Lamaism (for lack of a better term) is a very different animal than, say, Sri Lankan Buddhism. My reading is almost exclusively confined to Tibetan works and Mahayana texts that are revered there. I particularly enjoyed the end result of Nagarjuna's Mulamadhyamakakarika - I was sitting there wondering how he was going to say that nirvana is permanent after everything else he had analyzed and declared impermanent, and he then came to the fundamental conclusion that nirvana is not a permanent phenomenon, nor is it distinct from samsara. It was a mind-blowing conclusion that leads me to sometimes wonder why more Buddhists don't discuss it.

Regarding Akhenaten or Egypt's influence on Greece, there isn't really much of the substance you're looking for because it really just isn't there. The black power writers are wrong on pretty much everything Egypt-related. Egypt was strong in mathematics and engineering, and its wisdom literature almost certainly influenced Hebrew wisdom literature (try looking at R.B. Parkinson's Reading Egyptian Poetry), but its astronomy was (contrary to popular belief) very underdeveloped. The very word "chemistry" comes from the native Egyptian word for Egypt, but even through the Middle Ages it was a very rudimentary science.

If you're looking for information on Egyptian religion, there are tons of books out there but little that would interest one from a theological standpoint because Egyptian religion was fairly standard ancient-world paganism. Religion in Roman Egypt by David Frankfurter is probably one of the better books insofar as it traces pre-Christian sources for some Christian motifs (like Horus slaying Set as a prototype for St. George and the Dragon), it talks about actual practice from a period for which the practice is known (as opposed to hypothetical reconstructions of how it was practiced, à la Stephen Quirke's The Cult of Ra). Frankfurter talks about how peasants would scrape away the wall of a temple and drink the powder to try to cure illness, or pour water over hieroglyphs of a prayer and then collect it, believing it to have been made sacred in the process.

Sarolta Takacs wrote a book called Isis and Sarapis in the Roman World that documents the spread of those cults, but both of those cults were actually Roman adaptations of Egyptian ideas rather than actual Egyptian ones. Jacco Dieleman's Priests, Tongues, and Rites on the magical Leiden papyri is a fascinating book (both of the books last mentioned were published by Brill, which should give you a sense that they are serious works). Garth Fowden's The Egyptian Hermes: A Historical Approach to the Late Pagan Mind discusses Egyptian-influenced thought in the Hellenistic and Roman world, and of course you can always read the Nag Hammadi codices if you want to read about Gnosticism. The Aesculapius is an interesting text that has a purported Egyptian source, though I personally doubt it - it's just another example of Egypt being used as an "exotic" source of "hidden" knowledge, something that the ancients started and modern New Age wackos perpetuate.

If you want to look at older Egyptian religion I don't think you're going to find anything particularly interesting in a philosophical or intellectual way except by way of satisfying curiosity. The Pyramid Texts, the Book of the Dead and the bridge between the two, the Coffin Texts, pretty much lay out a fantastic cosmology replete with animal-headed deities and giant serpents.




On the subject of Akhenaton, I can only imagine you're correct, though I'm wondering if you have any recommendations on some of the broader religious and cosmological trends in Egypt. Anything from a metaphysical/philological perspective, like F.M. Cornford or even Martin Heidegger. Anything that precocious undergraduates and soft-headed graduate students get enthusiastic about. Also: anything that documents the extent and manner of Egypt's intellectual influence on Greece. All I've seen are black writers clutching their pearls and bleating about how there was once a mention of wisdom at some point in Middle Egyptian and so egyptians who are obviously black were really the originators and then being laughed at. They probably go to a poetry slam or something afterwards to get it all out. Anyway, recommendations from either would be great.