Great Hymn To The Aten - Analysis

Analysis

Different scholars have expressed different opinions on Akhenaten's religion of Atenism. Some express great admiration for both while others see Atenism as a means to a political end. Historian James Henry Breasted considered Akhenaten to be the first monotheist and scientist in history. In 1899, Flinders Petrie wrote: If this were a new religion, invented to satisfy our modern scientific conceptions, we could not find a flaw in the correctness of this view of the energy of the solar system. How much Akhenaten understood, we cannot say, but he certainly bounded forward in his views and symbolism to a position which we cannot logically improve upon at the present day. Not a rag of superstition or of falsity can be found clinging to this new worship evolved out of the old Aton of Heliopolis, the sole Lord of the universe. Miriam Lichtheim describes the hymn as "a beautiful statement of the doctrine of the One God.".

Henry Hall contended that the pharaoh was the “first example of the scientific mind.”

Egyptologist Dominic Montserrat discusses the terminology used to describe these texts, describing them as formal poems or royal eulogies. He views the word 'hymn' as suggesting "outpourings of emotion" while he sees them as "eulogies, formal and rhetorical statements of praise" honoring Aten and the royal couple. He credits James Henry Breasted with the popularisation of them as hymns saying that Breasted (erroneously) saw them as "a gospel of the beauty and beneficience of the natural order, a recognition of the message of nature to the soul of man"(quote from Breasted).

Monsterrat argues that all the versions of the hymns focus on the king and suggests that the real innovation is to redefine the relationship of god and king in a way that benefited Akhenaten, quoting the statement of Egyptologist John Baines that "Amarna religion was a religion of god and king, or even of king first and then god."

The "Hymn to the Aten" was set to music by Philip Glass in his opera Akhnaten. In his book "Reflections on the Psalms", C.S. Lewis compared the Hymn to the Psalms of the Judaeo-Christian canon, as did Breasted (who broke them up into stanzas to resemble Western poems). Miriam Lichtheim commented about an alleged resemblance with Psalm 104 saying that "The resemblances are, however, more likely to be the result of the generic similarity between Egyptian hymns and biblical psalms. A specific literary interdependence is not probable."