“Great Hymn to the Aten”

Impact

Akhenaten’s revolution was the pivotal event in the period of the Egyptian New Kingdom (ca. 1550–1069 BCE), yet its influence was largely negative. During the reigns of Tutankhamen (ca. 1336–1327 BCE) and Ay (ca. 1327–1323 BCE), the Egyptians restored traditional religion and returned to conventional art. The reversal continued under Horemheb (ca. 1323–1295 BCE), who started dismantling Akhenaten’s buildings and using the talatat as building blocks for new projects. The fact that the king’s own kin (Tutankhamen) and courtiers (Ay and probably Horemheb) oversaw this about-face attests to the bitterness that his ideas engendered.

Long-term, Akhenaten’s fate was even more dismal. No later than the time of Ramses II (ca. 1279–1213 BCE)—and perhaps as early as that of Horemheb—the king and his immediate heirs were struck from official records. When scribes needed to refer to Akhenaten, they did so in a roundabout, pejorative way, calling him “the rebel” or “the enemy of Amarna” rather than by his name.

Although Akhenaten’s revolution failed, traces of it did survive. After the king’s death, the vernacularization of official writing proceeded apace. Moreover, funerary religion began to stress the sun’s passage through the underworld at night. Members of the Anglo-Dutch archaeological mission at Saqqara, the necropolis of Memphis, discovered a beautiful representation of this solarized afterlife in the tomb of Maya and Meryt, dating to the later fourteenth century BCE.

On the reactionary level, Akhenaten’s heresy contributed to the rise of personal piety, the individual aspect of religion, and a shift away from serving the pharaoh. Recall that stanza 8 of the “Great Hymn” describes the king as the sole intermediary between the Aten and humanity. Such a claim was unprecedented, even in the autocratic history of the Nile Valley, and it provoked a severe response. Out of either disgust or guilt, the Egyptians shifted control over the individual’s destiny from the king to the gods—especially to the resurgent Amen. As a result, everyone from the lowest washerwoman to the pharaoh himself was obliged to bow in contrite prayer before a volatile and omnipotent divine will.

More complex is the possible relationship between Akhenaten’s ideas and “Ba Theology.” The word ba, written with the human-headed bird hieroglyph, denotes the ability to travel between this world and the next. By extension, it also designates a god’s power to reside in kheperu —idols, animals, and so forth—as well as the kheperu themselves. After Akhenaten’s reign, the Egyptians began to equate ba with Amen, calling him the “one god who makes himself into millions” and speaking of four elements—water, earth, air, and light—that emanate from him. One text says that Amen “hides himself in the Solar Orb,” while another stresses his seclusion, remoteness, and inscrutability.

Akhenaten’s religion and Ba Theology do have striking similarities. Both the Aten and Amen were unique, distant, and mysterious deities. Some papyrus manuscripts even characterize Amen as the “ba of gods and human beings,” expressing a measure of pantheism. Of course, the two movements have differences too. The “Great Hymn” never uses the word ba to characterize the Aten’s light, while Ba Theology does not object to cult images.

Nonetheless, if Akhenaten’s heresy and Ba Theology are linked, it is significant that the latter flourished for over a millennium. Indeed, by the Roman era (30 BCE–395 CE), Ba Theology fed into the conceptions of Isis and Bes Pantheos. Egyptians referred to Isis as “the One,” the queen of matter and fate. The Greek polymath Plutarch reports that she “is called by many names, since she turns herself into this thing or that and is receptive to all manner of shapes and forms.” Likewise, the North African writer Apuleius calls her the “mother of the universe” and the “mistress of the elements.” As for Bes Pantheos, a document from the Saite Period (ca. 664–525 BCE) portrays him as the embodiment of Amen’s ba elements.

In the end, Ba Theology—and hence, Akhenaten’s religion—may have influenced the late antique notion of a high god who fills the world from within. Writings in the Corpus Hermeticum, part of the Hermetica—the body of philosophical and mystical works attributed to the mythical divine sage Hermes Trismegistus—say that this deity is “the One and the All,” that he is hidden yet manifest, and that he creates life alone. Several passages associate the high god with the sun, and one even describes him as “the incorporeal light.” The most intriguing part of the Corpus Hermeticum, however, is an exchange between Hermes and his son Tat on the subject of “everlasting bodies”:

Tat. What then can we call real, father?—Hermes. The Sun alone; because the Sun, unlike all other things, does not suffer change, but continues to be as he is. Wherefore the Sun alone has been entrusted with the task of making all things in the universe; he rules over all things, and makes all things. Him do I worship, and I adore his reality, acknowledging him, next after the one supreme God, as the Maker.

This excerpt clearly echoes Akhenaten’s thinking. Like Tat, the king sought the real and the lasting. He learned that cult statues decay and perish, while the Aten endures. He thus worshiped that body which held the light-energy that sustains all living things.

A last way in which Akhenaten may have shaped the future is through Psalm 104 of the Hebrew Bible. The American Egyptologist James Henry Breasted noticed a number of parallels between this text and the “Great Hymn.” Psalm 104 associates God with the sun, imbues him with a universal quality, gives him power over life and time, and celebrates the multiplicity of his creation. Breasted maintained that the biblical song was, in fact, derived from the Egyptian one. Others have gone even further, arguing that Akhenaten was the tutor of Moses and the father of Judaism. Today, however, most scholars eschew such theories as flights of fancy.