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THE GREAT ATEN

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Bianca
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« Reply #30 on: February 26, 2008, 10:20:06 am »










                                      The History of Monotheism in Antiquity





We in the western world today tend to associate monotheism with our own traditions, as if it
were originally the invention of our European ancestors.

It wasn't.

Ancient Semitic cultures rooted in the Near East and its environs not only explored monotheistic
thinking earlier and more fully but also today embrace the strictest form of monotheism to date,
Islam. Historical data are clear that the conception of a universe created and guided by one
deity alone is the product of Eastern ideologies exported to, not from, the West.

It's like pants, something we in the West rarely think about as essentially foreign, even though
they are.

Indeed, a mere glance at costume history shows that very few people in early Western Civili-
zation—Greeks, Romans, Franks—regularly wore tight-fitting garments, especially below the
waist.

In fact, it wasn't until well after antiquity, when trade and war had opened the way for cultural
exchange between East and West, that large numbers of men who lived in Europe began wear-
ing pants and other clothing styles suited to horseback riding. So, if not for contact with the
East, we might all still be wearing tunics and worshiping a pantheon of gods.

Many today also assume that the earliest historical evidence for monotheism is to be found among
ancient Hebrew scriptures, the accounts of a people who lived in the Near East during the second
and first millennia BCE.

It isn't.

Not only did the Hebrews develop their monotheistic tenets slowly and over the course of several
centuries—as we'll see in the next section of the class—but long before the Hebrews even existed
as a coherent social group, the ancient Egyptians experimented with a form of single-deity worship.

 The guiding force behind this brief pause in polytheism was a mysterious pharaoh who gave him-
self the name Akhenaten.

Whether or not his theological experiment influenced or in any way stimulated the religion outlined
in the Old Testament is not clear.

What is certain is that the ancient Hebrews were not the only, nor the first, people on record to
adopt the notion of a single, cosmic entity overseeing everything.
« Last Edit: February 26, 2008, 11:06:56 am by Bianca » Report Spam   Logged

Your mind understands what you have been taught; your heart what is true.
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