Egypt's Heretic Pharaoh Introduces Monotheism
by Bill Lazarus |
Hathor and Seti I |
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Ed's note: This is the third in a series about the world before religion. If you missed the first two articles, they will be found in previous newsletters located in Archives. The previous columns have looked at the rise of religion as an offshoot of magic and then at early religious ideas that infused Sumerian, Babylonian and Egyptian faiths. The names in those religions were different -- Amon, Re, Marduk, Ishtar and Tiamat, to name a few -- but the basic idea was strikingly similar. All of these religions believed in many gods, what today we label as pagan. They had gods to oversee childbirth, death and everything in between. In Babylon, the supreme |
god, Tiamat, was a woman. Her name, which means "chaos" found a home in the Bible: "And the earth was without form, and void; and chaos was upon the face of the deep." (Gen: 1:2) She lost her authority after getting split in half by Marduk, ending up as the "firmament" above and below the earth as described in Genesis. The Egyptians were partial to Hathor, a cow-like deity who gave birth to the Earth. She fit nicely into a theology where local gods, like Osiris, Re and Amon, eventually became titular deities for the entire country. Such gods had dominated Egyptian faith for centuries. |
However, one pharaoh in the mid-1400s B.C. was aggravated by the amount of control on his powers wielded by the priests of Amon. The pharaoh, whose name Amonhotep IV, means "Pleasing to Amon," fussed and fumed with the priestly caste for some years before launching a new idea that still reverberates in the modern world. He chose as his god a minor deity in the Egyptian pantheon, called Aten (also spelled Aton). He changed his name to Akhenaten (or Akhnaten or Ikhnaton), which
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