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Praising the Hidden One

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Praising the Hidden One

The Leiden Hymns to Amun are a set of hymns numbered by chapters on a papyrus of the Ramesside period, now in Leiden, praising the great god Amun of Thebes. They present a sophisticated theology of a supreme and hidden deity: Amun, whose name is connected with hiddenness, is celebrated as the one whose true nature is concealed even from the other gods, who created himself and all that is, and in whom, in some of the boldest passages, the other great gods Ra and Ptah are treated as aspects of a single divine being. This tendency toward exalting one god as the source and hidden unity behind the many has been much discussed by scholars as a movement within Egyptian religion toward a kind of theological unity. Composed for the worship of Amun at the height of his prominence in the New Kingdom, the hymns are among the most theologically ambitious texts of ancient Egypt, and they survive as a major source for Egyptian conceptions of the divine.

The identification of Amun, Ra and Ptah as aspects of one underlying divine reality, rather than three separate and competing gods, has drawn comparison from Egyptologists to later monotheistic and monist theological moves, though scholars caution against reading the hymns as a straightforward proto-monotheism, since the wider Egyptian pantheon continued to be worshipped without interruption. The papyrus on which the hymns survive was acquired for the Leiden collection in the nineteenth century and remains one of the principal sources for how New Kingdom theologians tried to reconcile the unity of the divine with the multiplicity of named gods.

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