mon·o·the·ism Noun /ˈmänəˌTHēˌizəm/
- The doctrine or belief that there is only one God
In the 19th century, a debate arose among Egyptologists which was to rage for many years and which is still not entirely over. The debate was centered around a fundamental aspect of Egyptian religion and the Egyptian gods; where there the ancient Egyptians at all time polytheists or were there times or even ongoing trends in which Egyptian religion moved slowly but inexorably towards monotheism?
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| Painted limestone stela depicting Akhenaten and Nefertiti with infant princesses. The disk of the solar Aten shines on the royal family in an expression of what was essentially a closed theological system. Egyptian gods, 18th Dynasty, Egyptian Museum, Cairo. |
In his early 1930s work The Dawn of Conscience, Egyptologist James Henry Breasted argued that the religion of the heretic 18th Dynasty pharaoh, Akhenaten - who attempted to do away with most of Egypt's traditional gods and to replace them with the worship of the solar disk or Aten - was nothing less than a direct precursos of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic monotheism of later history. From 1934, Egyptologist Hermann Junker went even further, suggesting that Egyptian religion had originally been monotheistic and had eventually degenerated into a morass of separate cults after the founding of the Egyptian state. Although the argument for this kind of primative monotheism and the idea of a single, transcendent deity has long been discarded, the idea that Egyptians did gradually developed monotheistic ways of thought has been more abiding.
Some scholars have seen the successive rise of pre-eminent deities such as Ra, Osiris and Amun as precisely this kind of
development. Others have said that the Egyptian word for god, netcher, used without reference to any particular god (which was especially common in Egyptian wisdom literature or instructions and in personal names which combined the word god with some other element) also demonstrated the idea of an underlying single god in Egyptian religion. In an influential work published in 1960 Siegfried Morenz drew these arguments together in support of the idea that behind the nearly countless Egyptian gods there was among at least some Egyptians a growing awareness of a single god.
Another side of the story appeared with the publication of an incisive study by Eric Hornung in 1971, Hornung systematically examined the question, and found no evidence for an ongoing movement towards monotheism. Of central importance, he argued that the word "god" in Egyptian usage never appears to refer to an abstract deity of higher order than other gods, but it is rather a neutral term which can apply to any deity, or as Hornung expressed it, "whichever god you wish". In the same manner, personal names such as Mery-netcher translated as "whom god loves", could mean any god and may be found with many specific parralets such as "whom Ptah loves". From this perspective, the various expressions of syncretism or the "indwelling" of one deity in another, are not considered evidence of a move towards monotheism (some believe it is). While worshippers may have elected to venerate a given god above all others, this is merely henotheism, a form of reilgion in which the other gods remain.
Finally, while it is true that at given times we find a supreme god at the head of the Egyptian pantheism, the other gods remain, the qualities of the supreme being are not limited to any one god, and even within the same period of time we find many gods being called "lord of all that exists" and "sole" or "unique".
According to Hornung, only the "heretic" Akhenaten clearly insisted upon an approach which affirmed one god to the exclusion of the many, while other scholars have looked at the context of Akhenaten's religious revolution differently. in his 1997 word Moses the Egyptian, Jan Assmann has pointed out that the previous creation accounts developed by Egyptians, and the ongoing process of syncretism, reflect two fundamental but different approaches to the paradox of "the one and the many" inherent in all ancient Egyptian religion. Assmann has characterized these divergent viewpoints as one of generation - by which the one produces the many (as seen in Egyptian creation accounts), and one of emanation - in which the one is present in the many (as seen in syncretism).
These point of views existed concurrently in Egypt throughout most of the Dynastic Period, but in the religion of Akhenaten the concept of the emanation of the god Aten is not to be found. It is through generation alone that the ATen recreates the world and all is in it. In this view, although visible and in that sense immanent in his creation, the Aten also transcended it in the manner found in true monotheism.
