Akhnaton, King of Egypt

by Dmitry Sergeyevich Merezhkovsky

Some were fighting and others plundering.

The tender stalks of the flowers in the beds broke under the soldiers' heavy tread. There were pools of blood on the floor of the chapel. The wood of the sacred pillars was chopped for bonfires, the purple of the sacred curtains was torn to make leg wrappings; the gold was scraped off the walls with fingernails. An old woman from the Jewish settlement, seeing that a precious casket had been screwed into the floor and could not be carried away, bit at it so hard that she secured a pearl with her teeth.

Naaman, the prophet, also from the Jews' Settlement, was stamping on a gilded wooden disc of Aton—a gold one would not have been given even to a prophet—dancing and shouting.

"God of vengeance, Lord God of vengeance, show Thyself! Arise, judge of the earth, and judge the proud!"

Cellars were broken into. They were so flooded with wine that people went down on their hands and knees and lapped it up. People drank themselves to death. Two drunken men had a fight and falling to the bottom of the cellar were drowned in the wine.

The screams of women and the blood of murdered children formed a ghastly tribute to their respective gods—Aton, Amon or Jahve.

The Sun's garden, God's paradise, was turned into hell.

A handful of Achaeans and Trojans, who had not been massacred in the pond, retreated towards the palace that stood in the narrow part between the pond and the north wall of the garden. The palace was defended by Mahu's war-chariots, the black archers, Lycian slingers and Hittite Amazons.

Hearing that the king was in the palace, Tuta's soldiers attacked it: they wanted to take the king, dead or alive, so as to end the war.

At the same time Tutankhaton's main forces were approaching from the south and Ramose's troops from the north. The great battle that was to decide the destinies of Egypt began under the very walls of Maru Aton. It looked phantom-like in the darkness of the night, the white moonlight and the red glow of the conflagration. The blast of the trumpets, the beat of the drums, the neighing of horses, the rumble of chariots, the clashing of swords, the whistling of arrows, the moans of the dying and the cries of the victors were all mingled in one seething hell. And the centre of it, the fixed axis in the whirling hurricane of the war, was the quiet palace tower.