Akhenaten’s Advanced Biomedical Knowledge of the Human Sperm and Egg

This post introduces the creation myths that developed in the temples at Heliopolis and Hermopolis in Egypt, and shows that Akhenaten’s vision of the sperm and egg in human procreation was more advanced than the biomedical knowledge of Aristotle living a thousand years later.

1. The World-Sperm Ejaculated by Atum at Heliopolis and the World-Egg Laid by the Cosmic Goose at Hermopolis

Egyptian thought about creation throughout the pharaonic period was embedded in iconography, language and ritual. This natural philosophy consists of cosmological, biological and anthropological knowledge, rather than straight theology. The origins of existence were regarded as so mysterious that explanations from various perspectives (with different emphases and details) coexisted as tantalizing vignettes of what happened, cultivated at various shrines. Unlike modern Western thinkers, there was no desire to compose a single grand theory as a convenient but often problematic orthodoxy.

As Egyptian contemplation matured the idea of a transcendent divinity was integrated with the thronging pantheon of gods through syncretism, giving rise to several influential systems with commonalities as well as unique features. The mystery to be solved concerned how being could issue from nonbeing, and the many from the one? The One was understood as Atum at Heliopolis (On in Egyptian), the Aten at Amarna (Akhetaten), and Amun at Hermopolis (Khemenu).

The primeval waters are pre-existent in all Egyptian cosmogonies. The Heliopolitan myth of Atum maps how the One began to manifest through a family of divinities, explained in terms of division and multiplication. According to Pyramid Text 1248 Atum set creation into motion through an auto-erotic deed:

Atum is he who (once) came into being, who masturbated in On. He took his phallus in his grasp that he might create orgasm by means of it, and so were born the twins Shu and Tefnut.

Pyramid Text 1652 adds more detail, for Atum sneezed out or spat out Shu and Tefnut who produced Geb (earth) and Nut (sky). This cosmic biophysics tracks becoming in terms of divine emanations envisaged as the bodily emissions of the high god.

The sages responsible for the creation myth at Hermopolis adopted an entirely different standpoint, contemplating the paradox of how being emerged from non-being, and order from chaos. The system is based on entities with serpentine bodies and the heads of frogs, known as the Ogdoad (‘Eight’), who lived in slime and produced conditions that allowed the world-egg to form on the primal mound in the cosmic Nile. The god Amun is a member of the Ogdoad and, together with his wife Amaunet, they represent hiddenness and mystery. The Book of the Dead (spell 85) reads:

I am the soul who created the Abyss, who made his seat in the realm of the dead. My nest will not be seen, my world-egg will not be broken.

Sometimes Amun is represented as the Great Cackler, a goose whose voice broke the silence of the beginning and who laid the world-egg.

The impulses from Atum are transcendent from the top down, while the Ogdoad moving in the slimy waters of creation is an immanent system, from the bottom up. As such they are complementary, and contemplating them together expands and deepens perspectives on creation.

2. Akhenaten’s Knowledge of Human Procreation Was More Advanced than Aristotle Living a Thousand Years Later

Akhenaten (1388-1355 BCE) composed the Hymn to the Aten, recognized as a literary masterpiece many centuries ahead of its time. One stanza praises the influence of the Aten on human procreation:

Creator of the germ in woman,

maker of seed in man,

giving life to the son in the body of his mother,

soothing him that he may not weep,

nurse even in the womb.

Giver of breath to sustain alive every one that he makes

when he comes forth from the womb on the day of his birth.

(translated by James Breasted, The Dawn of Conscience, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1933, p. 283)

The ‘seed in man’ and the ‘egg in woman’ attest to the pharaoh’s knowledge of the paternal and maternal contributions that are precursors for conception and human procreation. While common knowledge nowadays, Akhenaten’s insight was revolutionary and unheard of 3400 years ago.

The creation myth recited in the shrine at Heliopolis articulated a patriarchal vision of Atum-Re ejaculating his semen into the primeval waters of Nun. At Hermopolis a matriarchal system pictured the Ogdoad conditioning the forces of chaos so that the world-egg could develop. We know how the human sex cells (the spermatozoon and ovum) are generated and combine when conception happens, but it would be wrong to assume that the Egyptians knew that the world-sperm fertilized the world-egg.

Throughout pharaonic times Egyptian myth functioned as a flexible symbolic language of revelation. Creational processes were considered so mysterious that partial explanations from distinct perspectives were deemed sufficient. It was not until Ptolemaic times (305-31 BCE) that Egyptian myths about creation came to be synthesized into explicit narrative accounts.

Against this backdrop of the history of ideas in Egypt, Akhenaten did what no one else before him had done. He synthesized the Heliopolitan and Hermopolitan systems into a single theory. A strict monotheist, he erased the many traditional divinities in the Egyptian pantheon and replaced them with the Aten. The result is an inspired naturalism that discloses the spiritual powers of the Aten operating in the consciousness and physiology of a man and a woman, not the old gods creating the world.

A man ejaculates sperm in the style of Atum and a woman like Amun ovulates an egg like the mythic bird of creation, and conception occurs through its fertilization. With awesome insight Akhenaten integrated the separate myths of Heliopolis and Hermopolis into a visionary monotheism focused on human beings rather than Atum, Amun and their entourages. In doing so he eliminated much superstition and herein lies the genius of his system articulated through the magnificent language of his hymn.

We can gauge just how advanced Akhenaten’s knowledge was by comparing his theory with that of Aristotle (384-322 BCE), the brilliant pupil of Plato. Aristotle tested his ideas in the field of embryology by conducting experiments, and his biochemical theory of human procreation likens the action of male semen on menstrual blood (a woman’s contribution) in the womb to ‘rennet,’ curdled milk used to prepare cheese (Generation of Animals, 739b). For Aristotle human procreation was all about the man who contributed sperm, with the woman little more than a convenient incubator of the foetus.

Unlike the heretic pharaoh, he was oblivious of the existence of an ovum (or egg) produced by a woman through ovulation. So Akhenaten’s theory of human procreation ̶ a thousand years earlier ̶ was more advanced than the one presented by Aristotle (see Joseph Needham, A History of Embryology, Cambridge University Press, 1959, pp. 21f.,37-56).

3. The Next Post: the Biblical Secret that Moses was the Successor of Akhenaten

Our journey through the portal of time continues in the fourth post. We will investigate Akhenaten’s understanding of his identity as the son and prophetic mouthpiece of the Aten, and how this Amarna impulse – rejected by mainstream Egyptian culture in the Ramesside age − came to powerful expression through Moses the Israelite prophet of Yahweh.