Amun

In 1910 René Basset suggested that the cult of Amun first developed in ancient Libya before spreading to ancient Egypt. But this is just an unproven hypothesis since Amun was "[f]irst attested in the tomb of Pharaoh Unas" ( 2350 BCE) in Egypt, and not in Libya. Amun and Amaunet are mentioned in the Old Egyptian Pyramid Texts. The name Amun (written ) meant something like "the hidden one" or "invisible", which is also attested by epithets found in the Pyramid Texts "O You, the great god whose name is unknown". Amun rose to the position of tutelary deity of Thebes after the end of the First Intermediate Period, under the 11th Dynasty. As the patron of Thebes, his spouse was Mut. In Thebes, Amun as father, Mut as mother, and the Moon god Khonsu as their son formed the divine family or the "Theban Triad". ==Temple at Karnak==

The history of Amun as the patron god of Thebes begins in the 20th century BC, with the construction of the Precinct of Amun-Ra at Karnak under Senusret I. The city of Thebes does not appear to have been of great significance before the 11th Dynasty. Major construction work in the Precinct of Amun-Ra took place during the 18th Dynasty when Thebes became the capital of the unified ancient Egypt. Construction of the Hypostyle Hall may have also begun during the 18th Dynasty, though most building was undertaken under Seti I and Ramesses II. Merenptah commemorated his victories over the Sea Peoples on the walls of the Cachette Court, the start of the processional route to the Luxor Temple. This Great Inscription (which has now lost about a third of its content) shows the king's campaigns and eventual return with items of potential value and prisoners. Next to this inscription is the Victory Stela, which is largely a copy of the more famous Merneptah Stele found in the funerary complex of Merenptah on the west bank of the Nile in Thebes. Merenptah's son Seti II added two small obelisks in front of the Second Pylon, and a triple bark-shrine to the north of the processional avenue in the same area. This was constructed of sandstone, with a chapel to Amun flanked by those of Mut and Khonsu. The last major change to the Precinct of Amun-Ra's layout was the addition of the first pylon and the massive enclosure walls that surrounded the whole Precinct, both constructed by Nectanebo I. ==New Kingdom==

Identification with Min and Ra in the temple and Chapel at Abydos When the army of the founder of the Eighteenth Dynasty expelled the Hyksos rulers from Egypt, the victor's city of origin, Thebes, became the most important city in Egypt, the capital of a new dynasty. The local patron deity of Thebes, Amun, therefore became nationally important. The pharaohs of that new dynasty attributed all of their successes to Amun, and they lavished much of their wealth and captured spoil on the construction of temples dedicated to Amun. The victory against the "foreign rulers" achieved by pharaohs who worshipped Amun caused him to be seen as a champion of the less fortunate, upholding the rights of justice for the poor. : "The three gods are one yet the Egyptian elsewhere insists on the separate identity of each of the three." This unity in plurality is expressed in one text: Henri Frankfort suggested that Amun was originally a wind god and speculating pointed out that the implicit connection between the winds and mysteriousness was paralleled in a passage from the Gospel of John: : "The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear the sound of it, but do not know where it comes from and where it is going." A Leiden hymn to Amun describes how he calms stormy seas for the troubled sailor: ==Third Intermediate Period==

amulet from the Walters Art Museum depicts Amun fused with the solar deity, Re, thereby making the supreme solar deity Amun-Re. Theban High Priests of Amun While not regarded as a dynasty, the High Priests of Amun at Thebes were nevertheless of such power and influence that they were effectively the rulers of Egypt from 1080 to 943 BC. By the time Herihor was proclaimed as the first ruling High Priest of Amun in 1080 BC—in the 19th Year of Ramesses XI—the Amun priesthood exercised an effective hold on Egypt's economy. The Amun priests owned two-thirds of all the temple lands in Egypt and 90 percent of her ships and many other resources. Consequently, the Amun priests were as powerful as the pharaoh, if not more so. One of the sons of the High Priest Pinedjem would eventually assume the throne and rule Egypt for almost half a century as pharaoh Psusennes I, while the Theban High Priest Psusennes III would take the throne as king Psusennes II—the final ruler of the 21st Dynasty. Decline In the 10th century BC, the overwhelming dominance of Amun over all of Egypt gradually began to decline. In Thebes, however, his worship continued unabated, especially under the Nubian Twenty-fifth Dynasty of Egypt, as Amun was by now seen as a national god in Nubia. The Temple of Amun, Jebel Barkal, founded during the New Kingdom, came to be the center of the religious ideology of the Kingdom of Kush. The Victory Stele of Piye at Gebel Barkal (8th century BC) now distinguishes between an "Amun of Napata" and an "Amun of Thebes". Tantamani (died 653 BC), the last pharaoh of the Nubian dynasty, still bore a theophoric name referring to Amun in the Nubian form Amani. ==Iron Age and classical antiquity==

Nubia and Sudan Areas outside Egypt continued to worship him into classical antiquity. In Nubia, where his name was pronounced Amane or Amani (written in meroitic hieroglyphs as "𐦀𐦉𐦊𐦂" and in cursive as "𐦠𐦨𐦩𐦢"), he remained a national deity, with his priests, at Meroe and Nobatia, regulating the whole government of the country via an oracle, choosing the ruler, and directing military expeditions. According to Diodorus Siculus, these religious leaders were even able to compel kings to commit suicide, although this tradition stopped when Arkamane, in the 3rd century BC, slew them. In Sudan, excavation of an Amun temple at Dangeil began in 2000 under the directorship of Drs Salah Mohamed Ahmed and Julie R. Anderson of the National Corporation for Antiquities and Museums (NCAM), Sudan and the British Museum, UK, respectively. The temple was found to have been destroyed by fire, and accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) and C14 dating of the charred roof beams have placed the construction of the most recent incarnation of the temple in the 1st century AD. This date is further confirmed by the associated ceramics and inscriptions. Following its destruction, the temple gradually decayed and collapsed. One of the most famous temples dedicated to Amun in Nubia is at Jebel Barkal, located near the bank of the Nile just above the 4th cataract. Built out of and around a large sandstone mound, an early iteration of the temple was made of mudbrick by Thutmose III. During the reign of Akhenaten, talatat blocks were used to create the first part of the enduring monumental structure consisting of the outer court, pylon, and inner shrine. The pinnacle of the temple is a large, solid piece of rock protruding from the sandstone mound, and is commonly thought to symbolize either a Uraeus or the White Crown of Upper Egypt. The site became known as a primal source of divine kingship, and association with the cult of Amun centered at Jebel Barkal helped to legitimize the ruler of Upper Egypt. The worship of Ammon was introduced into Greece at an early period, probably through the medium of the Greek colony in Cyrene, which must have formed a connection with the great oracle of Ammon in the Oasis soon after its establishment. Iarbas, a mythological king of Libya, was also considered a son of Hammon. According to the 6th century AD author Corippus, a Libyan people known as the Laguatan carried an effigy of their god Gurzil, whom they believed to be the son of Ammon, into battle against the Byzantine Empire in the 540s AD. Levant Amun is mentioned in the Hebrew Bible as אמון מנא Amon of No in Jeremiah 46:25 (also translated the horde of No and the horde of Alexandria), and Thebes possibly is called No-Amon in Nahum 3:8 (also translated populous Alexandria). These texts were presumably written in the 7th century BC. Greece Amun, worshipped by the Greeks as Ammon of Heliopolis, (meaning "city of the sun god") had a temple and a statue, the gift of Pindar (d. 443 BC), at Thebes, and another at Sparta, the inhabitants of which, as Pausanias says, consulted the oracle of Ammon in Libya from early times more than the other Greeks. At Aphytis, Chalcidice, Amun was worshipped, from the time of Lysander (d. 395 BC), as zealously as in Ammonium. Pindar the poet honored the god with a hymn. At Megalopolis the god was represented with the head of a ram (Paus. viii.32 § 1), and the Greeks of Cyrenaica dedicated at Delphi a chariot with a statue of Ammon. When Alexander the Great occupied Egypt in late 332 BC, he was regarded as a liberator, thus conquering Egypt without a fight. He was pronounced son of Amun by the oracle at Siwa. Amun was identified as a form of Zeus and Alexander often referred to Zeus-Ammon as his true father, and after his death, currency depicted him adorned with the Horns of Ammon as a symbol of his divinity. The tradition of depicting Alexander the Great with the horns of Amun continued for centuries, with Alexander being referred to in the Quran as "Dhu al-Qarnayn" (The Two-Horned One), a reference to his depiction on Middle Eastern coins and statuary as having horns of Ammon. Several words derive from Amun via the Greek form, Ammon, such as ammonia and ammonite. The Romans called the ammonium chloride they collected from deposits near the Temple of Jupiter-Amun in ancient Libya sal ammoniacus (salt of Amun) because of proximity to the nearby temple. Ammonia, as well as being the chemical, is a genus name in the foraminifera. Both these foraminiferans (shelled Protozoa) and ammonites (extinct shelled cephalopods) bear spiral shells resembling a ram's, and Ammon's, horns. The regions of the hippocampus in the brain are called the cornu ammonis – literally "Amun's Horns", due to the horned appearance of the dark and light bands of cellular layers. A Greek interpretation for why Amun is sometimes depicted with the head of a ram comes from Herodotus. He recounts a myth where Amun, urged by his son Khonsu to reveal his true form, concealed himself behind a ram's fleece while manifesting. This clever disguise allowed Amun to partially fulfill his son's request without fully exposing his true nature. ==See also==