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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 been regarded as the paragon of this kind of polytheism, and deservedly so. A list of all the gods found in Egyptian texts would contain over 1,400 names. While most of these belong to obscure deities such as Tayet (goddess of weaving) and Nepri (god of grain), some five dozen can be considered gods of first or second rank, worshiped in temples or mentioned in texts throughout most of ancient Egyptian history.
Egypt’s worldview was basically polytheistic throughout its ancient history—from the fourth millennium B.C., when its gods first appeared in recognizable images, to the fifth century A.D., when Christians finally closed the last of the ancient temples. In fact, polytheism was so much a part of Egyptian thought that the early Christian Egyptians easily tolerated the plural word “gods” in their own personal names.
Despite its fundamental and persistent polytheism, ancient Egypt also gave birth to the world’s earliest recorded belief in a single god. This was the religion espoused by the so-called heretic pharaoh Akhenaten (c. 1352–1336 B.C.). After ruling for five years in traditional Egyptian fashion, the pharaoh changed his name from Amenophis, which honored the state god Amun, to Akhenaten, meaning “He who is effective for the Sun Disk.” At the same time, he created a new capital on the Nile at Tell el-Amarna, midway between the traditional Egyptian capital, Memphis, and the religious center of Thebes. He called his new city Akhetaten, meaning “Place where the Sun Disk becomes effective.” Clearly, he wanted to make a break with the past.
Tell el-Amarna has been extensively excavated. The most extraordinary recovery was an archive of cuneiform tablets known as the Amarna letters. Written in Akkadian, an East Semitic language that served as the diplomatic lingua franca of the day, the tablets consist largely of diplomatic correspondence between Akhenaten (along with his father Amenophis III) and petty monarchs in Canaan and elsewhere. Some of the tablets also tell us about life and religion at Akhetaten/Amarna.
The era itself takes its name from the site. It is known as the Amarna Period. Its god—indeed, the god of all Egypt if Akhenaten could have had his way—was the natural phenomenon of light, which Akhenaten saw as the prime force in the universe.
When Akhenaten first promulgated his new religion, he identified this force with the traditional sun god Re-Harakhti—that is, the sun (Re) appearing as ruler of the world at dawn (Harakhti). But this traditional god was given another name in Akhenaten’s new religion—a long formula known as the didactic name, which is more credo than name: “The living one, Re-Harakhti, who becomes active in (or from) the Akhet [the space just below the visible horizon] in his identity of the light that is in the sun disk.” This new name served to disassociate Akhenaten’s theology even further from traditional Egyptian notions of divinity. It emphasized the abstract nature of his god: The new image was not an icon to be worshiped but merely a large-scale version of the hieroglyph for light. This new name became the credo of Akhenaten’s religion. By Akhenaten’s third year on the throne, the traditional depiction of Re-Harakhti, as a falcon or falcon-headed human, was abandoned and replaced by the image of the sun disk (or Aten, the Egyptian word for “sun disk”) with multiple rays.
Akhenaten’s religion seems to have begun as another example of traditional Egyptian henotheism, the practice of stressing the primacy of one god over all others. The didactic name of the new god was written in two cartouches (ovals that enclose the hieroglyphic names of the pharaoh). In this way, the new god was proclaimed dominant over the pantheon. His rule was also proclaimed by means of a jubilee festival, just like that celebrated by pharaohs in their 30th regnal year.
Eventually, however, the new god was proclaimed not just as the greatest but as the only god “with no other except him,” as the Amarna texts say. The names, images and avatars associated with the traditional gods—and even the word
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Akhenaten’s monotheism differed in one crucial respect from that of the early Hebrews. His god was not transcendental but immanent, dependent on nature. Light comes into the world only through the medium of a natural phenomenon, the sun—“in his identity of the light that is in the sun disk,” as the didactic name puts it. Moreover, Akhenaten’s god was also much more impersonal than the traditional Egyptian gods. It could be prayed to and worshiped, but it never spoke to its worshipers in return.
In other respects, however, Akhenaten’s creed has some of the classic features of monotheistic religion. Like Christianity and Islam, it is a secondary religion, one that arose in contrast to existing beliefs. It is also a revealed religion—the first to be documented in history. The Amarna texts frequently speak of Akhenaten’s “teaching of life.” Akhenaten’s own hymn to the god proclaims, “You are in my heart, and there is no other who knows you except your son, Akhenaten.”
Like many monotheistic religions, Akhenaten’s theology eventually lost its tolerance for other conceptions of divinity. Sometime after his ninth regnal year, the pharaoh began an active campaign of persecution against other forms of Egyptian religion, erasing the names of individual gods and changing the plural “gods” to the singular “god” on monuments throughout Egypt.
At the same time, he purged the didactic name of his own god from any possible association with the traditional religion of Egypt. The old name was “The living one, Re-Harakhti, who becomes active in (or from) the Akhet in his identity of the light that is in the sun disk.” The new didactic name was “The living one, the sun, ruler of the Akhet, who becomes active in (or from) the Akhet in his identity of the light that comes in the sun disk.” In the new formula, the name of the traditional sun god, Re-Harakhti, was replaced by a more neutral expression, “the sun, ruler of the Akhet.” The word for light in the didactic name was also changed; instead of
The contrast between Akhenaten’s monotheistic theology and traditional Egyptian polytheism is striking. Some Egyptologists see little in common between 049the two. To the renowned Egyptologist James Henry Breasted, writing in the early years of this century, Akhenaten’s religion was an enlightened precursor of Judeo-Christian monotheism, preached in vain to a world still enthralled by the darkness of polytheism.1 Other scholars have made a more reasoned effort to explore the relationship of Akhenaten’s monotheism to what preceded it in Egyptian religion. They have tried to understand how the idea of monotheism might have arisen within a polytheistic worldview.
One prominent early theory argued that Egyptian religion had originally been monotheistic and had only “degenerated” into polytheism after the founding of the Egyptian state.2 In this view, Akhenaten’s theology could be seen as an attempt to return Egyptian religion to its monotheistic roots. The arguments for a primitive monotheism of this sort have long been discredited,3 but the notion has persisted that monotheism itself might have existed in some form within Egyptian religion before Akhenaten.4 Proponents of this view have pointed to a number of texts suggesting that Egyptian theologians had begun to perceive an underlying unity beneath the multiplicity of their gods as early as the Middle Kingdom (2040–1640 B.C.), centuries before Akhenaten moved his capital to Amarna.
For example, Egyptian wisdom literature, which appears at the beginning of the second millennium B.C., rarely refers to individual gods of the Egyptian pantheon. Instead, it normally uses just the term
Great is the blessing of god
He makes the ignorant become the wise
the hater become the lover
He makes the small surpass the great,
the one at the end be first
He teaches the dumb to speak
and opens the ears of the deaf.5
Passages such as this sound almost biblical, and can easily suggest that the Egyptian writer had in mind a single divine authority similar to the god of the Bible.
Likewise, ancient Egyptian creation accounts consistently refer to a single god as the origin of all creation, though in this case by name rather than anonymously. In early texts, this is most often the god Atum, the primal source of all matter (like the singularity in the “Big Bang” theory of modern physics), who evolved into the multiplicity of creation. Or it is the sun god Re, the ultimate manifestation of Atum, whose rising at the first dawn began the continuing process of daily life.
In the centuries immediately preceding Akhenaten, Egyptian theologians focused their attention on the god Amun as the prime cause. Unlike creators such as Atum and Re, who are part of the world they have created, Amun was seen as transcendent, existing apart from creation; the very name Amun means “hidden,” a reference to the notion that the god’s true being cannot be perceived in the phenomena of nature. Whether the creator was viewed as immanent or transcendent, however, his existence reflects a primal monotheism.
This small move can also be seen as evidence for an underlying belief in the unity of all gods. This is particularly clear in the case of Atum: Though he evolved into the forces and elements of the created world—which the Egyptians recognized as gods—he continued to exist as an individual god in his own right.
Egyptian theologians regularly solved such conceptual paradoxes by means of syncretism, the practice of combining one or more gods into a composite deity, who bore the names of the component gods but was conceived and addressed as a single being. Re-Harakhti, for example, combines the natural force of the sun (the god Re) with the power of kingship (the god Harakhti, or Horus of the Akhet) in a theoretical construct that expresses the role of the sun as the dominant force in nature. Similarly, the god Re-Atum expresses the unity of the original material source of the world (Atum) with its ultimate manifestation, the sun. Such constructs allow for the simultaneous experience of the divine as both singular and diverse, in much the same way that the notion of the Trinity 053allows Christians to understand three distinct aspects of god within a single deity.
Underlying the practice of syncretism is the realization that one god can also be seen as an aspect or manifestation of another. The critical Egyptian term is ba, or emanation, the form in which, or the means by which, something can be perceived. A sarcophagus, for instance, is the ba of the sky goddess Nut, mother of both Osiris and the sun, the chief gods with whom the deceased is identified (See the Pyramid Texts, Spell 11).
Egyptian syncretisms usually involve only two or three gods, but at least in theory all the gods could be understood as bas of a single deity. Evidence for such a conception of divinity can be seen in the text known as the Litany of Re, first attested about 200 years before Akhenaten, in which the god Re is addressed “in all his evolutions” as 75 different gods:6
Homage to you Re, high and controlling:
who ascends to the secret cavern;
for you are the body of Atum.
Homage to you Re, high and controlling:
who ascends to the inaccessible place of Anubis;
for you are the body of Khepri
Homage to you Re, high and controlling:
great of inspection in his whereabouts;
for you are the body of Nut.
Homage to you Re, high and controlling;
lord of attack against where he is headed;
for you are the body of Isis.
The idea also appears in somewhat different form as early as the Pyramid Texts (about 2400 B.C.), one of which states that the deceased king, united with Re, will “become completed in (or as) every god” (Pyramid Texts, Spell 215).
The creation accounts and syncretism reflect two theoretical solutions to the problem of the One and the Many, as Jan Assmann has pointed out in a recent book, Moses the Egyptian (Harvard University, 1997). The relationship can be seen as either one of generation, in which the One produces the Many, or as one of emanation, in which the One is present in the Many. In ancient Egypt both relationships existed simultaneously, although theories of emanation were most thoroughly developed by Ramesside theologians, after the Amarna revolution, in the late second millennium B.C. In the monotheism of Amarna, however, the concept of the ba—or emanation of the god—is absent. Only generation is present: The god continually recreates the multiplicity of the world, but always exists apart from his creation. In this sense, too, Akhenaten’s religion is comparable to more familiar brands of monotheism.
It is tempting to see the theory of emanation as the Ramesside period’s answer to Amarna monotheism, as Assmann does. Before Amarna, the dominant theory was in fact one of generation (the One produces the Many), but the notion of emanation (the One is present in the Many) was not a Ramesside invention. The practice of syncretism, which is based on the idea that two or more deities can share a single identity, goes back to the earliest periods of Egyptian history. The creation theology of Atum, which is the ultimate expression of emanation, is already fully developed in the Pyramid Texts of the mid-third millennium B.C. Like the multiple gods of traditional Egyptian religion, differing perceptions of the unity of god also seem to have existed harmoniously within the traditional religion for much of Egypt’s ancient history.
Amarna religion can be viewed as a logical culmination of one such perception—that which understood the one god as the generative source of all gods, in the same way that a parent generates his or her children. Later Ramesside theology is a logical culmination of the other view—that the one god is present in the multiplicity of all the gods.
I would like to suggest a synthesis of two opposing theses in modern Egyptology regarding Akhenaten’s monotheism. One thesis views Akhenaten’s ideas as totally derivative of concepts already present in Egyptian theology well before Amarna.7 The other thesis sees Akhenaten’s theology—and his monotheism—as a radical innovation.
The most influential proponent of the latter view is the German Egyptologist Erik Hornung.8 Hornung dismisses features such as those I have just described as evidence for Egyptian monotheism outside of Amarna. The use of the neutral term
This analysis of the evidence is actually a more informed version of earlier theories, such as that espoused by Breasted. Like Breasted, however, Hornung is then forced to see the monotheism of the 054Amarna period as fundamentally alien to traditional Egyptian religious ideas. “Monotheism does not arise from the gradual accumulation of ‘tendencies’ in that direction,” Hornung writes, “but requires a radical about-turn of thought, such as occurred under Akhenaten.”9
Hornung is certainly right in pointing to the distinction between Akhenaten’s monotheism and the earlier understanding of god, but the difference was not as severe as he supposes. What was radical about Akhenaten’s theology was not its proclamation of the oneness of god but its insistence on exclusivity. Traditional Egyptian religion, like Egyptian thought, reflects a polyvalent logic: Different explanations of a phenomenon are seen as complementary rather than as mutually exclusive. To take but one example, creation accounts centered on Atum, Re, Amun or a number of other gods are not competing cosmogonies, as earlier Egyptologists thought, but rather complementary explanations of the creation—different facets of an essentially uniform understanding of how the world came into being. In the same way, the polyvalent logic of Egyptian thought could easily allow an appreciation of the underlying oneness of god to coexist alongside, and even within, traditional Egyptian polytheism—and, in fact, the evidence suggests that it did so long before Akhenaten.
Though henotheism was a well-established practice in traditional Egyptian religion, this does not in itself rule out the simultaneous appreciation of god as one any more than it excludes a polytheistic worldview. The best evidence for this is the phenomenon of syncretism, which unites the view of god as simultaneously Many and One. In the same way, the creator of Egyptian cosmogonies continued to exist as a single god despite the multiplicity of his diverse “evolutions.”
This is not to say that Egyptian religion was essentially a disguised monotheism, monotheism with a polytheistic face. In fact, insofar as it was appreciated at all, the perception of god as essentially one was probably limited to a few Egyptian theologians at any one time. For ordinary Egyptians, however, it may well be that the experience of god was essentially monotheistic. While they continued to understand the world around them in polytheistic terms, they also took it one god at a time—not by simply selecting one of the many Egyptian gods to worship, but rather by identifying their uniform notion of “god” with a particular god, depending on the particular situation. In addition to simple pragmatism, this is the reason for the use of a neutral term for god,
In this understanding of the world, what Akhenaten invented was not the notion that god is One but the belief that god is only One. Insofar as monotheism is defined as exclusive in this way, his religion is in fact the first recorded instance of true monotheism. But this is not the same as saying that Akhenaten was the first to appreciate the underlying oneness of god. What Akhenaten introduced to the world is rather the first recorded instance of univalent logic—the notion that one and only one explanation of reality can be true. It is this characteristic, rather than his understanding of the divine, that was new and radical in Egyptian thought. And it is probably this exclusivity in Akhenaten’s teaching, more than any other feature, that ultimately doomed his new religion to failure in Egyptian eyes.
When Akhenaten died, about 1336 B.C., his new theology died with him. Five years later, his capital city, Akhetaten, had been abandoned and the worship of the old pantheon of gods was restored throughout the country. Egypt remained staunchly polytheistic for the rest of pharaonic history—though the notion of a single, exclusive God eventually triumphed in the monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
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
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.
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).
Wolfgang Helck, Die Lehre des Djedefhor und die Lehre eines Vaters an seinen Sohn (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1984), pp. 42–50.
Erik Hornung, Das Buch der Anbetung des Re im Westen, Aegyptiaca Helvetica 2 (Basel and Geneva, 1975).
The most extreme expression of this approach is F.J. Giles’s Ikhnaton (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press, 1970).
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).