Amun

• 1. The Hidden One

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  His name, written imn, meant something like "the hidden one" or "invisible." The Pyramid Texts call him "O You, the great god whose name is unknown." That paradox sits at the heart of Amun. He was a god the ancient Egyptians could pray to but never quite see, and yet his temples grew into the largest religious complexes in the country.

  Amun first appears in the tomb of Pharaoh Unas, around 2350 BCE, in Egypt. He started as one figure among many, possibly one of eight deities in the Hermopolite creation myth, paired with a wife named Amunet. From that modest beginning, something unusual happened. He climbed.

  How did a minor wind god from the Hermopolitan Ogdoad come to be called king of the gods? Why did pharaohs credit him with their victories, and why did priests of his cult one day rule Egypt outright? What made him a champion of the poor, a god the silent could call on, and how did his ram's horns end up on the head of Alexander the Great, in chemistry textbooks, and even in the human brain? Those threads run from the Nile to Greece, Rome, Nubia, and the Hebrew Bible.

• 2. The Climb To Thebes

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  Thebes does not appear to have been a place of great significance before the 11th Dynasty, around the 21st century BC. When that dynasty came to power, Amun rose with it, taking the position of patron deity of Thebes and replacing the war god Montu.

  After the First Intermediate Period, Amun settled into a family. His spouse in Thebes was the goddess Mut. Their son was the moon god Khonsu. Together, father, mother, and son formed the divine household known as the Theban Triad.

  A second leap came centuries later. After Thebes rebelled against the Hyksos rulers and Ahmose I took the throne in the 16th century BC, Amun acquired national importance. The victor's home city became the most important city in Egypt, and its local god became a national one. Pharaohs of the new dynasty attributed all their successes to him, and they poured their wealth and captured spoil into temples in his name. That wealth would later make his priesthood a power rivaling the throne itself.

• 3. Champion Of The Poor

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  "Amun who comes at the voice of the poor in distress, who gives breath to him who is wretched." These words come from votive stelae left by the artisans of Deir el-Medina. The conqueror's god had become something tenderer, a protector of the less fortunate who upheld the rights of justice for the poor.

  Because Amun was believed to aid those who traveled in his name, he was called the Protector of the road. He upheld Ma'at, meaning truth, justice, and goodness. Anyone who prayed to him first had to show they were worthy by confessing their sins.

  The stelae describe a god whose anger never lasted. "The Lord of Thebes spends not a whole day in anger; His wrath passes in a moment." The worshipper pleads, "May your ka be kind; may you forgive; It shall not happen again." He was the Lord of the silent, the one who came at the cry of the troubled, central to personal piety in a way few state gods ever were. That intimacy lived alongside a far grander identity, forged when Amun merged with the sun.

• 4. Ram, Sun, And Fertility

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  When Egypt conquered Kush, they identified the chief Kushite deity as Amun, and he was depicted as a woolly ram with curved horns. From that aged ram-god, Amun absorbed the ram, and his images sometimes carried small ram's horns known as the Horns of Ammon. A solar ram can be traced back to the pre-literate Kerma culture in Nubia, contemporary with Egypt's Old Kingdom.

  Rams were considered a symbol of virility, so Amun also became a fertility deity, absorbing the identity of the god Min to become Amun-Min. In this role he gained the epithet Kamutef, "Bull of his mother." On the walls of Karnak he appears ithyphallic, holding a flail, just as Min was shown.

  As his cult grew, Amun merged with the sun god Ra to become Amun-Ra. The Hymn to Amun-Ra calls him "Lord of truth, father of the gods, maker of men, creator of all animals, Lord of things that are, creator of the staff of life." In the New Kingdom, across the 16th to 11th centuries BC, he stood as the self-created creator deity above all others. The Leiden hymns go further still, binding him to two other gods in a single mystery.

• 5. Three Gods In One

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  "All gods are three: Amun, Re, and Ptah, whom none equals. He who hides his name as Amun, he appears to the face as Re, his body is Ptah." The Leiden hymns treat the three as a trinity, distinct gods yet a unity in plurality. As one description puts it, "The three gods are one yet the Egyptian elsewhere insists on the separate identity of each of the three."

  Henri Frankfort argued that Amun was originally a wind god. He pointed to the link between winds and mysteriousness, and he paralleled it with a line 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 shows that wind-god power as comfort. "The tempest moves aside for the sailor who remembers the name of Amon. The storm becomes a sweet breeze for he who invokes His name." The hymn promises that "Amon is more effective than millions," and that "the single man becomes stronger than a crowd." The god who calmed the seas also drove the largest building project at Thebes.

• 6. Stone At Karnak

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  The Precinct of Amun-Ra at Karnak rose under Senusret I, beginning in the 20th century BC. Major work followed in the 18th Dynasty, when Thebes became the capital of a unified Egypt. The Hypostyle Hall may have begun then, though most of its building fell to Seti I and Ramesses II.

  Merenptah turned the walls into a record of war. On the Cachette Court he commemorated his victories over the Sea Peoples, at the start of the processional route to the Luxor Temple. This Great Inscription, now missing about a third of its content, shows his campaigns and his return with prisoners and items of value. Beside it stands the Victory Stela, largely a copy of the more famous Merneptah Stele found in his funerary complex on the west bank of the Nile.

  Merenptah's son Seti II added two small obelisks before the Second Pylon and a triple bark-shrine of sandstone, with a chapel to Amun flanked by those of Mut and Khonsu. The last great change came from Nectanebo I, who added the first pylon and the massive enclosure walls around the whole Precinct. Long before that final wall went up, one pharaoh had tried to erase Amun entirely.

• 7. The Atenist Break

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  Akhenaten, also known as Amenhotep IV, advanced the worship of the Aten, a god whose power showed in the sun disk. He defaced the symbols of many old deities, moved his capital away from Thebes, and built his religion around the Aten alone. The priests of Amun suddenly found themselves stripped of their former power, and the change was very unpopular with them.

  The irony is that the old praises of Amun read strikingly like the later Hymn to the Aten. One stela addressed to Amun says, "When thou crossest the sky, all faces behold thee, but when thou departest, thou are hidden from their faces." It calls him "valiant herdsman, driving his cattle, their refuge and the making of their living," and "The sole Lord, who reaches the end of the lands every day."

  Atenism outlasted its founder only briefly. Smenkhkare kept it established during a reign of about two years. Then an enigmatic female pharaoh, Neferneferuaten, held the throne for a short and unclear period. After her death, Akhenaten's 9-year-old son Tutankhaten reversed it all, restored the old polytheistic religion, and renamed himself Tutankhamun. His sister-wife became Ankhesenamun. Under Horemheb, Akhenaten's name was struck from the records, the capital returned to Thebes, and it seemed the cult had never existed. The priests who returned would soon hold more power than any pharaoh had imagined.

• 8. Priests, Coins, And Chemistry

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  From 1080 to about 943 BC, the High Priests of Amun at Thebes were effectively the rulers of Egypt. The priesthood owned two-thirds of all temple lands in Egypt and 90 percent of her ships. Herihor became the first ruling High Priest in 1080 BC, in the 19th year of Ramesses XI. A son of the High Priest Pinedjem ruled almost half a century as Psusennes I, and the priest Psusennes III took the throne as Psusennes II, the last ruler of the 21st Dynasty.

  In Nubia, Amun became a national god, pronounced Amane or Amani. His priests at Meroe and Nobatia regulated the whole government through an oracle, chose the ruler, and directed military campaigns. According to Diodorus Siculus, they could even compel kings to commit suicide, a tradition that stopped when Arkamane slew them in the 3rd century BC. At Jebel Barkal, near the Nile's 4th cataract, the Egyptians believed the mountain housed a primeval form of Amun of Karnak, calling it the Thrones of the Two Lands.

  The god then crossed into the wider ancient world. He was worshipped by the Greeks as Ammon, with a temple and statue given by the poet Pindar at Thebes, and another at Sparta. When Alexander the Great occupied Egypt in late 332 BC, the oracle at Siwa pronounced him son of Amun. He called Zeus-Ammon his true father, and after his death currency showed him wearing the Horns of Ammon. The Quran later names him Dhu al-Qarnayn, the Two-Horned One, after those coins. From the same horns came words that survive today. Romans named the ammonium chloride from deposits near the Temple of Jupiter-Amun sal ammoniacus, salt of Amun, the root of ammonia. Spiral-shelled ammonites carry his name, and the curved regions of the brain's hippocampus are still called the cornu ammonis, literally Amun's Horns.