Jan Assmann (1938-2024), “Rise of Monotheism in the Ancient World 02: All Gods are One: Evolutionary and Inclusive Monotheism”
Thursday, 2 December 2004, 19:00 IDT
Van-Leer Institute
43 Jabotinsky Street
Jerusalem 9214116
ISRAEL
Chaired by Guy Stroumsa
Sponsored by:
George L. Mosse Program in History
Department of History, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Lecture Summary: Already in the seventeenth century when the terms “monotheism” and “polytheism” were not yet coined, Ralph Cudworth (1618-1688) stated that all religions were basically monotheistic in that they acknowledged only one supreme deity as origin or creator of the universe. In our time, C. S. Lewis said that monotheism should be regarded not as the opposite but as the maturity of polytheism. This holds true for an evolutionary trend that can be observed in Indian, Mesopotamian, Greek, and Egyptian religions. Again, the lecture will concentrate on Egypt to show the various steps this “evolutionary monotheism” took to evolve around the basic idea of divine unity, which Cudworth was right to postulate.
This lecture series was published as Of God and Gods: Egypt, Israel, and the Rise of Monotheism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Madison, 2008).
Jan Assmann (1938-2024) was a leading scholar in the fields of Egyptology, memory and culture studies, comparative literature, and the history of religion. He studied at Heidelberg, Munich, Göttingen and Paris. He served as professor of Egyptology at the University of Heidelberg from 1976 to 2003 and taught at several other universities in Europe, Israel, and the United States. His many awards included a 1996 Max Planck Award for Research, a German historians’ prize in 1998, and honorary degrees from several institutions of higher learning. He is the author of numerous books, including Moses the Egyptian, The Price of Monotheism, and Cultural Memory and Early Civilization, Of God and Gods: Egypt, Israel, and the Rise of Monotheism. Since 1968 he was married to Aleida née Bornkamm. They had 5 children.
