Great Hymn to the Aten

The hymn

The Great Hymn to Aten is the longest form of one of a number of hymns attributed to Pharaoh Akhenaten who in his own lifetime attempted to convert ancient Egypt from its centuries of polytheism to monotheistic Atenism with Aten as the only God of the universe. The ancient Egyptian view of the universe, a view that was common to all the ancient civilizations, was that of the earth as the center of the universe and a material reality separate from the religious reality of an afterlife.

In its most complete form the hymn was found in the tomb of Ay in the rock tombs at Amarna (ancient Akhet-Aten, the city Akhenaten founded). It provides a glimpse of the religious artistry of the Amarna period in multiple forms from poetry to building massive temples to even building a whole new city as the capital city of Egypt.

Various courtiers' tombs were found to have prayers or hymns which resembled each other and were to the Aten or to the Aten and Akhenaten jointly. One of these, found in almost identical form in five tombs, is known as The Short Hymn to the Aten. The long version discussed in this article was found in the tomb of the courtier (and later Pharaoh) Ay.

Akhenaten forbade the worship of all the other Egyptian gods even in private in the home, a radical departure from the centuries of Egyptian religious practice. Finally, Akhenaten issued a royal decree that the name Aten was no longer to be depicted by the hieroglyph of a solar disc emanating rays but instead had to be spelled phonetically. Thus Akhenaten extended even further the heretical belief that Aten was not at all the disc or orb of the sun (the Egyptian sun god Ra) - a physical being or thing - but instead that Aten was a universal spiritual presence(see Atenist Revolution under Atenism and Implementation of Atenism under Akhenaten).

After Akhenaten's death his religious reforms were discarded completely as heretical by the powerful polytheist priesthood of the god Amun based in Thebes and under their extreme pressure Akhenaten's son, the eight year old child successor Tutankhaten was forced to revert Egypt back to the old religion of Amun. He had to even change his very name to Tutankhamun to show that the new Pharaoh had thus rejected his father Akhenaten's religion of Aten and that he was now a follower of the god Amun.

Hymn

The hymn praises Aten as a unique spiritual force (a universal presence) existing all alone by Itself before the creation of the universe. It begins with Aten who of Its own volition created the universe with its immense variety and forms without human beings being aware of its origin and mode of creation. It goes on to declare that not only did Aten create all living things on earth but that it created human beings also.

After that the hymn illustrates the omnipotent power of Aten as the bestower of lifespans and sustenance to each and every human being, the creator of their uniqueness in their color and appearance as well as in their speech and nationhood.

Atenism has been described by some scholars as the earliest known example of monotheistic thought while others consider it to have been an example of henotheism.

How manifold it is, what thou hast made!

They are hidden from the face (of man).

O sole god, like whom there is no other!

Thou didst create the world according to thy desire,

Whilst thou wert alone: All men, cattle, and wild beasts,

Whatever is on earth, going upon (its) feet,

And what is on high, flying with its wings.

The countries of Syria and Nubia, the land of Egypt,

Thou settest every man in his place,

Thou suppliest their necessities:

Everyone has his food, and his time of life is reckoned.

Their tongues are separate in speech,

And their natures as well;

Their skins are distinguished,

As thou distinguishest the foreign peoples.

Thou makest a Nile in the underworld,

Thou bringest forth as thou desirest

To maintain the people (of Egypt)

According as thou madest them for thyself,

The lord of all of them, wearying (himself) with them,

The lord of every land, rising for them,

The Aton of the day, great of majesty.

Analysis of the Hymn

Different scholars have expressed different opinions on Akhenaten's religion of Atenism. Some express great admiration for both while others see Atenism as a means to a political end.

Historian James Henry Breasted considered Akhenaten to be the first monotheist and scientist in history.

In 1899, Flinders Petrie wrote: If this were a new religion, invented to satisfy our modern scientific conceptions, we could not find a flaw in the correctness of this view of the energy of the solar system. How much Akhenaten understood, we cannot say, but he certainly bounded forward in his views and symbolism to a position which we cannot logically improve upon at the present day. Not a rag of superstition or of falsity can be found clinging to this new worship evolved out of the old Aton of Heliopolis, the sole Lord of the universe.

Henry Hall contended that the pharaoh was the “first example of the scientific mind.”

Egyptologist Dominic Montserrat discusses the terminology used to describe these texts, describing them as formal poems or royal eulogies. He views the word 'hymn' as suggesting "outpourings of emotion" while he sees them as "eulogies, formal and rhetorical statements of praise" honoring Aten and the royal couple. He credits James Henry Breasted with the popularisation of them as hymns saying that Breasted (erroneously) saw them as "a gospel of the beauty and beneficience of the natural order, a recognition of the message of nature to the soul of man"(quote from Breasted).

Monsterrat argues that all the versions of the hymns focus on the king and suggests that the real innovation is to redefine the relationship of god and king in a way that benefited Akhenaten, quoting the statement of Egyptologist John Baines that "Amarna religion was a religion of god and king, or even of king first and then god."

Akhenaton's religious reforms (later regarded heretical and reverted under his successor Tutankhamun) have been described by some scholars as the earliest known example of monotheistic thought while others consider it to have been an example of henotheism.

The "Hymn to the Aten" was set to music by Philip Glass in his opera Akhnaten.

In his book Reflections on the Psalms, C.S. Lewis compared the Hymn to the Psalms of the Judaeo-Christian canon, as did Breasted (who broke them up into stanzas to resemble Western poems). Miriam Lichtheim commented about an alleged resemblance with Psalm 104 saying that "The resemblances are, however, more likely to be the result of the generic similarity between Egyptian hymns and biblical psalms. A specific literary interdependence is not probable."

See also

• Atenism

• Akhenaten

Citation for comparison to Psalm 104, see Pritchard, James B. "The Ancient Near East, An anthology of Texts and Pictures", Princeton University Press, 1958, page 227.

• Moses and Monotheism

External links

• Great Hymn to the Aten, transcribed and scanned by Geoffrey Graham