God Ra in the Egyptian pantheon occupied a special place. This is understandable: a southern country, constantly burning the sun above his head … Other gods and worshipers performed their specific functions, and only the beneficent god Ra illuminated the whole Earth, without distinguishing between the poor and rich, pharaohs and slaves, people and animals.
According to the Egyptians, Ra never born, always existed. He stood above other gods, being a kind of prototype of a single god, who later found embodiment in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. But, it seems, the idea of monotheism was in the minds even in 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 fact, the new solar deity, Aton, was not much different from the old solar cult, Amon-Ra. Unless the fact that the new priests were completely controlled by Amenhotep, who adopted the new name Akhenaten, which means "pleasing to the god Aton."
But the idea of monotheism, which found a response in the minds of the mental elite (a part of unbiased priests, intelligentsia and associates of Akhenaten), did not find support among the wide uneducated layers of the population of the Ancient Egyptian kingdom. The cult of Aton did not become massive.
The inertia of the thousand-year-old religious attitude was stronger than the intellectual delights of the Egyptian elite. According to many historians, Akhenaten died as a result of a conspiracy, and everything returned to normal. God Ra remained on 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 Yunu. The Greeks from the time of the conquest 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 Greek Heliopolis.
The cult of Ra has existed for a very long time. The beginning was laid in the Ancient Kingdom - in the first half of the third millennium BC. God Ra was at first one of the many Egyptian gods. But later, through the efforts of the priests who assisted in the accession to the throne to the founder of the fifth dynasty, his cult rose and dominated the others for more than two thousand years. The priests of Ra, not being complete dogmas, admitted a peculiar "symbiosis" of their god with less significant deities of different territories of Egypt. So, in Elephantine, he bore the name Khnum-Ra, in Thebes - Amon-Ra. This measure minimized the possibility of local religious separatism.
After the hoplites of Alexander of Macedon entered Egypt without a fight, the decline of traditional religion began. No, the Greeks did not pursue the admirers of Ra. It’s just that the time of the old religion has passed. Fewer people believed in the old gods, the temples gradually fell into decay, and with the advent of Christianity, the sun god Ra was finally forgotten. By the fifth century of the new era, the Egyptians had even forgotten the letter on which they had previously written hymns to the gods. But the system of Egyptian hieroglyphic writing at 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, did we discover Egyptian history for modern mankind, which was previously known only from the laconic comments of Egypt’s neighbors - Greeks, Romans, Persians and Arabs.
