The Oracle, the Amarna Crisis, and Alexander

Amun spoke through oracles: his cult image, carried in procession, was consulted on questions of state and justice, and his desert oracle at the Siwa oasis became famous across the Mediterranean, identified by the Greeks with Zeus as Zeus Ammon. When the pharaoh Akhenaten raised the sun-disc Aten above all gods in the fourteenth century BCE and had Amun's name chiselled from the monuments, it was Amun's power he was attacking; after Akhenaten's death the old god was restored and the reform undone. Centuries later Alexander the Great made the arduous journey to Siwa to be greeted by the oracle as a son of Amun, a recognition that helped legitimate his rule of Egypt. The Greek Zeus Ammon, a bearded Zeus with a ram's horns, spread the god's image far beyond Egypt.

Amun's priesthood produced one of ancient Egypt's more remarkable political offices, the God's Wife of Amun, a title held by royal women at Thebes who, especially during the Third Intermediate and Late Periods, wielded effective religious and political authority over Upper Egypt as Amun's consecrated earthly consort, adopting successors rather than marrying and controlling vast temple estates in their own right. The office shows how completely religious and secular power fused around Amun's cult at its height, a pattern separately echoed in the wealth and influence of the ordinary Amun priesthood at Karnak, which by the New Kingdom's end rivalled and at times eclipsed the authority of the pharaoh himself.