The history of Akhunaton is established by the later Egyptology. Sharpe makes no mention of it, though the point had been discussed from 1839 onwards. Cp. Lepsius, Letters from Egypt, etc., Bohn trans. 1853, p. 27; and Nott and Gliddon’s Types of Mankind, 1854, p. 147, and Indigenous Races of the Earth, 1857, pp. 116–17, in both of which places will be found the king’s portrait. See last reference for the idle theory that he had been emasculated, as to which the confutation by Wiedemann (Aegyptische Geschichte, p. 397, cited by Budge, Hist. of Egypt, 1902, iv, 128) is sufficient. In point of fact, he figures in the monuments as father of three or seven children (Wiedemann, Rel. of Anc. Eg. p. 37; Erman, p. 69; Budge, iv, 123, 127).
Dispute still reigns as to the origin of the cult to which he devoted himself. A theory of its nature and derivation, based on that of Mr. J. H. Breasted (History of Egypt, 1906, p. 396), is set forth in an article by Mr. A. E. P. Weigall on “Religion and Empire in Ancient Egypt” in the Quarterly Review, Jan. 1909. On this view Aten or Aton is simply Adon = “the Lord”—a name ultimately identified with Adonis, the Syrian Sun-God and Vegetation-God. The king’s grandfather was apparently a Syrian, presumably of royal lineage; and Queen Tii or Thiy, the king’s mother, who with her following had wrought a revolution against the priesthood of Amen, brought him up as a devotee of her own faith. On her death he became more and more fanatical, getting out of touch with people and priesthood, so that “his empire fell to pieces rapidly.” Letters still exist (among the Tell-el-Amarna tablets) which were sent by his generals in Asia, vainly imploring help. He died at the age of twenty-eight; and if the body lately found, and supposed to be his, is really so, his malady was water on the brain.
Mr. Breasted, finding that Akhunaton’s God is described by him in inscriptions as “the father and the mother of all that he made,” ranks the cult very high in the scale of theism. Mr. Weigall (art. cited, p. 60; so also Budge, Hist. iv, 125) compares a hymn of the king’s with [Ps. civ, 24] sq., and praises it accordingly. The parallel is certainly close, but the document is not thereby certificated as philosophic. On the strength of the fact that Akhunaton “had dreamed that the Aton religion would bind the nations together,” Mr. Weigall credits him with harbouring “an illusive ideal towards which, thirty-two centuries later, mankind is still struggling in vain” (p. 66). The ideal of subjugating the nations to one God, cherished later by Jews, and still later by Moslems, is hardly to be thus identified with the modern ideal of international peace. Brugsch, in turn, credits the king with having “willingly received the teaching about the one God of Light,” while admitting that Aten simply meant the sun’s disk (Hist. of Egypt, 1-vol. ed. p. 216).
Maspero, again, declares Tii to have been an Egyptian of old stock, and the God “Atonou” to have been the deity of her tribe (Hist. anc., as cited, p. 249); and he pronounces the cult probably the most ancient variant of the religions of Ra (p. 250). Messrs. King and Hall, who also do not accept the theory of a Syrian derivation, coincide with Messrs. Breasted and Weigall in extolling Akhunaton’s creed. In a somewhat summary fashion they pronounce (work cited, p. 383) that, “given an ignorance of the true astronomical character of the sun, we see how eminently rational a religion” was this. The conception of a moving window in the heavens, which appears to be the core of it, seems rather a darkening than a development of the “philosophical speculations of the priests of the Sun at Heliopolis,” from which it is held by Messrs. King and Hall to have been derived. Similarly ill-warranted is the decision (id. p. 384) that in Akhunaton’s heresy “we see ... the highest attitude [? altitude] to which religious ideas had attained before the days of the Hebrew prophets.” Alike in India and in Egypt, pantheistic ideas of a larger scope than his or those of the Hebrew prophets had been attained before Akhunaton’s time.
Dr. E. A. Wallis Budge, on the other hand, points out that the cult of the Aten is really an ancient one in Egypt, and was carried on by Thothmes III, father of Amen-hetep II, a century before Akhunaton (Amen-hetep IV), its “original home” being Heliopolis (History of Egypt, 1902, iv, 48, 119). So also von Bissing, Gesch. Aeg. in Umriss, p. 52 (reading “Iton”). Rejecting the view that “Aten” is only a form of “Adon,” Dr. Budge pronounces that “as far as can be seen now the worship of Aten was something like a glorified materialism”—whatever that may be—“which had to be expounded by priests who performed ceremonies similar to those which belonged to the old Heliopolitan sun-worship, without any connection whatsoever with the worship of Yahweh; and a being of the character of the Semitic God Adôn had no place in it anywhere.” Further, he considers that it “contained no doctrines on the unity or oneness of Aten similar to those which are found in the hymns to Rā, and none of the beautiful ideas on the future life with which we are familiar from the hymns and other compositions in the Book of the Dead” (Ib. pp. 120–21).
By Prof. Flinders Petrie Queen Tii or Thiy is surmised to have been of Armenian origin (see Budge, iv, 96–98, as to her being “Mesopotamian”); and Prof. Petrie, like Mr. Breasted, has inferred that she brought with her the cult of which her son became the devotee. (So also Brugsch, p. 214.) Messrs. King and Hall recognize that the cult had made some headway before Akhunaton took it up; but deny that there is any reason for supposing Queen Tii to have been of foreign origin; adding: “It seems undoubted that the Aten cult was a development of pure Egyptian religious thought.” Certainty on such an issue seems hardly possible; but it may be said, as against the theory of a foreign importation, that there is no evidence whatever of any high theistic cult of Adonis in Syria at the period in question. Adonis was primarily a Vegetation-God; and the older view that Aten simply means “the sun’s disk” is hardly disposed of. It is noteworthy that under Akhunaton’s patronage Egyptian sculpture enjoyed a term of freedom from the paralyzing convention which reigned before and after (King and Hall, as cited, pp. 383–84). This seems to have been the result of the innovating taste of the king (Budge, Hist. iv, 124–26).
As the centuries lapsed the course of popular religion was rather downward than upward, if it can be measured by the multiplication of superstitions.[134] When under the Ramesside dynasty the high-priests of Amen became by marriage with the royal family the virtual rulers, sacerdotalism went from bad to worse.[135] The priests, who held the allegorical key to mythology, seem to have been the main multipliers of magic and fable, mummery, ceremonial, and symbol; and they jealously guarded their specialty against lay competition.[136] Esoteric and exoteric doctrine flourished in their degrees side by side,[137] the instructed few apparently often accepting or acting upon both; and primitive rites all the while flourished on the level of the lowest savagery,[138] though the higher ethical teaching even improves, as in India.
Conflicts, conquests, and changes of dynasties seem to have made little difference in the life of the common people.[139] Religion was the thread by which any ruler could lead them; and after the brief destructive outbreak of Cambyses,[140] himself at first tolerant, the Persian conquerors allowed the old faiths to subsist, caring only, like their predecessors, to prevent strife between the cults which would not tolerate each other.[141] The Ptolemies are found adopting and using the native cults as the native kings had done ages before them;[142] and in the learned Greek-speaking society created by their dynasty at Alexandria there can have been at least as little concrete belief as prevailed in the priesthood of the older civilization. It developed a pantheistic philosophy which ultimately, in the hands of Plotinus, compares very well with that of the Upanishads and of later European systems. But this was a hot-house flower; and in the open world outside, where Roman rule had broken the power of the ancient priesthood and Greek immigration had overlaid the native element, Christianity found an easy entrance, and in a declining society flourished at its lowest level.[143] The ancient ferment, indeed, produced many stirrings of relative freethought in the form of Christian heresies to be noted hereafter; one of the most notable being that of Arius, who, like his antagonist Athanasius, was an Alexandrian. But the cast of mind which elaborated the dogma of the Trinity is as directly an outcome of Egyptian culture-history as that which sought to rationalize the dogma by making the popular deity a created person;[144] and the long and manifold internecine struggles of the sects were the due duplication of the older strifes between the worshippers of the various sacred animals in the several cities.[145] In the end the entire population was but so much clay to take the impress of the Arab conquerors, with their new fanatic monotheism standing for the minimum of rational thought.
For the rest, the higher forms of the ancient religion had been able to hold their own till they were absolutely suppressed, with the philosophic schools, by the Byzantine government, which at the same time marked the end of the ancient civilization by destroying or scattering the vast collection of books in the Serapeion, annihilating at once the last pagan cult and the stored treasure of pagan culture. With that culture too, however, there had been associated to the last the boundless credulity which had so long kept it company. In the second century of our era, under the Antonines, we have Apuleius telling of Isis worshipped as “Nature, parent of things, mistress of all elements, the primordial birth of the ages, highest of divinities, queen of departed spirits, first of the heavenly ones, the single manifestation of all Gods and Goddesses,” who rules all things in earth and heaven, and who stands for the sole deity worshipped throughout the world under many names;[146] the while her worshipper cherishes all manner of the wildest superstitions, which even the subtle philosophy of the Alexandrian Neo-Platonic school did not discard. All alike, with the machinery of exorcism, were passed on to the worship of the Christian Queen of Heaven, leaving out only the pantheism; and when that worship in turn was overthrown, the One God of Islam enrolled in his train the same host of ancient hallucinations.[147] The fatality of circumstance was supreme.