Helvetica 2 (Basel and Geneva, 1975).

7.

The most extreme expression of this approach is F.J. Giles’s Ikhnaton (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press, 1970).

8.

Hornung, Der Eine und die Vielen (1971), translated by John Baines as Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt: The One and the Many (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1982).

9.

Hornung, “Monotheismus im pharaonischen Ägypten,” in Monotheismus im Alten Israel und seiner Umwelt, ed. Othmar Keel, Biblische Beiträge 14 (Freiburg, 1980), p. 91.