The sun-god and the king lay at the heart of Egyptian theological thinking and cultic practice as they had developed over the previous centuries. The daily course of the sun-god, who was also the primeval creator-god, guaranteed the continued existence of his creation. In the temple, the sun-god’s daily journey through the heavens was symbolically enacted by means of rituals and hymns, the principal aim of which was to maintain the created order of the universe. The king played a crucial role in this daily ritual; he was the main officiant, the sun priest, who had an intimate knowledge of all aspects of the sun-god’s daily course. Every sunrise was a repetition of the ‘first occasion’, the creation of the world in the beginning. Ra himself went through a daily cycle of death and rebirth; at sunset he entered the netherworld, where he was regenerated and from which he was reborn in the morning as Ra-Horakhty. Light could not exist without darkness; without death there could be no regeneration and no life. Together with the sun-god the dead were also reborn; they joined Ra on his daily journey and went through the same eternal cycle of death and rebirth. Osiris, the god of the dead and the underworld, with whom the deceased were traditionally identified, was increasingly seen as an aspect of Ra, and the same held true for all other gods, for, if the sun-god was the primeval creator, then all the other gods had emerged from him and were therefore aspects of him. In this sense a tendency towards a form of monotheism is inherent in the religion of New Kingdom Egypt.
Towards the end of the reign of Amenhotep III the cult of many gods as well as that of his own deified self were increasingly solarized, but at the same time the king appears to have tried to counterbalance this development by commissioning an enormous number of statues of a multitude of deities and by developing the cult of their earthly manifestations as sacred animals. However, in hymns from the very end of the reign, the sun-god is clearly set apart from the other gods— he is the supreme god who is alone, far away in the sky, whereas the other deities are part of his creation, alongside men and animals. Amenhotep Ill’s successor was soon to find a radically different solution to the problem of unity and plurality.
Although the seat of government during most of the New Kingdom was the northern capital, Memphis, the i8th-Dynasty kings had originated from Thebes, and this city remained the most important religious centre of the country. Its local god, Amun (‘the hidden one’), had become associated with the sun-god Ra and as Amun-Ra King of the
Gods was worshipped in every major temple in Egypt, including Memphis. The king was the bodily son of Amun born from the union of the god with the queen mother in a sacred marriage that was ritually reenacted during the annual Opet Festival in Amun’s temple at Luxor. During the great processions that formed part of this important festival, the king was publicly acclaimed as the earthly embodiment of Amun; thus the king and the god were intimately linked by a powerful amalgam of religious and political ties. All of this had made Amun-Ra the most important god of the country, whose temple received a substantial part of Egypt’s wealth and whose priesthood had acquired considerable political and economic power. This, too, was soon to change under Amenhotep’s successor.
World History
