The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

34 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

divine to which the Egyptian attained was that of“the nameless

one,”since the name was regarded as something very real and

concrete, as, in fact, the essence of that to which it belonged.

To say, therefore, that a thing was nameless, was equivalent to

either denying its existence or to lifting it out of the world of the

concrete altogether.

[035] There was a moment in the history of Egypt when an attempt
was made to put a real signification into the apparently abstract
terms and phrases addressed to the gods. The Pharaoh Khu-
n-Aten, towards the close of the Eighteenth Dynasty, appears
suddenly on the scene as a royal reformer, determined to give life
and meaning to the language which had described the supreme
deity as“the sole and only god,” the absolute ruler of the
universe, who was from all eternity, and whose form was hidden
from men. But the impulse to the reform came from Asia.
Khu-n-Aten's mother was a foreigner, and his attempt to engraft
Asiatic ideas upon Egyptian religion, or rather to substitute an
Asiatic form of faith for that of his fathers, proved a failure.
The worship of the one supreme deity, whose visible symbol
was the solar disc, though enforced by persecution and by all
the power of the Pharaoh himself, hardly survived his death.
Amon of Thebes and his priesthood came victorious out of
the struggle, and the pantheistic monotheism of Khu-n-Aten
was never revived. Symbolism remained, while the abstract
thought, to which that symbolism should have been a stepping-
stone, failed to penetrate into Egyptian religion. The Egyptian
continued to be content with the symbol, as his father had been
before him. But in the priestly colleges and among the higher
circles of culture it became less materialistic; while the mass
of the people still saw nothing but the symbol itself, the priests
and scribes looked as it were beyond it, and saw in the symbol
the picture of some divine truth, the outward garment in which
the deity had clothed himself. What constituted, however, the
peculiarity of the Egyptian point of view was, that this outward