Perhaps more striking evidence of deities integrated into Aten-worship were the god Shu and the goddess Tefnut, with whom the king and queen were identified. Shu, god of the air, and Tefnut, goddess of moisture, were twins, the original divine pair of creation. They formed the space between sky and earth. Shu and Tefnut were also believed to welcome the newly risen sun. Although not exactly personified abstractions like Ma'at or Hapi, Shu and Tefnut are in some ways not strongly differentiated from Re': one of Tefnut's forms, for instance, is as the eye of Re'. At any rate, the intermediary quality of Shu and Tefnut, between earth and heaven, and their role as worshippers of the rising sun, made them perfect divine figures for Akhenaten and Nefertiti to identify with. With the Aten,
Akhenatcn-Shu and Nefertiti-Tefnut perhaps act as a replacement for the traditional family triads of gods who were worshipped in Egyptian temples. In the tomb of Ipy (number 10) at Amarna, Akhenaten and Nefertiti are shown offering to the Aten small boxes containing scented oils. These boxes are shaped like the earlier form of the Aten's cult name (see Figure 2. la) and adorned with statuettes of Shu and Tefnut; they take up the middle of the composition, reflecting the way both the gods and the royal couple occupy the medial space between heaven and earth. Shu, of course, was honoured in the formal name of the Aten. It may be that the Akhenaten-Shu and Nefertiti-Tefnut analogy became less symbolically important after year 9, c. 1343 bce, when the titles of the Aten were altered to exclude the name of Shu. Re' and Aten, the 'father' of the king, are the only divine entities now mentioned (see Figure 2.1b). But two points remain. The first is that Akhenaten's 'monotheism' could accept gods other than Aten - as long as they fitted in with royal ideas about self-representation. The second is that identifying themselves with Shu and Tefnut enabled Akhenaten and Nefertiti to centre worship of the Aten upon themselves as the earthly embodiments of the sky- god's children.
This focus on the king as divine intermediary and sole interpreter of the god's words receives its fullest expression in the so-callcd 'hymns' to the Aten, metrical poems known from different versions, of varying length, in the tombs of Akhenaten's courtiers at Amarna. A god who has no human or animal form needs an interpreter to make himself known. Akhenaten becomes that interpreter in the 'hymns', which rcplace the formal speeches traditionally exchanged between gods and kings and recorded on temple walls.
Before looking at the 'hymns', I want to mention another problem with terminology. To describe the royal eulogies to the Aten as 'hymns' immediately superimposes fields of meaning which confuse understanding of the texts and their purpose. 'Hymns' seems an unsuitable word, because it suggests a congregation of ordinary people singing 'All Things Bright and Beautiful' or 'Salve Regina'. Nothing whatever is known about how (if at all) these poetic compositions were performed: communal singing is improbable, as the 'hymn' is said to be an adoration (dw3) of the Aten spoken in Akhenaten's words. Describing these compositions as 'hymns' was popularised by the American Egyptologist James Henry Breasted, who believed them to be 'a gospel of the beauty and beneficence of the natural order, a recognition of the message of nature to the soul of man'.4" Akhenaten's formal poems are not ecstatic celebrations of nature, and Akhenaten is not the Egyptian Wordsworth: the 'hymns' ultimately honour the Aten and royal couple in a rigid and formulaic way. I prefer to think of the 'hymns' to the Aten as eulogies, formal and rhetorical statements of praise, rather than outpourings of emotion, although for the sake of familiarity I continue (reluctantly) to use 'hymn'.
Much has been made of the supposed similarities between the 'hymns' and Psalm 104:16-23. Both describe the natural world waking and sleeping under god's beneficcnt eye. Akhenaten says to the Aten:
The land grows bright when you are risen from the horizon . . . All flocks are content with their pasturage, Trees and grasses flourish,
Birds fly from their nests, their wings adoring your ka, All small cattle prance on their legs,
All that fly up and alight, they live when you rise for them.1'1
The 'hymn's' nature segments are often quoted in vacuo, distorting the strength of its political statements. The 'hymn' is addressed to the Aten and the royal couple as almost equal entities, and its climax comes only with the barrage of royal titles at the end. This emphasises their intimate relationship with the Aten and the way he maintains their rule, on earth. Although everyone can sec the Aten and receive its benefits, only Akhenaten knows its secrets. Even the Aten's performance of creation itself is ultimately for Akhenaten's benefit:
You are in my heart and there is none who knows you but your son alone (titles ofAkhenaten),
For you make him aware of your plans and your strength . . .
You rise up and make [all creation] grow for the King, and everyone who
hurries about on foot since you founded the land. You raise them up for your son who issued from your body, who lives on Ma'at (titles of Akhenaten and Nefertiti).
The shorter versions of the 'hymn' illustrate the same phenomenon. It's interesting to note their physical setting in the tombs of the courtiers at Amarna. They are inscribed in the same parts of the tomb that would be inscribed with a eulogy to the sun in the Theban necropolis. Yet the Theban compositions are not about the king in the same way as the Amarna 'hymns'. The 'hymn' preserved in the tomb of Ay at Amarna starts off,
Adoration of Aten (titles of Aten in form b), given life continually, by the king who lives on Ma'at, the Lord of the Dual Kingdom (titles of Akhenaten): 'You appear beautifully, O living Aten, Lord of Eternity, dazzling, beautiful, mighty
and continues:
'O living Aten, who is born in the sky daily, so that without ceasing he might give birth to his august son, just like himself - the son of Re' who exalts his beauty (titles of Akhenaten).,5"
Everything is focused on the king, who acts as the upholder of Ma'at, a thoroughly conventional component of pharaohs' political role. In this sense the 'hymns' sum up what was truly different from before and where Akhenaten's real innovation lay. They are a traditional type of text, even carved in the usual place in the tomb, but completely rc-cmphasised to intensify the traditional supports of royal power. They show how 'Amarna religion was a religion of god and king, or even of king first and then god'.1,1
Akhenaten, then, certainly redefined the relationship of king and god to his own advantage. Whether this was an innovation of his own has been much debated. Current orthodoxy, which owes much to the work of Jan Assmann, tends to regard Akhenaten as having refined and extended ideas that had been around in Egypt for some time. Jan Assmann believes that Akhenaten's religion was one component of what he calls the 'crisis of polytheism'. '2 Some aspects of this can be traced back as far as the Twelfth Dynasty, c. 1938-1759 bce, which was also the first time that the Aten was mentioned as a divinity. The 'crisis' developed during the reign of Amunhotep III, who started to express theologically the ruling dynasty's wealth and power, and found its most extreme form under Akhenaten. One important issue in the 'crisis of polytheism' was the unknowableness of the god, something that obviously attracted Akhenaten. During his reign Akhenaten can be said have to developed his own version of other trends in the presentation of kingship that can be traced back to his father. When Amunhotep III sailed in his barge Aten dazzles, he was analogising his own journey with the sun-god's progression across the sky and through the underworld. Akhenaten took this one step further in his chariot rides through Akhet- aten. The prominence of Akhenaten's mother Tiye prefigured that of Nefertiti, especially in Tiye's relationship to solar cults at the Nubian temples Tiye, like Nefertiti, may have been identified with the goddess Tcfnut.