DBWI Atenism Doesn't Form

Now Atenism is the world's oldest Monotheistic religion, and besides Tengriism and Hinduism is the largest denomination in the world. It was the first mass appealing religions to ever come about, and probably the most important one to form in the west. It was likely the source of other such monotheistic religions such as Zoroastrianism and Lugatianism as well.

While records are scattered; references to the old pantheon of Egypt have been found, and it's noted that before then, the god of the dead for the Egyptians (Osiris if I got the name right) was the main people's god, while Amun or some such was the state religion.

So what if Ahkenaten decided to make one of these two his main vehicles, or what if he was bumped off by say the Amunites, who seemed to have some power if the ruins at Ipet-Isu are an indication? How far would history change?
 
Without the unifying force of the Aten, I fully expect that the Egyptian Empire would never have progressed southwards into the heart of Africa to Lake Aten. Which would be a great shame as then the great Sun Temple at Bujagali would never have been built! That would be a great cultural loss for the world!

Beyond that - Prior to Aten, Egyptian religion wasn't particularly interested in the salvation of the non-believer, but only the faithful. The outward focus of the faithful helped tie the various disparate peoples. Would Assyrian, Elamite, Babylonian and Egyptian have all been so tightly bound without it? I think not. One of the Mesopotamians would have been likely to unite the area and unleash great harm on the Middle East.

I can't say I expect a happy history for Egypt, whilst the Aten tied us all together, it was based in Egypt and as such Egypt formed the Metropole that led to our modern world. Places like Mesopotamia, Anatolia, and even the Greeks were beginning to become a threat!

I'd put my money on being subsumed into an Iranian Empire - the Plateau can host any number of invaders of Mesopotamia, and combined, they have greater resources than Egypt would have naturally (at least at the time of the 18th Dynasty).
 
One of the Mesopotamians would have been likely to unite the area and unleash great harm on the Middle East.
...Sort of like how the Atenist empire wiped out the culture of Judea? Saying nothing of the aggressive religious zeal which essentially stamped out the indigenous religions of the Euphrates and Tigris regions.

Often glossed over by Egyptophiles is the fact that Atenites preached their religion aggressively through the state structures they imposed upon regions conquered in warfare. Outside of the Metropole, the great Atenite empires were built through conversion by the sword and enforcement by the state. The foundation of Atenism was basically an absolute monarch declaring his god the biggest god and himself the only intermediary for that god. Maybe without Atenism you'd get some form of monarchical structure adopted by other countries that didn't also include the concept of the monarch as divine or semi-divine, but you can blame Akhenaten for inspiring thousands of years of priest-emperors situating themselves as embodiments of the faith and forcing that faith on others through the state.

Basically it's no shock that government by elective populism came out of Armenia - positioned as it is on the edge of the Atenist empires - and why electivist governments almost universally ban priests and holy men from holding any elected office. Unless you're Egyptian, the Atenist experience was bad for you. Atenism may be the most followed religion, but let's not forget that there are still fewer Atenists than there are atheists.
 
Eh, referencing Taoism and the Moh School are kind of cheap tactics to inflate the number of irreligious people in the world; without those two, the number of irreligious people drop down to 3rd place. Besides, from what regions not affected by the religion's rise, Monarchs tended to claim rule by divine mandate. China has the Mandate of Heaven, The Rix of Gallu was favored by Lugus, and the Shahanshahs of Iran had guiding the Atar of Ahura Mazda into granting the realm stability.

As for Armenia being the home of Populism; like the Greek cities of old, they were hard to unify. They just had the ability to centralize and make a rule by the popular will more open and stable.
 
You're inflating your Atenist stats by using the old trick of including people who were raised Atenist and abandoned the faith later. Those people aren't actually still Atenists, no matter how much the statechurch media in Egypt likes to pretend lapsed Atenists can never leave the faith.

If you look at the archaeological evidence (see the findings of Kerkorian and Nguyen, but there's lots of others), Akhenaten experienced a great deal of resistance getting buy-in from the Egyptian establishment. Atenism only took root in a permanent way when Akhenaten vigorously suppressed the old priesthood and reallocated religious offices to loyalists within his court. Without that, I doubt Atenism would've lasted much beyond his reign. At least in the Chinese paradigm, rulership was a right, and an incompetent ruler could be overthrown because it meant they had lost the Mandate of Heaven. The Egyptian paradigm never had any such concept, starting off with the absolute priest-monarch just declaring who the main god is, then stamping down all other forms of worship. That's why you have so much cultural similarity from roughly Nubia to the Mesopotamian river system: Atenism was imposed on these regions by the sword because it was a vehicle for the legitimacy and power of the state, and so long as conquered peoples viewed the Pharaoh as the sole representative of the only god, their will to resist would be broken.

Some of us prefer not to live in a theocracy built on fear. Thank the Morrigan that kind of mind-rot never made it up here into Brythonia.
 
The irony is you think I'm backing Atenism there; if you go with that order, then it's Hinduism that wins gold, then Atenism. Sorry, but lapsed Atenists usually still occasionally bow their head to either East or West for festivals and the like, they just tend to not be fanatics like what you're trying to pose all of them as. I've mentioned that I'm a follower of Tengri in other posts and you can even find a photo of me celebrating Almati with some family, so I don't get where you're coming from with this other than trying to poison the well by trying to paint me as some shill to Egyptian media.

And for the Brythonia bit... Rix being Lugus' messenger ring the bell? Using the Druids and the edicts of his Semi-divine Ancestors to enact law? Brythonia was absolutist until the 31st Century SR and was in many ways similar to a theocratic state by being the closest to "Lugus".
 
Where'd you read that? Lugh was never presented as "the only god." In any case you can make the case that most regions had some form of undemocratic government, but for the most part the priest and the king weren't the same person. Never did Brythonia have a head of state who was also the high priest. Today it's electivist and it's been so for a long time.

Every country had embarrassing religious stuff in the past but Egypt can't seem to let go of it, especially these days with the Egyptophile movement. Just when it seemed like there was some hope for secularization, there was just this great big archconservative backlash and all of a sudden it's all GLORY TO ATEN again.

It's actually sort of sad. I can appreciate Egyptian culture but it's so tied in with a really problematic governance model that it's hard to love.
 
Lugus as I understand it is the only purely divine entity in the Gallic "pantheon", with ancestors occasionally raised as lesser deities over certain things or for families. Then again, I was raised with a different religion and I'm not too familiar with it, seeing as there's only one Grove for my province's Lugatians to hold festivals in. I was raised with the idea that all paths lead to a happy afterlife, as all paths where you do good does good in the eyes of Tengri and his servants, whatever system you choose.

As for Egypt's problems, blame it on a mixture of events, namely the toppling of the 67th Dynasty which sought reforms ever since Egypt's 7th waning from the international sphere. Military and Priests didn't like that and enacted a brief and bloody coup to make things right.
 
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