Amun

From New World Encyclopedia
Amun and Mut

Amun (also spelled Amon, Amoun, Amen, and rarely Imen, Greek Ἄμμων Ammon, and Ἅμμων Hammon, Egyptian Yamanu) was the name of a deity, in Egyptian mythology, who gradually rose to become one of the most important deities in Ancient Egypt, before fading into obscurity.

Amun in an Egyptian Context

Amun
in hieroglyphs
imn
n
C12

As an Egyptian deity, Geb belonged to a complex religious, mythological and cosmological belief system developed in the Nile river basin from earliest prehistory to 525 B.C.E.[1] Indeed, it was during this relatively late period in Egyptian cultural development, a time when they first felt their beliefs threatened by foreigners, that many of their myths, legends and religious beliefs were first recorded.[2] The cults within this framework, whose beliefs comprise the myths we have before us, were generally fairly localized phenomena, with different deities having the place of honor in different communities.[3] Despite this apparently unlimited diversity, however, the gods (unlike those in many other pantheons) were relatively ill-defined. As Frankfort notes, “the Egyptian gods are imperfect as individuals. If we compare two of them … we find, not two personages, but two sets of functions and emblems. … The hymns and prayers addressed to these gods differ only in the epithets and attributes used. There is no hint that the hymns were addressed to individuals differing in character.”[4] One reason for this was the undeniable fact that the Egyptian gods were seen as utterly immanental—they represented (and were continuous with) particular, discrete elements of the natural world.[5] Thus, those who did develop characters and mythologies were generally quite portable, as they could retain their discrete forms without interfering with the various cults already in practice elsewhere. Also, this flexibility was what permitted the development of multipartite cults (i.e. the cult of Amun-Re, which unified the domains of Amun and Re), as the spheres of influence of these various deities were often complimentary.[6]

The worldview engendered by ancient Egyptian religion was uniquely appropriate to (and defined by) the geographical and calendrical realities of its believer’s lives. Unlike the beliefs of the Hebrews, Mesopotamians and others within their cultural sphere, the Egyptians viewed both history and cosmology as being well ordered, cyclical and dependable. As a result, all changes were interpreted as either inconsequential deviations from the cosmic plan or cyclical transformations required by it.[7] The major result of this perspective, in terms of the religious imagination, was to reduce the relevance of the present, as the entirety of history (when conceived of cyclically) was ultimately defined during the creation of the cosmos. The only other aporia in such an understanding is death, which seems to present a radical break with continuity. To maintain the integrity of this worldview, an intricate system of practices and beliefs (including the extensive mythic geographies of the afterlife, texts providing moral guidance (for this life and the next) and rituals designed to facilitate the transportation into the afterlife) was developed, whose primary purpose was to emphasize the unending continuation of existence.[8] Given these two cultural foci, it is understandable that the tales recorded within this mythological corpus tended to be either creation accounts or depictions of the world of the dead, with a particular focus on the relationship between the gods and their human constituents.

Etymology

Amun's name is first attested to in Egyptian records as imn, which can be translated as "the Hidden (One)."[9] Since vowels were not written in Egyptian hieroglyphics, Egyptologists, in their hypothetical reconstruction of the spoken language, have argued that it would have originally been pronounced *Yamānu (yah-maa-nuh). The name survives, with unchanged meaning, as the Coptic Amoun, the Ethopian Amen, and the Greek Ammon.[10]

Some scholars have noted a strong linguistic parallel between the names of Amun (/Amen) and Min, an ancient deity who shared many areas of patronage and influence with his more popular contemporary. This veracity of this potential identification is bolstered by the fact that, historically speaking, the cult of Amun did supplant the worship of Min, especially in the area around Thebes (from whence it originated).[11]

Creator

Gradually, as god of air, he came to be associated with the breath of life, which created the ba, particularly in Thebes. By the First Intermediate Period this had led to him being thought of, in these areas, as the creator god, titled father of the gods, preceding the Ogdoad, although also part of it. As he became more significant, he was assigned a wife (Amunet being his own female aspect, more than a distinct wife), and since he was the creator, his wife was considered the divine mother from which the cosmos emerged, who in the areas where Amun was worshipped was, by this time, Mut.

Amun became depicted in human form, seated on a throne, wearing on his head a plain deep circlet from which rise two straight parallel plumes, possibly symbolic of the tail feathers of a bird, a reference to his earlier status as a wind god.

Having become more important than Menthu, the local war god of Thebes, Menthu's authority became said to exist because he was the son of Amun. However, as Mut was infertile, it was believed that she, and thus Amun, had adopted Menthu instead. In later years, due to the shape of a pool outside the sacred temple of Mut at Thebes, Menthu was replaced, as their adopted son, by Chons, the moon god.

King

File:Amun5.jpg
Bas-relief depicting Amun as king.
File:Chem.jpg
Amun-Min

When the armies of the Eighteenth dynasty evicted the Hyksos rulers from Egypt, the victors' city of origen, Thebes, now held the mantle of the most important city in Egypt. Therefore, Amun became nationally important. The Pharaohs attributed all their successful enterprises to Amun, and they lavished much of their wealth and captured spoil on the construction of his temples.

Because of the adoration now given to Amun, visiting Greek travelers to Egypt would report back that Amun, king of the Egyptian gods, was one in the same, and therefore became identified with, the Greek king of the gods Zeus. As did Amun's consort Mut become associated with Zeus's consort Hera.

As the Egyptians considered themselves oppressed during the period of Hyksos' rule, the victory under the supreme god Amun, was seen as his championing of the less fortunante. Consequently, Amun was viewed as upholding the rights of justice to the poor, and became titled Vizier of the poor, and by aiding those who travelled in his name, he became the Protector of the road. Since he upheld Ma'at, those who prayed to Amun were required first to demonstrate that they were worthy, by confessing their sins.

Fertility God

When, subsequently, Egypt conquered Kush, they identified the chief deity of the Kushites as Amun. This deity was depicted as Ram headed, more specifically a woolly Ram with curved horns, and so Amun started becoming associated with the Ram. Indeed, due to the aged appearance of it, they came to believe that this had been the original form of Amun, and that Kush was where he had been born.

However, since rams, due to their rutting, were considered a symbol of virility, Amun also became thought of as a fertility deity, and so started to absorb the identity of Min, becoming Amun-Min. This association with virility led to Amun-Min gaining the epithet Kamutef, meaning Bull of his mother, in which form he was often found depicted on the walls of Karnak, ithyphallic, and with a scourge.

Sun God

Amun-Ra
in hieroglyphs
imn
n
ra
Z1
C1
Amun-Ra

As Amun's cult grew bigger, Amun rapidly became identified with the chief God that was worshipped in other areas, Ra-Herakhty, the merged identities of Ra, and Horus. This identification led to a merger of identities, with Amun becoming Amun-Ra. As Ra had been the father of Shu, and Tefnut, and the remainder of the Ennead, so Amun-Ra was likewise identified as their father.

Ra-Herakhty had been a sun god, and so this became true of Amun-Ra as well, Amun becoming considered the hidden aspect of the sun (e.g. during the night), in contrast to Ra-Herakhty as the visible aspect, since Amun clearly meant the one who is hidden. This complexity over the sun led to a gradual movement towards the support of a more pure form of deity.

During the eighteenth dynasty, the pharaoh Akhenaten (also known as Amenhotep IV) introduced the worship of Aten, an unseeable god whose power was manifested both literally and symbolically in the sun's disc. He defaced the symbols of the old gods and based his new religion upon one new god: the Aten. However, this abrupt change was very unpopular, particularly with the previous temple priests, who now found themselves without any of their former power. Consequently, when Akhenaten died, his name was striken from the Egyptian records, and all of his changes were swiftly undone. It was almost as if this monotheistic sect had never occurred. Worship of the Aten was replaced and worship of Amun-Ra was restored. The priests persuaded the new underage pharaoh Tutankhaten, whose name meant "the living image of Aten", to change his name to Tutankhamun, "the living image of Amun".

Decline

After the Twentieth dynasty moved the center of power back to Thebes, the powerbase of Amun's cult had been revivified, and the authority of Aten began to weaken. Under the Twenty-first dynasty the secondary line of priest kings of Thebes upheld his dignity to the best of their power, and the Twenty-second favoured Thebes.

The sarcophagus of a priestess of Amon-Ra cerca 1000 B.C.E. at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History.

As the sovereignty weakened, the division between Upper and Lower Egypt asserted itself; thereafter, Thebes would have rapidly decayed had it not been for the piety of the kings of Nubia towards Amun, whose worship had long prevailed in their country. Thebes was at first their Egyptian capital, and they honoured Amun greatly, although neither their wealth nor culture were sufficient to affect much change.

However, in the rest of Egypt, the popularity of his cult was rapidly overtaken by the less divisive cult of the Legend of Osiris and Isis, which had not been associated with the viewed-as-traitorous Akhenaten. And so there, his identity became first subsumed into Ra (Ra-Herakhty), who still remained an identifiable figure in the Osiris cult, but ultimately, became merely an aspect of Horus.

In areas outside of Egypt where the Egyptians had previously brought the worship of Amun, his fate was not as dreadful. In Nubia, where his name was pronounced Amane, he remained the national god, with his priests at Meroe and Nobatia, via an oracle, regulating the whole government of the country, choosing the king, and directing his military expeditions. According to Diodorus Siculus, they were even able to compel kings to commit suicide, although this behaviour stopped when Arkamane, in the 3rd century B.C.E., slew them.

Likewise, in Libya there remained a solitary oracle of Amun in the Libyan Desert at the oasis of Siwa. Such was its reputation among the Greeks that Alexander the Great journeyed there after the battle of Issus and during his occupation of Egypt in order to be acknowledged the son of Amun. Even during this occupation, Amun, identified as a form of Zeus, continued to be the great god of Thebes throughout its decay.

Derived terms Several words derive from Amun via the Greek form Ammon: ammonia and ammonite. Ammonia, as well as being the chemical, is a genus name in the foraminifera. Both these foraminiferans (shelled Protozoa) and ammonites (extinct shelled cephalopods) have/had spiral shells resembling a ram's, and Ammon's, horns. The regions of the hippocampus in the brain are called the cornu ammonis – literally "Amun's Horns", due to the horned appearance of the dark and light bands of cellular layers. The religious term Amen is also said to originate from the time before the Exodus when the ancient Israelites were slaves in Egypt.[citation needed]

Notes

  1. This particular "cut-off" date has been chosen because it corresponds to the Persian conquest of the kingdom, which marks the end of its existence as a discrete and (relatively) circumscribed cultural sphere. Indeed, as this period also saw an influx of immigrants from Greece, it was also at this point that the Hellenization of Egyptian religion began. While some scholars suggest that even when "these beliefs became remodeled by contact with Greece, in essentials they remained what they had always been" (Erman, 203), it still seems reasonable to address these traditions, as far as is possible, within their own cultural milieu.
  2. The numerous inscriptions, stelae and papyri that resulted from this sudden stress on historical posterity provide much of the evidence used by modern archeologists and Egyptologists to approach the ancient Egyptian tradition (Pinch, 31-32).
  3. These local groupings often contained a particular number of deities and were often constructed around the incontestably primary character of a creator god (Meeks and Meeks-Favard, 34-37).
  4. Frankfort, 25-26.
  5. Zivie-Coche, 40-41; Frankfort, 23, 28-29.
  6. Frankfort, 20-21.
  7. Assmann, 73-80; Zivie-Coche, 65-67; Breasted argues that one source of this cyclical timeline was the dependable yearly fluctuations of the Nile (8, 22-24).
  8. Frankfort, 117-124; Zivie-Coche, 154-166.
  9. As Budge (1969: Vol. II) notes, "The word or root amen certainly means 'what is hidden,' 'what is not seen,' 'what cannot be seen,' and the like, and this fact is proved by the scores of examples which may be collected from texts of all periods. In hymns to Amen we often read that he is 'hidden to his children,' and 'hidden to gods and men' (2).
  10. Pinch, 100; Wilkinson, 92; W. Max Muller and Kaufmann Kohler, "Amon" in the Jewish Encyclopedia, retrieved August 13, 2007.
  11. See, for example, G. A. Wainwright's "The Origin of Amun," The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, Vol. 49. (Dec. 1963), pp. 21-23. 22.

References
ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.

  • Assmann, Jan. In search for God in ancient Egypt. Translated by David Lorton. Ithica: Cornell University Press, 2001. ISBN 0801487293.
  • Breasted, James Henry. Development of religion and thought in ancient Egypt. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986. ISBN 0812210454.
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  • Griffith, F. Ll. and Thompson, Herbert (translators). The Leyden Papyrus. 1904. Accessed at sacred-texts.com.
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