Amon

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A major deity of ancient Egypt, worshipped as a god of hidden power and the air, and later merged with Ra as Amun-Ra at Thebes
2. The chief god of the Theban region in ancient Egypt, associated with hiddenness, wind and creative force, who was later fused with the sun god Ra
3. An ancient Egyptian divinity of the air and of concealed or unseen power, whose cult grew into a central state religion centred on Thebes

Etymology: The name of this Egyptian god was spelled in several ways by the time it reached English, and each spelling records a different stage of the transmission. The original Egyptian was "jmn", which scholars vocalize as roughly "Imen" or "Amen", a word meaning "the hidden one" in the sense of the god who was unseen. The Greeks adopted it as "Ammon" (Ἄμμων), and the Coptic-speaking Egyptians of later centuries wrote it as "amoun", the form from which the modern "Amun" descends. The spelling "Amen" that many people associate with the god is a 19th-century artifact. The German Egyptologist Karl Richard Lepsius used "Ȧmen" as his transcription of the Egyptian, and that spelling briefly circulated in scholarship before being abandoned. Its familiarity today comes mainly from its identical sound to the closing word of prayers, a coincidence that has no etymological connection to the god. "Amon" is an alternative spelling of "Amun", the form most Egyptologists now use. It is simply one of several English renderings of the same Egyptian name.