Deified in Life | Pharaoh as Egyptian Gods

Despite the human-divine duality inherent in the reign of most Egyptian pahraohs there were instances when living kings do seem to have been declared fully divine within their own lifetimes. This was not the result of

The sanctuary of the mortuary temple of Ramesses II
 at Abu Simbel, holds seated statues of Ptah, Amun, Ramesses
 and Re-Horakhty. Here the figure of the king represents not
only the god Osiris, but also Ramesses himself as god.
 19th Dynasty, Egyptian Gods

arbitrary theological or royal decree, however, and it seems clear that such kings usually "earned" their immortality through long and successful reigns. The clearest evidence for this comes from the New Kingdom; although the exact details of the situation are not always clear, the living deification of Amenophis III and Ramesses II are relatively well attested. In the case of Amenophis III, we find that towards the end of his reign, this king began the increasing solarization of Egypt's major cults and of his own kingship.

According to the reconstruction of events by Raymond Johnson and others, at the time of his Sed jubilee celebrated in the 30th year of his reign, the king declared himself deified and merged with the solar disk as the Aten or as Re-Horakhty. From this time we find the king taking divine prerogatives in his representations such as those showing him with the curved beard of the Egyptian gods, with the horns of Amun and wearing the lunar crescent and sun disk or presenting an offering before a statue of himself. Even here, however, the evidence of royal deification may not be what it appears on the surface. Besty Bryan has pointed out that Amenophis may not have intended by his own deification to have transcended kingship on earth permanently and that the cultic and political uses of a divine ruler could have been limited to prescribed occasions such as the king's Sed festival.

Representations of living deified kings in the presence of deities show a level of equality which transcends that found in normal shrine of the great rock-cut temple of Abu Simbel, for example, the deified Ramesses II had four statues cut to represent Ptah, Re-Horakhty, Amun-Re and himself, seated side by side. That the king is not simply depicted in the company of the Egyptian gods is clear as the figures are shown as incontrovertible equals. It has even been suggested that in this group the king might be represented as an embodiment or manifestation of all these national Egyptian gods. We can only be sure that in some circumstances the living Egyptian king could be declared divine in a manner which transcended the aspect of divinity which was taken on at the coronation. Whether this deification of the living monarch equalled that accorded deceased kings in permanency or in degree we may never know.

The nature of Akhenaten is also of particular interest in regard to the question of monarchical divinity but is difficult to ascertain. While some scholars have seen this king as taking the role of divine son of the god Aten, others have seen him as a member of a king of divine triad which also included his queen Nefertiti. More recently, a number of Egyptologists have pointed out what appear to be associations with traditional Egyptian solar theology even within the Amarna Period. Euge-Cruz-Uribe has shown that just as Amenophis III may have been equated with the Aten, and his queen Tiye with Hathor, complex parallels may have been promulgated which suggested the equation of the living Akhenaten with the god Shu, Khepri and other solar deities, Nefertiti with Tefnut, and possibly, a royal daughter with the goddess Maat.

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