Egyptian Monotheism.

During the last eighty years the gods of Egypt and the religion of the Ancient Egyptians have been carefully studied by many Egyptologists, but the difficulties which surround these subjects have not yet been cleared away. The responsibility for the existence of these difficultïes rests upon the Egyptians themselves, because they did not write books on their religion or explanations of what they believed. But a great many hymns to their gods and legends of their gods and goddesses have come down to us, and from these, thanks to the publication of Egyptian texts during the last thirty years, it is now possible to arrive at a number of important conclusions about the Egyptian religion and its general character. The older Egyptologists debated the question whether it was monotheistic, polytheistic, or pantheistic, and the differences in the opinions which they formed about it will illustrate its difficulty. Champollion believed it to have been “a pure monotheism, which manifested itself externally by a symbolic polytheism.” ¹ Tiele thought that in the beginning it was polytheistic, but that it developed in two opposite directions; in the one direction gods were multiplied, and in the other it drew nearer and nearer to monotheism. ² Naville treated it as a “religion of nature, inclining to pantheism.” ¹ Maspero admitted that the Egyptians applied the epithets, “one God” and “only God” to several gods, even when the god was associated with a goddess and a son, but he adds “ce dieu Un n’était jamais Dieu tout court”; ² the “only god” is the only god Ȧmen, or the only god Ptaḥ, or the only god Osiris, that is to say, a being determinate possessing a personality, name, attributes, apparel, members, a family, a man infinitely more perfect than men. He is a likeness of the kings of this earth, and his power, like that of all kings, is limited by the power of neighbouring kings. The conception of his unity is geographical and political at least as much as it is religious. Rā, only god of Heliopolis, is not the same as Ȧmen, only god of Thebes. The Egyptian of Thebes proclaimed the unity of Ȧmen to the exclusion of Rā, the Egyptian of Heliopolis proclaimed the unity of Rā to the exclusion of Ȧmen. Each one god, conceived of in this manner, is only the one god of the nome or of the town, and not the one god of the nation recognized as such throughout the country.