Buy essays online: Akhenaten and Egypt
// June 10th, 2012 // No Comments » // Free essays
Religion was extremely important to ancient Egyptian society because people at the epoch heavily relied on the natural forces and they created different cults honoring gods of the sun, earth, water, etc. In such a way, they believed that through honoring these gods they could deserve their support and, therefore, ancient Egyptians counted for higher crops, income and better life which they could achieve only with the support of various deities. In such a context, it is obvious the extent to which the attempt of Akhenaten to introduce monotheism in ancient Egypt was radical. It is obvious that the honoring of one god, Aten, should change the perception of the surrounding world and the position of gods in the life of ancient Egyptian people.
Obviously, this step was extremely progressive from the point of view of political power of the pharaoh. At the same time, it was a substantially progressive step in the religious development of the country because monotheism in its pure form emerged consistently later in the Western civilization along with the development of Christianity. In such a situation, the attempt of Akhenaten to develop the cult of Aten as the main and the only god of ancient Egypt could not be adequately perceived by the society. In all probability, Akhenaten realized possible benefits of the establishment of monotheism in the country because it would help the pharaoh to increase his control over the religious life of the country and, what was more important, it would help him decrease substantially the role of priests and leaders of various religious cults. In this respect, it should be said that the pharaoh naturally did not want to share his power with various religious cults. In the situation, when there were a variety of cults it was really difficult to control religious views of Egyptians because, even though the pharaoh could proclaim himself a god, and even though Egyptians really viewed him, as they actually did, as a god, the pharaoh still could not be viewed as the religious leader of the entire nation. In fact, he was just the leader of a particular cult he was supposed to belong to and which he actually represented as a pharaoh. Consequently, the adepts of all the other cults could respect him but they did not view the pharaoh as the only living being the possesses the divine authority because there existed a variety of other cults that also possessed high divine authority and, thus, could be equal, if not to say, superior to the cult which the pharaoh represented. (more…)




