But Amon was usually of human form, with two lofty feathers rising above his crown. Under the Theban dynasties he became the supreme god, first of Egypt, then of the Egyptian empire. All other gods had to give way before him, and to lose their individuality in his. His supremacy began with the rise of the Eleventh and Twelfth Dynasties; it was checked for a moment by the Hyksos conquest of Egypt, but in the end the check proved only a fresh impulse. It was the princes of Thebes, the servants of Amon, who raised the standard of revolt against the Asiatic intruder, and finally drove him back to Asia. Amon had been their helper in the war of independence, and it was he who afterwards gained their victories for them in Syria and Ethiopia. The glory and wealth of Egypt were all due to him, and upon his temple and city accordingly the spoils of Asia were lavished, and trains of captives worked under the lash. The Hyksos invasion, moreover, and the long war of independence which followed, destroyed the power of the old feudal princes, while it strengthened and developed that of the Pharaoh. The influence of the provincial gods passed away with the feudal princes whose patrons they had been; the supremacy of the Pharaoh implied also the supremacy of the Pharaoh's god. There was none left in Egypt to dispute the proud boast of the Theban, that Amon was "the one god."
But he became the one god not by destroying, but by absorbing the other gods of the country. The doctrines of the Ennead and the Trinity had prepared the way. They had taught how easily the gods of the State religion could be merged one into the other; that their attributes were convertible, and yet, at the same time, were all that gave them a distinct personality. The attributes were to the Egyptian little more than the concrete symbols by which they were expressed in the picture writing; the personality was little more than a name. And both symbols and name could be changed or interchanged at will.
The process of fusion was aided by the identification of Amon with Ra. The spread of the solar cult of Heliopolis had introduced the name and worship of Ra into all the temples of Egypt; the local gods had, as it were, been incorporated into him, and even the goddesses forced to become his wives or his daughters. The Pharaoh, even the Theban Pharaoh, was still "the son of the sun-god"; as Amon was also his "father," it was a necessary conclusion that Amon and Ra were one and the same.