Ancient Egyptian Religion and the Concept of Monotheism
The second century Roman writer Lucian satirized the “ridiculous creatures from Egypt who have been crammed into heaven,” and nearly 2000 years later Adolf Erman, in Die agyptische Religion (1905), was apologizing for subjecting his readers to the long list of major Egyptian deities worshiped in ancient Egypt.
Lucian was ridiculing the animal nature of many of the Egyptian gods, but Erman was doing something a good deal more serious – he was responding to late 19th century attempts to reinterpret ancient Egyptian religion as essentially monotheistic. In 1869, lectures by Emmanuel de Rouge’s and other French Egyptologists had begun to argue that Egyptian religion was originally and fundamentally monotheistic. They had been joined in this interpretation by the English Egyptologist Sir Peter le Page Renouf, who claimed the dog-faced gods satirized by Lucian were a later degeneration of an originally more sublime monotheistic faith.
In the same year, Gaston Maspero took the position that Egyptian polytheism was a secondary phenomenon deriving from an earlier monotheism, but by 1888, working on the translation of the Pyramid Texts of the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties which had been discovered in 1880-81, he recanted. Other writers also began backtracking and the idea of Egyptian monotheism which had been so enthusiastically embraced, was quietly dropped. Of the few who did address the issue, like James Henry Breasted, the monotheistic interpretation was rejected in favor of pantheism and henotheism (the devotion to a single god while accepting the existence of other gods, a belief also held by the early Hebrews).
But the matter would not rest. A neo-monotheistic interpretation of the Egyptian concept of god reasserted itself among French Egyptologists in the 1930s when Etienne Drioton, director general of the Egyptian Antiquities Service, and Jacques Vandier published a political and intellectual history titled L’Egypt. Drioton’s views were adopted by German Egyptologist Siegfried Morenz, who in the 1960s wrote that there was a “single reality of God behind the profusion of his manifestations,” and that every single deity was firmly anchored “in the depths of a single divine essence.”
Karl W. Luckert, preparing a larger work on the evolution of religious thought, offered a book on the religions of the ancient Near East which not only endorsed the monotheistic interpretation, but also ventured to enlarge the issues involved by suggesting that Egyptian religious concepts influenced Hebrew and Christian theology. Christianity, Luckert asserted, is more than merely, or even primarily, the offspring of the Hebrew religion (p.106).
This debate among scholars concerning the monotheism of Egyptian religion and its possible impact on Hebrew and Christian religious ideas does not involve the religious reforms of the pharaoh Akhenaton (Amenhotep IV) in the fourteenth century B.C. which so fascinated Sigmund Freud in his Moses and Monotheism (1939) and which many still believe manifested the progression from polytheism to monotheism in the ancient world. Rather, it concerns whether the theology (account of the origin and descent of gods), cosmogony (origin or creation of the universe), and soteriology (theory dealing with salvation) of the Egyptian religion are expressions of a monotheistic conception of an all-encompassing divinity, and whether among the various Near Eastern religions which contributed to the Hebrew and Christian concept of God and his creation, those ideas of the ancient Egyptian religion were the most decisive.
Few textbook authors take note of the development of this debate. Texts on Western Civilization uniformly and explicitly state that ancient Egyptian religion was polytheistic. And while they acknowledge the contributions of Mesopotamian and Persian (Zoroastrian) religious stories and ideas to the Judeo-Christian tradition, the Egyptian contribution, particularly the notion of its being the inspiration for monotheistic concepts, is specifically rejected.
This is unfortunate, but perhaps not surprising in a society where it is now the fashion to celebrate human diversity to the point of insisting on maintaining separate cultural identities, even if it forces us to overlook the commonality of human experience. During the Italian Renaissance, the intolerance of Christian views was subtly challenged by Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) who, though he considered Christianity the most perfect religion, saw in all religious thought a common human striving to know and love God (ascent of the soul towards god) and noted the harmony between the ideas of Christianity and Platonism which he felt had its origins in Persian Zoroastrianism. Ficino’s associate Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494) widened Ficino’s idea in asserting that all religions and philosophies contained valid insights and that they all “participated in truth” because there is one universal truth which they all touch at some point. Of particular interest, in light of the discussion below, is Pico’s idea that God is both identical with being and above the particulars of being (in nature and yet transcendent).
The monotheistic characteristics of Egyptian religious theologies that influenced Hebrew and Christian theologies date back to writings in the reign of Menes, founder of the First Dynasty around 2920 B.C. They were created by the priests of the ancient Egyptian cult center at Junu (On in Semitic), renamed Heliopolis by the Greeks, and placed on the walls of seven pyramids during the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties (2494-2181 B.C.). This Heliopolitan theology became the dominant strain of Egyptian religious thought which all later theological formulations felt compelled to embrace.
| Section 14 | Section 16 |