The Egypt of the Hebrews and Herodotos

by A. H. Sayce

The Pharaoh had been named by his father, Amenôphis iii., after himself, but Amenôphis iv. had not long mounted the throne before he gave himself a new name, and was henceforth known as Khu-n-Aten, “the Glory of the Solar Disk.” The change of name was the outward sign and token of a religious revolution. The king publicly renounced the ancient religion of Egypt, of which he was the official representative, and declared himself a convert to an Asiatic form of faith. The very name of Amon, the supreme god of Thebes and of the royal family to which Khu-n-Aten belonged, was proscribed, and erased from the monuments wherever it occurred. In the temples and tombs and [pg 054] quarries alike it was defaced; even the name of the king's own father, which contained it, was not spared. When the arm of the persecutor was thus extended to the written and sculptured monument, we cannot suppose that the adherents of the ancient cult would be treated with a gentle hand.

It was not long before the Pharaoh and the powerful hierarchy of Thebes were at open war. But the priesthood proved too strong for the king. He quitted the capital of his fathers and built himself a new city farther north. It is the site of this city which is now covered by the mounds of Tel el-Amarna.

Towards the northern side of it rose the palace of the Pharaoh, whose ruins have been explored by Professor Flinders Petrie. It was one of the most gorgeous edifices ever erected by man. The walls and columns were inlaid with gold and bronze and stones of various colours, and adorned with statuary and painting. Even the floors were frescoed; and, if we may judge from the one discovered by Professor Petrie, the art was of the highest order. The plants and animals and fish depicted on it are drawn with a perfection and a truthfulness to nature which seem to belong to the nineteenth century of our era rather than to the fifteenth century before Christ.

The public offices of the government adjoined the palace, and around it were the houses of the nobles [pg 055] and officers of the court. They too reflected the gay and brilliant adornment of the royal palace, and their walls were enlivened by frescoes, which represented the scenes of every-day life. Among the public offices was the archive-chamber, to which the documents of state had been transferred from Thebes, as well as the foreign office, where scribes were busily engaged in correspondence with the governors of the Asiatic provinces of the empire and the princes of foreign states.

In the centre of the city rose the great temple of Aten, the solar disk, the new object of the Pharaoh's adoration. Though the name was Egyptian, the deity and his cult were alike of Asiatic origin. The Aten, in fact, to whom the temple had been reared, was the Asiatic Baal. He was the Sun-god, whose visible manifestation was the solar disk. But it was a Sun-god who was not only supreme over all other gods; they were absorbed into him, and existed only in so far as he endowed them with divine life. It is thus that Aten-Ra, the solar disk of the Sun-god, is addressed by the Pharaoh's queen: “Thou disk of the Sun, thou living god, there is none other beside thee! Thou givest health to the eyes through thy beams, Creator of all things!” One of Khu-n-Aten's officers, on the walls of his tomb, speaks in similar terms: “Thou, O god, who in truth art the [pg 056] living one, standest before the two eyes. Thou art he which createst what never was, which formest everything, which art in all things: we also have come into being through the word of thy mouth.”

The new faith of Egypt was a combination of the worship of Baal with the philosophic conceptions which had gathered round the worship of the Egyptian Sun-god, Ra, at Heliopolis. The worship of Baal had lost its grossness, and been refined into a form of monotheism. But the monotheism was essentially pantheistic; there was, indeed, but one god to whom adoration was paid, but he was universally diffused throughout nature. The personal character of the Asiatic Baal seems to have disappeared in the Aten worship of Egypt.

Along with the new religion came a new style of art. Asiatic artists and workmen manufactured the variegated glass and bright-coloured porcelain of Tel el-Amarna, or discarded the conventionalism of Egyptian art in their delineation of animal and vegetable life, while architecture branched out in new directions, and the sculptor exaggerated the peculiarities of the king's personal appearance. Every effort, in fact, was made to break away from the past, and from the mannerisms and traditions of Egyptian art. That art had been closely associated with the ancient religion of the country, and [pg 057] with the change of religion came a change in all things else.

The causes of the change can now in great measure be traced. To some extent it was due to the character of the king himself. A plaster cast of his face, taken immediately after death, has been found by Professor Petrie, and is an eloquent witness of what the man himself was like. It is the face of a philosopher and a mystic, of one whose interest lay rather in the problems of religious belief than in the affairs of state. In studying it we feel that the man to whom it belonged was destined to be a religious reformer.

But this destiny was assisted by the training and education which Khu-n-Aten had received. His mother, Teie, bore a foremost part in the introduction of the cult of Aten. She must have been a woman of strong character, and her influence over her son must also have been great. If, as is probable, Khu-n-Aten was very young when he ascended the throne, the religious reform he endeavoured to effect must have been in great measure his mother's work. That she had aroused deep feelings of hatred among the adherents of the older creed may be gathered from the condition of Khu-n-Aten's tomb. Though the body of the Pharaoh was despoiled, and the sarcophagus in which it rested shattered into [pg 058] fragments, they had nevertheless been deposited in the sepulchre that had been constructed to receive them. But no trace of the queen-mother's mummy has been met with, and the corridor in the royal tomb, which seems to have been excavated for her, has never been finished, any more than the two or three tombs which were cut in the immediate neighbourhood. After the death of her son, Queen Teie seems to have found no protector from the vengeance of her enemies.

It is probable that Teie was of Asiatic birth, though no certain proof of it has yet been found. Her husband, Amenôphis iii., was fond of connecting himself by marriage with the royal houses of Asia, and more than one of the wives who occupied a secondary rank in the Pharaoh's household were of Asiatic extraction. His own mother had been an Asiatic princess, the daughter of the king of Mitanni, the Aram-Naharaim of the Old Testament. From Mitanni also had come two of his own wives, as well as the wife of his son and successor, Amenôphis iv. (Khu-n-Aten).