King Tut to Dad: My god is better than yours



Statue of Akhenaten (Photo by Gerard Ducher)

Monotheists the world over might be rejoicing at the recent return of Akhenaten’s (King Tut’s dad’s) statue to its most cherished space within the Egyptian Museum.  Some might even interpret the streetwise finding - then honest handling - of this rare archaeological treasure to be nothing short of miraculous.

King Tut himself might not have been so jubilant over this return.  That is because he spent most of his short reign making it his primary order of business to reverse Akhenaten’s so-called monotheistic revolution.

Akhenaten took on his very name from the ardent (and within his historical and cultural context, revolutionary) worship of a particular god, Aten.  Egyptians at that time had been polytheistic for centuries, worshipping such gods as Ra and Horus.  Aten’s full name, The Rahorus who rejoices in the horizon, in his/her Name of the Light which is seen in the sun disc, indicates a synthesis of Ra, Horus, plus masculine and feminine deities.  It is believed that Akhenaten was therefore creating a blended monotheistic religion (or, at the very least, a henotheistic religion that emphasized one god above all others).

All this did not sit very well with Akhenaten’s royal son, Tutankhamun (or at least with the priests who had lost much of their power during Akhenaten’s religious revolution, and now viewed the malleable nine-year-old Tut as a means of getting back what they had lost).   Therefore, by the third year of young King Tut’s reign, a counterrevolution was already in full swing.

Worship of Aten was quite suddenly replaced with worship of the ancient Amun-Ra god.  The priests of

Amun were now once again in power, and the capital was moved back to its former location at Thebes. 

It is often said that (henotheistic) monotheism was weakened at this point, but the type of focused worship

that was then afforded to Amun might indicate otherwise.  Perhaps both Pharoahs, Akhenaten and Tutankhamun, each accomplished more of a political shift than a theological one.  If so, they may have been more alike than either would have ever cared to acknowledge.

Resources

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/41647345/41645941

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aten

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amun

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akhenaten

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tutankhamen

Copyright February 19, 2011 by Linda Van Slyke   All Rights Reserved