Egyptian Literature

The sky is a dark bowl, the stars die and fall. The celestial bows quiver, the bones of the earthgods shake and planets come to a halt when they sight the king in all his power, the god who feeds on his father and eats his mother. The king is such a tower of wisdom even his mother can’t discern his name. His glory is in the sky, his strength lies in the horizon like that of his father the sungod Atum who conceived him.

—from “The Cannibal Hymn” translated by Tony Barnstone and Willis Barnstone

Literary Focus Epithet An epithet is a descriptive name, adjective, phrase, or title that is repeatedly used to describe or characterize a quality or characteristic of a person, place, or thing. We use epithets when we refer to “America the Beautiful,” “Richard the Lionhearted,” or “Paris, the City of Lights.” In “The Great Hymn to the Aten,” epithets are used to honor and show respect for the attributes of the Egyptian sun god, Aten.

An epithet is an adjective or other descriptive phrase that is regularly used to characterize a person, place, or thing. For more on Epithet, see the Handbook of Literary and Historical Terms.

Background “The Great Hymn to the Aten” is the longest of several New Kingdom praise poems to the sun god Aten. This poem, composed as a hymn, or sacred song, was found on the wall of a tomb built for a royal scribe named Ay and his wife. It was intended to assure their safety in the afterlife. The Egyptians had worshiped the sun—along with a host of other gods—since the Old Kingdom. But during the Amarna period of the New Kingdom, the pharaoh Amenhotep IV, who later took the name Akhenaten (“he who serves the Aten”), declared that the sun god, Aten, was the one true god. Thus, Egypt was introduced to one man’s concept of monotheism, or belief in one god. Akhenaten, who came to power as a child and ruled from 1379 B.C. to 1362 B.C., was an unusual ruler. Under his reign, conservative, tradition-bound Egypt experienced a revolution that affected every aspect of life. Akhenaten was a talented poet, and this poem, as well as several others, has been attributed to him. But Akhenaten’s break with tradition must have seemed too shockingly revolutionary for the Egyptians, who for centuries had recognized and worshiped approximately eighty gods, each of whom took a different form and represented a different power. As soon as their radical pharaoh died, the Egyptians returned to the worship of their traditional deities. The Great Hymn to the Aten translated by Miriam Lichtheim

Splendid you rise in heaven’s lightland,

O living Aten, creator of life! When you have dawned in eastern lightland, You fill every land with your beauty. 5 You are beauteous, great, radiant, High over every land; Your rays embrace the lands, To the limit of all that you made. Being Re,° you reach their limits,

10 You bend them the son whom you love; Though you are far, your rays are on earth, Though one sees you, your strides are unseen. When you set in western lightland, Earth is in darkness as if in death; 15 One sleeps in chambers, heads covered, One eye does not see another. Were they robbed of their goods, That are under their heads, People would not remark it. 20 Every lion comes from its den, All the serpents bite; Darkness hovers, earth is silent, As their maker rests in lightland. Earth brightens when you dawn in lightland, 25 When you shine as Aten of daytime; As you dispel the dark, As you cast your rays, The Two Lands° are in festivity. Awake they stand on their feet, 30 You have roused them; Bodies cleansed, clothed, Their arms adore your appearance. The entire land sets out to work, All beasts browse on their herbs; 35 Trees, herbs are sprouting, Birds fly from their nests, Their wings greeting your ka.

All flocks frisk on their feet, All that fly up and alight, 40 They live when you dawn for them. Ships fare north, fare south as well, Roads lie open when you rise; The fish in the river dart before you, Your rays are in the midst of the sea.... 45 How many are your deeds, Though hidden from sight, O Sole God beside whom there is none! You made the earth as you wished, you alone, All peoples, herds, and flocks; 50 All upon earth that walk on legs, All on high that fly on wings, The lands of Khor and Kush,

The land of Egypt. You set every man in his place, 55 You supply their needs; Everyone has his food, His lifetime is counted. Their tongues differ in speech, Their characters likewise; 60 Their skins are distinct, For you distinguished the peoples. You made Hapy in dat,°

You bring him when you will, To nourish the people, 65 For you made them for yourself. Lord of all who toils for them, Lord of all lands who shines for them, Aten of daytime, great in glory! All distant lands, you make them live, 70 You made a heavenly Hapy descend for them; He makes waves on the mountains like the sea, To drench their fields and their towns. How excellent are your ways, O Lord of eternity! A Hapy from heaven for foreign peoples, 75 And all lands’ creatures that walk on legs, For Egypt the Hapy who comes from dat. Your rays nurse all fields, When you shine they live, they grow for you; You made the seasons to foster all that you made, 80 Winter to cool them, heat that they taste you. You made the far sky to shine therein, To behold all that you made; You alone, shining in your form of living Aten, Risen, radiant, distant, near. 85 You made millions of forms from yourself alone, Towns, villages, fields, the river’s course; All eyes observe you upon them, For you are the Aten of daytime on high.... earth come from your hand as you made them, 90 When you have dawned they live, When you set they die; You yourself are lifetime, one lives by you. All eyes are on beauty until you set, All labor ceases when you rest in the west; 95 When you rise you stir [everyone] for the King, Every leg is on the move since you founded the earth. You rouse them for your son who came from your body, The King who lives by Maat, the Two Lands,

Neferkheprure, Sole-one- of-Re, 100 The Son of Re who lives by Maat, the Lord of crowns, Akhenaten, great in his lifetime; (And) the great Queen whom he loves, the Lady of the Two Lands, Nefer-nefru-Aten Nefertiti,°

Lightland = sky Hapy in dat = Hapy is the river nile; The Two Lands = Upper and Lower Egypt dat is the underworld Ka = life force Maat = personification of truth, order and Khor and Kush = Syria and Nubia moral law Nefertiti = Aktenaten’s wife

INFORMATIONAL TEXT Pharaohs of the Sun Rick Gore from National Geographic, April 2001

Akhenaten, Nefertiti, and the boy pharaoh Tutankhamun—perhaps Akhenaten’s son born to a secondary wife—have been called the Pharaohs of the Sun. Their reign was brief. Akhenaten ruled just 17 years, and within a few years after his death in 1336 B.C., the old orthodoxy1 was restored. Akhenaten’s enemies soon smashed his statues, dismantled his temples, and set out to expunge2 all memory of him and Nefertiti from Egypt’s historical record. But the controversy the couple created lives on. Egyptologists still struggle to piece together the story of this renegade pair. Swept up in religious passion, they brought the vast and powerful Egyptian empire to the brink of collapse. “You’re never going to find two Egyptologists who agree on this period,” said Nicholas Reeves, a British Egyptologist. Barry Kemp, an archaeologist at Cambridge University, is even more pessimistic: “The minute you begin to write about those people you begin to write fiction.” The same may be true of the likenesses left of them....

In the Egyptian Museum in Cairo are colossal statues—troubling and mesmerizing—of Akhenaten. His face is elongated and angular with a long chin. His eyes are mystical and brooding. His lips are huge and fleshy. Although he wears a pharaoh’s headdress and holds the traditional symbols of kingship, the crook and flail,3 across his chest, the chest is spindly, and the torso flows into a voluptuous belly and enormous feminine hips.

Because of the strangeness of these and so many other images of Akhenaten, scholars speculated for decades that the pharaoh had a deforming disease. But now many believe that the odd appearance of the colossi4 might be rooted in Akhenaten’s new religion, for Aten had both male and female aspects. They also point out that in the early years of his reign, when Akhenaten was a young radical fighting an established religion, he had reasons for the exaggeration. He wanted to break down more than a thousand years of artistic tradition, so he instructed his artists to portray the world as it really was.

Instead of the standard static depictions of physically perfect pharaohs smiting5 enemies or making offerings to the gods, artists gave the new king a much more realistic appearance. “Akhenaten probably didn’t have the greatest physique by American standards,” says James Allen, a specialist on the period at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. “He had the easy life in the palace.” For the first time, artists routinely portrayed the pharaoh in informal situations—being affectionate with Nefertiti or playing with his children. They also painted scenes of life and nature—wheat rippling in the wind, farmers plowing, birds taking flight. In truth, Akhenaten unleashed a creative furor that gave rise to perhaps the finest era of Egyptian art....

We walk to a 40-foot-high relief Akhenaten had carved on a wall of Amun-Re’s6 temple soon after taking power. It’s a traditional “smiting scene” for pharaohs. Akhenaten holds his enemies by their hair and is about to kill them.... “His was a strange new vision,” says Robert Vergnieux of the University of Bordeaux in France. “Since the Egyptians’ god was now the sunlight, they didn’t need statues in dark inner sanctums. So they built temples without roofs and performed their rituals directly under the sun.”

“For a short time the Egyptians believed the sun god had come back to Earth in the form of the royal family,” says Ray Johnson.7 “There was a collective excitement that becomes tangible in the art and architecture. The whole country was in jubilee. It’s one of the most astonishing periods in world history.”