Akhenaten Was Not the First Monotheist

Akhenaten was not the first monotheist, and the label has done more to hide him than any of the kings who chiselled his name off the walls. For roughly seventeen years in the mid-fourteenth century BC a pharaoh who began his reign as Amenhotep IV renamed himself, built a new capital on virgin ground in Middle Egypt, and closed the temples of the god who had made his family rich. Then he died, and within a generation the capital was empty, the temples were open, and his successors were referring to him, when they had to refer to him at all, without a name. What happened in between is one of the strangest episodes in the ancient world. But "the first monotheist" is a modern verdict, not an ancient one, and it answers a question the Amarna evidence does not actually ask.¹

My reading is this. Atenism was a royal solar cult in which one visible god, the sun-disc, was worshipped through one visible family, the king and Nefertiti. It was exclusive in a way that Egyptian religion had never been, and that exclusivity was the revolution. But exclusivity is not the same thing as monotheism, and the part of the episode that shook Egypt was not a doctrine about how many gods exist. It was the erasure of Amun and the shutting down of the largest economic institution in the country. That is why it died with him.

Where the label comes from

The phrase belongs to the early twentieth century. James Henry Breasted, the great American Egyptologist who founded the Oriental Institute in Chicago, wrote Akhenaten up in his History of Egypt (1905) as a religious genius centuries ahead of his time, "the first individual in human history," and treated the Aten cult as a monotheism that anticipated the Hebrew prophets.² Breasted's Akhenaten was a solitary idealist, a pacifist, a poet, a man who saw one god behind the world and paid for it. It is a beautiful portrait. It is also, as Dominic Montserrat showed in his book on the afterlife of the king, a portrait of what a liberal Protestant American in 1905 wanted an ancient prophet to look like.³

Freud made it permanent. Moses and Monotheism, published in 1939, the year he died, argued that Moses was an Egyptian, a follower of the Aten religion who carried it out of Egypt after the collapse and imposed it on a Semitic people who eventually murdered him for it.⁴ Almost no Egyptologist accepts the historical claim, and Freud did not really expect them to; he was doing psychoanalysis on a civilisation. But the book fixed the idea that Amarna was where monotheism started, and once Freud had said it the phrase was in every popular account, museum label, and school textbook that followed.

Notice what both men needed. They needed Atenism to be a religion in the sense they understood the word: a belief about God, held by a believer, transferable to other believers. That is exactly the shape the evidence does not have.

What the Aten actually was

The Aten is not a new god. The word means the disc, the physical sun, and it appears in Egyptian texts long before Akhenaten as one aspect of the sun-god Re. His father Amenhotep III had already given it prominence; his royal barge was called Aten Gleams, and the sun-hymns of that reign, the "New Solar Theology" as Jan Assmann named it, were already talking about a single sun-god who made everything and whom all the other gods only served.⁵ Akhenaten did not invent solar supremacy. He inherited it and then did something with it that nobody had done before.

The first thing he did was give the god a name like a king's. The Aten's full title was written inside two cartouches, the ovals reserved for royal names, and it was a theological formula rather than a name. In Murnane's edition it runs, paraphrased: Re-Horakhty, glad in the horizon, in the identity he bears as Shu who is in the Aten. Around the ninth year the formula was revised to strip out the gods it still contained. Horakhty, the falcon Horus of the horizon, and Shu, god of the air, went, and the revised version makes the god Re, master of the horizon, glad in it, in the identity he bears as the father Re arrived as the Aten.⁶ That revision is the closest the Amarna texts come to a doctrinal statement, and what it says is: no more theology by combination. Egyptian religion had spent two thousand years fusing gods, Amun-Re, Re-Horakhty, Ptah-Sokar-Osiris; the sun-disc's second name refuses to fuse with anyone.

The Aten also celebrated jubilees. The sed-festival was the ancient renewal rite of kingship, and Akhenaten held one for the god early in his reign at Karnak, in a series of open-air temples he built east of the Amun precinct before he left Thebes.⁷ Two of those temples belonged especially to Nefertiti; on the reused blocks recovered from later buildings she is shown officiating alone and even smiting enemies, a pose otherwise reserved for the king. A god who is written like a king, who holds the king's festivals, and who is served by a king and queen as a matched pair, is a god that has been folded into the monarchy. It is not a god that a private person could pick up and carry away.

Exclusivity is not the same thing as monotheism, and the part of the episode that shook Egypt was not a doctrine about how many gods exist.

The Great Hymn and its one careful sentence

The text everyone quotes is the Great Hymn to the Aten, carved in the tomb of the courtier Ay at Amarna and probably composed in the king's own name.⁸ It is a genuinely great poem. The sun rises and the land wakes; the sun sets and lions come out of their dens; the chick speaks inside the egg; the Nile is put in the sky as rain for foreign lands; the god is, paraphrasing Lichtheim, the only god there is, none beside him, who made the earth alone. Read on its own it sounds like Genesis with better weather.

But the hymn has a second half that Breasted's readers tend to skip, and it is where the theology actually lives. Paraphrasing Lichtheim again: nobody knows you, the hymn tells the god, except your son Neferkheprure Waenre — Akhenaten's throne name — made expert by you in your designs and your strength.⁸ The god is knowable by one man. That man is the sole channel through which the god's intentions reach the world. Everyone else, in the tomb-prayers at Amarna, is praying not to the Aten but to the king; the standard tomb formula asks the pharaoh, not the disc, for a good burial and a long life.⁶

Look at what the private houses at Amarna contained. Not images of the sun. Images of the royal family, seated under the disc with its little hands, kissing their daughters, in household shrines.⁹ The Aten's rays end in hands that give the sign of life to Akhenaten and Nefertiti and nobody else. If you were a stonemason at Akhetaten, your religion was the king. The king's religion was the sun. There is a middle term in this structure that a real monotheism does not have, and the Great Hymn puts it there deliberately.

Psalm 104

Which brings me to the parallel that has carried the "first monotheist" story since Breasted first pointed to it. Psalm 104 also has lions that hunt by night and go home at sunrise, ships on the sea, creatures that wait for their food in season, and an exclamation at the sheer number of God's works answering the hymn's marvelling at all the Aten has made, almost line for line.⁸ The resemblance is real. What it means is contested, and the sides are worth naming.

The strong position, argued in detail by John Day, is direct literary dependence: the Egyptian hymn survived somewhere, probably through Canaanite intermediaries, and a Judaean poet centuries later drew on it.¹⁰ The weak position, which most Egyptologists take, is that both texts belong to a broad Near Eastern tradition of creation-and-providence hymns, that the shared images are the images anyone in that world would reach for, and that Psalm 104 is closer to Ugaritic and Mesopotamian material than to Amarna in its structure and vocabulary. Even Day's version does not get you to a transmitted theology; a Judaean borrowing a stanza about lions is not a Judaean inheriting a monotheism, and nothing in the psalm has the hymn's crucial second half about the son who alone knows the god. My own view is that the parallel is a genuine literary curiosity and a very poor argument for anything else.

Three readings, and which one holds

The scholarship of the last fifty years has settled into three positions, and none of them is Breasted's.

Erik Hornung, in Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt, gave the modern account of how Egyptian polytheism worked: gods were one and many, in his subtitle's phrase, fluid, combinable, never reduced to a single principle, and Amarna was the exception that proved the rule.¹¹ In his later book on Akhenaten he was more willing than most to keep the word monotheism, but he redefined it as a religion of light: the Aten was not a personality with a will so much as the light itself, visibly there every day, and Akhenaten was a man who took that visibility with terrible seriousness. Hornung's Akhenaten is a religious thinker, but a thinker about the sun, not about the oneness of God.¹¹

Jan Assmann's reading is the most influential. Amarna was history's first "counter-religion": a religion defined by what it rejects, drawing for the first time a hard line between true and false worship. Assmann sees this as the ancestor of what he calls the Mosaic distinction, but he insists that Amarna's version had no revelation, no scripture, no ethics, and no community of believers, only a king and a cosmos, which is why he classifies it not as monotheism proper but as a kind of cosmotheism forced into a single object.⁵ On Assmann's account the deep novelty was intolerance. Egypt had never before had a god who required the others not to exist.

Donald Redford, who spent years excavating the smashed blocks of Akhenaten's Karnak temples, is willing to call the king a monotheist and unwilling to admire him for it. His Akhenaten is a rigid, humourless autocrat whose "religion" was a personal cult of himself and his father the sun, imposed by fiat, ignored by most of the country, and abandoned the moment the fiat stopped.⁷ Nicholas Reeves pushed the same line further into politics: the whole programme was a power grab, a young king breaking the priesthood of Amun that had grown rich enough to rival the throne.¹²

I think Assmann and Redford between them have it, and that the two readings are not really rivals. Assmann is right that the new thing was exclusion, not unity: the Aten did not absorb the other gods, as Amun-Re had been quietly doing for two centuries, it abolished them, and abolition is a political act before it is a theological one. Redford is right that the cult was, in structure, a cult of the royal house. Put those together and "henotheism" or "royal solar theology" are the honest labels. One god was worshipped; the existence of others was denied by decree; access to the one god ran through one family. That is a monarchy with a single sanctioned deity. Calling it monotheism smuggles in everything the word later came to mean, a personal creed, a scripture, a people, and none of those are on the ground at Amarna.

Where I part company with Hornung is on the word "religion" itself, and here the comparison with Greece is useful. In the Greek essay I argued that we keep mistaking a culture's stories about the gods for a creed. Amarna is the reverse error. Here there really was something like a creed, one god, no others, king as sole interpreter, and we mistake it for something that could exist without the king. It could not, and it did not.

If you were a stonemason at Akhetaten, your religion was the king. The king's religion was the sun.

The real revolution: a hacked-out name and an empty treasury

The thing that would have felt revolutionary to an Egyptian in Akhenaten's tenth year was not a hymn. It was a work crew on a ladder.

Sometime after the move to Akhetaten the king ordered the name of Amun erased. Not just at Karnak, but across the country, on temple walls, on statues, on stelae, in the cartouches of his own father Amenhotep III, whose name contains Amun's, and eventually the plural word "gods" itself, wherever it could be found.⁶ Nothing like this had happened before. Egyptian kings usurped each other's monuments and occasionally damned a predecessor, but a god had never been targeted. In a culture where a name written in stone was a form of existence, this was not censorship. It was an attempt to kill Amun.

And Amun was not only a god. By the mid-Eighteenth Dynasty the estate of Amun at Karnak was the largest landholder and employer in Egypt after the crown itself: fields, herds, workshops, ships, granaries, and the tens of thousands of people who worked them, fed by offerings that had been pouring in since the wars of Thutmose III.⁷ When Akhenaten redirected that revenue to the Aten, and to the Aten's temples in a city that had not existed five years earlier, he was doing more than changing the addressee of the offerings. He was pulling the money out of an entire regional economy and moving it two hundred miles downstream. The boundary stelae at Amarna, in which the king swears he will never extend the city's limits and describes the god's estate laid out on the ground, read like a foundation charter for a new fiscal system as much as a new religion.⁶

This is the part that Tutankhamun's court remembered. The Restoration Stela set up in that boy's name a few years after Akhenaten's death does not complain about heresy or theology. It says, summarising Murnane rather than quoting him, that the temples of the gods from Elephantine to the Delta had fallen into ruin, their shrines overgrown, their sanctuaries as if they had never been, and that the gods had turned their backs on the land: armies sent to Syria failed, prayers went unanswered.⁶ Whether or not that is an accurate description of the countryside, it is an accurate description of what the elite thought had gone wrong. The temples had stopped. The system that Egyptians called ma'at, the daily maintenance of order through offerings, festivals, and the king's service to the gods, had been suspended for a generation, and everyone downstream of it, from the priests to the boatmen who moved the grain, had felt it.

Barry Kemp's decades of excavation at Amarna give the view from below, and it is telling. In the Workmen's Village on the edge of the city, where the people who cut the tombs lived, the excavators found amulets of Bes and Taweret, the old household gods of childbirth and the home, and small painted chapels that have nothing to do with the sun-disc.⁹ The heresy stopped at the door. Ordinary people had never been asked to believe anything; they had been asked to watch the king believe. That is what a royal cult looks like when you dig it up.

Why it died with him

The end is fast and mostly silent. Akhenaten died around his seventeenth regnal year. There was a brief and badly understood interval involving a co-ruler or successor named Smenkhkare and a female king Neferneferuaten who may or may not be Nefertiti; the arguments are technical and unsettled.⁷ Then a child named Tutankhaten came to the throne, was renamed Tutankhamun, and moved the court back to Thebes and Memphis. Amarna was abandoned within a decade or two of its founding, its stone quarried away under Horemheb and the early Ramessides. Later king lists at Abydos skip straight from Amenhotep III to Horemheb. When a Ramesside legal text needed to date something to Akhenaten's reign, it called him the rebel of Akhetaten.⁶

Real monotheisms do not collapse like that. They survive their founders precisely because they are portable, because a book or a community or a set of practices can outlive the person who started them. Amarna had no book, no community that was not the court, and no practice a peasant could perform without the king in the picture. Its one transferable text, the Great Hymn, says in so many words that only the king knew the god. When the king was gone the god was unknowable, and Egypt did the sensible thing and went back to the gods it could reach.

There is a coda that I find more interesting than the collapse. Egyptian religion after Amarna did move toward a kind of oneness, but by the old route rather than the new one. The great Ramesside hymns to Amun describe him as the hidden god of whom all other gods are manifestations, one who turned himself into millions, to paraphrase Leiden, and one famous passage says all the gods are three, Amun, Re, and Ptah, and that even those three are one.⁸ That is Egypt taking the sun-theology Akhenaten had grown up with and finishing it without him: not one god instead of the many, but one god behind the many. Assmann calls this the difference between revolutionary and evolutionary monotheism, and if you want to find an Egyptian ancestor for later ideas of a single hidden God, this is the better candidate.⁵ It also has the advantage of having lasted. The Book of the Dead went on being copied for a thousand years after Amarna, and no one at Amarna had wanted it copied at all.

So the honest description is unglamorous. A king in the fourteenth century BC, standing on a solar theology his father's court had already built, took the visible sun as his personal god, wrote it a name in a cartouche, made himself and his queen its only interpreters, abolished its rivals by decree, and broke the temple economy of Thebes to fund it. That was a heresy, and a real one, and it earned the enmity it got. But it was a heresy of the crown, in the crown's language, held together by the crown's power, and it did not outlive the man who wore it. Breasted wanted a prophet, Freud wanted a father, and the walls of Amarna, where you can still see the little hands of the sun reaching down to a king and no one else, keep quietly offering something stranger and more Egyptian than either.