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, pharaohs and slaves, people and animals.

According to the Egyptians, Ra never born, has always existed. He stood over other gods, being something of a type 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 veneration 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. Unless the fact that the new priests were completely under the control of Amenhotep, who adopted the new name Akhenaten, which means "acceptable to God Aton."

But the idea of monotheism, which found response in the minds of the mental elite (a part of unaffiliated priests, intellectuals and associates of Akhenaten), found no support among the broad uneducated sections of the population of the Ancient Egyptian kingdom. The cult of Aton did not become mass. The inertia of the millennial religious worldview turned out to be stronger than the intellectual delights of the Egyptian elite. According to many historians, Akhenaten was killed as a result of the conspiracy, and everything returned to normal. God Ra remained on the list of the most revered Egyptian deities.

The religious center of the solar deity was Heliopolis, 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 the Greek Heliopolis.

The cult of Ra existed for a very long time. The beginning 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, admitted a kind of "symbiosis" of their god with less significant deities of different territories of Egypt. So, 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 of Macedon entered Egypt without a fight, the decline of the 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 a letter on which hymns to the gods had previously written. But the system of Egyptian hieroglyphic writing by that time was three and a half thousand years old!

And only at the beginning of the nineteenth century, thanks to the efforts of the brilliant linguist François Champollion, Egyptian history was discovered for modern mankind, which was previously known only from tacit comments of Egypt's neighbors - Greeks, Romans, Persians and Arabs.