Don't Know Much About Mythology - Kenneth C. Davis [53]
Aten had previously been a little-known god worshipped in Thebes. Unlike Re and other gods, Aten, whose name meant “disc of the Sun,” had no human characteristics. Aten was depicted only as a sun from which rays emanated, ending in hands that held the ankh, Egyptian symbol of life. Amenhotep was so devoted to the worship of Aten that he changed his name to Akhenaten. Akhenaten’s wife Nefertiti was his supporter in this transformation, taking on the role of priestess and assisting Akhenaten in the new religious ceremonies. Supposedly one of the most beautiful women in Egyptian history, Nefertiti is the subject of several sculptured portraits that have survived from ancient times. She and Akhenaten began a full-scale attempt to wipe out references to all other gods. Throughout Egypt, statues to Amun-Re were smashed, and the god’s name was literally chiseled out of monuments. State temples were torn down, and the traditional religious festivals and public holidays were no longer celebrated. The reasons for this radical reformation—the equivalent of a modern American president trying to wipe out any reference to Christianity in America and banning Christmas, Easter, and other religious holidays—are uncertain. There may have been political reasons behind Akhenaten’s purge of the other gods.
Within a short time, the vast state mechanism of religion had been reduced to worship of a single god led by one man, the pharaoh. Only he and Nefertiti could communicate with this god. As popes and other religious leaders have well understood over the centuries, the professed ability to communicate exclusively with the gods is a great way to consolidate power.
After Akhenaten’s death, the Egyptians stopped worshipping Aten. The new pharoah, Tutankhamun, began the restoration of the old gods, and traditional worship was completely restored under Horemheb, a general in Tut’s service, who managed to secure the throne for himself after the death of Tut’s successor, and then leveled Amarna.
But for years, many scholars have argued that the worship of this one divinity lingered among the people of Israel, who, according to biblical accounts, had lived in Egypt for hundreds of years. And that creates another interesting collision of myth and faith. The concept of one god became an important part of the religion that was developed by the Israelite leader Moses. The history of the cult of Aten has led to the suggestion that the Jewish and Christian belief in one God may have been derived from Egyptian worship. Among the proponents of this idea was Sigmund Freud, who laid out his theory in his final book, Moses and Monotheism. Or perhaps it was the other way around. As Bruce Feiler writes in his bestseller Walking the Bible, “Might the Israelites have learned to worship one god following the lead of some maverick pharaoh? Or might the Egyptians have learned the same thing by taking an idea from the patriarchs?”
In the traditional Jewish and Christian view, such questions are heresy. But they point to the reason why mythology matters. Cultures collide. Myths are absorbed in the aftermath of that collision. The ideas of one civilization are borrowed and remolded by another. There is no question that the Egyptians profoundly influenced the Greeks in their beliefs and practices. Is it reasonable to ask if they had done the same to the ancient Hebrews? Aten’s monotheistic revolution raises a beguiling set of questions. Where do the Hebrews, the twelve tribes of Israel, fit into Egyptian history? And did these Egyptian ideas influence the man who brought the Israelites out of Egypt and delivered God’s biblical law on a set of tablets received on Mount Sinai?
This is where myth and history collide—and it is one of the fundamental reasons to understand mythology. Where is