Jan Assmann

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Jan Assmann spent decades working through one of the most charged questions in the study of religion: whether the birth of monotheism was not a triumph of spiritual insight but an act of violence against an older, more tolerant way of knowing the divine. Born on the 7th of July 1938, he trained as an Egyptologist and classical archaeologist at some of Europe's foremost universities, including LMU Munich, Heidelberg, the University of Paris, and the University of Göttingen. From those foundations he built a career that reached far beyond the study of hieroglyphs and burial rites. By the time he retired from Heidelberg University in 2003, Assmann had reshaped how scholars think about memory, religion, and the origins of Western faith. He died on the 19th of February 2024, at the age of 85, leaving behind a body of work that still provokes argument in theology faculties and history seminars around the world.

• 2. From Cairo to Heidelberg

  ›

  In 1966, Assmann arrived in Cairo as a fellow of the German Archaeological Institute, beginning a five-year immersion in Egyptian antiquity that would shape everything he wrote afterward. From 1967 to 1971 he continued there as an independent scholar, working directly with the material culture of one of history's oldest civilizations before returning to Germany to complete his habilitation in 1971. The habilitation is the senior academic qualification in the German university system, a second major research work required for a full professorship. He was appointed professor of Egyptology at Heidelberg University in 1976, where he taught for more than a quarter century. After retirement in 2003, Heidelberg was not the end: the University of Konstanz named him Honorary Professor of Cultural Studies, a title that signaled how broadly his influence had spread beyond the specialized field where he started.

• 3. The Architecture of Memory

  ›

  In the 1990s, Assmann and his wife Aleida Assmann built a theoretical framework that drew wide international attention: a distinction between cultural memory and communicative memory. Cultural memory, in their account, refers to the long-term storage of a group's shared past through ritual, text, and monument. Communicative memory is the shorter-horizon, everyday memory passed between people in living conversation. The German original of his foundational book on the subject, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, appeared in Munich in 1992; Cambridge University Press published the English translation, Cultural Memory and Early Civilization, in 2011. The framework proved useful across disciplines, from literary studies to political theory to the social sciences, which explains why the pair were jointly awarded the Balzan Prize for Collective Memory in 2017 and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in 2018. In 2020 they received the Pour le Mérite for Sciences and Arts together.

• 4. Cosmotheism and the Mosaic Cut

  ›

  Assmann's most contested argument centred on what he called the Mosaic Distinction: the idea that monotheism introduced a sharp division between true and false religion that earlier polytheistic cultures, which he grouped under the label cosmotheism, did not recognize. Cosmotheism, in his reading, was a system in which different peoples' gods could be equated with one another across cultures. Monotheism, first visible in the Atenism of ancient Egypt and then in the Exodus of the Israelites, broke that equivalence and introduced a new kind of religious intolerance. He laid out this argument in Die Mosaische Unterscheidung, published in Munich in 2003 and translated by Robert Savage as The Price of Monotheism. The book attracted serious criticism. Assmann subsequently acknowledged that he no longer held the theory in its original form, specifically pulling back on its Mosaic aspect. His book Moses the Egyptian, published by Harvard University Press in 1997, had already traced how the memory of Egypt haunted the formation of Western monotheism, reading Moses himself as a figure through whom Egyptian religious ideas re-entered the tradition that claimed to reject them.

• 5. Egypt and Judaism

  ›

  Assmann pressed beyond Egyptology's usual boundaries by arguing that ancient Egyptian religion exercised a deeper influence on Judaism than mainstream scholarship had recognized. To describe the mechanism, he developed the concept of normative inversion: the idea that certain Jewish practices and theological positions were formulated as deliberate reversals of Egyptian ones. He traced this principle partly to Manetho, the Egyptian priest and historian of the third century BCE, and noted its reappearance in the writings of the medieval philosopher Maimonides, specifically in Maimonides' references to the Sabians. The Egyptian solar religion of the New Kingdom was another persistent focus. His 1983 German study Re und Amun examined the crisis of the polytheistic worldview in ancient Egypt across the 18th through 20th dynasties; Anthony Alcock translated it into English as Egyptian Solar Religion in the New Kingdom, published in 1995. His 2001 English translation of The Search for God in Ancient Egypt, rendered by David Lorton, extended the same inquiry into Egyptian piety more broadly. In 2014 the American University in Cairo Press issued From Akhenaten to Moses, directly tracing the arc from the Egyptian pharaoh who imposed a short-lived solar monotheism to the biblical figure who, in Assmann's reading, carried Egyptian religious memory into a new tradition.

• 6. Honours and Recognition

  ›

  The scale of Assmann's recognition across disciplines is striking. The Max Planck Award for Research came in 1996, followed in 1998 by the German Historians' Prize and an honorary doctorate in theology from the theology faculty at Munster. Yale University awarded him an honorary doctorate in social sciences in 2004, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem followed with an honorary doctorate in 2005. The Alfried Krupp Prize for Scholarship came in 2006; the Großer Literaturpreis der Bayerischen Akademie der Schönen Künste in 2011. The Sigmund Freud Prize arrived in 2016, and in 2022 he received the Knight Commander's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. The breadth of those awarding bodies, from theology faculties in Germany to Yale's social science division to a literary prize from a Bavarian arts academy, maps the unusual range of readers his work had reached. His engagement with Freud extended into his scholarship as well: an essay titled 'Freud, Selliti, and the Murder of Moses' appeared in a 2018 volume on Freud and monotheism, examining the violent origins of monotheism as Freud had theorized them alongside Assmann's own framework.