90 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia
The solar disc was thus, as it were, the mask through which
the supreme Creator revealed himself. And this Creator was the
one true living God, living eternally, brooking the worship of no
other god at his side, and, in fact, the only God who existed in
truth. All other gods were false, and the followers of Aten-Ra
were accordingly called upon to overthrow their worship and
convert their worshippers. At the same time, Aten was the father
of all things; he had called all things into existence by the word of
his mouth, men equally with the beasts and birds, the flowers and
the far-off heaven itself. If, therefore, men refused to worship
him, it was because they had been led astray by falsehood and
ignorance, or else were wilfully blind.
Whatever measure of success the reforms of Khu-n-Aten
attained among the natives of Egypt, they must have possessed in
so far as they represented a reformation, and not the introduction
of a new and foreign cult. There must have been a section
of the people, more especially among the educated classes,
whose religious ideas were already tending in that direction, and
who were therefore prepared to accept the new“doctrine.”The
language often used of the gods, if strictly interpreted, implied a
more or less modified form of monotheism; the Egyptian deities,
as we have seen, had come to be resolved into manifestations of
the sun-god, and the symbol of the new faith enabled it to be
connected with the ancient worship of Ra. The old sun-worship
of Heliopolis formed a bridge which spanned the gulf between
Amon and Aten. Indeed, the worship of the solar disc itself
was not absolutely strange. An Egyptian, for instance, who
was buried at Kom el-A%mar, opposite El-Kab, in the reign of
it at thy pleasure to give life to mankind; for thou hast made them for thyself,
O lord of them all who art ever with them, O lord of all the earth who risest for
them, O sun of day (the mighty one in?) the remotest lands, thou givest them
their life, thou sendest forth the Nile in heaven, that it may descend for them;
it raises its waves mountain high like the sea, it waters the fields of their cities.
How glorious are thy counsels! O lord of eternity, thou art a Nile in heaven for
foreign men and cattle throughout all the earth! They walk on their feet, (and)