Amun

Amun began as a minor Theban deity, one of eight primordial gods in the Pyramid Texts, his name meaning “the hidden one.” That obscurity became an advantage: when the rulers of Thebes drove out the Hyksos and founded the New Kingdom around 1570 BCE, they credited their victory to him and made him the god of empire. Linked to the sun god Ra as Amun-Ra, he became creator of the universe and King of the Gods. His house at Karnak grew into the largest religious structure ever built — 250 acres of stone raised over two millennia, a Hypostyle Hall of 134 columns. The priesthood that served him accumulated land, gold and grain until, by the reign of Amenhotep III, it was nearly as powerful as the pharaoh. Akhenaten tried to erase him around 1350 BCE, closing the temples and promoting the sun-disc Aten; within a generation Tutankhamun reopened them and Amun was restored. When Alexander the Great took Egypt in 331 BCE, he marched to the oracle of Amun at Siwa to be named the god’s son, and put the god’s ram horns on his coins.

What ended Amun was not a rival god but a change in the empire’s religion. As Rome turned Christian, the Theodosian decrees of 389–391 CE ordered the pagan temples closed across the empire; in Egypt the priesthoods lost their patronage and fell silent, and Christian mobs converted or wrecked the sanctuaries. A few held on at the southern edge — the temple of Isis at Philae kept the old gods until its closure under Justinian around 537 — and then there was no one left to perform the rites. Karnak still stands, walked through by tourists who photograph the columns and leave. The god who outranked pharaohs, whose oracle named the conqueror of the known world, receives no worship from any of them.