Mono

The word monotheism is derived from the Greek μόνος meaning "single" and θεός meaning "God". The English term was first used by Henry More in the 17th century.

The first monotheist in history seems to be the penultimate Hyksos King of Avaris, named Apophis, who took Sutheck (Set) to be his sole deity, and enforced this god on the population by means of banning worship of all other gods, and allowing the sacred animals of the Egyptians to be killed.[citation needed] Following the second intermediate period, Akhnaton replicated the monotheism of Apothis but with the Aten disk as the one-god of monotheism.

The concept sees a gradual development out of notions of henotheism and monolatrism. In the Ancient Near East, each city had a local patron deity, such as Shamash at Larsa or Sin at Ur. The first claims of global supremacy of a specific god date to the Late Bronze Age, with Akhenaten's Great Hymn to the Aten (connected to Judaism by Sigmund Freud in his Moses and Monotheism), and, depending on dating issues, Zoroaster's Gathas to Ahura Mazda.[citation needed] Currents of monism or monotheism emerge in Vedic India in the same period, with e.g. the Nasadiya Sukta. Philosophical monotheism and the associated concept of absolute good and evil emerges in Classical Antiquity, notably with Plato (c.f. Euthyphro dilemma), elaborated into the idea of The One in Neoplatonism, later culminating in the doctrines of Christology in Early Christianity and finally (by the 7th century) in the radical tawhid in Islam.