The desire of the court for a change of religion is understandable. The cult of the god Amon, as has been said, was so hedged about with conventionalities that free thought was impossible. We have seen, however, that the upper classes were passing through a phase of religious speculation, and they were ready to revolt against the domination of a priesthood which forbade criticism. The worship of the intangible power of the sun, under the name of Aton, offered endless possibilities for the exercise of those tendencies towards the abstract which were now beginning to be felt all over the civilised world. This was man’s first age of philosophical thought, and for the first time in history the gods were being endued with ideal qualities.
Apart from all questions of religion, the priesthood of Amon had obtained such power and wealth that it was a very serious menace to the dignity of the throne. The great organisation which had its headquarters at Karnak had become an incubus which weighed heavily upon the state. For political reasons alone, therefore, it was desirable to push the priests of Heliopolis into a more prominent position.
There was, moreover, a third consideration. The god Aton, with whom Ra and Ra-Horakhti were now being identified, was, we have seen, originally the same as the Syrian and Greek Adonis, the word “Adon” or “Aton” meaning simply “lord.” Thus the propounders of the new doctrines must have dreamt of an Egypto-Syrian empire bound together by the ties of a common religion. With one god understood and worshipped from the cataracts of the Nile to the distant Euphrates, what power could destroy the empire?
3. THE POWER OF QUEEN TIY.
In Amonhotep III. one may see the lazy, speculative Oriental, too opinionated and too vain to bear with the stiff routine of his fathers, and yet too lacking in energy to formulate a new religion. On the other hand, there is every reason to suppose that Queen Tiy possessed the ability to impress the claims of the new thought upon her husband’s mind, and gradually to turn his eyes, and those of the court, away from the sombre worship of Amon, “the unknown god,” into the direction of the brilliant cult of the sun. Those who have travelled in Egypt will realise how completely the land is dominated by the sun. The blue skies, the shining rocks, the golden desert, the verdant fields, all seem to cry out for joy of the sunshine. The extraordinary energy which one may feel in Egypt at sunrise, and the deep melancholy which sometimes accompanies the red nightfall, must have been felt by Tiy also in her palace at Thebes.
As the years passed the power and influence of Queen Tiy increased; and now that she had borne a son to the king there was added to her great position as royal wife the equally great rôle of royal mother. Never before had a queen been so freely represented on all the king’s monuments, nor had so fine a series of titles been given before to the wife of a Pharaoh. At Sedênga, far up in the Sudan, her husband erected a temple for her; and in distant Sinai a beautiful portrait head of her was recently found. All visitors to Thebes have seen her figures by the side of the legs of the two great colossi at the edge of the Western Desert; and the huge statues of herself and her husband, now in the Cairo Museum, will have been seen by those who have visited that collection. Of Grilukhipa,[16] however, and the king’s other wives, one hears nothing at all: Queen Tiy relegated them to the background almost before their marriage ceremonies were over.
By the time that Amonhotep III. had reigned for thirty years or so, he had ceased to give much attention to state affairs, and the power had almost entirely passed into the capable hands of Tiy. Already an influence, which we may presume to have been to a large extent hers, was being felt in many directions: Ra-Horakhti and Aton were being brought into the foreground, a tone of thought which can hardly be regarded as purely Egyptian was being developed, the art was undergoing modifications and had risen to a pitch of excellence never attained before or after. The exquisite low-reliefs of the end of the reign of Amonhotep III.—for example, those to be seen at Thebes in the tombs of Khaemhat and Rames,[17] both of which are definitely dated to the close of the reign—stir one almost as do the works of the early Florentine masters. There is an elusive grace in the dainty figures there sculptured, which, through another medium and under other laws of convention, cause them to appeal with the same force of indefinable sweetness as do the figures in the works of Filipino Lippi and Botticelli. In the mass of Egyptian painting and sculpture of secondary importance such gems as these have been overlooked and have not been appreciated by the public; but the present writer ventures to think that some day they will set the heart of all art-lovers dancing as danced those of Queen Tiy’s great masters.
The court in which the little prince passed his earliest years was more brilliant than ever it had been before, and Queen Tiy presided over scenes of indescribable splendour. Amonhotep III. has been truly called “the Magnificent”; and at no period, save that of Thothmes III., were the royal treasuries so full or the nobles so wealthy. Out of a pageant of festivities, from amidst the noise of song and laughter, the little sad-eyed prince first emerges on to the stage of history, led by the hand of Queen Tiy; but as he appears before us, above the clink of the golden wine-bowls, above the sound of the timbrels, one seems to hear the lilt of a more simple song, and the peaceful singing of a lark.
4. AKHNATON’S MARRIAGE.
During the last years of his reign the Pharaoh, although well under fifty years of age,[18] seems to have suffered from permanent ill-health. On two occasions the King of Mitanni sent to Egypt a miracle-working statuette of the goddess Ishtar, apparently in the hope that Amonhotep might be cured of his illness by it. It is probable that the king had never been a very strong man. Having been born when his father—himself extremely delicate—was but a child, he had had little chance of enjoying a robust middle age, and he passed on to his children this inherent weakness. One hears no more of his daughters,[19] whom we have seen mourning for their grandparents Yuaa and Tuau, and there is some likelihood that they died young. The little Prince Amonhotep was already developing constitutional weaknesses which rendered his life very precarious. His skull was misshapen, and he must have been subject to occasional epileptic fits. And now Queen Tiy gave birth to a daughter, who was named Baketaton in honour of the new god, and who seems to have lived less than a score of years, since nothing more is heard of her after her twelfth or thirteenth year.