God Ra in the Egyptian pantheon occupied a special place. This is understandable: a southern country, a constantly burning sun overhead … Other gods and divines performed their specific functions, and only the beneficent god Ra illuminated the entire Earth, making no distinction between poor and rich, pharaohs and slaves, people and animals.
According to the Egyptians, Ra was never born, always existed. He stood above other gods, being something like a prototype of a single god, later embodied in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. But it seems that the idea of monotheism was in the minds of ancient Egypt. No wonder the pharaoh of the eighteenth dynasty Amenhotep the fourth, trying to get rid of the dictates of numerous priests of various cults (the most influential of which were the priests of Ra), introduced the veneration of the god Aton, or the solar disk, rejecting all other gods. In essence, the new solar deity, Aton, differed little from the old solar cult, Amun-Ra. Perhaps the fact that the new priests were completely controlled by Amenhotep, who adopted the new name Akhenaten, which means "pleasing to the god Aten."
Butthe idea of monotheism, which found a response in the minds of the mental elite (some of the unbiased priests, intelligentsia and close associates of Akhenaten), did not find support among the broad uneducated sections of the population of the Ancient Egyptian kingdom. The cult of the Aten did not become widespread.
The inertia of the thousand-year-old religious attitude turned out to be stronger than the intellectual frills of the Egyptian elite. According to many historians, Akhenaten died as a result of a conspiracy, and everything returned to normal. God Ra remained in the list of the most revered Egyptian deities.
The religious center of the solar deity was Heliopolis, which in Greek means the city of the Sun or Solntsegrad. Under this name, the city appears in many historical studies, although the real Egyptian name for this center was Iunu. The Greeks from the time of the conquests of Alexander the Great had a great influence on the life of Egypt. The Egyptian god Ra in their minds was identified with the Greek Helios. Without further ado, the conquerors simply renamed the Egyptian city of Iunu into the Greek Heliopolis.
The cult of Ra has existed for a very long time. It began in the Old Kingdom - in the first half of the third millennium BC. The god Ra was originally one of the many Egyptian gods. But later, through the efforts of the priests who assisted the founder of the Fifth Dynasty in ascending the throne, his cult rose and dominated the others for more than two thousand years. The priests of Ra, not being complete dogmatists, allowed a kind of "symbiosis" of theirgod with less significant deities of different territories of Egypt. So, in Elephantine, he bore the name Khnum-Ra, in Thebes - Amon-Ra. This measure made it possible to minimize the possibility of local religious separatism.
After the hoplites of Alexander the Great entered Egypt without a fight, the decline of traditional religion began. No, the Greeks did not persecute the worshipers of Ra. It's just that the time of the old religion has passed. Fewer and fewer people believed in the old gods, the temples gradually fell into decay, and with the advent of Christianity, the sun god Ra was completely forgotten. By the fifth century AD, the Egyptians had forgotten even the letter on which they used to write hymns to the gods. But the system of Egyptian hieroglyphic writing by that time totaled three and a half thousand years!
And only at the beginning of the nineteenth century, thanks to the efforts of the brilliant linguist Francois Champollion, we discovered Egyptian history for modern mankind, which was previously known only from the laconic comments of Egypt's neighbors - Greeks, Romans, Persians and Arabs.
