“Great Hymn to the Aten”

Context

Located in northeastern Africa and bordering the Mediterranean Sea, Egypt is the site of one of the ancient world’s earliest civilizations. The Nile, the longest river in the world, runs northward through Egypt and into the Mediterranean Sea. Because of the northerly flow of the river, the Nile Delta region—located in the northern part of Egypt—is known as Lower Egypt; the valley region in the south is known as Upper Egypt.

Egypt’s Eighteenth Dynasty emerged from the strife that erupted at the end of the Second Intermediate Period (ca. 1650–1550 BCE). Semitic immigrants called the Hyksos—a name derived from the Egyptian expression heqau khasut, meaning “rulers of foreign lands”—gained control of the Nile Delta and projected their influence up the river valley. Theban princes of the Seventeenth Dynasty (ca. 1580–1550 BCE) rose to challenge them from Upper Egypt, and a series of fierce battles ensued. Under Ahmose (ca. 1550–1525 BCE), a scion of the Seventeenth Dynasty and the founder of the Eighteenth Dynasty, the Thebans sacked the Hyksos stronghold of Avaris, in the delta region near the Mediterranean coast. The Thebans pursued the Hyksos refugees eastward toward Canaan (roughly modern-day Palestine), massacring them at Sharuhen, in southern Canaan.

The victorious Eighteenth Dynasty viewed the Hyksos ascendancy as a period of foreign oppression and sought to improve national security by “extending the boundaries of Egypt,” which effectively became a motto. Especially noteworthy in this respect is Thutmose III (ca. 1479–1425 BCE), who campaigned seventeen times in the Near East. As a result of such adventures, later pharaohs ruled an empire that included Egypt, Nubia, and vassal territories in Canaan and Syria. They also inherited diplomatic ties with other great powers, including Mitanni, Babylon, and the Hittites.

Egyptian empire-building led to a new cosmopolitan spirit. Simply put, kings were now too involved in the wider world to pursue a traditional policy of isolationism. They still may have viewed outsiders with contempt and apprehension, but they had to receive foreign envoys at their palaces and take foreign princesses into their harems. With these political obligations went economic and cultural exchange, such that exotic merchandise and strange customs—including the worship of foreign gods like Baal and Astarte and foreign artistic motifs like the running spiral—flowed into the Nile Valley as never before. The Thebans had, in effect, butchered the Hyksos at Sharuhen, only to cohabit, barter, and worship with their confederates.

Cosmopolitanism in turn sparked reflections on the nature of the divine. Without renouncing their old polytheism (belief in many gods), the Egyptians began thinking about a more universal type of supernatural being. Moreover, they evolved a new conception of the solar creator, Re, as a deity who acts alone, rather than in concert with others. Finally, the Egyptians started to focus on the sun god’s visible journey across the sky and his generation of life and time. The German Egyptologist Jan Assmann has labeled the latter two trends “the New Solar Theology.”

The hymn of the brothers Suti and Hor illustrates these new ideas. Dating to the first half of the fourteenth century BCE, it glorifies Amen, the creator god of Thebes, as he appears in various solar guises. (The Egyptians were not at all averse to combining divinities in this way.) The hymn triumphantly proclaims that Amen, as the Aten—both deity and orb—captures and encompasses foreign lands. It does not refer to any nonsolar deities except one, the sky goddess Nut. In addition, it emphasizes the sun’s rays and their life-giving energy, declaring that the god’s unseen aspects—his self-creation and his character—are mysterious and unknown.

Before turning to the reign of Akhenaten, two other developments are worth mentioning. The Eighteenth Dynasty’s military campaigns resulted in plunder, a good deal of which went directly to Amen’s cult. By the fourteenth century BCE, Amen’s priests may have acquired so much power that they became a threat to royal authority. Also significant is the Eighteenth Dynasty’s antiquarian focus—its effort to revitalize the culture of the distant past. Thutmose IV (ca. 1400–1390 BCE), for example, restored the Great Sphinx at Giza in Lower Egypt, while Akhenaten’s father, Amenhotep III (ca. 1390–1352 BCE), researched the Sed Festival, an ancient rite of rejuvenation intended for a king’s thirtieth regnal year. (Contrary to custom, however, Amenhotep III celebrated a total of three Sed Festivals.)

There were thus several intriguing developments, but no major crises, when Amenhotep IV assumed the throne around 1352 BCE. (Egyptologists are divided over whether Amenhotep III was still alive at this point and participating in a coregency.) In his fourth regnal year, however, the new pharaoh, together with his wife, Queen Nefertiti, began a revolution. Changing his name to Akhenaten, which means “Effective for the Solar Orb,” he built a new residence at the barren site of Amarna, about two hundred miles north of Thebes on the eastern bank of the Nile River. There, in open-roofed temples, he mixed contemporary theology with titles and symbols from the old sun cult of Heliopolis and worshiped the Aten. He also patronized a flowing, naturalistic style of art and allowed vernacular words into official documents, initiating the literary transition from Middle to Late Egyptian. (Middle Egyptian did not employ definite articles like pa, for example, and scribes tended to regard their use as inelegant, but Late Egyptian did include them.)

Akhenaten took another major step during his ninth regnal year, ordering the names of traditional gods, most notably Amen, hacked out of inscriptions. Some deities, like Ptah and Osiris, were spared the chisel and simply ignored. This persecution doubtless angered conservative elements in Egyptian society, but it does not seem to have affected popular religion.

In his twelfth regnal year, Akhenaten held a durbar, or reception, at Amarna. Envoys from throughout the Near East and Africa attended the event, but what they celebrated is today uncertain. The British Egyptologist Cyril Aldred believed that Akhenaten’s durbar marked the beginning of his sole rule, following the death of his father, Amenhotep III.

Unfortunately, modern scholars have little information about the end of Akhenaten’s reign. The defeat of Egypt’s closest ally, the Kingdom of Mitanni (in modern-day Syria), by the Hittites of central Anatolia (present-day Turkey), together with the squabbling of vassal princes in Canaan and Syria, may have exacerbated domestic tensions caused by the persecution of Amen and other traditional gods. Recent scholarship suggests that Nefertiti became Akhenaten’s coregent before his death in his seventeenth regnal year. Almost nothing is known about the successor Smenkhkare (ca. 1338–1336 BCE), except for the fact that he married the eldest of the king’s six daughters, Meritaten.