Thursday 5 April 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 In the public mind there is a simple sequence of polytheism being superseded by monotheism.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 2nd 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 14th 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 2nd 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.

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