History of the World/History of the World (Bureau Development, Inc.)(1992).BIN/dp/0222/02225.txt

Text File | 1992-10-12 | 22KB | 350 lines

$Unique_ID{how02225}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{History Of Religions
Chapter III: Part I}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Foot Moore, George}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{temples
god
aton
amon
egypt
thebes
religion
kings
name
city}
$Date{1913}
$Log{}
Title:       History Of Religions
Book:        Religions Of Egypt
Author:      Foot Moore, George
Date:        1913

Chapter III: Part I

Decline

     The two glorious centuries of the Twelfth Dynasty were followed by a
decline more swift and a fall more deep than those of the Old Kingdom.  The
long lists of ephemeral rulers which are the sum of our knowledge of this dark
age show only that legitimate and orderly succession was the exception;
pretenders and usurpers mounted the throne, only to be supplanted by fresh
conspiracies and revolutions.  Reduced to impotence by these internal
disorders, the unhappy country could present no effective opposition to the
foreign invasion which was not long in coming.  The Hyksos kings, at the head
of hordes of Asiatics, poured into the Delta, and in a few years reduced to
subjection not only Lower Egypt, but the whole valley of the Nile to a point
south of Thebes.  In the early stages of the invasion the cities and temples,
particularly in the Delta, doubtless suffered many outrages at the hands of
the conquerors, but the later kings of the line were at least superficially
Egyptianised; they adopted the old royal titles and gave themselves Re names
like their native predecessors. Their principal god was identified - whether
by themselves or by their subjects - with the old Egyptian god Set, who, as
the foe of Horus and Osiris, seemed the natural god of the barbarian enemies
of Egypt, and temples to this god were erected by Hyksos kings at Tanis and at
Avaris, their great fortified camp on the eastern frontier.

     Who these invaders were is an unsolved problem.  It is certain, however,
that they entered Egypt from the side of Syria, and when they were driven out
they made a strong stand at Sharuhen, in the south of what was afterward the
territory of Judah.  It is probable that Kadesh, the objective of several of
the campaigns of Thothmes III, was in his time the centre of their power.
These facts, as well as the names of some of the kings, support the testimony
of Manetho that the invaders, or at least the dominant element among them,
were Semites.

     The duration of their supremacy in Egypt, notwithstanding the large
figures given by Manetho, can hardly have exceeded a century or two, and in
the latter part of this time their hold on Upper Egypt must have become less
firm.  At Thebes a family of local dynasts ruled the city, probably at first
as vassals of the Hyksos, and gradually extended their power over Upper Egypt,
being reckoned by Manetho as the Seventeenth Dynasty of Egyptian kings.  About
1580 Ahmose I, the founder of the Eighteenth Dynasty, after a severe struggle,
captured the last stronghold of Hyksos at Avaris and expelled them finally
from Egypt.  He followed them into Syria, and took Sharuhen after a siege of
six years.  At the other extremity of Egypt he recovered from the Nubians the
territory between the first and second cataracts, and thus re-established the
kingdom within its old limits.

     The empire which Ahmose I founded was extended by his successors, the
Amenhoteps and Thutmoses, far into Nubia on the one side, while on the other
it included all Syria to the Euphrates and the Amanus.  These conquests
brought to Egypt, as the booty of war and as tribute, enormous riches and
great multitudes of captives; commercial expeditions, especially to Punt
(southern Arabia), contributed to the growing wealth and luxury. In little
more than a century Egypt, which had been reduced by internal disorder and
foreign invasion to complete impotence, reached the highest pitch of its
greatness.  The state was an absolute monarchy with a strongly centralised
administration; the princes and counts who in the break-up of the Middle
Kingdom and the turbulent times that followed had made themselves virtually
independent lordlings were deprived of all power; the landed nobility
disappeared, and a great part of the land was now crown domain.  The long wars
of liberation and conquest gave the monarchy a military character unlike
anything the temperamentally unwarlike Egyptians had ever known; the
introduction of the horse and the prominent part the chariot force now played
in the battle, the employment of numbers of foreign mercenaries, created a
professional army which overshadowed the old national levies.

     Nowhere is the new order of things more noticeable than in religion. The
capital of the empire was Thebes; under the banner of the Theban Amon-Re the
kings drove out the Hyksos and conquered Syria; to him they erected temples in
their Asiatic provinces.  As the god of the Egyptians in their wars against
foreigners in every quarter and of every colour, Amon became the national god
in quite a different sense from that in which the Heliopolitan theology had
made Re a national god; as Amon-Re he was supreme by a double title.

     Out of the spoils of war and the revenues of the state the kings of the
Eighteenth Dynasty built him temples of size and splendour hitherto unheard
of, and enriched them by enormous gifts and endowments.  A large part of the
captives of war were dedicated as slaves of the god; great estates with all
their serfs were settled upon the temples.  The priesthood now for the first
time became a numerous and powerful class.  The chief priest of Amon was the
head of the state religion, with authority over all the other priesthoods, and
these great ecclesiastics sometimes filled high offices in the state.
Amenhotep III had one chief priest of Amon for treasurer and another for
vizier.  Before the sun of Amon all the other gods began to pale; only Ptah of
Memphis and Re of Heliopolis, who shared with him in smaller measure the
favour of the kings, retained something of their old prestige.

     This was the situation when Amenhotep IV (1375-58 B.C.) made his
revolutionary attempt to dethrone the mighty Amon and establish the worship of
Aton as the sole religion of the state.  The change meant much more than a
monarch's capricious preference for one cult above another, such as
Elagabalus' devotion to the sun-god of Emesa; it was a serious effort to
introduce a higher monotheism.  It has been noted above that the Heliopolitan
priesthood had exalted Re as creator and ruler of the world to a place far
above all the gods, but that they had compromised the monotheistic principle
of their own theology by recognising the many deities as the One under other
names, so that the practical result of the acceptance of the doctrine had been
to confer on every god the attributes and power of Re.  Yet the conception of
the unity of god, in vaguely pantheistic form, was firmly fixed in the
religious philosophy of the Egyptians.  The priests of Memphis called this god
Ptah; at Heliopolis he was, as of old, Re; at Thebes, Amon - in truth he is
"the god of innumerable names."

     Among these names is one which, though ancient, had never gained wide
currency - Aton, the solar orb, or disc, visible in the sky.  As the divine
sun, he is closely akin to Re, but he had not, like Re, been fused with
terrestrial gods of various beastly shapes nor represented in human form, and
by its freedom from such associations his name was a fit symbol for God in a
purer solar monotheism.  Where this movement began is not certainly known;
there is some reason to think that it was at Heliopolis, where Amenhotep IV
built a temple to Aton.  The fact that Amenhotep III named a pleasure barge in
his artificial lake "Aton gleams" and had a company of Aton in his body-guard
shows that the god - and presumably the doctrine - was known in Thebes before
the reformation.

     In the early part of his reign, Amenhotep IV began the erection of a
stately temple to Aton in Thebes, between the temples of Karnak and Luxor, on
grounds which his father had laid out as a garden of Amon.  Thebes, Amon's
city, had to hear itself officially renamed "City of the Brightness of Aton,"
and the quarter in which Amon's great temples lay "Brightness of Aton the
Great." The proud and powerful priesthood of Amon is not likely to have looked
with complacency on this exaltation of the upstart god, and still less on the
diversion of the streams of treasure they had been wont to see pour into their
coffers.  But there was worse to follow.  Not long after the completion of the
temple of Aton, the king ousted the priesthoods from the temples throughout
the land, suppressing the public worship and effacing the names of the gods
wherever they occurred in inscriptions; the very word "gods" was treated in
the same way.  Amon was pursued with peculiar vindictiveness not only in the
temples, but in the cemeteries. The monuments of the king's ancestors, and
even those of his own father, were mutilated to destroy the obnoxious word. ^1
The king's own name was the same as his father's, Amenhotep, "Amon rests"; he
changed it to Ikhnaton, "Spirit of Aton."

[Footnote 1: The mutilation of the name of Amon was not an exhibition of
impotent hatred; it was, according to ancient notions, the destruction of the
bearer of the name.]

     But, after all, Thebes was Amon's city.  The silent temples on whose
walls the king's forefathers were worshipping Amon or conquering an empire in
his might, the obelisks commemorating their jubilees, their tombs across the
valley, all proclaimed him; every brutal scar on a historic monument cried out
his name.  There must have been other things to make Thebes an unpleasant
residence for the iconoclastic king.  An obsequious court might change its
religion at the royal pleasure, but the people must have seen with sullen
discontent, if not with open protest, the sacrilegious outrages perpetrated on
the gods and the temples; and the priests were there to fan the flame.

     It is easy to imagine, therefore, why Amenhotep formed the plan of
removing the capital from Thebes.  Nearly three hundred miles farther north,
on an unoccupied site, he founded a new city, Akhetaton, "Horizon of Aton."
Three temples of Aton were erected there, besides magnificent palaces and
government buildings.  The court and officials built them residences in the
new capital, a flourishing city sprang into existence as by magic, and tombs
were hewn in the eastern cliff for the kings and the nobles - a city of the
dead.  Ikhnaton also ordered temples of Aton to be built not only at
Heliopolis, but in remoter parts of his empire, in upper Nubia and in Syria.

     The great temple of Aton differed from the ordinary type of Egyptian
temples chiefly in having no cella for the image of the god.  Instead of this
there were behind the hypo-style hall two large halls or courts, surrounded by
small chambers and having an altar in the middle.  In these the more solemn
rites of worship took place, while the great altar in the fore court received
the common sacrifices, which consisted, as in other temples, of the flesh of
bullocks, geese, and the like, in great quantities.

     In various scenes Aton is represented by a disc from which long rays
issue, each ending in a hand; in one of these the common symbol of life, the
Ankh, is held out to the king.

     The teaching of the new religion, which Ikhnaton professes to have
received by revelation from his father Re, is best learned from the great hymn
to Aton, which is notable not only for its nobility of conception, but for its
poetic beauty. ^1

[Footnote 1: Translations of it are given in Breasted, History of Egypt, pp.
371 ff.; Religion in Ancient Egypt, pp. 324 ff.]

     What is remarkable in this hymn is not its recognition of one god as
creator and ruler - the hymns to Amon do the same, and in very similar phrase;
it is, in fact, not so much in what it says as in what it does not say that it
differs most widely from even the highest utterances of the orthodox Egyptian
religion.  There are no references to the ancient solar myths, such as the
combat of the sun with the dragon monster, to his voyage in his morning and
evening barks, to his ancient and magical names.  Not the fabulous adventures
of an anthropomorphic sun god, but the beneficent works of the divine sun,
move the poet's admiration and gratitude.  The realism of the art which
Ikhnaton fostered is a product of the same disposition to see things as they
are.  Besides this expurgation of the mythical and conventional, there is a
strikingly universal strain in the hymn.  The Syrians and the Ethiopians are
not only creatures of God, but are subjects of his providential care; men's
speech and their colour are diverse as God has appointed.  Of the theological
chauvinism which makes a national god out of a universal one there is no
trace.

     Even more significant is the disappearance from the tombs of the whole
Osirian eschatology, mythical and magical, and, indeed, of all those fantastic
notions of the hereafter which had so much exercised the Egyptians through all
their history.  The deceased prays to the sun to grant the certainty of
beholding him, and to refresh him with the breath of the north wind; the
scarab bears a prayer to Aton, and the pyramid amulet is inscribed with his
name and symbol.

     All this seems to many scholars so strange that they think it necessary
to look abroad for the source of these ideas.  A favourite theory with them
has been that the religion of Aton was introduced from Syria.  It seemed for a
time to be made out that the queen mother, Tiy, who had great influence over
her son, and Nefertiti, his wife, were Syrian princesses; the name Aton
suggested to etymologists by sound the Canaanite Adon.  These combinations
have proved to be mistaken; the discovery of the tomb of Tiy showed that she
was a native Egyptian, a woman of the people.  But the fatal objection to the
theory, before as after these discoveries, is that there is no trace of such a
solar monotheism in Syria.  On the other hand, it was the logical end of
Egyptian theological thinking and of Amenophis' own career.  In his first
years he built temples to the sun-god Re-Harakhte at Thebes, Memphis,
Heliopolis, and other cities.  When Aton first appears it is under the title,
"Harakhte who triumphs in the horizon in his name 'Splendour who is Aton'"
(the disc of the sun).  What is really strange is not the monotheism, but the
exclusive turn Amenophis gave it and his determination to make it the sole
religion in his dominions.

     Whatever the actuating motives may have been, the sincerity of the king's
conviction can as little be questioned as the logical consistency of his
action.  He made, at a cost greater than he could foresee, the attempt to
reform the religion of his country by putting into effect its highest
conceptions, and by rejecting the incongruous survivals of its barbarous
beginnings which choked these ideas and rendered them unfruitful.  We cannot
but be reminded of the like attempt of Josiah to make monotheism the religion
of Judah in reality as well as in prophetic doctrine by casting out all
foreign gods and destroying the high places.  The event, too, was not
dissimilar: no sooner was the strong hand of the royal reformer withdrawn than
his reforms were engulfed in a flood-tide of reaction.

     While Amenhotep was building temples and arranging ceremonies and
composing hymns in honour of Aton, the Asiatic provinces of the empire, the
conquests of his great forefathers, were slipping from his grasp.  The letters
and despatches from Syria found in the archives of the new capital (called the
El-Amarna letters, from the modern name of the place) contain urgent appeals
to the Pharaoh to come to the rescue of his hard-pressed governors and loyal
vassals, but these appeals remained unheeded.  It is evident from the records
of Harmheb's reign that internal affairs had also suffered from the same
preoccupation.  An absolute ruler cannot give his whole mind to religion
without neglecting more vital concerns of the state. We hear of no serious
disorders, however, so long as he lived, though the sequel shows that
disaffection must have been wide-spread.

     Amenophis IV died about 1358, after a reign of seventeen years or more.
He had no son, and was succeeded by the husband of his eldest daughter, who
was soon followed by another son-in-law, Tutenkhaton ("Living Image of Aton").
The turn things were taking is shown by the fact that Tutenkhaton transferred
the capital back to Thebes, and not only permitted the resumption of the
worship of Amon, but restored the temples and himself conducted the great
festival of the god at Karnak and Luxor; it was not long before he changed his
own name to Tutenkhamon.  The reaction was in full swing.  The name of Amon
was restored in the inscriptions which Amenophis had mutilated.  Tutenkhamon's
successor, Eye, who seems to have had no better title to the throne than that
he was the husband of Amenophis' nurse, was the last of the heretic kings.
After a brief period of anarchy, Harmheb, the commander-in-chief of the army,
with the support of the military and the priesthood of Amon, poclaimed himself
king.  When he had re-established order with a hard hand, his first concern
was to restore the temples throughout the land, replace the images according
to the old pattern, furnish the shrines with the vessels of silver and gold
for use in worship, provide them with priests, assign them the materials for
offerings, and endow them with lands and cattle.  The work of restoring the
names of the gods in the mutilated inscriptions was completed; every mark of
Amenophis' iconoclastic fury was as far as possible effaced.  The temples of
Aton at Thebes were razed, and the stones used to build two pylons for Amon.
At the abandoned capital, Akhetaton, the temples and tombs were ruined;
everywhere the name of the Ikhnaton was obliterated, and when it was necessary
in legal proceedings to cite enactments or documents of his reign, he was
referred to as "that criminal of Akhetaton." Amon-Re was avenged.  His priests
in their hymns exulted over the fallen foe of the god: "Woe to him who injures
thee!  Thy city endures, but the city of him who injures thee has perished.
Shame upon him who commits sacrilege against thee in any land. . . .  The sun
of him who knew thee not has set; but he who knows thee, he shines; the
sanctuary of him who injured thee lies in darkness, and the whole earth is in
light."

     The reform that fails always leaves things worse than they were; and
especially a reform put through by force provokes a more violent reaction,
which is carried by its own momentum farther than its first leaders foresee or
desire.  So it was with Amenophis' reforms.  From the time when the old
religion was triumphantly reinstated, its face was turned backward, and the
only visible progress it made for a thousand years was in reviving ancient
superstitions and inventing new ones.

     The kings of the Nineteenth Dynasty who followed Harmheb endeavoured to
reconquer the Asiatic provinces which had been lost under Amenophis IV and in
the disorders that followed his death.  Seti and Rameses II had little
difficulty in recovering Palestine and southern Syria, but the new Hittite
power which had arisen in the north barred their way in that direction.  After
a series of campaigns extending over some fifteen years, which,
notwithstanding the boasts of conquest in the inscriptions, do not seem to
have permanently advanced the Egyptian frontier much beyond Beirut and the
southern end of the Bika', a treaty of alliance was contracted between the two
states.  These wars, like those of the great kings of the Eighteenth Dynasty,
were conducted under the banner of Amon-Re as the national god, and again, as
in the earlier conquests, a great part of the spoils was bestowed on his
temples.  Rameses II removed the residence from Thebes to Tanis, in the Delta,
for its greater convenience as a base for his Syrian enterprises, but the city
of Amon was not neglected; to say nothing of other buildings, such as the
enlargement of the Luxor temples, the great hall of columns at Karnak
surpasses all that his predecessors had done.  Nor were the other gods
forgotten; everywhere Rameses enlarged, rebuilt, or beautified their temples,
so that there are few temples remaining in Egypt on which his name does not
appear.

     Great additions were also made to the wealth of the temples by occasional
gifts and by endowments.  It was the theory of the state religion that the
temples were royal sanctuaries where the king worshipped the god; in the
scenes on the temple walls depicting religious rites the king is always the
central figure.  The successors of Rameses continued to lavish treasure upon
the temples, and as their possessions were exempt from taxation they became
enormously rich.  From the figures given in the Harris Papyrus it appears that
under one of the later kings of the dynasty three-quarters of a million acres,
nearly one-seventh of all the land of Egypt, was church property, and the
temples held among them 107,000 slaves, besides enormous herds of cattle.  By
far the greater part of these riches belonged to three gods, Amon of Thebes,
Ptah of Memphis, and Re of Heliopolis; Amon alone held 583,000 acres of land
and 420,000 cattle, large and small.  The office of high priest of Amon, the
head of all the priesthoods of the land, had now become hereditary.  He
maintained a body of troops, and altogether wielded a power which even the
strongest king could not with impunity defy.  Under the Twentieth Dynasty the
Theban high priest, Hrihor, who had long been the real ruler of Egypt, boldly
set aside the fiction of ruling for the Ramessid king and seated himself upon
the throne (about 1090).