Amun-Ra

Amun began in the dark. In the tradition of Hermopolis, the city the Egyptians called the City of the Eight, he was one of the Ogdoad, the eight primeval beings, four frog-gods and four snake-goddesses, who embodied the formless chaos that existed before creation, and his name meant the Hidden One, the invisible power that moves unseen through the world. His female counterpart was Amaunet, the Hiddenness, and together they were the mystery from which all things came. The Egyptians also felt his presence in the wind, the breath that fills the lungs yet cannot be seen, and in the silence before sound. His first temple stood at Thebes, then a modest provincial town in Upper Egypt, where he displaced the old war god Montu as the local patron. When the Theban prince Mentuhotep II reunited Egypt around 2055 BCE, ending the civil wars of the First Intermediate Period, his god rose with him. The kings of the Twelfth Dynasty took the name Amenemhat, which means Amun is in Front, and carried their god's standard into battle and into stone. Even so, he was still one god among many, a local lord waiting for his hour.

His hour came with empire. Around 1550 BCE the Theban king Ahmose I drove out the Hyksos, the foreign shepherd kings who had ruled the Delta, and founded the New Kingdom, the age of Egypt's greatest power. The victorious pharaohs credited their triumph to Amun, and they fused him with Ra, the ancient sun god of Heliopolis, creating Amun-Ra, King of the Gods, Lord of the Thrones of the Two Lands. The temple of Karnak at Thebes, called Ipet-isut, the Most Select of Places, grew into the largest religious complex the world has ever seen, its Great Hypostyle Hall a stone forest of one hundred and thirty-four columns, built and enlarged by thirty pharaohs across fifteen centuries. Amun chose his own kings. The priests of Karnak carried his golden barque in procession, and the god answered questions by dipping the prow, and by this oracle he selected the young Thutmose III, then a minor prince serving in the temple, marking him out as the future conqueror of seventeen campaigns. Hatshepsut, the woman who ruled as pharaoh, carved her divine birth in stone at Deir el-Bahari: Amun himself had come to her mother in the guise of the king, and she was his daughter. When Thutmose III crushed a coalition of Canaanite kings at Megiddo, he dedicated the spoils to Karnak, and three whole towns in Lebanon were handed over to Amun's estate.

For all his power, Amun remained unknowable. The hymns of the New Kingdom called him the one who made himself into millions, whose length was the sky and whose width was the earth, yet no man could tell his true form. One great hymn declared that all the gods were three: Amun, Ra, and Ptah, the creator god of Memphis, and that Amun was the hidden soul behind them all, his name secret, his nature beyond speech. In his oldest aspect he was the Great Cackler, the primordial goose whose cry first broke the silence of eternity and whose egg held the world. In another he was Amun Kamutef, the Bull of His Mother, a fertile form fused with Min, the ancient god of the harvest and the hunt, ensuring the fields and herds of Egypt. At Thebes he formed a holy family with Mut, the mother goddess who replaced Amaunet as his consort, and Khonsu, the moon god who was their son. Twice a year the whole city turned out for him. At the Opet Festival his barque sailed from Karnak to Luxor amid soldiers, dancers, and rivers of beer, renewing the bond between the god and the king, and at the Beautiful Festival of the Valley he crossed the Nile to visit the temples of the dead on the western bank, so that ordinary families could feast all night among the tombs of their ancestors. To the poor he was the vizier of the humble, the god who hears the voice of the oppressed and comes swiftly to the cry of the weak.

Power gathered power. Amun's temples owned vast estates, gold mines in Nubia, fleets of ships, and herds counted by the hundred thousand, and the wealth made his High Priests rivals to the throne. One king tried to break them. Amenhotep IV, who renamed himself Akhenaten, shut the temples of Amun, sent agents to chisel the god's name from every obelisk and tomb, and raised a new capital for a new god, the Aten, the visible disk of the sun. It was the only attempt in three thousand years to erase the Hidden One, and it failed. Within a few years of the heretic's death, the boy-king Tutankhaton changed his name to Tutankhamun, Living Image of Amun, reopened the temples, and the name of Akhenaten was itself condemned to oblivion. Yet the priesthood only grew stronger. By the end of the Twentieth Dynasty the High Priest Herihor wore the double crown in his own reliefs and ruled Upper Egypt in all but name, and the Theban priests answered petitions through the oracle of the god as if the age of kings had passed. When Libyan warlords later carved Egypt into petty realms, it was Amun of Thebes, and his chosen daughter the God's Wife of Amun, a royal princess sworn to serve the god alone, who kept the south together.

South of Egypt, beyond the cataracts of the Nile, Amun wore the head of a ram. At Gebel Barkal, a flat-topped holy mountain in Nubia that the Egyptians read as a colossal uraeus, the rearing cobra of kingship, stood the great temple of Amun of Napata. The kings of Kush worshipped him there as their own god, and around 750 BCE the Kushite king Piye marched north into Egypt at the head of an army, declaring that he came at Amun's command to restore the god's honour. His successors of the Twenty-Fifth Dynasty, Shabaka and Taharqa, ruled Egypt itself as the chosen sons of Amun, and Taharqa covered Gebel Barkal with temples and inscriptions. Even when the armies of Assyria drove the Kushites back into the south, the faith did not die. At their new capital of Meroe, the kings and queens of Kush still journeyed to Napata to be crowned by Amun of the ram's horns, and the temple of Amun at Napata remained a place of pilgrimage for a thousand years after the pharaohs had gone.

The Greeks met Amun in the desert. At the oasis of Siwa, far out in the Libyan sands, stood a famous oracle of the god whom they called Ammon, and they identified him with Zeus, their own king of the gods. In 331 BCE Alexander of Macedon, fresh from conquering Egypt, led a small party across three hundred miles of waterless desert, guided, men said, by rain that fell at the god's command and by crows that flew ahead of the column. At Siwa the chief priest greeted him as the son of the god, and Alexander entered the sanctuary alone. What the god told him he never revealed, but afterwards he minted his own image on silver wearing the curling ram's horns of Ammon, and his successors, the Ptolemies who ruled Egypt after him, did the same. Rome knew him as Jupiter Ammon, and the salt gathered by camel caravans near his desert shrine was called sal ammoniac, the salt of Ammon, from which chemists later took the name ammonia. The spiral fossil shells found in ancient rocks were named ammonites for their likeness to his horns. Christianity closed his temples and the hymns of Karnak fell silent, yet the god who began as the wind and the hiddenness of things left his name written in chemistry, in fossils, and on the coins of the greatest conqueror the ancient world produced.