Amen

Name and Representation

The origin of Amen is lost in antiquity. However, Amen is one of the ancient Egyptian gods because we know he appears in some of the earliest texts. During the 5th dynasty, Amen was considered a primeval God within the Pyramid Texts. These were the texts written on the walls of some of the 100 pyramids in Egypt. It is written in the Pyramid Texts that ascending into the sky, the per aa (pharaoh in Hebrew) would, as the son of Geb, sit “upon the throne of Amen.”

Even then, Amen was different in a sense from the other deities in the fact that there was little information about him. He was often described as hidden, an unseen creative power central in the Egyptian myth of world creation. Although the name “Amen” means “hidden” and “unknown,” this has not prevented human beings from seeking to make representations of the great god. Although it is true that the name suggests concealment, it could also mean invisible, hence Amen is the invisible force that permeates the sky, the Earth, and human beings and demonstrates his universality by concealing his true identity behind an epithet that means “hidden.” The ancient Africans in the Nile Valley referred to Amen as “asha renu” meaning “rich in names.”

The name Amen means “the hidden one” or “the unknown one” in the ancient Mdw Ntr, the divine language of ancient Egypt. It is a meaning that accompanied the name down the centuries. When people say the name Amen, they are pronouncing the most enduring name of a deity on Earth. Worshipped as the power that stood behind the achievements of the mightiest warriors of antiquity such as Senursert, Thutmoses III, and Rameses II, Amen takes his place as the war god par excellence. But more so, because of the numerous offerings made in his name in the Nile Valley, Amen is the name most revered by the ancient priests of Egypt.

Representations of Amen in an anthropomorphic sense suggest a figure like a king. He often appears wearing a crown consisting of two high plumes. Each feather is divided vertically in two sections and horizontally in seven sections. Indeed, other representations of Amen show him as a man seated on a throne holding a scepter as a symbol of life, as a man with the head of a frog, as a man with the head of a uraeus, as an ape, or as a lion on a pedestal. Sometimes Amen is seen as a man with an erect phallus. His sacred animals are the ram with curved horns and the Nile Goose; both are animals associated with the creative or procreative energies of the universe.

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