Akhenaten полностью

As in my epigraph to this section, Akhenaten is often thought to have made 'a clean sweep of all the rest' of the gods in his monotheistic zeal. A major difficulty in assessing his 'clean sweep' is that we still do not know much about how far Aten-worship extended outside Akhet-aten, or what happened to the traditional cults at the same time. If these cults somehow continued in most places and Aten- worship was largely restricted to royalty and its circles, this would be evidence for the narrow social base of the religious changes. On the other side of the coin, a few of the traditional gods retained a presence at Akhet-aten. Some of these are personifications or divinised abstractions rather than gods with temples and active cults, such as Ma'at, personification of cosmic order, and Hapi, the Nile flood. Ma'at and Hapi stand for important concepts, but as personifications rather than de facto gods they are not a threat to the Aten. Somewhat different is the so-called Mnevis-bull, divine animal of the great sun-cult at Heliopolis and believed to be the herald of Re' and the god's earthly intermediary. In the first boundary stela of year 5, Akhenaten decreed that the sacred bull of Heliopolis was to be buried in the mountain east of Akhet-aten. This could perhaps show Akhenaten's animosity to the cult of Heliopolis. Moving the sacred bull to the new capital deconsecrated Heliopolis, so that Akhet-aten would become the unequivocal centre of sun-worship. On the other hand, bringing the bull to Akhet-aten could show the Heliopolis cult's central importance in Egyptian religion. It could even have been a way of making the new landscape of Akhet- aten sacred, by providing it with a suitable religious 'monument' in the form of the divine bull - significantly, not a man-made monument but a creation of the Aten. And at Akhet-aten there were people whose names honoured the cult of Heliopolis, such as Hesuefemiunu ('He-gives-praise-in-Heliopolis'). These names were not changed, so presumably they were considered acceptable.⁴⁷

Perhaps more striking evidence of deities integrated into Aten-worship were the god Shu and the goddess Tefnut, with whom the king and queen were identi­fied. Shu, god of the air, and Tefnut, goddess of moisture, were twins, the original divine pair of creation. They formed the space between sky and earth. Shu and Tefnut were also believed to welcome the newly risen sun. Although not exactly personified abstractions like Ma'at or Hapi, Shu and Tefnut are in some ways not strongly differentiated from Re': one of Tefnut's forms, for instance, is as the eye of Re'. At any rate, the intermediary quality of Shu and Tefnut, between earth and heaven, and their role as worshippers of the rising sun, made them perfect divine figures for Akhenaten and Nefertiti to identify with. With the Aten,

Akhenatcn-Shu and Nefertiti-Tefnut perhaps act as a replacement for the trad­itional family triads of gods who were worshipped in Egyptian temples. In the tomb of Ipy (number 10) at Amarna, Akhenaten and Nefertiti are shown offering to the Aten small boxes containing scented oils. These boxes are shaped like the earlier form of the Aten's cult name (see Figure 2. la) and adorned with statuettes of Shu and Tefnut; they take up the middle of the composition, reflecting the way both the gods and the royal couple occupy the medial space between heaven and earth. Shu, of course, was honoured in the formal name of the Aten. It may be that the Akhenaten-Shu and Nefertiti-Tefnut analogy became less symbolic­ally important after year 9, c. 1343 bce, when the titles of the Aten were altered to exclude the name of Shu. Re' and Aten, the 'father' of the king, are the only divine entities now mentioned (see Figure 2.1b). But two points remain. The first is that Akhenaten's 'monotheism' could accept gods other than Aten - as long as they fitted in with royal ideas about self-representation. The second is that identi­fying themselves with Shu and Tefnut enabled Akhenaten and Nefertiti to centre worship of the Aten upon themselves as the earthly embodiments of the sky- god's children.

This focus on the king as divine intermediary and sole interpreter of the god's words receives its fullest expression in the so-callcd 'hymns' to the Aten, metrical poems known from different versions, of varying length, in the tombs of Akhen­aten's courtiers at Amarna. A god who has no human or animal form needs an interpreter to make himself known. Akhenaten becomes that interpreter in the 'hymns', which rcplace the formal speeches traditionally exchanged between gods and kings and recorded on temple walls.