has a local legend and a limited popular worship. These are the facts
that clog the wings of Egyptian monotheistic speculation and bring it
to the earth again. Pure monotheism accordingly, the belief in a god
beside whom no other god exists, it might be hard to find in Egypt at
all. The last extract given above comes nearest to it; but the last
line of that extract cannot be called monotheistic.

An attempted religious reformation at the end of the eighteenth
dynasty may be mentioned here, as it appears to have aimed at
concentrating all the worship of Egypt on a single object. The object
chosen, however, was a material one,--the sun's disk, Aten,--and
though all Egyptian gods tended to become sun-gods, some sun-gods, no
doubt, were better than others, and Aten was not the finest of them.
King Chut-en-Aten, or Glory of the Sun-disk, the royal fanatic who
made this attempt at unity, went great lengths to accomplish his
object, but the attempt was a failure, and was abandoned after his
death even by the members of his own family. What Chut-en-Aten tried
to introduce perhaps came nearer true monotheism than anything that
ever existed in Egypt. He made war on other gods and wished to
establish one only god in the land, but this exclusiveness the
Egyptians could not understand. The Egyptian believed in many gods,
and while worshipping one god with fervour, by no means denied the
existence or the power of others in other places. Even foreign
deities were in his eyes real and potent beings, each in his own
territory. It is henotheism, not monotheism, that we see in this most
religious land; the worship of one god at a time while other gods are
also believed to exist and act. The one god who is before the mind of
the worshipper is exalted above the rest, and spoken of as if no
other god required to be considered; but the worshipper does not
dream as yet of questioning the existence of other gods, or feel
himself debarred from worshipping them if he should visit their
country.

Syncretism.--The hymns contain several other speculative positions
about the gods (chapter iv.), and we may briefly mention these.
Syncretism, as we saw, is very largely represented in Egyptian
thought, and enters, indeed, into its very bone and marrow. In the
ennead of a city the great gods may be arranged together after the
fashion of a court where one or two rule over the rest; but in
numberless passages we find the relations of gods adjusted in anot