4. THE PERSECUTION OF AKHNATON’S MEMORY.
The priests of Amon-Ra had now begun openly to denounce Akhnaton as a villain and a heretic, and as they restored the name of their god where it had been erased, so they hammered out the name and figure of Akhnaton wherever they saw it. Presently they pulled down the Aton temple at Karnak, and used the blocks of stone in the building of a pylon for Amon-Ra. Soon it was felt that Akhnaton’s body could no longer lie in state, together with that of Queen Tiy, in the Valley of the Tombs of the Kings. The sepulchre was therefore opened once more and the name “Akhnaton” was everywhere erased from the inscriptions, as was his figure from the scenes upon the shrine of Queen Tiy. The mummy was lifted from its coffin and the royal name was cut out of the gold ribbons which passed round it, both at the back and the front. It was then replaced in the coffin, and from this the name was also erased.
The question may be asked why it was that the body was not torn to pieces and scattered to the four winds, since the king was now so fiercely hated. The Egyptians, however, entertained a peculiar reverence for the bodies of their dead, and it would have been a sacrilege to destroy the mummy even of this heretic. No thought could be entertained of breaking up the body upon which the divine touch of kingship had fallen: that would have been against all the sentiments which we know the Egyptians to have held. The cutting out of the name of the mummy was sufficient punishment: for thereby the soul of the king was debarred from all the benefits of the earthly prayers of his descendants, and became a nameless outcast, wandering unrecognised and unpitied through the vast underworld. It was the name “Akhnaton” which was hated so fiercely; and one may perhaps suppose that the priests would have been willing to substitute the king’s earlier name, Amonhotep, upon the mummy had they been pressed to do so. His name and figure as Amonhotep IV. is not damaged upon the monuments; but only the representations of him after the adoption of the name Akhnaton have been attacked.
The tomb, polluted by the presence of the heretic, was no longer fit for Tiy to rest in; and the body of the queen was therefore carried elsewhere, perhaps to the sepulchre of her husband Amonhotep III. The shrine, or outer coffin, in which her mummy had lain was pulled to pieces, and an attempt was made to carry it out of the tomb to its owner’s new resting-place, but this arduous task was presently abandoned, and one portion of the shrine was left in the passage, while the rest remained in sections in the burial-chamber. Some of the queen’s toilet utensils which had been buried with her were also left, probably by mistake. The body of Akhnaton, his name taken from him, was now the sole occupant of the tomb. The coffin in which it lay rested upon a four-legged bier some two feet or so from the ground, and in a niche in the wall above it stood the four canopic jars. And thus, with a curse, the priests left their great enemy. The entrance of the tomb was blocked with stones, and sealed with the seal of the necropolis; and all traces of its mouth were hidden by rocks and débris.
The priests would not now permit the name of Akhnaton to pass a man’s lips, and by the end of the reign of Horemheb, the unfortunate boy was spoken of in official documents as “that criminal.” Not forty years had passed since Akhnaton’s death, yet the priesthood of Amon was as powerful as it had ever been at any period of its existence. There were still living men who had been old enough at the time of the Aton power to grasp its doctrines; and those same eyes which had looked upon the fair City of the Horizon might now disturb the creatures of the desert in the ruined courts where the grave boy-Pharaoh had presided so lately. These men joined their voices to that crowd of priests who, not daring to allow the word Akhnaton to form itself upon their lips, poured curses upon the excommunicated and nameless “criminal.” Through starry space their execrations passed, searching out the wretched ghost of the boy, and banning him, as they supposed, even in the dim uncertainties of the Lands of Death. Over the hills of the west, up the stairs of the moon, and down into the caverns under the world, the poor twittering shadow was hunted and chased by the relentless magic of the men whom he had tried to reform. There was no place for his memory upon earth, and in the under-world the priests denied him a stone upon which to lay his head. It is not easy now to realise the full meaning to the Egyptians of the excommunication of a soul: cut off from the comforts of human prayers; hungry, forlorn, and wholly desolate; forced at last to whine upon the outskirts of villages, to snivel upon the dung-heaps, to rake with shadowy fingers amidst the refuse of mean streets for fragments of decayed food with which to allay the pangs of hunger caused by the absence of funeral-offerings. To such a pitiful fate the priests of Amon consigned “the first individual in history”; and as an outcast amongst outcasts, a whimpering shadow in a place of shadows, the men of Thebes bade us leave the great idealist, doomed to the horrors of a life which will not end, to the misery of a death that brings no oblivion.