By studying the carved reliefs and texts on the blocks, a number of conclusions could be reached about this new religion. Significantly, it was within the large, open courtyard that a royal jubilee was celebrated, and in fact this might have been the main function of Gemet Pa-Aten. At around age , Akhenaten surely did not need such a boost! At coronation, the throne name of the king was revealed. When construction on Gem Pa-Aten began, in the 2nd or 3rd regnal year, the king still used his birth name Amenhotep.
But before the project was completed around his 4th or 5th year, without explanation he dropped that name and adopted the name by which he is known in history: Akhenaten. With the jubilee, Akhenaten seems to signal that the Aten was now the ultimate ruler, replacing Amen-Re. What followed was a systematic programme of iconoclasm in which images of Amen and writings of his name throughout Egypt were desecrated and removed. The temples of his father, Amenhotep III, were not off-limits. This pristine land had not been sacred to any deity before.
No city or temples previously stood there. Only temples to Aten were built there, and the largest was called Gemet Pa-Aten. The king no longer tolerated any divine name or personification of a force of nature that could be construed as another deity.
The exclusivity of Aten and the campaign to exterminate Amen and other deities is proof positive of a movement from polytheism to monotheism.
If doubt remains that Akhenaten was a monotheist, consider some elegant and touching lines in The Great Hymn to the Aten , inscribed on the wall of the tomb of the high official named Aye at Amarna:.
A tenism was a monotheistic experiment. But what instigated such a radical shift from the polytheistic orthodoxy that had flourished in Egypt for millennia, and what led to the demotion of Amen-Re from his preeminent status, a position he had held for centuries? Here, there is little agreement among Egyptologists. Simply put, it was a political move. Others consider Atenism to be simply the climax of an evolution that had been underway for more than a century, in which Re had been moving towards universal status.
This interpretation, however, does not take into account the programme of iconoclasm towards Amen and other deities, and the disappearance of traditional images of the sun-god human form, falcon head, pyramid images, etc. One could advance Aten without eradicating Amen in a polytheistic system. My theory is that Akhenaten himself very early in his reign or even just before experienced a theophany — a dream or some sort of divine manifestation — in which he believed that Aten spoke to him.
This encounter launched his movement which took seven to nine years to fully crystallise as exclusive monotheism. Great idea, but based on what evidence? A third temple by the same name was built in Nubia.
Could the name of the three sanctuaries memorialise the dramatic theophany that set off the revolution? Akhenaten also uses the same language of discovery to explain how he found the land where he would establish the new city, Akhet-Aten. With Atenism, the evolution from polytheism to monotheism occurred rapidly, in just a few years. Historians of religion over the past years thought that such a shift to monotheism must have been a gradual development taking place over millennia.
Just like every field of learning in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the academic study of religion was shaped by evolutionary philosophy, an extension of Darwinian thought.
From this perspective, religion began in the hoary past from animism, where everything — trees, rivers, rocks, etc — was possessed by spirits; followed by totemism; then polytheism; henotheism; culminating finally in monotheism.
This linear development took thousands of years, it is claimed, moving from simple to complex forms. Some thinkers maintain that monotheism was achieved in the 6th and 5th centuries BCE for the ancient Jews, a development mirrored among Greek philosophers, in Zoroastrianism and other Asian religions during the same general period. But with Atenism, as the evidence suggests, the evolution from polytheism to monotheism occurred rapidly, in just a few years, contrary to the traditional understanding that monotheism appeared eight centuries later.
Some have toyed with the idea that either Moses influenced Akhenaten or vice versa. As noted, Akhet-Aten was located in central Egypt, more than miles away from the Land of Goshen in the northeastern delta where the Bible places the Hebrews. The main reason I reject the theory of one religion impacting the other is that each one is based on its own theophany. Akhenaten had his own divine encounter that gave rise to Atenism. Put another way, both religions stand on their own distinctive revelations.
Typically, what is needed for a religion to endure is that a leader or prophet who believes he or she received a divine message has a band of faithful followers to disseminate the tradition, and a set of authoritative writings is preserved for future generations.
This is the case of Moses and the Torah the Law. Not one of these has been found in later writing to indicate that a scriptural tradition resulted. If indeed Moses lived in the 13th century BCE as many scholars today believe, then it seems likely that Akhenaten was the first human in recorded history to embrace the exclusive worship of one god. What we know about it comes mostly from tombs and temples, whilst other great civilisations of the Bronze Age, such as Mesopotamia , are famous for their great cities.
This city will be of immeasurable importance to the scholarship of archaeologists and Egyptologists, who for centuries have struggled with understanding the specifics of urban, domestic life in the Pharaonic period. I teach a university subject on the foundations of urban life, and it always comes as a surprise to my students how little we know about urbanism in ancient Egypt.
The first great cities , and with them the first great civilisations , emerged along the fertile valleys of great rivers in Mesopotamia modern day Iraq , the Indus Valley modern day India and Pakistan and China at the beginning of the Bronze Age, at least 5, years ago. Just like cities today, they provided public infrastructure and roads, and often access to sanitation, education, health care and welfare.
Their residents specialised in particular professions, paid taxes and had to obey laws. But the Nile did not support the urban lifestyle in the same way as the rivers of other great civilisations. It had a reliable flood pattern and thus the second longest river in the world could be easily tamed, allowing for simple methods of irrigation that did not require complex engineering and large groups of workers to maintain.
Excavations of Early Dynastic c. But they are separated from the Dazzling Aten by some 1, years — as long as separates us from the Huns of Attila attacking ancient Rome.
The timing of Akhenaten's existence, together with his apparent, and significant, break from henotheism, has lead some to think he has some connection to the biblical character of Moses, although what that connection is, is a matter of some considerable dispute. One of the most thought provoking theories is the following; Akhenaten devoted so much attention to his new capital city of Akhet-Aten that he let the rest of Egypt fall apart. Akhenaten was followed as pharaoh by Smenkhkare , then Tutankhamun , then Ay.
Although originally a believer in Aten, Ay realised Egypt had to return to the old gods. Ay showered them with gifts, and sent them off to colonise Canaan, where the priests, the Yahus, became the Judahites, settling in the south in Judah, while the ordinary believers settled in the north, in Israel [ citation needed ]. When the Pentateuch came to be written during the Babylonian captivity, centuries later, Akhenaten became a template for Adam, and also for Abraham.
The Israelite hero Moses, who in the Bible account led the Children of Israel out of Egypt, was based on Ramesses II, and his troublesome brother Aaron was the previous pharaoh, Horemheb , who succeeded Ay, and who tried to expunge all evidence of Aten worship and of his predecessors. It is also argued that Hebrew was the lingua franca of the many different peoples at Akhet-Aten, borrowing from many sources including Egyptian and Ethiopian.
The Exodus mystery has captured the attention of Western thinkers for centuries. Clemens of Alexandria in AD was one of the first to mention a stunning similarity between the Egyptian symbols and those used by the ancient Hebrews [ citation needed ].
There is not any unquestionable evidence to support this theory [ citation needed ]. Conversely, more conservative Jews, Christians, and Muslims have suggested that Monotheism had already been introduced to Egypt some time earlier by the Hebrews, and that Aten was essentially a corrupted but well-meaning 'Egyptianized' version of the Hebrew's own God, "Yahweh.
A recent theory is that the Bible is the history of Egypt, specifically of the Pharoahs. Placing the characters of the Bible in the context of recorded history, there are many convincing links, where-as traditional beliefs don't gel with recorded history.
This includes characters such as Abraham, King Solomon and Moses. During the Amarna Period, the Aten was given a Royal Titulary as he was considered to be king of all , with his names drawn in a cartouche.
0コメント