Read Online A God Against the Gods by Allen Drury - Free Book Online

his gleaming golden statue in its sacred barque, lighted by a single ray of his father Sun, falling through a cleverly angled hole in the ceiling in such a way that his eyes are sunken, brooding, distant, terrifying in their somber depths. He is a god worshiped in fear by the people. He is supreme. And he is very cold.
    The Aten is the disk of the Sun, its open, natural essence, its golden rays, its light, its joy. The Aten is everywhere, beaming down upon the Two Lands and all the people. The Aten is open, candid, lovable, the giver and benefactor of all things, which all men may see whenever they wish to look upward. Amon hides: the Aten gleams. And slowly, slowly, ever so carefully, my House has begun in recent years a patient and cautious shifting of emphasis to the Aten, as counterweight to Amon, who needs control but is too strong to be openly challenged, even by us who are the Sons of the Sun in all his manifestations.
    Rekh-mi-re, Vizier of my great-grandfather Tuthmose III (life, health, prosperity!), wrote of my great-grandfather that he “saw his person in his true form—Ra, the Lord of Heaven, the King of Upper and Lower Kemet when he rises, the Aten when he reveals himself. ”My great-grandfather, like earlier kings of our dynasty, was officially said to have “rejoined the Aten” when he died; before that event he had constructed a temple to the Aten at Heliopolis in the Delta, seat of the cult of Ra-Herakhty, the Sun-God. Under my grandfather, Amonhotep II (life, health, prosperity!), the disk of the Aten became prominently displayed. At his command it carried a pair of enveloping arms to protect the ka ,or essence of being, of the land of Kemet, the royal House, and the people. In the reign of my father, Tuthmose IV (life, health, prosperity!), the Aten became officially the god of battles who makes Pharaoh supreme and gives him power over all his dominions—a great universal god whose exalted position in the sky entitles him to rule over the empire of all that his rays shine upon.
    Thus slowly but surely the Aten became recognized as a deity separate from Amon. I in my turn have continued the process. I built the modest temple which so incenses Aanen and his fellows. I named Tiye’s barge. I built my palace on the west bank of the Nile near the necropolis, becoming thereby the only Pharaoh ever to defy and prove empty the warnings of Amon and the cult of Osiris, god of the dead, that the west bank must be reserved only to the dead. I have started a new complex of buildings at Medinet Habu, near Malkata, among them another shrine to the Aten. From time to time I make public display of my worship of him; and contemplate, in due course, some further things upon which Tiye and I agree.
    In the same spirit and with the same motivation, I have more recently moved against Amon on another front. You note I say “moved against” as though it were a military campaign. So it is, for me, and to it Tiye and I give the thought and care that we no longer have to give to foreign battles, for they have all been won.… It will be a while before the battle against Amon is won.
    Three months ago, acting on a decision reached some time before but known only to Tiye and to Aye, I announced the appointment of my son, the Crown Prince Tuthmose, to be High Priest of the god Ptah at Memphis, the capital of Lower Kemet. The boy is now six years old, a fine, sturdy child, always laughing and happy like his sister Sitamon. He is very bright, very perceptive: already he understands something of the burden that will someday be his when I have rejoined the Aten and he in his turn has become Son of the Sun, God, King and Pharaoh. So he listened willingly and eagerly when his mother and I explained to him that we wished him to fill this post for us, highest religious office in the oldest, and in some ways still the most powerful, of the Two Lands.
    Millennia ago, before the kingdom was united by my unutterably remote ancestor, Menes