One and Many, a Modern Scholarly Argument

The Leiden hymns to Amun, preserved on a Ramesside period papyrus now in the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden, acquired as part of the broader nineteenth century European collection of Egyptian antiquities, have become central evidence in a specific modern scholarly debate about the nature of New Kingdom Egyptian theology. The German Egyptologist Jan Assmann, among others, has argued from texts like these that later New Kingdom religious thought developed a genuine theological move toward treating the many gods as manifestations or aspects of one underlying divine reality, with Amun's hiddenness, described in this papyrus as extending even to the other gods' knowledge of him, read as evidence of a sophisticated one and many theology rather than simple polytheism, a reading debated among Egyptologists who differ over how far this language should be read as genuinely systematic theology versus devotional hyperbole conventional to hymns praising any high god as supreme within their own composition.

The hymns are organized by chapter divisions on the papyrus itself, a structural feature that has let scholars treat them as a deliberately assembled collection rather than as miscellaneous verses copied together by chance, strengthening the case that whoever compiled this papyrus intended a sustained theological statement about Amun's hidden, unknowable nature specifically, distinct from the hymn to Osiris recorded elsewhere in this atlas, whose concerns are narrative and funerary rather than centered on divine hiddenness as a theme in its own right.