Re
Re West AsiaHeliopolis was the cult centre for Re, or Ra, the sun god. Such was his authority that he appears in the myths of many cults and even in his dotage the Egyptians thought of him as retaining immense power. In the third millennium BC the Pharaoh Chephren first styled himself ‘son of Re’, but it was the reforming zeal of Amenophis IV (1387–1366 BC) that raised the worship of the sun god to unprecedented heights. As Akhenaton, ‘the devotee of Aton’, this unusual pharaoh sought to concentrate devotion on the purely material character of the sun god as a solar disc, Aton. He rejected the deities invoked by previous rulers and persecuted the priests of Amun, the ram-headed god of Thebes, whose influence in religious affairs had been unchallenged since the expulsion of the Hyksos. He decided to build a new residence for Re and himself: this city, called Akhetaton, ‘the horizon of Aton’, was situated about half-way between Thebes and Memphis....
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