Amun
Amun | |||||
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Name in hieroglyphs |
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Major cult center | Thebes, Hermopolis, (as a member of the Ogdoad) | ||||
Symbol | two vertical plumes, the ram-headed Sphinx (Criosphinx) | ||||
Consort | |||||
Offspring | Khonsu | ||||
Equivalents | |||||
Greek equivalent | Zeus |
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Ancient Egyptian religion |
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Amun (
After the rebellion of Thebes against the
Amun-Ra retained chief importance in the
As the chief deity of the
in Rome.Early history
Amun and
Amun rose to the position of
Temple at Karnak
The history of Amun as the patron god of Thebes begins in the 20th century BC, with the construction of the Precinct of Amun-Re at Karnak under Senusret I. The city of Thebes does not appear to have been of great significance before the 11th Dynasty.
Major construction work in the Precinct of Amun-Ra took place during the
Construction of the
The last major change to the Precinct of Amun-Re's layout was the addition of the first pylon and the massive enclosure walls that surrounded the whole Precinct, both constructed by Nectanebo I.
New Kingdom
Identification with Min and Ra
When the army of the
[Amun] who comes at the voice of the poor in distress, who gives breath to him who is wretched ... You are Amun, the Lord of the silent, who comes at the voice of the poor; when I call to you in my distress You come and rescue me ... Though the servant was disposed to do evil, the Lord is disposed to forgive. The Lord of Thebes spends not a whole day in anger; His wrath passes in a moment; none remains. His breath comes back to us in mercy ... May your ka be kind; may you forgive; It shall not happen again.[11]
Subsequently, when Egypt conquered
As the cult of Amun grew in importance, Amun became identified with the chief deity who was worshipped in other areas during that period, namely the sun god Ra. This identification led to another merger of identities, with Amun becoming Amun-Ra. In the Hymn to Amun-Ra he is described as
Lord of truth, father of the gods, maker of men, creator of all animals, Lord of things that are, creator of the staff of life.[12]
Amarna Period
During the latter part of the
The introduction of Atenism under Akhenaten constructed a
When thou crossest the sky, all faces behold thee, but when thou departest, thou are hidden from their faces ... When thou settest in the western mountain, then they sleep in the manner of death ... The fashioner of that which the soil produces, ... a mother of profit to gods and men; a patient craftsman, greatly wearying himself as their maker ... valiant herdsman, driving his cattle, their refuge and the making of their living ... The sole Lord, who reaches the end of the lands every day, as one who sees them that tread thereon ... Every land chatters at his rising every day, in order to praise him.[13]
When Akhenaten died, Akhenaten's successor, Smenkhkare, became pharaoh and Atenism remained established during his brief 2-year reign. When Smenkhkare died, an enigmatic female pharaoh known as Neferneferuaten took the throne for a brief period but it is unclear what happened during her reign. After Neferneferuaten's death, Akhenaten's 9-year-old son Tutankhaten succeeded her. At the beginning of his reign, the young pharaoh reversed Atenism, re-establishing the old polytheistic religion and renaming himself Tutankhamun. His sister-wife, then named Ankhesenpaaten, followed him and was renamed Ankhesenamun. Worship of the Aten ceased for the most part and worship of Amun-Ra was restored.
During the reign of Horemheb, Akhenaten's name was struck from Egyptian records, all of his religious and governmental changes were undone, and the capital was returned to Thebes. The return to the previous capital and its patron deity was accomplished so swiftly that it seemed this monolatrist cult and its governmental reforms had never existed.
Theology
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The god of wind Amun came to be identified with the solar god
As Amun-Ra, he was petitioned for mercy by those who believed suffering had come about as a result of their own or others' wrongdoing.
Amun-Ra "who hears the prayer, who comes at the cry of the poor and distressed...Beware of him! Repeat him to son and daughter, to great and small; relate him to generations of generations who have not yet come into being; relate him to fishes in the deep, to birds in heaven; repeat him to him who does not know him and to him who knows him ... Though it may be that the servant is normal in doing wrong, yet the Lord is normal in being merciful. The Lord of Thebes does not spend an entire day angry. As for his anger – in the completion of a moment there is no remnant ... As thy
Ka endures! thou wilt be merciful![14]
In the Leiden hymns, Amun, Ptah, and Re are regarded as a trinity who are distinct gods but with unity in plurality.[15] "The three gods are one yet the Egyptian elsewhere insists on the separate identity of each of the three."[16] This unity in plurality is expressed in one text:
All gods are three: Amun, Re and Ptah, whom none equals. He who hides his name as Amun, he appears to the face as Re, his body is Ptah.[17]
Henri Frankfort suggested that Amun was originally a wind god and speculating pointed out that the implicit connection between the winds and mysteriousness was paralleled in a passage from the Gospel of John: "The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear the sound of it, but do not know where it comes from and where it is going."[18][19]
A Leiden hymn to Amun describes how he calms stormy seas for the troubled sailor:
The tempest moves aside for the sailor who remembers the name of Amon. The storm becomes a sweet breeze for he who invokes His name ... Amon is more effective than millions for he who places Him in his heart. Thanks to Him the single man becomes stronger than a crowd.[20]
Third Intermediate Period
Theban High Priests of Amun
While not regarded as a dynasty, the
Decline
In the 10th century BC, the overwhelming dominance of Amun over all of Egypt gradually began to decline. In Thebes, however, his worship continued unabated, especially under the Nubian Twenty-fifth Dynasty of Egypt, as Amun was by now seen as a national god in Nubia. The Temple of Amun, Jebel Barkal, founded during the New Kingdom, came to be the center of the religious ideology of the Kingdom of Kush. The
Iron Age and classical antiquity
Nubia and Sudan
In areas outside Egypt where the Egyptians had previously brought the cult of Amun his worship continued into
In
Siwa Oasis and Libya
In Siwa Oasis, located Western Egypt, there remained a solitary oracle of Amun near the Libyan Desert.[25] The worship of Ammon was introduced into Greece at an early period, probably through the medium of the Greek colony in Cyrene, which must have formed a connection with the great oracle of Ammon in the Oasis soon after its establishment. Iarbas, a mythological king of Libya, was also considered a son of Hammon.
According to the 6th century AD author Corippus, a Libyan people known as the Laguatan carried an effigy of their god Gurzil, whom they believed to be the son of Ammon, into battle against the Byzantine Empire in the 540s AD.[26]
Levant
Amun is mentioned in the Hebrew Bible as אמון מנא Amon of No in Jeremiah 46:25 (also translated the horde of No and the horde of Alexandria), and Thebes possibly is called נא אמון No-Amon in Nahum 3:8 (also translated populous Alexandria). These texts were presumably written in the 7th century BC.[27]
The Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, said: "Behold, I am bringing punishment upon Amon of Thebes, and Pharaoh and Egypt and her gods and her kings, upon Pharaoh and those who trust in him."
Greece
Amun, worshipped by the Greeks as Ammon, had a temple and a statue, the gift of
When
Several words derive from Amun via the Greek form, Ammon, such as
In Paradise Lost, Milton identifies Ammon with the biblical Ham (Cham) and states that the gentiles called him the Libyan Jove.
See also
Notes
- ^ was sceptre. After the Amarna period, Amun was instead painted with blue skin.
References
- RÉS367
- ISBN 9783643902351
- ISBN 978-0-06-117389-9.
- ISBN 1575060248.
- ^ ISBN 0-425-19096-X.
- ^ "Die Altaegyptischen Pyramidentexte nach den Papierabdrucken und Photographien des Berliner Museums". 1908.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-415-36116-3.
- ^ PT 276c
- ISBN 978-0415404860.
- ^ public domain: Griffith, Francis Llewellyn (1911). "Ammon". In Chisholm, Hugh (ed.). Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 1 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 860–861. This cites:
- Erman, Handbook of Egyptian Religion (London, 1907)
- Ed. Meyer, art. "Ammon" in Roscher's Lexikon der griechischen und römischen Mythologie
- Pietschmann, arts. "Ammon", "Ammoneion" in Pauly-Wissowa, Realencyclopädie
- Works on Egyptian religion quoted (in the encyclopædia) under Egypt, section Religion
- ISBN 0-520-03615-8.
- ISBN 0-486-29502-8..
- ISBN 978-0-226-90152-7.
- ^ Wilson 1951, p. 300
- ISBN 0-8014-8029-9.
- ISBN 978-0140201987.
- ISBN 978-0-299-22554-4.
- ^ John 3:8
- ASIN B0006EUMNK.
- ISBN 0-671-02219-9.
- ISBN 978-0500286289.
- ^ Herodotus, The Histories ii.29
- ^ Griffith 1911.
- .
- ^ Pausanias, Description of Greece x.13 § 3
- S2CID 164294564.
- ^ "Strong's Concordance / Gesenius' Lexicon". Archived from the original on 2007-10-13. Retrieved 2007-10-10.
- ^ Pausanias. Description of Greece. ix.16 § 1.
- ^ Pausanias. Description of Greece. iii.18 § 2.
- ISBN 978-1-884964-04-6.
- ^ Bosworth, A. B. (1988). Conquest and Empire: The Reign of Alexander the Great. New York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 71–74.
- ^ Jeremiah. xlvi.25.
{{cite book}}
: Missing or empty|title=
(help) - ISBN 978-0-415-39451-2.
- ^ Recent Ancient Coin Acquisitions Focus on Alexander the Great
- ^ Ammonite to Ammolite
- ^ "Eponyms". h2g2. BBC Online. 11 January 2003. Archived from the original on 2 November 2007. Retrieved 8 November 2007.
Sources
- David Klotz, Adoration of the Ram: Five Hymns to Amun-Re from Hibis Temple (New Haven, 2006)
- David Warburton, Architecture, Power, and Religion: Hatshepsut, Amun and Karnak in Context, 2012, ISBN 9783643902351.
- E. A. W. Budge, Tutankhamen: Amenism, Atenism, and Egyptian Monotheism(1923).
Further reading
- Assmann, Jan (1995). Egyptian Solar Religion in the New Kingdom: Re, Amun and the Crisis of Polytheism. Kegan Paul International. ISBN 978-0710304650.
- Ayad, Mariam F. (2009). God's Wife, God's Servant: The God's Wife of Amun (c. 740–525 BC). Routledge. ISBN 978-0415411707.
- Cruz-Uribe, Eugene (1994). "The Khonsu Cosmogony". Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt. 31: 169–189. JSTOR 40000676.
- Gabolde, Luc (2018). Karnak, Amon-Rê : La genèse d'un temple, la naissance d'un dieu (in French). Institut français d'archéologie orientale du Caire. ISBN 978-2-7247-0686-4.
- Guermeur, Ivan (2005). Les cultes d'Amon hors de Thèbes: Recherches de géographie religieuse (in French). Brepols. ISBN 978-90-71201-10-3.
- Klotz, David (2012). Caesar in the City of Amun: Egyptian Temple Construction and Theology in Roman Thebes. Association Égyptologique Reine Élisabeth. ISBN 978-2-503-54515-8.
- Kuhlmann, Klaus P. (1988). Das Ammoneion. Archäologie, Geschichte und Kultpraxis des Orakels von Siwa (in German). Verlag Phillip von Zabern in Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. ISBN 978-3805308199.
- Otto, Eberhard (1968). Egyptian art and the cults of Osiris and Amon. Abrams.
- Roucheleau, Caroline Michelle (2008). Amun temples in Nubia: a typological study of New Kingdom, Napatan and Meroitic temples. Archaeopress. ISBN 9781407303376.
- Thiers, Christophe, ed. (2009). Documents de théologies thébaines tardives. Université Paul-Valéry.
- Zandee, Jan (1948). De Hymnen aan Amon van papyrus Leiden I. 350 (in Dutch). E.J. Brill.
- Zandee, Jan (1992). Der Amunhymnus des Papyrus Leiden I 344, Verso (in German). Rijksmuseum van Oudheden. ISBN 978-90-71201-10-3.
External links
- Wim van den Dungen, Leiden Hymns to Amun
- (in Spanish) Karnak 3D :: Detailed 3D-reconstruction of the Great Temple of Amun at Karnak, Marc Mateos, 2007
- Amun with features of Tutankhamun (statue, c. 1332–1292 BC, Penn Museum)