Patriarchal Palestine

by A. H. Sayce

The son of Mut-em-ua was Amenophis III., whose long reign of thirty-seven years was as brilliant and successful as that of Thothmes III. At Soleb between the second and third cataracts he built a temple to his own deified self, and engraved upon its columns the names of his vassal states. Among them are Tunip and Kadesh, Carchemish and Apphadana on the Khabûr. Sangar, Assyria, Naharaim, and the Hittites also appear among them, but this must be on the strength of the tribute or presents which had been received from them. The Pharaoh filled his harîm with Asiatic princesses. His queen Teie, who exercised an important influence upon both religion and politics, came from Asia, and among his wives were the sisters and daughters of the kings of Babylonia and Mitanni, while one of his own daughters was married to Burna-buryas the Babylonian sovereign. His marriage with Gilu-khipa, the daughter of Sutarna, king of Aram-Naharaim, was celebrated on a scarab, where it is further related that she was accompanied to Egypt by three hundred and seventeen "maids of honour." Besides allying himself in marriage to the royal houses of Asia, Amenophis III. passed a good deal of his time in Syria and Mesopotamia, amusing himself with hunting lions. During the first ten years of his reign he boasts of having killed no less than one hundred and two of them. It was in the last of these years that he married queen Teie, who is said on scarabs to have been the daughter of "Yua and Tua." Possibly these are contracted forms of Tusratta and Yuni, who were at the time king and queen of Mitanni. But if so, it is curious that no royal titles are given to her parents; moreover, the author of the scarabs has made Yua the father of the queen and Tua her mother. Tuya is the name of an Amorite in one of the Tel el-Amarna letters, while from another of them it would seem as if Teie had been the daughter of the Babylonian king. One of the daughters of Tusratta, Tadu-khipa, was indeed married to Amenophis, but she did not rank as chief queen. In the reign of Meneptah of the nineteenth dynasty the vizier was a native of Bashan, Ben-Mazana by name, whose father was called Yu the elder. Yua may therefore be a word of Amorite origin; and a connection has been suggested between it and the Hebrew Yahveh. This, however, though possible, cannot be proved.

When Amenophis III. died his son Amenophis IV. seems to have been still a minor. At all events the queen-mother Teie became all-powerful in the government of the state. Her son, the new Pharaoh, had been brought up in the religious beliefs of his mother, and had inherited the ideas and tendencies of his Asiatic forefathers. A plaster-cast of his face, taken immediately after death, was discovered by Prof. Petrie at Tel el-Amarna, and it is the face of a refined and thoughtful theorist, of a philosopher rather than of a king, earnest in his convictions almost to fanaticism.

Amenophis IV. undertook no less a task than that of reforming the State religion of Egypt. For many centuries the religion of the priests and scribes had been inclining to pantheism. Inside the temples there had been an esoteric teaching, that the various deities of Egypt were but manifestations of the one supreme God. But it had hardly passed outside them. With the accession of Amenophis IV. to the throne came a change. The young king boldly rejected the religion of which he was officially the head, and professed himself a worshipper of the one God whose visible semblance was the solar disk. Alone of the deities of Egypt Ra, the ancient Sun-god of Heliopolis, was acknowledged to be the representative of the true God. It was the Baal-worship of Syria, modified by the philosophic conceptions of Egypt. The Aten-Ra of the "heretic" Pharaoh was an Asiatic Baal, but unlike the Baal of Canaan he stood alone; there were no other Baals, no Baalim, by the side of him.

Amenophis was not content with preaching and encouraging the new faith; he sought to force it upon his subjects. The other gods of Egypt were proscribed, and the name and head of Amon, the patron god of Thebes, to whom his ancestors had ascribed their power and victories, were erased from the monuments wherever they occurred. Even his own father's name was not spared, and the emissaries of the king, from one end of the country to the other, defaced that portion of it which contained the name of the god. His own name was next changed, and Amenophis IV. became Khu-n-Aten, "the splendour of the solar disk."

Khu-n-Aten's attempt to overthrow the ancient faith of Egypt was naturally resisted by the powerful priesthood of Thebes. A religious war was declared for the first time, so far as we know, in the history of mankind. On the one side a fierce persecution was directed against the adherents of the old creed; on the other side every effort was made to impede and defeat the Pharaoh. His position grew daily more insecure, and at last he turned his back on the capital of his fathers, and built himself a new city far away to the north. The priests of Amon had thus far triumphed; the old idolatrous worship was carried on once more in the great temple of Karnak, though its official head was absent, and Khu-n-Aten with his archives and his court had fled to a safer home. Upper Egypt was left to its worship of Amon and Min, while the king established himself nearer his Canaanite possessions.

Here on the eastern bank of the Nile, about midway between Minyeh and Siût, the new capital was founded on a strip of land protected from attack by a semi-amphitheatre of cliffs. The city, with its palaces and gardens, extended nearly two miles in length along the river bank. In its midst rose the temple of the new god of Egypt, and hard by the palace of the king. Both were brilliant with painting and sculpture, and inlaid work in precious stones and gold. Even the floors were frescoed, while the walls and columns were enamelled or adorned with the most costly materials that the Egyptian world could produce. Here and there were statues of alabaster, of bronze or of gold, some of them almost Greek in form and design. Along with the reform in religion there had gone a reform in art. The old conventionalized art of Egypt was abandoned, and a new art had been introduced which aimed at imitating nature with realistic fidelity.

The mounds which mark the site of Khu-n-Aten's city are now known as Tel el-Amarna. It had a brief but brilliant existence of about thirty years. Then the enemies of the Pharaoh and his work of reform finally prevailed, and his city with its temple and palaces was levelled to the ground. It is from among its ruins that the wondering fellah and explorer of to-day exhume the gorgeous relics of its past.

But among these relics none have proved more precious than the clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform characters, which have revolutionized our conceptions of the ancient East. They were preserved in the Foreign Office of the day. This formed part of the public buildings connected with the palace, and the bricks of which it was built were stamped with an inscription describing its character. Many of the tablets had been brought from the archive chamber of Thebes, but the greater part of the collection belongs to the reign of Khu-n-Aten himself. It consists almost entirely of official correspondence; of letters from the kings of Babylonia and Assyria, of Mesopotamia and Kappadokia, and of despatches from the Egyptian governors and vassal-princes in Syria and Palestine. They furnish us with a living and unexpected picture of Canaan about 1400 B.C.