O only One, You who were in the sky when there was no land and no mountains.
You Shepherd Lord, One only, Maker of everything there is !
The striking passages (as they are called by W. Budge) which are cited below come from Egyptian texts and they consist just a sample of a collection of relevant passages effected by the German Egyptologist Heinrich Brugsch:
_God is one and alone, and none other existeth with Him.
_God is the One, the One who made all things.
_God is a spirit, a hidden spirit, the spirit of spirits, the great spirit of the Egyptians, the divine spirit.
_He begetteth, but was never begotten; He produceth, but was never produced;
_He begat himself and produced himself.
_He createth but was never created; He is the maker of his own form, and the
Fashioner of His own body.
Thοse divine attributes, which originally characterized the head-god of every company of gods, became the attributes of the unique Lord God of the monotheistic religions.
The German Egyptologist Jan Assmann writes as follows:
The Theban theology of these decades (18th dynasty, 1570-1293) can be interpreted as an attempt to fill the hyphenated formulation Amun-Re with theological content, that is, to develop a divine concept sufficiently comprehensive to include all the traditions concerning Amun and all those of Re as well. The pure Amun aspect of the city god and the pure Re aspect of the of the sun god are connected by the concept of the supreme being who had already emerged in the theological fragments of the Middle Kingdom (c. 2000-1800) in his aspects of primeval god, creator god, and god of life.
I call this process “additive,” for I have the impression that this new concept of a supreme being was arrived at primarily by accumulation and juxtaposition. All aspects of divine unity –preexistence, creator, sustainer- were combined and connected with one another by means of simple but well ordered juxtapositions of sequences of predicates of Amun and Re.
An indication that Amen-Ra was the first “One and Only God” is the fact that Jews, Christians and Muslims are concluding their prayers by invoking his name: “Amen”
Jewish theologians honored their Amen-Ra worshiping Egyptian tutors by having Christianity and Islam chant Amen’s name for ever and ever!!
Both the name of the god Amen (imn) in the hieroglyphic script as the word Amen (imn) in Hebrew have identical spelling.
In the Wikipedia, however, you will read that the Hebrew word starts with aleph, while the
Egyptian name begins with a yodh.
While it is true that the Egyptian name starts with yodh, in the Egyptian script yodh “at the beginning of words is sometimes identical with aleph” as we are informed by Alan Gardiner, the author of the famous “Egyptian
Grammar.”
Moreover, it is to be noted that if the term “Amen” was an Hebrew word especially used to conclude prayers, the meaning of the word should have been adopted by Christians and Muslims and not its sound, so that worshippers would know what the meaning was of the word they were pronouncing.
