God Ra: from triumph to oblivion
God Ra in the Egyptian pantheon occupied a special place. This is understandable: the southern country, constantly burning sun overhead ... Other gods and boshents performed their specific functions, and only the beneficent god Ra illuminated the whole earth, making no distinction between the poor and the rich, the pharaohs and slaves, humans and animals.
According to the Egyptians, Ra never born,existed always. He stood over other gods, being something like the prototype of a single god, later embodied in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. But it seems that the idea of monotheism was in the minds of ancient Egypt. No wonder the pharaoh of the eighteenth dynasty Amenhotep the fourth, seeking to get rid of the dictates of the numerous priests of various cults (the most influential of whom were the priests of Ra), introduced the worship of the god Aton, or the solar disk, rejecting all other gods. In fact, the new solar deity, Aton, differed little from the old solar cult - Amon-Ra. Is that the fact that the new priests were completely under the control of Amenhotep, who adopted the new name Akhnaton, which means "pleasing to God Aton."
But the idea of monotheism, found resonance in the mindsthe mental elite (a part of unaffiliated priests, intellectuals and close associates of Akhenaten), did not find support among the wide uneducated sections of the population of the Ancient Egyptian kingdom. The cult of Aton did not become mass.
The religious center of the solar deity wasHeliopolis, which in Greek means the city of the Sun or Solntsegrad. Under this name, the city appears in many historical studies, although the real, Egyptian name of this center was Iunu. Greeks since the conquest of Alexander the Great had a great influence on the life of Egypt. The Egyptian god Ra in their minds was identified with the Greek Helios. Without further ado, the conquerors simply renamed the Egyptian city of Iun in Greek Heliopolis.
The cult of Ra existed for a very long time. The beginning of it was laid in the Ancient Kingdom - in the first half of the third millennium BC. God Ra was at first one of the many Egyptian gods. But later, through the efforts of the priests who assisted the founder of the fifth dynasty in ascension to the throne, his cult rose and dominated the others for more than two thousand years. Priests of Ra, not being finished dogmatists, allowed a kind of "symbiosis" of their god with less significant deities of different territories of Egypt. Thus, in Elephantine he bore the name of Khnum Ra, in Thebes, Amon-Ra. This measure allowed to minimize the possibility of local religious separatism.
After the hoplites of Alexander the Greatwithout a fight entered Egypt, the decline of traditional religion began. No, the Greeks did not pursue Ra's admirers. Just the time of the old religion has passed. Less and less people believed in old gods, temples gradually fell into decay, and with the advent of Christianity the god of the Sun Ra was finally forgotten. By the fifth century of the new era, the Egyptians forgot even the letter on which they wrote hymns to the gods. But the system of Egyptian hieroglyphic writing by that time totaled three and a half thousand years!
And only at the beginning of the nineteenth century, wethanks to the efforts of the genius linguist François Champollion, discovered for Egyptian history an Egyptian history that was previously known only from the brief comments of Egypt's neighbors - Greeks, Romans, Persians and Arabs.
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