The Best of the Bureau/The_Best_of_the_Bureau_Bureau_Development_Inc._1992.iso/dp/0079/00796.txt

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$Unique_ID{bob00796}
$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