Amun

Amun's rise is one of the clearest cases in Egyptian religion of politics and theology moving together. Originally a local god of Thebes whose name means the hidden one, he was carried to national pre-eminence when Theban dynasties reunified Egypt at the start of the Middle Kingdom and again at the start of the New Kingdom, and his priesthood at Karnak grew into one of the wealthiest and most powerful institutions of the ancient world, controlling vast estates and, at times, effectively the state itself. Fused with the sun-god as Amun-Ra, he combined the hidden creative power with the visible sun, becoming the supreme creator behind all things while remaining, by his very name, concealed.

Amun's central festival, the Opet, saw his cult image carried in a sacred barque each year in procession from Karnak to the nearby Luxor temple, travelling part of the way on the Nile itself, a rite that renewed the reigning pharaoh's divine authority by uniting his ka with Amun's own creative power; reliefs of the procession still cover the walls of Luxor temple's colonnade. The Karnak precinct grew, over more than a thousand years of pharaonic patronage, into the largest religious complex ever built in the ancient world, its Great Hypostyle Hall alone raised on 134 massive columns under Seti I and Ramesses II, and the avenue of ram-headed sphinxes linking Karnak to Luxor still marks Amun's sacred animal at monumental scale.

Amun spoke through oracles: his cult image, carried in procession, was consulted on questions of state and justice, and his desert oracle at the Siwa oasis became famous across the Mediterranean, identified by the Greeks with Zeus as Zeus Ammon. When the pharaoh Akhenaten raised the sun-disc Aten above all gods in the fourteenth century BCE and had Amun's name chiselled from the monuments, it was Amun's power he was attacking; after Akhenaten's death the old god was restored and the reform undone. Centuries later Alexander the Great made the arduous journey to Siwa to be greeted by the oracle as a son of Amun, a recognition that helped legitimate his rule of Egypt. The Greek Zeus Ammon, a bearded Zeus with a ram's horns, spread the god's image far beyond Egypt.

Amun's priesthood produced one of ancient Egypt's more remarkable political offices, the God's Wife of Amun, a title held by royal women at Thebes who, especially during the Third Intermediate and Late Periods, wielded effective religious and political authority over Upper Egypt as Amun's consecrated earthly consort, adopting successors rather than marrying and controlling vast temple estates in their own right. The office shows how completely religious and secular power fused around Amun's cult at its height, a pattern separately echoed in the wealth and influence of the ordinary Amun priesthood at Karnak, which by the New Kingdom's end rivalled and at times eclipsed the authority of the pharaoh himself.