Ra and the Sun Gods
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Ra takes many forms, but always around the circle. Look closer at this circle. One moment it looks like the sun, the next like a snake eating its own tail. If you try to pronounce this symbol, your voice would first be a hissing sound, like a rain of arrows in flight. Then it would grow faint and become a scuttling noise. And finally, it would be a name.

Khepri, the Scarab Perhaps you've caught sight of him before. An emerald shell, buzzing wing cases, a green flash in the seconds before dawn. It is the only chance to see him. Khepri brings the new day by rolling the sun from behind, like a scarab rolls a bowl of dung. He is not entirely beetle.

His body is that of an infant, and in those first few hours of day, as he guides the sun across the sky, he begins to age. His limbs lengthen. The fat of childhood gives way to muscle, to strength, and come midday, he has the body of a man. As for his scarab head, in the heat of the sun, it begins to shrivel, to desiccate and dry.

And then, the husk cracks all together. The symbols twist and reshape. Feathers, beady yellow eyes, as big, sharp as any blade. It is a falcon, the sun god's second name, Ra. It's the ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and welcome to the second episode of our mini-series about the Egyptian gods and goddesses.

Last time we explored the story of how the ancient Egyptians believed their gods were created, how it began with primordial water and, in one version, an egg. This time we're moving on to the Egyptian sun gods, particularly the highly revered god Ra or Ray. Both pronunciations of his name are accepted.

Now the crux of today's episode will be an interview with Dr. Campbell Price from Manchester Museum. Campbell, he is a fantastic Egyptologist and interviewee who's been on the podcast before to talk all about the Great Sphinx. But before that interview, we have a retelling of Ra's daily voyage with the sun.

how he sailed, yes that's right, sailed the sun across the sky in his boat, then navigated it through the underworld at night time, battling creatures along the way, and ultimately how he rolled the sun back into the living world like a scarab rolling a ball of dung. Safe to say, there's no story quite like it. As Ra, the god does not roll the sun as a scarab would. He sails with it, canvas billows, rope lines crack,

oars dance and turn above the clouds Ra is underway heading east far east he navigates his solar barge across the heavens with the sun as a crown atop his falcon head he also continues to age his skin begins to spot the strength of adulthood gives way to creaking joints to weakness and come late afternoon he has the body of an elder

As for his falcon head, in the heat of the sun, it begins to cinder, to scorch and sear, and then the feathers burn away altogether. The cymbals twist again. A snout, short bristled hair, two horns coiled into the hem of a crown. It is a ram, the sun god's third name, Aton. It is Aton who carries the dimming sun.

His solar barge runs aground beyond the western horizon, dusk. But it is not the end of the journey. How could it be? The sun cannot rise from the west next morning. It must rise from the east. Aton must bear it back. A second voyage. But this time, through the waters of the Duet. As there is a left, so there is a right. As there is a night, so there is a day.

And as there is a living word, so there is an underworld. The Duet It is a place of darkness, of reflections and echoes. It is the home of the dead. When Aton sets sails on his night barge, some of those dead crew it with him. Gods too. It is not merely because in this aged form the sun god needs help at the billowing canvas.

It is because this journey across the Duwet is perilous, chaotic. There are rip currents, wild beasts, and always this hissing sound, like a rain of arrows in flight. There is a change in the sun god too. As he grows old during the day, so he grows young during the night. Aton's snout gives way to Ra's feathers. Ra's feathers give way to Khepri's emerald shell.

It is as the scarred child that the danger is most severe. It is then that the hissing sound reaches crescendo. The waters of the duet ripple and froth, and a great serpent rises up. Apophis. Its scales have a pattern that follows neither rhyme nor reason. Its mouth is filled with hundreds of fangs, all splintered and spliced. Apophis is chaos incarnate.

Some say he is born of the severed umbilical cord of Ra. It takes great strength to master that chaos. It takes a god tough as a crocodile, hardy as a bull, and cunning as a desert fox. It takes Set, the sun god's great grandchild. He catches the serpent's lunge with his shield. With his spear, he drives it back below the waters of the Duet.

Set defends the night barge, long enough for it to reach safety beyond the eastern horizon. Only then can that hissing sound, like a rain of arrows in flight, grow faint. It becomes a scuttling noise, a scarab rolling a ball of dung.

Campbell, it is great to have you back on the podcast. Welcome back. Hello again, Tristan. It's a pleasure to be back. And we had to be back after the success of our episode on The Greatest Things. Yes. And like last time, we recorded it at the Manchester Museum. We are here again in the Manchester Museum.

But in a different setting, we are surrounded by ancient Egyptian artefacts. Yes, so this is in the Egypt inorganic store proper, last time we were in the archery store. So we're surrounded by about 5,000 stone pottery faience pieces.

And we've got also a couple on the table which we're going to explore because they link to our subject today, which are the sun gods of ancient Egypt. Now, I think it's fair to say the Egyptians, they have a big thing about the sun, don't they? Yes, you could say that. And in some ways...

Of the many gods of ancient Egypt, the sun god is the kind of primary manifestation of divinity. From the oldest times, we have evidence for worship of the sun. And were there many Egyptian deities associated with the sun? Who have we got? So you've got the big players, which are the sun god Re, whose name basically means the sun. The ancient Egyptians would write the word sun as Re.

Then you have variants like the god Aten, we'll come on to Aten, who is the sun disk and is especially favoured during one particular pharaoh's reign. But then it's very typical of the popularity of solar worship that different gods, including the king himself,

can take on aspects of solar-ness, solarity, if you like. So other gods like the god Amun, who is a major player in the New Kingdom, and a bit before and a bit after, he...

He mixes, he melds with the sun god Ra. So the main player is Ra or Re. I'm deliberately using both terms. Is it the same figure? It's the same figure. The ancient Egyptians write his name in the same way. But then he takes on another aspect, Re of the horizons, Re Horachti. So Horachti

that is partly a reference to the god Horus, who is shown as a falcon. And it seems Horus' incarnation as a falcon predates a way of visualising Rey. So both the sun god Rey and Horus have this falcon-headed aspect. Right. And we're going to get to that combination of sun gods like Rey with others like Amun. And I mean, I'd love to talk about Karnak in a bit as well, because that's a great example, isn't it? But beforehand, I feel we need to talk more about

shall we say, the original Ray? I mean, does he have mythical origins? Does he have a backstory? What do we know? When we look for myths in ancient Egypt, it's not like the Greek or the Roman pantheon. You're not getting the ins and outs of the family. What we think of

as ancient Egyptian mythology is built up from little references to the nature of the gods, to their epithets and to their interactions with each other. And epithets is kind of, it's like ray of the something. Yes. Little qualities. The mini-eyed or something like that. Exactly, exactly. So it's something that qualifies the god you're describing. So with the sun god,

The first definitive attestation of that word in association with the king is Dynasty 2. So almost 5,000 years ago, almost 3,000 BC. This is deep in the old kingdom. Yeah, this is almost pre-old kingdom. And by Dynasty 4, by the Pyramid Age, you're getting kings describing themselves as the sons of Rae.

So you can extrapolate from that perhaps that the pyramid itself, you know the four-sided pyramid, true sided flat-faced pyramid is an expression of some kind of maybe solar rays, who knows? The Egyptians never tell us directly what they mean by the pyramid. So the mythology of the god himself is actually quite elusive.

So we know he somehow is thought to be the parent, the father of the king. And that is consistent pretty much throughout pharaonic times. And then there are some stories that talk about, for example, him becoming old and then what that implies about the wiliness of other gods.

It's interesting you mentioned the pyramids there. I want to go on a quick tangent about that straight away. Monuments like the pyramids and obelisks too, they're tall, they're pointing towards the heavens and the sun, isn't it? Sometimes it's believed that they had gleaming aspects to them, almost reflecting the rays of the sun. It's interesting that these great monuments of ancient Egypt may have

solar imagery or solar reasons behind them? Yes, yes, exactly. I think there is deliberate use of solar imagery

It's often said that the very summit of the pyramids, the capstones, were gilded. Actual evidence of that is quite limited. We know of one account of a rather little-known queen's pyramid having a gilded capstone. But in the later New Kingdom, the time of Queen Hatshepsut, there are explicit texts that say the upper parts of obelisks have precious metal sheeting on them. And in that way, I guess...

You can think of an obelisk, and by extension a pyramid, as a kind of conduit taking divine energy because we know there's a concept of the gods existing in the sky. People exist on earth. You want to bridge those two realms. So an obelisk is like a lightning conductor for this divine energy. And actually the obelisk shape dates all the way back to dynasty five. So there are big temples in the old kingdom.

which are in the shape of big squat obelisks. Wow. And keeping on Ray, because he seems a very, very ancient god for the Egyptians, doesn't he? And endures for a long time. But the original Ray, the non-combined Ray, how is he usually depicted in the surviving source material?

Well, the interesting thing about the sun god is you can see the sun. You can actually perceive the sun. And the sun is, of course, very important to everyone around the world and not just to the ancient Egyptians. But it is significant, and perhaps we'll come on to this in a bit more detail, that Egypt is quite close to the equator.

Night and day are roughly the same length and even before there are written and figural records, there must be a concept of the power of the sun. When it comes to depicting Ray, rather than simply mentioning the name, the word, he appears as falcon-headed man with a sun disk atop his head. So if you were at a site in Egypt or you're in a museum and you see a falcon-headed guy,

You can tell if it's Rey if there's a sun disk on top. If he's wearing a crown, the double crown, you're probably looking at Horus. So when he comes to be depicted, this only really becomes common into the Middle Kingdom and certainly into the New Kingdom. He is as a falcon-headed man

The major exception is the reign of Akhenaten. So here's a bit of a teaser. Akhenaten really does reformulate how the Egyptians depict and think of divinity, certainly depict divinity. And he outlaws any representation, human-shaped representation. And so the sun god, the sun disc, the Aten that he so favours,

is simply the sun with rays coming off it. For most of the rest of Egyptian history when Sun God is depicted he is anthropomorphic. So he is human figured with a bird's head, a bird of prey. And I like this because a falcon, a hawk soars over humanity and kind of keeps a watchful eye.

You can see why there's an analogy with the king. Also, the gods are powerful. The gods are keeping an eye on you. The gods can be angered. They can swoop down and attack you. That seems like the perfect metaphor for the sun god, falcon-headed human being. Nice teaser of Akhenaten, by the way, during that. We'll get to him, certainly, a bit later. Let's now move on to the combination of Rey with other gods. You've already mentioned Horus and the similarities there with the falcon head.

It seems natural, therefore, that – and we'll talk about other gods that Ray is mixed with too – but of all the gods he's mixed with, Horus almost feels the most natural, at least in case of imagery. Yes, yes. And I think the ancient Egyptians had that.

concept and actually matching all this weird and wonderful imagery, which surprised and horrified the Romans and the Greeks, with what the ancient Egyptians actually believed is a challenge. Because ancient Egyptian iconography over thousands of years is very consistent. They were copying their own art more than they were copying nature. But what people actually day-to-day believed, you know, you wake up in the morning and the sun rises and

What do you think is actually happening? Question mark. We'll come back to that as well. Horus is consistently associated with Falcon.

And so you get this form, this extended form of the sun god, Re, as Re-Hor-Akhti. So break it down. You've got the sun god, Re. Hor is Horus, the falcon. And Akhti is the dual for the two horizons. So it's meant to be a universalizing term that this is the god who is in control of east and west, the rising and the setting of the sun. So it's the totality of sun.

the visible sun. What happens when the sun god disappears for the night is another story. Interesting. And let's keep on Reharakti a bit longer because we have in front of us

You can't see our listeners, however we will put a small video of Campbell explaining this object on our Instagram when we release this episode, so you can check it out there. But Campbell, what is this object? And it seems to show Ray Horakty right in front of us. Yes, so this is a stela which is made of wood, as you can see. When you look at the side it's quite clear. And a stela, is that a carved object? It's a memorial tablet, it's kind of commemorative, it's making a statement.

And so what we've got in front of us is maybe 20-25cm in height, a little less in breadth and about an inch thick. It was found in a grave and it was to accompany the deceased and we can see the deceased worshipping the sun god.

So we've got some hieroglyphs that tell us what is going on. The man, the living man, is a priest. He's called Bakken-Konsu, which is a great name for around 1000 BC, which I guess is the date of the Stela. And he is offering something to this seated figure, which...

As we can see, the figure is seated and isn't quite eye to eye with the standing human figure. So were the god to stand up, he would be very tall. He's very big. He's very tall, isn't he? Exactly. So you can identify that this is Reharachdi, first of all, by the hieroglyphs.

The hieroglyphs which face towards the man and therefore identify the figure behind them. You can always tell which way to read hieroglyphs by the way people and animals face. So the bird that writes re-hor faces towards the man and so is addressed towards him.

So you have his name Reharachti, Kheri-Necheru, literally chief of the gods. So you have a very simple epithet describing the importance of this god. He's shown as a king because he's holding the crook and the flail. So he's in charge of all the other gods and we know that from these mythical allusions. He's got the falcon head and he's got the sun disk atop his head, surrounded by a serpent. Now, the serpent is called

is closely associated with the vengeful eye of Re, which is referred to in various, what we might call myths, as a series of feline goddesses. It's sometimes described as his daughters or manifestations of his power, the goddess Sekhmet, lioness goddess, or the goddess Mut. Yes, so feline, you don't just mean cats, so it could be lions and stuff like that. Yes, lions, exactly. So there's a sense in which, although we see him here

Wrapped up, bound, often said to be mummy form, which is a misleading term. He's not meant to be dead. He's not meant to be a mummy. Mummified bodies are an emulation of gods who are shown in this wrapped form. This shows him as very placid, but he can be very judgmental and he can come after you with his roaring, flaming slingshot.

sun, I. So you've got to be careful what you do. It is a majestic depiction as well. What I also love about it is that on this particular example, it's not just, shall I say, a dull slab of stone today. The colour on this wooden tablet, which also looks quite loaf-shaped, is still there. And it's multi-coloured too. It's beautiful.

This is a result of this piece having been buried. It was found in Western Thebes by an Egyptian team led by William Matthew Flinders Petrie in the late 19th century. Because it's been buried for 3,000 years, the light hasn't got at it. We keep it in these conditions in the storeroom so that it can be preserved. There you go, Manchester Museum. That is just one of so many different amazing artefacts that you do have here.

One other question I'd like to ask before we move on from Rey Horakty. Forgive me if you've already mentioned this, but Horus, he's the god of what? What does he almost bring when the combination comes to add to Rey's character? Horus is essentially the god of kingship, of legitimate kingship. Associating the sun god with the Falcon and therefore with Horus just emphasises what in fact we're being told on this Steela, which is...

Reharacti is the first among equals of the gods. He is the chief god, the top dog. He is the king of the gods in some ways. After Dark, Myths, Misdeeds and the Paranormal is a podcast that delves into the dark side of history. Expect murder and conspiracy, ghosts and witches.

I'm Anthony Delaney. And I'm Maddy Pelling. We're historians and the hosts of After Dark from History Hit, where every Monday and Thursday we enter the shadows of the past. Discover the secrets of the darker side of history on After Dark from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm Raj Punjabi from HuffPost. And I'm Noah Michelson, also from HuffPost. And we're the hosts of Am I Doing It Wrong? A new podcast that explores the all too human anxieties we have about trying to get our lives right. Each week on the podcast, Raj and I pick a new topic that we want to understand better and bring a guest expert on to talk us through how to get it right.

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That leads us nicely on to almost, if it was, can we say the next stage of the evolution of this story with the next kind of chief god that Ray becomes associated with. Big in Thebes, where this was found, of course, which is the figure of Amun. So this figure of Amun-Ray, who is this? So the god Amun, whose name means hiddenness. So it's a kind of contradiction in terms. Ray, you can see.

Amun is the hidden one. He is especially associated, as you said, with the city of Thebes, modern Luxor, which is in the south of Egypt. And that is the hometown of a group of kings we know as Dynasty 11.

So, once they reunify Egypt after a period of decentralisation we call the first intermediate period, about 2000 BC, at that point they champion their local chief god, their patron god, the local god of the town, and that is Amun. With time, into the new kingdom particularly, Amun increases in importance. His temple becomes bigger and bigger, more lavish, more expansive.

And so it is fitting as he becomes this kind of state god that he should take on some other aspect to emphasize his seniority. And so he coalesces with the sun god, Ray. Now I should have said already, each god in ancient Egypt is usually associated with a particular geographical place. And so Ray from very ancient times is known in the north of Egypt

not terribly far away from where Cairo airport is now. If you've flown to Egypt, you probably landed not far from Ray's sacred site, the site of Heliopolis. And still we use that Greek term or ancient Iunu. And Iunu is written with the hieroglyph of a pillar. And the pillar is a kind of reference to the obelisk, which is a pillar, as I said, the conduit between the world of the living and the world of the gods in the sky.

the world of the sun. So in the new kingdom Amun the Hidden One, the god of Thebes, takes on this northern aspect. So god of the south, god of Luxor takes on the northern heliopolitan aspect to become a national god. And that's how you get Amun-Ra who is arguably the unquestioned king of the gods.

I'm presuming it's actually probably more complicated than what I'll say now, as almost everything in Egyptian mythology seems to be. Do you see at that time, let's say from the 11th dynasty onwards, that the star of Re-Herakhty falls and the star of Amun-Re rises? Or do they almost coexist side by side? That's a good question. I suspect they probably coexist. The problem we have, Tristan, is that...

We have lots preserved from Luxor because the stone re-users weren't so active there. Almost nothing survives of Heliopolis. So it's more than likely that there were lots of temples as big as Karnak, which have completely disappeared, which show a kind of parallel worship where Rey is still the main focus and Amun doesn't really get a look in.

Whereas down in Karnak, especially in the New Kingdom, the mixture of the gods is quite popular. So I suspect in the Middle Kingdom, Dynasty 11, Dynasty 12, there are parallel cults, if you like. The sun god is worshipped almost exclusively in his hometown up north, and Amun is worshipped in the south. And it's only in the New Kingdom that

where there's maybe more of a sense of needing or wanting national unity that the two mix up.

So you might get Amun being worshipped more in the north. We know that is the case. And you get Ra brought into the worship of Amun in the south. Well, Campbell, you mentioned one of my favourite places in Egypt there, Karnak. Oh, yeah. This beautiful, massive temple. And today, this is one of the main... And it was back then. This was the main area where Amun-Ra, these great ceremonies occurred some 3,000 years ago to celebrate worshipping this important god.

Yeah, I mean, Karnak is known in ancient Egyptian as the most selective places. As I said, I suspect in the north in Memphis, what is now under modern central Cairo, towards Saqqara and north again towards the airport Heliopolis would have had massive temples which were simply reused and built into other structures. Still, I think Karnak, to anyone who visits today, you really get a sense of

of this having been a very special, very sacred, very holy place.

Let's move on now from the combination of Re with these other gods. It's striking, isn't it, with these other gods that it's usually chief gods that Re is paired with. I'm guessing that once again reinforces this idea of the sun associated with kingship, associated with the most powerful. Yeah, so you get examples like Sobek Re. Sobek is the crocodile god associated with the Fayum area.

He becomes Sobek Rey to just make him out to be the most senior of gods in the region, I guess. So having this association with the sun god is not just saying there's some solar association, it's a mark of seniority, I think.

If we move on, let's go back to the whole mythology, the belief of Ray. If it's believed that he is the sun, where do they believe that Ray went during the night time? This is something the ancient Egyptians speculated on quite a bit and we have evidence of it in funerary literature. There are allusions to this way back in the pyramid age, the pyramid texts. These become

The coffin texts of the Middle Kingdom and then in the New Kingdom, bits of this kind of speculation appear in the Book of the Dead. But it's really when the ancient Egyptians are decorating royal tombs in the New Kingdom, in the Valley of the Kings, that we get more expansive visualizations about what the heck happens with the passage of the sun.

In the daytime, but especially at night, because that's when the sun god travels literally through the underworld. And as I said, because in Egypt, day and night are roughly the same length of time. Let us not forget, of course, the ancient Egyptians came up with the 24-hour day. They formalized that 12 hours of day, 12 hours of night. The sun god takes different forms. So the ancient Egyptians call this Khepruh.

Khepruv forms, images, manifestations is a good word. So you have the sun god at its zenith, at its prime, as this falcon-headed Reharachti. But then as the day progresses into evening...

The sun god ages and becomes old. He becomes Atum. He's often visualised with a ram's head. So you can switch him around the iconography. And then as he enters the underworld, he's in a boat. And so there's this concept of the sun

perceptible sun in the sky being in a boat and then certainly on rather confusingly isn't it so a boat sailing across the sky yeah the sun because i i guess if you're you're living in a culture that's dominated by the river by the nile how do you get around it's not by road there aren't roads as such there aren't many wheeled vehicles it's by boat so you see that the sun travels across this big blue thing i think well that must be

the celestial Nile. So then at sunset, the sun god enters the underworld and encounters versions of himself. There are 75 forms of the sun god and it all gets quite arcane. And the sun god in some sense dies. He kind of coalesces with the god of rebirth, Osiris, who we know from lots of other different contexts. And then he is reborn because how is the sun god going to reappear in the morning?

In that form, he takes the shape of a scarab beetle, the dung beetle that propels its ball of animal dung. In nature, you can see the ancient Egyptians could see the insect laying its eggs in the ball of animal excrement and the eggs hatching in new little scarabs coming out of the ball of seemingly inert matter.

So it's a great metaphor for rebirth and overcoming adversity is to just emerge from this ball of excrement. And the imagery we have from these New Kingdom royal tombs and then later in non-royal papyri, often referred to as the Amduat, literally what is in the underworld.

describes this journey. And the objective basically is for the deceased Pharaoh in the royal tombs and then later any deceased person lucky enough to have a papyrus

The objective is for them to join the boat. So almost a crewmate of Rey in the Underworld. So I like to think of it as being some kind of pleasure cruise in which you're rocking up to the bar and you can have a conversation with the gods. You're in the company of the gods in the ship bar. And that's the best way to have any hope of surviving the terrible rupture of death is to be in the presence of, and in fact to become one of the gods.

So the crew of this solar barge in the underworld, it wasn't just the pharaohs? Were there other people then who were supposedly or theorized to have been on it? Well, the crew changes depending on the different accounts. But one important member of the crew is the god Seth. Now, Seth, you may know the name because he's often associated with negativity. Chaos, isn't he? Chaos. Chaos.

unbridled qualities. He's dangerous, but he's also very powerful. So he's referred to as great of strength or great of power. And he is the one who defends

in his boat because boats on the Nile could be attacked by hippos or by crocodiles. In the same way, the ancient Egyptians visualise the main threat in the underworld to the sun god being a giant snake called Apep or Apophis, classicised as Apophis. So if you've got...

someone with brutish strength like Seth whose head is kind of a mythical beast, a kind of anteater type thing. You want him on the prow of the boat spearing this demonic beast

threatening giant serpent. And Apophis, I mean, that is quite a mythical beast to conjure up by the Egyptians, isn't it? And it's also, I think, it's at the top of this episode in the retelling of the myth that we have at the beginning. But it's also interesting. So it's not Ray himself who defeats Apophis, at least in a few versions. It's Seth. It's his helper, this chaotic helper, Seth, defeating this rather chaotic mythical beast. Yes, it's interesting, actually, that Seth

appears in one myth, perhaps the only true myth we have from ancient Egypt, the contendings of Horus and Seth when there's a fight to decide the legitimate succession of Osiris, the dead king who becomes the god of rebirth. Which we will get to in another episode. Which will be covered in another episode.

But in those contendings, most of the gods are siding with Horus as the legitimate son of Osiris. But it seems like the sun god, Rey, actually favours Seth. So maybe it's because Rey knows that he needs Seth's power to defend him in the underworld. Who knows? Yeah, it's got a bit of an advantage there. I mean, keeping on snakes before we get to, as hinted at earlier, teased at Akhenaten,

I'd like to keep a little bit longer on the snakes of the underworld because it seems that he's also protected by the coils of another serpent. And I'm going to get the pronunciation completely wrong. Mee-hen? Mee-hen, yeah. Mee-hen, yeah, yeah.

There's really mixed messages going on about the serpent imagery. So you can have the protective serpent which can defend the sun god and that's the kind of serpent that the king wears on his brow. So what we would call from the Greek term a 'eureus' - a kind of cobra that spits fire and poison at enemies, at bad people. So that's defending the sun god.

But then you have Apep, as we said, who's threatening the sun god and you need Seth to spear and skewer this monster. So in some ways, yeah, snakes, serpents can represent both good and bad and they're a metaphor for both.

Back to this time in the New Kingdom where it seems like the figure of Ray is almost thrown on its head because you get this very interesting figure who seems to have his own vision of the sun and how to worship it. Yes, so you're alluding here, of course, Tristan, to what one Egyptologist called the first individual in history, a guy called Akhenaten. So Akhenaten has to be understood...

by the reign of his father. So his father is called Amenhotep III. Amenhotep III rules for a long time, almost 40 years, and he experiments with the ways the king presents himself, the ways the king interacts with the gods. And in some ways, he solarizes himself. So after 30 years on the throne, he celebrates this Heb Sed, this jubilee festival, we might call it,

And at that moment, he takes on this added aspect, this solar aspect, and he starts aging backwards. So he's like a Benjamin Button character. He ages backwards and he describes himself as the dazzling Atten.

So this is important. The Aten, which is the word for the disc, the actual visual disc of the sun, that term had been used by the Egyptians before, but Akhenaten's father kind of makes deliberate play with it and then maybe shares the throne for a bit with his son. But at least when his son Amenhotep IV comes to the throne, it's not long before he really revolutionizes things.

and says, "Do you know what chaps? We're going to close the temples of all the gods and I'm going to move the capital to a completely godforsaken place we know as Amarna now in middle Egypt and we're going to exclusively worship the Aten." So in doing this he does away with centuries, millennia of iconography of divinity.

And the way we can see the Aten, and I have an example of this on the table in front of us, is simply the disc. There is no anthropomorphizing going on. Although we do have evidence early in the reign of Akhenaten, when he's probably still called Amenhotep before he changes his name to Akhenaten, which means effective for the Aten.

Before he does that name change, he visualizes the Aten as a version of Reharachti, he just calls him the Aten. But then, a few years into his reign, he changes to this kind of aniconic, not in the form of a human being,

which we can tell is the Aten because it has a snake at the front of it. It's interesting that the Aten is more king-like than any other god in some ways. Its names are written in cartouches as a pharaoh's names would be and it wears a urethra. And down from the bottom of the sun disk, stretching out exclusively towards Akhenaten and his family, no one else, because Akhenaten is the

The unique conduit, the unique prophet, the unique interlocutor between humanity and the God. Between the sun disk and Akhenaten and his family stretch these rays coming down, which end in hands holding the symbol for life, the Ankh. The Ankh, yes. So the message seems quite clearly to be...

Akhenaten is in receipt of this benefit. Ordinary people are not allowed to directly interact with the Aten. But in the temples of Amarna, this new city that Akhenaten sets up, there are no statues of the gods. And think what a massive industry it was, especially in the reign of Akhenaten's father, to produce statues of gods. The only statues that appear are of Akhenaten himself, his wife Nefertiti, and their children.

The way you would worship the Aten would be simply in an open courtyard because the Aten would be in the sky.

So even though Akhenaten does these radical changes, and also probably changes the economy, as you say, if you're no longer making all of these statues, the sun still remains at the centre of this very radical new imagery. So once again hinting that even with this radical change, the sun and the sun god is still right at the centre of it. Absolutely. And in fact, one of the names of the Aten

actually references Reharahti. So there is a kind of co-dependency, although it's often said Akhenaten was a monotheist and outlawed the worship of any other gods.

he does still retain the worship of the traditional sun god in some way. And it would be fascinating to know actually where it preserved if Akhenaten built at Heliopolis. He maybe continued to patronize that area in the north of Egypt, whereas he absolutely, we know, persecuted the worship of Amun down in Luxor, down in the south.

And that perhaps was for political and economic reasons as much as religious reasons. And last thing with that, how long does this sole worship of the sun last?

I mean the Akhenaten experiment isn't very successful. It lasts less than 20 years in total. And then there's a complete reversion and the Aten does still occasionally appear in texts but the widespread exclusive worship ends. So that ends. So with that experiment ending, but for 20 years of Egyptian history it's a period that continues to fascinate people, the name Akhenaten, doesn't it? Because it's so different.

And with the end of that experiment, and I'm guessing the revival of the traditional gods and worship, does the sun, I'm guessing the sun, it's not affected by this association with Akhenaten. It still remains incredibly popular following that, the sun god's return. Yes, because you get in the period immediately following Akhenaten, you get the kings called Ramesses. And the name means child of the sun god, right? Yeah.

So no, there's not a taboo on worshipping the sun god, but I think they pick up where they left off in terms of the traditional importance of Ray of Heliopolis in the north. And Amun-Ray comes back with full force and the royal family and the state lavish great expense on glorifying Karnak. Again, something which Akhenaten had simply just ignored.

And lastly, before we completely wrap up Campbell, naturally, you know, me first and foremost, very interested in Hellenistic history following the death of Alexander the Great.

And with the figure of Ray, I mean, how long does he endure? Do Egyptians still worship Ray at the time of the Ptolemies much later on? Yes. The Ptolemies, of course, being Macedonian Greek kings, have to play an interesting kind of political balancing act with looking out towards the Eastern Mediterranean world, but also trying to keep the Egyptian priests happy. There's a great interest, I think, in Memphis and the god Ptah, and there are new gods like Serapis.

They don't totally forget about Ra or Ray at Heliopolis. I think they still lavish some attention on that cult. And they do build other temples up and down the Nile Valley.

Thebes becomes a little bit of a backwater and it's prone to rebellions in the south under the Ptolemies. But it's interesting actually to consider, and I was reading actually a text describing this recently, even in Christian times, you get prayers read.

in Egyptian Coptic Christianity, to Jesus, to the Holy Spirit, and to the sun god, Ray. So there is a very ancient and very persistent association with the sun, which I think transcends even the so-called end of paganism.

I think the reason that the sun god is so popular is because Egypt is such a hot, sunny country for a start. And there's very much, and I think we'll come on to this in the next episode, a yin and a yang thing with Osiris, who represents death and rebirth, and a ray that represents the sun.

Because it is often said that the dead want to spend eternity with the sun in their faces. So that is an ambition for the afterlife. Well, there you go, Campbell. That's a very nice way for us to end this episode. The first of our episodes with you for this Egyptian Gods and Goddesses miniseries. This first one on the sun gods. Campbell, it just goes for me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come back on the podcast. Pleasure.

Well, there you go. There was Dr. Campbell Price talking through the story of Ra and the sun gods of ancient Egypt. The latest episode in our special Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt miniseries this September and October. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. Now, the narration for the story at the beginning, it was done by Mene Elbezawi. It was written by Andrew Hulse. The whole episode was produced by our assistant producer, Joseph Knight, and our producer, Anne-Marie Luff.

And the whole episode was mixed together by our editor, Aidan Lonergan. Thank you to you all for making this episode a reality. Thank you too for listening to this episode of The Ancients. Please follow this show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps and you'll be doing us a big favour. And don't forget, you can also listen to us and all of History Hit's podcasts ad-free and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe at historyhit.com slash subscribe.

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