Amen-Re’s influence spread through all Egypt, and for 600 years he had no rival atop the pantheon. He called his new capital Itj-tawy, ‘Seizer of the Two-Lands’, and likely here he fused together Amen and Re into a single, powerful deity: Amen-Re, who was called ‘the king of the gods’. In a unifying gesture, Amenemhet moved the capital north, back to the Memphis area where Upper and Lower Egypt meet, with his devotion to Amen intact. He was the first to incorporate Amen into his name. By around 1950 BCE, Amenemhet – meaning ‘Amen is foremost’ – founded another dynasty, the 12th. It was left to an 11th-dynasty ruler, the Theban Mentuhotep II to unify the land through war around 2000 BCE. Rival pharaohs ruled Egypt, resulting in parallel kingships based in Memphis in the north and Thebes in the south. Northern and southern Egypt were embroiled in civil war between c21 BCE. Around 2000 BCE, then, there were two dominant deities in Egypt: Re, who reigned in the north, and Amen, who ruled the south. Amen’s principal cult centre was Karnak Temple in Thebes. As his name suggests in ancient Egyptian, Amen is the ‘hidden one’ and is often depicted in human form with blue skin, representing the blue sky or atmosphere. Meanwhile, in the southern town of Thebes (modern Luxor), the god Amen emerged as the most powerful religious force. Re’s son was Horus the sky-god, represented as a falcon, and the Pharaohs were the incarnation of Horus.
By his agency, Re created other gods, over which he was chief, as well as humans. The pyramids and obelisks still familiar today owe their shape and symbolic significance to this ancient solar image. His cult centre was in a suburb of present-day Cairo, still known by the ancient Greek name Heliopolis, ‘City of the Sun’, and his principal icon was a pyramid-shaped stone called the benben. In the north, the most powerful god in the Egyptian pantheon was Re, the sun god.
This geographical and political dualism had its counterpart in religion. In the 4th millennium BCE, there were two distinct cultures in Egypt: one in the Delta (north) region, the other in the south. Where did it come from? And why didn’t the world’s first monotheism last? The other burst on to the scene around 1350 BCE, flourished for a moment, and was then eclipsed when its founder died in 1336 BCE. One is associated with Moses, the Bible and ancient Israel’s faith, which is the foundation of Judaism and Christianity. More than 3,000 years ago, ancient Egypt, with its myriad gods and goddesses, saw the founding of two monotheistic religions within a century of each other.
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