The Priests of Amun

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The name was a confession of limits. Imn, the Egyptians wrote it, and the word meant something like the one who is concealed — a god whose nature was that he could not be seen. Air has no shape; breath cannot be drawn on a wall; the wind that bent the reeds along the Nile came from nowhere a hand could point to. The Theban scribes made a theology out of that absence. The other gods had faces — Ra the disk, Hathor the cow, Ptah the wrapped craftsman — but the god of Thebes withheld his, and the men who served him built, on that withholding, the largest religious establishment the ancient world would know.

From a local god to the king of the gods

Amun begins small. In the Old Kingdom he is a minor figure of the Theban nome, paired with a consort, Amaunet, in the lists of primordial powers; the Pyramid Texts name him among the eight deities of the deep, the unseen breath of the waters before creation. Thebes itself was then a provincial town. Nothing in the third millennium would have predicted what came of either.

The turn was political. When the princes of Thebes drove out the Hyksos rulers of the Delta and founded the Eighteenth Dynasty around 1550 BCE, they credited the victory to their city god, and they paid him in the only coin a pharaoh kept — land, gold, captives, and stone. The kings of the New Kingdom returned from Syria and Nubia and laid the spoils at Karnak. Thutmose III, who walled the courts of the temple with the annals of his campaigns, assigned to Amun the first fruits of conquest; Hatshepsut raised obelisks to him sheathed in electrum. Generation after generation the god grew rich on the wars his city had won.

He grew, too, in rank. The Theban priests fused their hidden god with the visible sun, and Amun became Amun-Ra — king of the gods, the concealed power and the seen one in a single name. It was a move of real theological daring. A god who had no face could stand behind all the faces; the hiddenness that had once been a local peculiarity became the sign of a deity larger than any image, a breath moving through the whole pantheon. The Theban hymns press this nearly to a single principle: Amun as the one whose true form no other god knows, the power behind the powers. Modern scholars argue over how far to read this — Erik Hornung set the New Kingdom theology of the hidden god against a flexible polytheism in which one deity could be raised to the summit without the rest being denied. That a god could be exalted that high, and stay one among many, is the puzzle the hymns leave; whether it tilts toward a true unity is the contested ground.

What is not contested is the wealth. The temple of Amun at Karnak became the richest corporation in Egypt. It held fields up and down the Nile, herds of cattle, fleets of ships, quarries and mines, workshops and granaries, and the people to work all of it. The Great Harris Papyrus, drawn up at the death of Ramesses III around 1155 BCE, lists the endowments the kings had heaped on the temples; read against the surveys, it shows that by the end of that reign roughly a third of Egypt’s cultivable land belonged to the temples, and of that share the lion’s part — about three quarters — belonged to Amun of Thebes. The same papyrus records the king’s gifts to Thebes in the bare arithmetic of an account book: hundreds of thousands of sacks of grain, weights of gold and silver, lapis and turquoise, cattle, fowl, and bound captives, set down line after line. At Karnak in this period more than eighty thousand people, not all of them priests, worked the god’s estates and workshops or were counted among his dependents.

This was less a congregation than an economy, and the priesthood that ran it was a graded service rather than a class of preachers. At its head stood the High Priest of Amun, the First Prophet, and beneath him the Second, Third, and Fourth Prophets; below them ranged the lector-priests who read the rites, the scribes who kept the accounts, the wab-priests who served in rotation, and the great staff of weavers, brewers, herdsmen, sailors, and field hands whose labor fed the god and his servants. The temple was at once a sanctuary, a treasury, a granary, a court, and a port. A priest of Amun might spend his term not in prayer but in surveying fields or auditing a herd; the cult and the counting-house were one institution. The office of First Prophet, sitting atop all of it, was a kind of throne — and increasingly its holders behaved as if it were one.

The great hypostyle hall of the Temple of Amun-Ra at Karnak, Thebes, the ritual heart of the god’s estate. Photograph by Mohammed Moussa, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

The hidden god speaks

A face that cannot be seen still has a will, and the Theban system found a way to read it. The instrument was the bark. Amun’s cult image lived in the dark of the innermost sanctuary, attended daily by priests who washed, clothed, anointed, and fed it; on festival days the god was lifted into a portable shrine shaped like a boat — the sacred bark, with rams’ heads at prow and stern, the ram being his animal — and carried out on the shoulders of shaven-headed bearers into the light.

In procession the god could be questioned. A petition was put, or two written choices were set before the bark, and the priests watched its motion: a dip forward, a press toward one document, a heaviness drawing the bearers back. From these movements the answer was read — a forward surge for assent, a recoil for refusal, an inclining of the prow toward the chosen name. From the New Kingdom on, the surviving documents are full of such consultations. A man brings a dispute over the ownership of a house and the god confirms the rightful holder; a tomb-worker is accused of theft and the bark passes down a line of suspects until it halts before the guilty; a candidate’s name is set before the god and accepted or sent away. The oracle of Amun decided lawsuits and property disputes, cleared or condemned the accused, named men to office, located thieves. It could even make a king. Thutmose III left an inscription telling how, while still a young prince standing in the hypostyle hall during a festival, the god in his bark sought him out through the columns, halted before him, and led him to the station of the ruler — the god, in the telling, choosing the pharaoh. The mechanism put the throne’s legitimacy inside the temple. Whoever carried the bark held, in some measure, the answer; and the priests carried the bark.

The festivals that filled the Theban year were the public body of this religion. At the Opet feast the god traveled in his bark from Karnak south to the temple of Luxor, renewing the union of Amun with the kingship; at the Beautiful Festival of the Valley he crossed to the west bank to visit the dead among their tombs, and the living feasted at the graves through the night. These were not pageants laid over the faith. They were the faith — the hidden god made briefly, gorgeously present, moving through his city in the one form he would consent to take, a boat on the shoulders of his servants. To feed him in the dark and to carry him in the sun were the two halves of a single service, and that service was the Theban priesthood’s reason for being.

The hall of columns at Karnak, lithograph after David Roberts, R.A., from The Holy Land, Syria, Idumea, Arabia, Egypt and Nubia (1846–49). Public domain, Library of Congress / Wikimedia Commons.

The one king who tried to end them

By the middle of the Eighteenth Dynasty the temple of Amun had become a power the crown could not simply command. Into that imbalance walked the strangest figure in the king-lists. Amenhotep IV came to the throne around 1353 BCE and within a few years repudiated his name, his god, and the whole apparatus of Thebes. He became Akhenaten, “effective for the Aten,” and raised the sun-disk, the Aten, above all the gods of Egypt — at first as the foremost, then, with a violence that has no clear precedent, as the only one to be worshiped.

He did not merely promote a rival. He moved the capital downriver to a virgin site, Akhetaten, the modern Amarna, away from Karnak and its clergy. He closed the temples of the other gods, redirected their revenues, and sent his agents through the country to hack the name of Amun out of the stone wherever it had been carved — from temple walls, from private tombs, even, where they could reach it, from the tops of obelisks. The plural word for the gods was attacked. Whether the Aten cult amounted to a monotheism, and whether the Great Hymn to the Aten stands behind the language of the biblical Psalm 104, are questions argued at the level of attribution and resemblance, not of proven descent; what the monuments show plainly is the erasure. The richest god in Egypt was, for a span of years, struck from his own kingdom.

It did not hold. Akhenaten died around 1336 BCE, and the reaction was total. His young successor, who had been named Tutankhaten, changed his name to Tutankhamun — “living image of Amun” — abandoned Amarna, and restored the old cults; a great stela records the reopening of the temples and the remaking of the divine images. The priesthood of Amun came back not weakened but vindicated, its estates restored and its position now beyond challenge from any theology. Akhenaten himself was repaid in his own currency. The later king-lists, the official roll of legitimate rulers compiled in temples like that at Abydos, simply omit him; the heretic was struck from memory as he had struck Amun from the walls. The hostile erasure is part of the record, performed by the institution he had tried to abolish.

The priest-kings of Thebes

The triumph had a long tail, and at its end the priests took the throne in name as well as fact. Through the Nineteenth and Twentieth Dynasties the office of High Priest of Amun became hereditary and ever more autonomous, its incumbents marrying into the royal house and accumulating titles that shaded toward kingship. The Ramesside state, drained by foreign pressure and internal disorder, grew weak in the south. The temple did not.

Around 1080 BCE, in the reign of the last Ramesses, the general and High Priest Herihor took the decisive step. At Karnak he had himself depicted in royal regalia, wrote his name in a cartouche, and assumed the titles of a pharaoh — while the nominal king sat far away in the Delta. He combined in one man the highest sacred office and the command of the army of the south, and he governed in the god’s name; documents of the period are dated not to a king’s regnal years but to a new reckoning, the era of the “Repeating of Births,” a renewal proclaimed under Amun’s authority. From this point Upper Egypt was governed from Thebes by the High Priests of Amun, who ruled as a line of priest-kings. Herihor’s successors, among them Pinedjem I, held the south while a separate dynasty held the north from Tanis; the two houses were bound by marriage and a careful fiction of unity, and at the great burials the High Priests of Amun would gather the disturbed mummies of the earlier pharaohs and rewrap them, tending the dead kings as the living regents of the god. A son of Pinedjem would in time take the northern throne outright as Psusennes I, so that the priestly house and the royal one became, for a span, a single family. The arrangement is what scholars call the Theban theocracy: a state in which the god was, in the most literal administrative sense, the ruler, and the High Priest his regent. The bark that had once chosen a king now stood behind a clergy that had become kings. The institution had completed the arc its name implied — the hidden god governing through the men who carried him.

The royal family beneath the rays of the Aten, the sun-disk Akhenaten raised against Amun; relief from Amarna, 18th Dynasty, Neues Museum / Berlin. Photograph via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.

The god outlives his city

The Theban temple-state did not last, and Egypt’s center of gravity moved away from it for good — north to the Delta dynasties, then to the Kushite pharaohs of the Twenty-fifth Dynasty, who revered Amun above all and built a “second Karnak” for him far up the Nile at Jebel Barkal, carrying an oracle of Amun into Nubia. But the most far-traveled echo of the Theban god lay in the western desert, at the oasis of Siwa.

There, at a sanctuary remote from the Nile, an oracle of Amun had grown famous across the Greek world, where the god was identified with Zeus and worshiped as Zeus-Ammon. In 331 BCE, having taken Egypt from the Persians, Alexander the Great turned west across the sand to consult it. The accounts of Arrian, Plutarch, and Quintus Curtius Rufus differ in detail, but agree on the substance: the priest of Amun greeted the Macedonian as the son of the god. For the conqueror, the greeting did the work the bark had once done for Thutmose — it made him pharaoh in the only idiom Egypt recognized, the son of Amun. The hidden god of a small Theban town had, by then, been speaking for some twelve hundred years, and his last great pronouncement set a Greek on the throne of the pharaohs and sent the title of Amun’s son out across an empire that reached to India.

What remains is the stone. Karnak stands roofless now, its hall of columns open to the sky, the cartouches of Herihor still cut into the walls beside the kings he displaced. The daily rite has been silent for sixteen centuries. But the columns were raised to house a god who had refused a face, and a hall built to hide him keeps, in its scale, the exact measure of how large that hidden thing was thought to be — a building the size of the secret it was made to hold.

→ In the library: Budge, The Gods of the Egyptians / Egyptian Magic (1899) · The Book of the Dead (Papyrus of Ani), trans. Budge

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