Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt: Lecture IX. The Imperial Age—The World-State Makes its Impression on Religion—Triumph of Re—Earliest Monotheism—Ikhnaton (Amenhotep IV)

This great royal hymn doubtless represents an excerpt, or a series of fragments excerpted, from the ritual of Aton, as it was celebrated from day to day in the Aton temple at Amarna. Unhappily, it was copied in the cemetery in but one tomb, where about a third of it has perished by the vandalism of the modern natives, leaving us for the lost portion only a very inaccurate and hasty modern copy of thirty years ago (1883). The other tombs were supplied, with their devotional inscriptions, from the current paragraphs and stock phrases which made up the knowledge of the Aton faith as understood by the scribes and painters who decorated these tombs. It should not be forgotten, therefore, that the fragments of the Aton faith which have survived to us in the Amarna cemetery, our chief source, have thus filtered mechanically through the indifferent hands, and the starved and listless minds of a few petty bureaucrats on the outskirts of a great religious and intellectual movement. Apart from the Royal Hymn, they were elsewhere content with bits and snatches copied in some cases from the Royal Hymn itself, or other fragments patched together in the form of a shorter hymn, which they then slavishly copied in whole or in part from tomb to tomb. Where the materials are so meagre, and the movement revealed so momentous, even the few new contributions furnished by the short hymn are of great value. 1 In four cases the hymn is attributed to the king himself; that is, he is represented as reciting it to Aton. The lines are as follows:

In these hymns there is an inspiring universalism not found before in the religion of Egypt. It is world wide in its sweep. The king claims that the recognition of the Sun-god's universal supremacy is also universal, and that all men acknowledge his dominion. On the great boundary stela likewise he says of them, that Aton made them "for his own self; all lands, the Ægæans bear their dues, their tribute is upon their backs, for him who made their life, him by whose rays men live and breathe the air." 3

But in the beginning of all, Aton called himself forth out of the eternal solitude, the author of his own being. The king calls him "My rampart of a million cubits, my reminder of eternity, my witness of the things of eternity, who himself fashioned himself with his own hands, whom no artificer knew." 1 In harmony with this idea, the hymns love to reiterate the fact that the creation of the world which followed was done while the god was yet alone. The words "while thou wert alone" are almost a refrain in these hymns. He is the universal creator who brought forth all the races of man and distinguished them in speech and in color of the skin. His creative power still goes on calling forth life, even from the inanimate egg. Nowhere do we find more marked the naïve wonder of the king at the Sun-god's life-giving power than in this marvel, that within the egg-shell, which the king calls the "stone" of the egg—within this lifeless stone, the sounds of life respond to the command of Aton, and, nourished by the breath which he gives, a living creature issues forth.

This life-giving power is the constant source of life and sustenance, and its immediate agency is the rays of the Sun. It is in these rays that Aton is present on earth as a beneficent power. Thus manifested, the hymns love to dwell upon his ever-present universal power. "Thou art in the sky, but thy rays are on earth;" "Though thou art far away, thy rays are on earth;" "Thy rays are in the midst of the great green sea;" "Thy rays are on thy beloved son;" "He who makes whole the eyes by his rays;" "It is the breath of life in the nostrils to behold thy rays;" "Thy child (the king), who came forth from thy rays;" "Thou didst fashion him (the king) out of thine own rays;" "Thy rays carry a million royal jubilees;" "When thou sendest forth thy rays, the Two Lands are in festivity;" "Thy rays embrace the lands, even all that thou hast made;" 1 "Whether he is in the sky or on earth, all eyes behold him without [ceasing]; he fills [every land] with his rays, and makes all men to live; with beholding whom may my eyes be satisfied daily, when he dawns in this house of Aton and fills it with his own self by his beams, beauteous in love, and lays them upon me in satisfying life for ever and ever." 2 In these last words the king himself expresses his own consciousness of the god's presence, especially in the temple, by his rays. The obvious dependence of Egypt upon the Nile made it impossible to ignore this agency of life, and there is nothing which discloses more clearly the surprising rationalism of Ikhnaton than the fact that he strips off without hesitation the venerable body of myth and tradition which deified the Nile as Osiris, and attributes the inundation to natural forces controlled by his god, who

in like solicitude for other lands has made a Nile for them in the sky.

It is this recognition of the fatherly solicitude of Aton for all creatures which lifts the movement of Ikhnaton far above all that had before been attained in the religion of Egypt or of the whole East before this time. "Thou art the father and the mother of all that thou hast made" is a thought which anticipates much of the later development in religion even down to our own time. The picture of the lily-grown marshes, where the flowers are "drunken" in the intoxicating radiance of Aton, where the birds unfold their wings and lift them "in adoration of the living Aton," where the cattle dance with delight in the sunshine, and the fish in the river beyond leap up to greet the light, the universal light whose beams are even "in the midst of the great green sea"—all this discloses a discernment of the presence of God in nature, and an appreciation of the revelation of God in the visible world such as we find a thousand years later in the Hebrew psalms, and in our own poets of nature since Wordsworth.

It is evident that, in spite of the political origin of this movement, the deepest sources of power in this remarkable revolution lay in this appeal to nature, in this admonition to "consider the lilies of the field." Ikhnaton was a "God-intoxicated man," whose mind responded with marvellous sensitiveness and discernment to the visible evidences of God about him. He was fairly ecstatic in his sense of the beauty of the eternal and universal light. Its beams enfold him on every monument of his which has survived. He prays, "May my eyes be satisfied daily with beholding him, when he dawns in this house of Aton and fills it with his own self by his beams, beauteous in love, and lays them upon me in satisfying

life for ever and ever." In this light—which more than once, as here, he identifies with love, or again with beauty, as the visible evidence of the presence of God—he revels with an intoxication rarely to be found, and which may be properly compared to the ecstatic joy felt by such a soul as Ruskin in the contemplation of light. Ruskin, as he sees it playing over some lovely landscape, calls it "the breathing, animated, exulting light, which feels and receives and rejoices and acts—which chooses one thing and rejects another—which seeks and finds and loses again—leaping from rock to rock, from leaf to leaf, from wave to wave, glowing or flashing or scintillating according to what it strikes, or in its holier moods absorbing and enfolding all things in the deep fulness of its repose, and then again losing itself in bewilderment and doubt and dimness, or perishing and passing away, entangled in drifting mist, or melted into melancholy air, but still—kindling or declining, sparkling or still—it is the living light, which breathes in its deepest, most entranced rest, which sleeps but never dies." 1 That is the loftiest modern interpretation of light, a veritable gospel of the beauty of light, of which the earliest disciple was this lonely idealist of the fourteenth century before Christ. To Ikhnaton, too, the eternal light might sleep, when he that made the world has "gone to rest in his horizon," but to him also as with Ruskin it "sleeps but never dies."

In this aspect of Ikhnaton's movement, then, it is a gospel of the beauty and beneficence of the natural order, a recognition of the message of nature to the soul of man, which makes it the earliest of those revivals which we call in the case of such artists as Millet and the Barbizon school, or of Wordsworth and his successors, "a return to

nature." As the earliest of such movements known to us, however, we cannot call it a "return." We should not forget also that this intellectual attitude of the king was not confined to religion. The breath of nature had also touched life and art at the same time, and quickened them with a new vision as broad and untrammelled as that which is unfolded in the hymns. The king's charmingly natural and unrestrained relations with his family, depicted on public monuments without reserve, is another example of his powerful individuality and his readiness to throw off the shackles of tradition without hesitation in . the endeavor to establish a world of things as they are, in wholesome naturalness. The artists of the time, one of them indeed, as he says, under the king's own instructions, put forth works dominated by the same spirit. Especially do they reflect to us that joy in nature which breathes in the religion of Ikhnaton. We have come to speak habitually of an Amarna age, in religion, in life, in art, and this fact of itself is conclusive evidence of the distinctive intellectual attitude of Ikhnaton.

It is remarkable that the hymns as an expression of religious aspiration contain so little reference to character and to ethical matters. We have seen that the Solar theology was closely identified from the beginning with the development of the moral consciousness in Egypt. Recognizing as it does more clearly than ever was done before the beneficent goodness of the Sun-god's sway, it is inconceivable that the Amarna movement should have rejected the highly developed ethics of Heliopolis. Its close connection with the Heliopolitan theology is evident throughout. The identification of the royal line with that of the Sun-god by the Heliopolitan priests in the Pyramid Age had resulted, as we have seen, in transferring

to Re the humane qualities of beneficent dominion with which the Pharaohs of the Feudal Age were imbued. The Pharaoh was the "good shepherd" or "good herdman," and this figure of the paternal and protecting sovereign had been transferred to Re. Re had thus gained wondrously in qualities of humane and paternal sympathy, as a result of this development in the conception of the kingship in the Feudal Age. The social forces which had contributed this high ideal of kingship were thus the ultimate influences, which, through the kingship, enriched and humanized the otherwise rather mechanical and perfunctory political conception of Re's dominion. The human appeal which he now made was thus akin to that of Osiris himself. This tendency of the Solar faith was entirely in sympathy with the teaching of Ikhnaton. Under his father we have found a Sun-hymn calling the Sun-god "the valiant herdman driving his herds," a hint clearly connecting the Aton faith with the social and moral movement of the Feudal Age, which we have just recalled. Nevertheless it is evident that it was the beneficence and beauty rather than the righteousness of the Sun-god, on which Ikhnaton loved to dwell, in the hymns to his god. Outside of the hymns, however, there is a marked prominence of the ancient word "truth," or, as we have observed so often, "justice" or "righteousness." To the official name of the king, there is regularly appended the epithet, "living in truth," 1 and although it is difficult

to interpret the phrase exactly, it is evident that the conception of Truth and Right, personified as a goddess, the daughter of the Sun-god at a remote age, occupied a prominent place in the Aton movement, and not least in the personal faith of the king. The new capital was called the "seat of truth" in the short hymn, and we frequently find the men of Ikhnaton's court glorifying truth. One of his leading partisans, Eye, says: "He (the king) put truth in my body and my abomination is lying. I know that Wanre (Ikhnaton) rejoices in it (truth)." 1 The same man affirms that the Sun-god is one "(whose) heart is satisfied with truth, whose abomination is falsehood." 2 Another official states in his Amarna tomb: "I will speak truth to his majesty, (for) I know that he lives therein. . . . I do not that which his majesty hates, (for) my abomination is lying in my body. . . . I have reported truth to his majesty, (for) I know that he lives therein. Thou art Re, begetter of truth. . . . I took not the reward of lying, nor expelled the truth for the violent." 3 Re was still the author of truth or righteousness at Amarna as before, and if we hear of no judgment hereafter in the Amarna tombs, it was clearly only the rejection of the cloud of gods and demi-gods, with Osiris at their head, who had been involved in the judgment as we find it in the Book of the Dead. These were now banished, and the dramatic scene of the judgment seems to have disappeared with them, although it is clear that the ethical requirements of the Solar faith, the faith in which they emerged and developed, were not relaxed in Ikhnaton's

teaching. The sacerdotal invasion of the moral realm with mechanical magical agencies for insuring justification was also evidently repelled by Ikhnaton. The familiar heart scarab now no longer bears a charm to still the accusing voice of conscience, but a simple prayer, in the name of Aton, for long life, favor, and food. 1

Such fundamental changes as these, on a moment's reflection, suggest what an overwhelming tide of inherited thought, custom, and tradition had been diverted from its channel by the young king who was guiding this revolution. It is only as this aspect of his movement is clearly discerned that we begin to appreciate the power of his remarkable personality. Before his time religious documents were usually attributed to ancient kings and wise men, and the power of a belief lay chiefly in its claim to remote antiquity and the sanctity of immemorial custom. Even the social prophets of the Feudal Age attribute the maxims of Ptahhotep to a vizier of the Old Kingdom, five or six centuries earlier. Until Ikhnaton the history of the world had been but the irresistible drift of tradition. All men had been but drops of water in the great current. Ikhnaton was the first individual in history. Consciously and deliberately, by intellectual process he gained his position, and then placed himself squarely in the face of tradition and swept it aside. He appeals to no myths, to no ancient and widely accepted versions of the dominion of the gods, to no customs sanctified by centuries—he appeals only to the present and visible evidences of his god's dominion, evidences open to all, and as for tradition, wherever it had left material manifestations of any sort in records which could be reached, he endeavored to annihilate

it. The new faith has but one name at Amarna. It is frequently called the "teaching," and this "teaching" is attributed solely to the king. There is no reason to question this attribution. But we should realize what this "teaching" meant in the life of the Egyptian people as a whole.

Here had been a great people, the onward flow of whose life, in spite of its almost irresistible momentum, had been suddenly arrested and then diverted into a strange channel. Their holy places had been desecrated, the shrines sacred with the memories of thousands of years had been closed up, the priests driven away, the offerings and temple incomes confiscated, and the old order blotted out. Everywhere whole communities, moved by instincts flowing from untold centuries of habit and custom, returned to their holy places to find them no more, and stood dumfounded before the closed doors of the ancient sanctuaries. On feast days, sanctified by memories of earliest childhood, venerable halls that had resounded with the rejoicings of the multitudes, as we have recalled them at Siut, now stood silent and empty; and every day as the funeral processions wound across the desert margin and up the plateau to the cemetery, the great comforter and friend, Osiris, the champion of the dead in every danger, was banished, and no man dared so much as utter his name. 1 Even in their oaths, absorbed from childhood with their mothers' milk, the involuntary names must not

be suffered to escape the lips; and in the presence of the magistrate at court the ancient oath must now contain only the name of Aton. All this to them was as if the modern man were asked to worship X and swear by Y. Groups of muttering priests, nursing implacable hatred, must have mingled their curses with the execration of whole communities of discontented tradesmen—bakers who no longer drew a livelihood from the sale of ceremonial cakes at the temple feasts; craftsmen who no longer sold amulets of the old gods at the temple gateway; hack sculptors whose statues of Osiris lay under piles of dust in many a tumble-down studio; cemetery stone-cutters who found their tawdry tombstones with scenes from the Book of the Dead banished from the cemetery; scribes whose rolls of the same book, filled with the names of the old gods, or even if they bore the word god in the plural, were anathema; actors and priestly mimes who were driven away from the sacred groves by gendarmes on the days when they should have presented to the people the "passion play," and murmuring groups of pilgrims at Abydos who would have taken part in this drama of the life and death and resurrection of Osiris; physicians deprived of their whole stock in trade of exorcising ceremonies, employed with success since the days of the earliest kings, two thousand years before; shepherds who no longer dared to place a loaf and a jar of water under yonder tree and thus to escape the anger of the goddess who dwelt in it, and who might afflict the household with sickness in her wrath; peasants who feared to erect a rude image of Osiris in the field to drive away the typhonic demons of drought and famine; mothers soothing their babes at twilight and fearing to utter the old sacred names and prayers learned in childhood,

to drive away from their little ones the lurking demons of the dark. In the midst of a whole land thus darkened by clouds of smouldering discontent, this marvellous young king, and the group of sympathizers who surrounded him, set up their tabernacle to the daily light, in serene unconsciousness of the fatal darkness that enveloped all around and grew daily darker and more threatening.

In placing the movement of Ikhnaton against a background of popular discontent like this, and adding to the picture also the far more immediately dangerous secret opposition of the ancient priesthoods, the still unconquered party of Amon, and the powerful military group, who were disaffected by the king's peace policy in Asia and his lack of interest in imperial administration and maintenance, we begin to discern something of the powerful individuality of this first intellectual leader in history. His reign was the earliest age of the rule of ideas, irrespective of the condition and willingness of the people upon whom they were to be forced. As Matthew Arnold has so well said, in commenting on the French Revolution: "But the mania for giving an immediate political application to all these fine ideas of the reason was fatal. . . . Ideas cannot be too much prized in and for themselves, cannot be too much lived with; but to transfer them abruptly into the world of politics and practice, violently to revolutionize the world at their bidding—that is quite another thing." But Ikhnaton had no French Revolution to look back upon. He was himself the world's first revolutionist, and he was fully convinced that he might entirely recast the world of religion, thought, art, and life by the invincible purpose he held, to make his ideas at once practically effective. And so the fair

city of the Amarna plain arose, a fatuous island of the blest in a sea of discontent, a vision of fond hopes, born in a mind fatally forgetful that the past cannot be annihilated. The marvel is that such a man should have first arisen in the East, and especially in Egypt, where no man except Ikhnaton possessed the ability to forget. Nor was the great Mediterranean world which Egypt now dominated any better prepared for an international religion than its Egyptian lords. The imperial imagination of Ikhnaton reminds one of that of Alexander the Great, a thousand years later, but it was many centuries in advance of his age.

We cannot wonder that when the storm broke it swept away almost all traces of this earliest idealist. All that we have to tell us of him is the wreck of his city, a lonely outpost of idealism, not to be overtaken and passed till six centuries later those Bedouin hordes who were now drifting into Ikhnaton's Palestinian provinces had coalesced into a nation of social, moral, and religious aspirations, and had thus brought forth the Hebrew prophets.

Footnotes

312:1 Pyr. § 1434.

312:2 See above, pp. 13–14.

313:1 See Thutmose III's Hymn of Victory, BAR, II, 655–662.

313:2 BAR, II, 98.

315:1 British Museum Stela, No. 826. This important monument much needs an adequate publication. It is accessible only in two very incorrect copies, published by Birch, Trans. Soc. Bib. Arch., VIII, 143, and Pierret, in his Recueil, I. I had also my own copy made in student days, and not much more reliable than the publications. I have not yet seen Scott-Moncrieff's recent volume of British Museum stelæ, and do not know whether it was included by him. The above translation could undoubtedly be corrected in parts on the basis of a better text.

315:2 Or "Begetter without being born," as already in the Middle Kingdom; see above, p. 274.

316:1 The word "hues" is the word commonly meaning "skin." That it has the meaning "hue" or similar is shown by similar passages in Naville, Mythe d’Horus, pl. xii, 1. 2; Amarna Hymn of Tutu, l. 2, and Amarna Hymn of Api, ll. 2–3.

318:1 See above, p. 211.

318:2 His name occurs four times in the Turin Book of the Dead, published by Lepsius. It does not occur at all in the Pyramid Texts, unless the reference in Pyr. § 1095 is to him, which seems to me not entirely certain.

319:1 Hapuseneb, the first High Priest of Amon, who occupied the position at the head of the new sacerdotal organization, was grand vizier under queen Hatshepsut, but it is more likely that her husband, Thutmose III, effected this organization than that she should have done it. However this may be, the evidence will be found in BAR, II, 388 ff.

320:1 BAR, II, 869; see also the author's History of Egypt, p. 360.

320:2 BAR, II, 987.

320:3 Pyr. § 334.

321:1 The decree for the burial of the sacred bull of Heliopolis, Mnevis, at Amarna (Davies, Amarna, V, p. 30) is clearly a compromise with the Heliopolitan priests, but of course does not mean "animal worship."

322:1 See Sethe, Zeitschr. für aegypt. Sprache, 44, 116–118, where this new rendering of the name is demonstrated. The rendering in the author's history, p. 364, is to be changed accordingly.

322:2 It has been widely stated that the hostility of Ikhnaton did not extend beyond his erasure of Amon; but this is an error. I found other gods expunged in Nubia. See also my remarks in Zeitschr. für aegypt. Sprache, 40, 109–110.

322:3 There were at least four. The earlier Boundary Stelæ give five (Davies, Amarna, V, p. 30), but one is evidently a dittography of the preceding in the ancient scribes copy.

323:1 A list of the Aton temples will be found in my essay in the Zeitschr. für aegypt. Sprache, 40, 106–113. The Nubian city of Ikhnaton was found in 1907 by the University of Chicago Expedition. See my Monuments of Sudanese Nubia, pp. 51–82.

323:2 These tombs were frequently visited and studied in the early days of Egyptology, and fragmentarily published. No complete publication, however, was issued until 1903–8, when N. de G. Davies published his valuable Rock Tombs of El Amarna, vols. I–VI, London, 1903–8, which includes everything at Amarna except the town site and the tomb of the king. I copied the most important hymns there in 1895, and these two sources are the bases of the renderings given above. For a presentation of the Amarna situation, historically considered, especially the life of the court in the new environment, the reader may refer to the author's History of Egypt, pp. 358–378. A popular discussion and description of the remarkable reliefs in the tombs will be found in the author's Two Thousand Miles Up the Nile, soon to be published.

324:1 The best text is that of Davies, Amarna, VI, pl. xxix. Full commentary will be found in my De hymnis in solem sub rege Amenophide IV. conceptis, Berlin, 1894, though unfortunately based on the older text of Bouriant. Some changes in the above translation, as compared with that in the author's History, are due to a few new readings in Davies's text, as well as to further study of the document also. The division into strophes is not in the original, but is indicated here for the sake of clearness. The titles of the strophes I have inserted to aid the modern reader.

324:2 There is a pun here on the word Re, which is the same as the word used for "all."

326:1 The shorter hymns follow the phrase "sole God," with the addition, "beside whom there is no other" (see Davies, Amarna, I, XXXVI, l. 1, and III, XXIX, l. 1).

This use of the word sp for "quality" or "power" will be found also in the hymn of Suti and Hor translated above (Brit. Mus. Stela 826, 1. 3); Great Hymn to Amon (1, 5), and similarly on the late statue of Hor (Louvre 88, Brugsch, Thes., VI, 1251, l. 1).

326:2 The word "heart" may mean either "pleasure" or "understanding" here.

327:1 The word is one used only of the people of Egypt.

327:2 The word used implies the nourishment of a mother at the breast.

329:1 The short hymn was put together in a composite text of all versions in the second (unpublished) portion of my De hymnis in solem, and this was later supplemented by my own copies. Davies has also put together a composite text from five tombs in his Amarna, IV, pls. xxxii—xxxiii, The above translation is based on both sources.

330:1 See above, p. 71.

331:1 Variant: "Breath, it enters the nostrils when thou showest thyself to them."

331:2 The remainder of the line is lost. Only one of the five texts Which exist from the beginning goes as far as this point. It also stopped at this place, so that only part of a line has been lost.

331:3 Stela K, Davies, Amarna, V, pl. xxix, l. 7.

332:1 Boundary Stela K, ibid., V, pl. xxix, l. 9.

333:1 See my De hymnis in solem, pp. 21–22.

333:2 Boundary Stela K, Davies, Amarna, V, pl. xxix, ll. 10–11.

335:1 Ruskin, Modern Painters, vol. I, p. 250.

337:1 It is difficult to define the exact meaning of this phrase. The Sun-god was the father of the goddess who personified Truth, and his close connection with truth is evident throughout. In the sixty-fifth chapter of the Book of the Dead, he lives "in truth" or "on truth," using the same words applied to Ikhnaton. But the passage exhibits a very materialistic conception of truth, for the Sun-god lives "on truth" as the Nile lives "on fish." (See Grapow, Zeitschr. für aegypt. Sprache, 49, 51.) The chapter is a magical charm to force the Sun-god to justify the deceased. It was doubtless such materialistic notions of ethical concepts which led the priests to employ magic in the realm of ethics and ethical values.

338:1 BAR, II, 993, 1002.

338:2 BAR, II, 994.

338:3 BAR, II, 1013.

339:1 See Schaefer, Zeitschr. für aegypt. Sprache, 48, 45 f., and Proceedings of the Soc. of Biblical Arch., XVII, 155, No. 3.

340:1 In mortuary doctrines this Amarna movement was unable wholly to eradicate the old customs. The heart scarab is mentioned above; "ushebti" statuettes were also known. There is one in Zurich, see Wiedemann, Proceed. of the Soc. of Bib. Arch., VII, 200–3; also one in Cairo, see Maspero, Musée égyptien, III, pl. xxiii, pp. 27–28. They contain prayers for sustenance at the tomb, in the name of Aton. Osiris is not named.