It was to raise this new capital, together with all the houses and villas surrounding it, that thousands of captive slaves were now put to work deep within the quarries of Hatnub, quarries famed alike on account of the superb quality of their fine white limestone and the translucency of their striated alabasters.
In building Pharaoh’s new city gigantic blocks in both of these rich materials were brought down from the hills along a specially leveled causeway. Each giant block had been secured upon great wooden sleds of hardened sycamore, and hauled to the new site by the concerted efforts of sweating oxen and groaning sleds.
Overseers were told of to prod the oxen; others to lash the scarred backs of the unhappy Asiatic slaves. The chief of each section occupied himself in pouring water upon the ground to prevent the sled from taking fire by friction, or oil to facilitate the movement of the sled.
When not so engaged the chief sang a love-song in time to the thwack of the overseers’ staves, as they further lacerated the bloody backs of the staggering captives. It was commonly said of a chief of a quarry-gang that he needed but three canopic jars at his entombment, since he lacked—a heart.
At the site of the new city other dull-eyed Asiatics, similarly flogged into line, worked waist-deep in sandy pits or muddy ditches. Day in, day out, the heavy wooden brick-carriers bit into the cracked and blistered shoulders of emasculated Amu.
Indeed, long before the quickening rays of Aton had mounted above the low hills which shut in the City of the Sun to the east, sweat, mud and blood had baked upon the naked backs of Ethiopian, Libyan, Canaanite and Kheftiu alike. Nay, Egyptians themselves, the down-trodden herdsmen, were as like as not torn from their ripening fields to toil perhaps at pressing bricks for Pharaoh’s palace, library and villa, or, cursed, cuffed and beaten by the shrieking taskmasters, to crack their thews at the well-nigh smoking ropes which encircle some colossal shaft, shrine or statue intended for the great temple of the sun-god Aton.
From their lofty posts above the valley watchful vultures craned their necks, as they slowly circled earthward. Such a stupendous undertaking exacted a heavy toll of death.
But what of deserted Thebes, of Huy and the priests of Amen?
Ever since the theft of the cultus-statue of the temple by the Atonites the priests at Karnak had shut themselves up behind the great walls of the Temple of Amen. Behind those massive walls they had continued to intone the ritual of Amen to an empty shrine and the Theban Recention of the Book of the Dead to deserted courts and forgotten offering-tables. Aton and its ritual they anathematized, though an Aton shrine had, for a time, been forced upon them.