ned to early forays into political propaganda. But the point is that the image of the unique nexus of divinity and humanity in the figure of the king was the primary cultural artifact of Egyptian civilization.
That said, it must be added that the artifact underwent reformulation from time to time over the 2,500-plus years of pharaonic Egypt. During the early New Kingdom reign of Amenhotep IV, or Akhenaten, the unity of pharaoh and god took on something of an aspect of monotheism--which Freud, for one, took to be a precursor of Hebrew monotheism, and which, according to Assmann, was more or less transfigured by the artifacts and ethos of Hebrew culture into the moral universality of Judaism. But even Akhenaten's formulation of his affinity and identification with the divine, however radically different it may have been from that of his predecessors, retained as a fundamental attribute of Egyptian religion the unique position and privilege of pharaoh vis-à-vis that religion's theogony.
In that regard, Assmann describes the Amarna religion over which Akhenaten presided one in which the pharaoh ruled the cosmos "as a kind of junior partner, bearing the title of 'son' while the god is called 'father.'" Akhenaten's kingdom, which, to be sure, had a religion that subsumed all traditional gods in the divine figure of the light of the sun, was nonetheless of this world, even as the pharaoh made a claim to participation in the kingdom of the cosmic world. That is because the pharaoh never relinquished his authority over how society ought to govern itself--according to truth and justice (maat). The fact that the monotheistic implications of Akhenaten's religious praxis were suppressed by his successors does not mark so much the religious differences between one pharaoh's reign and another's as the distinctions, reign to rein, in ways that royal pharaonic culture articulated the connection between the divine realm and the royal personage....