A Hymn to Amen-Rā

Egyptian (New Kingdom) · Papyrus of Cairo; the hymn is sung between c. 1600 and 900 BC.

Translation: E. A. Wallis Budge, 1914 — E. A. Wallis Budge, The Literature of the Ancient Egyptians (1914), ch. XII. Public domain.

A temple hymn to Amen-Rā, the sun-god of Thebes who by the New Kingdom had absorbed the other gods and was addressed as maker of everything: "maker of men, creator of all animals … Maker of the herbage that sustaineth the life of cattle," "Suspender of the sky, who hammered out the earth," "the One, the maker of things which are."

The overlap with the Hebrew nature-psalms is striking — Psalm 104 especially (God who makes grass grow for the cattle, who stretches out the heavens, whose creatures all wait on him), and Psalm 19, Psalm 145 and Nehemiah 9:6. Egypt reaches for one god by piling every divine name onto Amen-Rā; the psalms start from one and never leave.

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Cairo papyrus 4 biblical parallels