Before the Church · c. 1350 BC
The Great Hymn to the Aten
Attributed to Akhenaten
What it is
Carved in a courtier's tomb at Amarna. When the sun sets the land is in darkness as though dead, lions come out and every snake bites; when it rises the Two Lands are in festival, people wash and dress and lift their arms, the cattle browse, the birds fly up with wings adoring.
Why it lasted
Psalm 104 follows its sequence closely enough — night and the beasts, dawn and human work, ships and the great sea, creatures waiting for their food — that direct dependence at some remove is the usual explanation.
Scripture it works from
Where to read it
Public domain and free to read in full, though not held here. The archives below have it.
These open a search on each archive rather than a direct link, which is the honest way to point at an edition nobody here has checked line by line.
Read next