When was monotheism created, and by what group of people?

Answer 1

Marc---Akhenaten did but no one else in Egypt did. My religion is Egyptian and we are monolatrous. One supreme force that has many forms/manifestations. Akhenaten was the one that had Aten as the only thing worshipped. It is just a disc and not even a God.

Answer 2

My understanding is that the early Zoroastrians and Akhenatens followers lived at roughly around the same time - Zoroastra lived sometime around 1000-1500 BC in Afganistan and Akhenaten around 1300BC in Egypt. But I believe it was the Zoroastrians who had a big impact on the monotheism that was to follow in Israel and Judah.

Zorasta was a priest who claimed that the one true god had revealed himself to him. All the other gods were relegated to angels. There were also demons (with a striking similarity to the main animal-like gods of the neighbouring Hindu religion) and a head bad guy. God was represented by fire, as the head god in the previous religion had been, hence good was light and evil black. Another innovation was that if you were good, you went to heaven, and bad went to hell (kind of like in the nearby Hinduism where how good you were affected what you would reincarnated as).

Whether Zorastra or Akhenaten was first, I believe that it is from Zorastra that Judaism, Christianity and Islam got a lot of their ideas (monotheism, heaven, hell, angels, demons, the devil, light and dark). As the Persians made Zorastrianism their official state religion and then conquered most of the middle east, including Israel, prior to the writing of the old testamant.

Answer 3

No-one knows, as the concept appears to be older than recorded history. The Sun was the first monotheistic god, and is the basis of monotheism worldwide.

Answer 4

You can say it was the Egyptians who first had monotheism. Akanaten got rid of all the temples (because the priests became too powerfull) and instituted worship of the Atten, or Atten-Ra (the sun disk).
After Akanaten's death, almost all traces of this were wiped out, because he was considered a heritic. Most physical representations of him were destroyed, his name removed from temple walls. It was considered a grave insult to do such back then, like spitting on someone's grave.

Answer 5

Ikhnaten or Akhnaton, a pharoah of Egypt, is the first recorded monotheist. He was born Amenhotep, named after Amen-Ra, the chief god of united Egypt. His god was Aten, symbolized by the disc of the Sun, and he changed his name to include it. Moses was probably influenced by Ikhnaten. Moses is said to've written the earliest books of the Bible, so he could write them to include his god he called Yahweh, but Moses wasn't a monotheist. He was a henotheist, i.e. he believed many gods existed but swore to serve one above all others, as the First Commandment says. Zoroaster of Persia invented a divine war between good Ahuramazda and evil Ahriman. During the Persian Captivity, Hebrew priests saw it was a neater system to have separate sources of good and evil, so they copied Ahriman and renamed him Lucifer the Satan or the Devil. Before this, Yahweh sent both good and evil, e.g. hardening a pharoah's heart in Exodus. A serpent tempted Eve, not a devil. Some Bible verses are contradictory as a result of the Persian influence. (Others are contradictory without it.) Both Yahweh and Lucifer are credited with certain things, e.g. David's census. EDIT: Someone said Zoroaster was first, but he had two main gods and many minor ones, as I've said. He lived in the 6th Century B.C.

Answer 6

The first recorded instance of monotheism was by the Pharoah Akenaten (King Tuts father). He got rid of the pantheon of gods and made the worship of the Ahten (Sun) the religion of egypt.

Answer 7

The first monotheist was Akenhatan, the Egyptian pharoah, who believed that by divine right, he was chosen to be ruler of Egypt. He made Ra the only god that could be worshipped in Egypt during that time.

Answer 8

Yes, as far as is known, it was one Egyptian Pharaoh who tried a monotheist society, but once he died, they went back to all their old gods.

the Jews were the first ones to make it stick. They were originally polytheists like everyone else, but eventually figured out that they could gain more power and control claiming their god was the one and only.

Answer 9

The Egyptians i think. Amon Ra

Answer 10

The Jews - The time of Moses.