7. AKHNATON’S TROUBLES.
Akhnaton’s health was so very uncertain that he hastened to construct for himself a tomb in the cliffs behind the City of the Horizon. He selected as the site of his last resting-place a gaunt and rugged valley which here cuts into the hills, leading back, around tumbled rocks and up dry watercourses, to the Arabian desert beyond. It is
“A savage place!—as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover.”
Here Akhnaton elected to be buried, where hyænas prowled and jackals wandered, and where the desolate cry of the night-owls echoed over the rocks. In winter, the cold wind sweeps up this valley and howls around the rocks; in summer the sun makes of it a veritable furnace unendurable to man. There is nothing here to remind one of the God who watches over him, and the tender Aton of the Pharaoh’s conception would seem to have abandoned this place to the spirits of evil. There are no flowers where Akhnaton cut his sepulchre, and no birds sing; for the king believed that his soul, caught up into the noon of Paradise, would need no more the delights of earth.
The tomb consisted of a passage descending into the hill, and leading to a rock-cut hall, the roof of which was supported by four columns. Here stood the sarcophagus of pink granite in which the Pharaoh’s mummy would lie. The walls of this hall were covered with scenes carved in plaster,[76] representing various phases of the Aton worship. From the passage there led another small chamber beyond which a further passage was cut, perhaps to lead to a second hall in which the queen should be buried; but the work was never finished.
The construction of the tomb was interrupted by the death of Akhnaton’s second daughter, Meketaton, who had barely lived to see her ninth birthday. It has already been seen that she seems to have been ailing for some time, and her death was perhaps no surprise to her parents. Their grief, however, was none the less acute for this; and when the body of the little girl had been laid to rest in one of the chambers of her father’s tomb, the walls were covered at Akhnaton’s order with scenes representing the grief of the bereaved family. Here Queen Nefertiti is seen holding in her arms her lately born seventh daughter, whose name, ending in ... t, is now lost; while the five other little girls weep with their parents beside the bier of their dead sister. It is a pathetic picture, and one which stirs our sympathy for a Pharaoh who, unlike all other kings of Egypt, could weep for the loss of a daughter.
This was not Akhnaton’s only grief. His doctrines were not being accepted in Egypt as readily as he had hoped, and he was probably able to detect a considerable amount of insincerity in the attitude of those around him. There was hardly a man whom he could trust to continue in the faith should he himself die; and even as he put the last touches to his temples and his palaces he was aware that he had built his house upon the sand. The empire which he had dreamed of, bound together by the ties of a common worship of Aton, was fast fading out of sight, and the news which reached him from Syria was disquieting in the extreme.
At this time the King of Babylon, whose son had married Akhnaton’s daughter, seems to have been on bad terms with his neighbour, the King of Mitanni, the father of the Pharaoh’s much-loved Queen Nefertiti; and Akhnaton came nigh to being drawn into the quarrel. The Babylonian king had been ill for some time, and in the course of the international correspondence Nefertiti had never once sent her condolences to him, apparently because he was a poor friend to her father. This was much resented, and the King of Babylon at last sent an insulting letter to Akhnaton, in which he states that he is sending him the usual present of decorative objects which etiquette required of him, but that he wishes it to be understood that only a fraction of the gift is intended for the “mistress of his house,” i.e., Nefertiti, since she had not troubled to ask after his health.