History of Egypt, Chaldea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria in the Light of Recent Discovery

by L. W. King; H. R. Hall

The Tomb of Pentu (No. 5) at Tell el-Amarna, inhabited by Mr. de G. Davies during his work for the Archaeological Survey of Egypt (Egypt Exploration Fund). About 1400 B.C.

Among them are statues of the late Middle Kingdom, including one of King Usertsen (Senusret) IV of the XIIIth Dynasty. There are also reliefs of the reign of Amenhetep I, which are remarkable for the delicacy of their workmanship and the sureness of their technique.

We know that the temple was built as early as the time of TJsertsen, for in it have been found one or two of his blocks; and no doubt the original shrine, which was rebuilt in the time of Philip Arrhidseus, was of the same period, but hitherto no remains of the centuries between his time and that of Hatshepsu had been found. With M. Legrain’s work in the greatest temple of Thebes we finish our account of the new discoveries in the chief city of ancient Egypt, as we began it with the work of M. Naville in the oldest temple there.

One of the most interesting questions connected with the archaeology of Thebes is that which asks whether the heretical disk-worshipper Akhunaten (Amenhetep IV) erected buildings there, and whether any trace of them has ever been discovered. To those who are interested in Egyptian history and religion the transitory episode of the disk-worship heresy is already familiar. The precise character of the heretical dogma, which Amenhetep IV proclaimed and desired his subjects to. accept, has lately been well explained by Mr. de Garis Davies in his volumes, published by the “Archaeological Survey of Egypt” branch of the Egypt Exploration Fund, on the tombs of el-Amarna. He shows that the heretical doctrine was a monotheism of a very high order. Amenhetep IV (or as he preferred to call himself, Akhunaten, “Glory of the Disk”) did not, as has usually been supposed, merely worship the Sun-disk itself as the giver of life, and nothing more. He venerated the glowing disk merely as the visible emanation of the deity behind it, who dispensed heat and life to all living things through its medium. The disk was, so to speak, the window in heaven through which the unknown God, the “Lord of the Disk,” shed a portion of his radiance on the world. Now, given an ignorance of the true astronomical character of the sun, we see how eminently rational a religion this was. In effect, the sun is the source of all life upon this earth, and so Akhunaten caused its rays to be depicted each with a hand holding out the sign of life to the earth. The monotheistic worship of the sun alone is certainly the highest form of pagan religion, but Akhunaten saw further than this. His doctrine was that there was a deity behind the sun, whose glory shone through it and gave us life. This deity was unnamed and unnamable; he was “the Lord of the Disk.” We see in his heresy, therefore, the highest attitude to which religious ideas had attained before the days of the Hebrew prophets.

This religion seems to have been developed out of the philosophical speculations of the priests of the Sun at Heliopolis. Akhunaten with unwise iconoclastic zeal endeavoured to root out the worship of the ancient gods of Egypt, and especially that of Amen-Bà, the ruler of the Egyptian pantheon, whose primacy in the hearts of the people made him the most redoubtable rival of the new doctrine. But the name of the old Sun-god Bà-Harmaehis was spared, and it is evident that Akhunaten regarded him as more or less identical with his god.

It has been supposed by Prof. Petrie that Queen Tii, the mother of Akhunaten, was of Mitannian (Armenian) origin, and that she brought the Aten religion to Egypt from her native land, and taught it to her son. Certainly it seems as though the new doctrine had made some headway before the death of Amenhetep III, but we have no reason to attribute it to Tii, or to suppose that she brought it with her from abroad. There is no proof whatever that she was not a native Egyptian, and the mummies of her parents, Iuaa and Tuaa, are purely Egyptian in facial type. It seems undoubted that the Aten cult was a development of pure Egyptian religious thought.

At first Akhunaten tried to establish his religion at Thebes alongside that of Amen and his attendant pantheon. He seems to have built a temple to the Aten there, and we see that his courtiers began to make tombs for themselves in the new realistic style of sculptural art, which the king, heretical in art as in religion, had introduced. The tomb of Barnes at Shêkh ‘Abd el-Kûrna has on one side of the door a representation of the king in the old regular style, and on the other side one in the new realistic style, which depicts him in all the native ugliness in which this strange truth-loving man seems to have positively gloried. We find, too, that he caused a temple to the Aten to be erected in far-away Napata, the capital of Nubia, by Jebel Barkal in the Sudan. The facts as to the Theban and Napata temples have been pointed out by Prof. Breasted, of Chicago.

But the opposition of the Theban priesthood was too strong. Akhunaten shook the dust of the capital off his feet and retired to the isolated city of Akhet-aten, “the Glory of the Disk,” at the modern Tell el-Amarna, where he could philosophize in peace, while his kingdom was left to take care of itself. He and his wife Nefret-iti, who seems to have been a faithful sharer of his views, reigned over a select court of Aten-worship-ping nobles, priests, and artists. The artists had under Akhunaten an unrivalled opportunity for development, of which they had already begun to take considerable advantage before the end of his reign and the restoration of the old order of ideas. Their style takes on itself an almost bizarre freedom, which reminds us strongly of the similar characteristic in Mycenaean art. There is a strange little relief in the Berlin Museum of the king standing cross-legged, leaning on a staff, and languidly smelling a flower, while the queen stands by with her garments blown about by the wind. The artistic monarch’s graceful attitude is probably a faithful transcript of a characteristic pose.

We see from this what an Egyptian artist could do when his shackles were removed, but unluckily Egypt never produced another king who was at the same time an original genius, an artist, and a thinker. When Akhunaten died, the Egyptian artists’ shackles were riveted tighter than ever. The reaction was strong. The kingdom had fallen into anarchy, and the foreign empire which his predecessors had built up had practically been thrown to the winds by Akhunaten. The whole is an example of the confusion and disorganization which ensue when a philosopher rules. Not long after the heretic’s death the old religion was fully restored, the cult of the disk was blotted out, and the Egyptians returned joyfully to the worship of their myriad deities. Akhunaten’s ideals were too high for them. The débris of the foreign empire was, as usual in such cases, put together again, and customary law and order restored by the conservative reactionaries who succeeded him. Henceforth Egyptian civilization runs an uninspired and undeveloping course till the days of the Saïtes and the Ptolemies. This point in the history of Egypt, therefore, forms a convenient stopping-place at which to pause, while we turn once more to Western Asia, and ascertain to what extent recent excavations and research have thrown new light upon the problems connected with the rise and history of the Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian Empires.