IKHNATON, THE RELIGIOUS REVOLUTIONARY

By J.H. Breasted

I. IKHNATON'S RELIGIOUS MOVEMENT

AMENHOTEP IV, the young and inexperienced son of Amenhotep III and the queen Tiy, inherited a difficult situation. The conflict of new forces with tradition was, as we have seen, already felt by his father. The task before him was so to manipulate these conflicting forces as eventually to give reasonable play to the new and modern tendency, but at the same time to conserve enough of the old to prevent a catastrophe.

It was a problem of practical statesmanship, but Amenhotep IV saw it chiefly in its ideal aspects. His mother, Tiy, and his queen, Nofretete, perhaps a woman of Asiatic birth, and a favorite priest, Eye, the husband of his nurse, formed his immediate circle. The first two probably exercised a powerful influence over him, and were given a prominent share in the government, at least as far as its public manifestations were concerned: for, in a manner quite surpassing his father's similar tendency, he constantly appeared in public with both his mother and his wife. The lofty though impracticable aims which he had in view must have found a ready response in these his two most influential counselors. Thus, while Egypt was in sore need of a vigorous and skilled administrator, the young king was in close counsel with a priest and two perhaps gifted women, who, however able, were not of the fibre to show the new Pharaoh what the empire really demanded. Instead of gathering the army so sadly needed in Naharin, as Thutmose III would have done Amenhotep IV immersed himself heart and soul in the thought of the time, and the philosophizing theology of the priests was of more importance to him than all the provinces of Asia. In such contemplations he gradually developed ideals and purposes which make him the most remarkable of all the Pharaohs, and, we may even say, the first individual in human history.

The profound influence of Egypt's imperial position had not been limited to the externals of life, to the manners and customs of the people, to the rich and prolific art, pregnant with new possibilities of beauty, but had extended likewise to thought and religion. In the Old Kingdom the Sun—God was conceived as a Pharaoh, whose kingdom was Egypt. With the expansion of the Egyptian kingdom into a world-empire it was inevitable that the domain of the god should likewise expand. As the kingdom had long since found expression in religion, so now the empire was a powerful influence upon religious thought. This is evident in the remark of a great military leader like Thutmose III regarding his god (Amon): “He seeth the whole earth hourly”. If this was true it was because the sword of the Pharaoh had carried the power of Egypt's god to the limits of Egypt's empire.

While this was a more or less mechanical and unconscious process, it was accompanied by an intellectual awakening which shook the old Egyptian traditions to the foundations and set the men of the age to thinking in a larger world. Of what stuff Thutmose III was made we have already seen. The idea of universal power, of a world-empire, was visibly and tangibly bodied forth in his career. The first human personality of world­wide aspects was sure to affect men’s ideas of divine personality. There is a touch of universalism now discernible in the theology of the empire: it is directly due to such impressions as Thutmose III and his successors made. Egypt was forced out of the immemorial isolation of her narrow valley into world-relations, with which the theology of the time must reckon—relations with which the Sun-god was inextricably involved. Commercial connections maintained from an immemorially remote past, had resulted in the Middle Kingdom in a literature of adventure in far-off countries, as illustrated by such tales as the Shipwrecked Sailor or the Story of Sinuhe, but such knowledge of distant lands had done little toward bringing the great world without into the purview of Egyptian religious thinking. The limits of the dominion of the Egyptian gods had been fixed as the outer fringes of the Nile valley long before the outside world was familiar to the Nile-dwellers; and merely commercial intercourse with a larger world had not been able to shake the tradition. Many a merchant had seen a stone fall in distant Babylon and in Thebes alike, but it had not occurred to him, or to any man in that far-off age, that the same natural force reigned in these widely separated countries. Many a merchant of that day, too, had seen the sun rise behind the Babylonian ziggurats, as it did among the clustered obelisks of Thebes; but the thought of the age had not yet come to terms with such far-reaching facts as these. It was universalism expressed in terms of imperial power which first caught the imagination of the thinking men of the empire, and disclosed to them the universal sweep of the Sun-god’s dominion as a physical fact. In the Ancient East monotheism was but imperialism in religion.

Already under Amenhotep III an old name for the material sun, Aton, had come into prominent use, where the name of the Sun-god might have been expected. Thus, he called the royal barge on which he sailed with Tiy on her beautiful lake, Aton gleams, and a company of his body-guard bore the new god’s name. He appended to his own name the epithet, dawning like Aton, or even called himself the shining Aton. A cult of the newly named Sun-god had really been inaugurated and there was probably a chapel dedicated to him at Heliopolis. Now and again he had even been designated as 'the sole god' by Amenhotep Ill's contemporaries.

Amenhotep IV was soon closely associated with the new ideas. Like some other rulers of his line, he had been crowned in Hermonthis, known as the Upper Egyptian Heliopolis, where the Solar theology was strong, and a brother of his mother was high-priest there. Early in his reign we find him there engaged in the worship of Aton, in a temple of the god, of which he may have been the builder. He made no attempt to conceal the identity of the new deity with the old Sun-god, Re. He assumed the office of high-priest of Aton with the same title, Great Seer, as that of the high-priest of Re at Heliopolis. But, however evident the Heliopolitan origin of the new state-religion might be, it was not merely Sun-worship; the word Aton was employed in place of the old word for “god” (neter), and the god was evidently conceived to be far more than the merely material sun. The king was evidently deifying the light or the vital heat which he found accompanying all life. It plays an important part similar to that which we find it assuming in the early cosmogonic philosophies of the Greeks. Thence, as we might expect, the god is stated to be everywhere active by means of his “rays”. In his age of the world it is perfectly certain that the king could not have had the vaguest notion of the physico-chemical aspects of his assumption, any more than had the early Greeks in dealing with a similar thought; yet the fundamental idea is surprisingly true, and, as we shall see, marvelously fruitful.

The most ancient symbol of the Sun-god was a pyramid, and, as a falcon, the figure of that bird was also used to designate him. These, however, were intelligible only in Egypt, and Amenhotep IV had a wider arena in view. The new symbol depicted the sun as a disk from which diverging beams radiated downward each ray terminating in a human hand. It was a masterly symbol suggesting a power issuing from its celestial source, and putting its hand upon the world and the affairs of men.  As far back as the Pyramid Texts the rays of the Sun-god had been likened to his arms and had been conceived as an agency on earth. The outward symbol of his god thus broke sharply with tradition; but it was capable of practical introduction in the many different countries making up the empire, and could be understood at a glance by any intelligent foreigner. Which was far from the case with any of the traditional symbols of Egyptian religion. To indicate the imperial power of Aton, Amenhotep IV now enclosed the god’s full name, as already introduced by his father, m two royal cartouches, suggesting for the god an earthly dominion like that of the Pharaoh.

His zeal for the new cult was evident from the beginning. He sent an expedition to the sandstone quarries of Silsileh to secure the great shaft for an obelisk to be erected in Amenhotep III's Karnak temple of Aton, and the chief nobles of his court were in charge of the works at the quarry. Thebes was now called “City of the Brightness of Aton”, and the temple-quarter, “Brightness of Aton the Great”; while the Aton sanctuary itself bore the name of “Gem-Aton”, a term of uncertain meaning. Although the other gods were still tolerated as of old, it was nevertheless inevitable that the priesthood of Amon should view with growing jealousy the brilliant rise of a strange god in their midst, an artificial creation of which they knew nothing, save that much of the wealth formerly employed in the enrichment of Amon's sanctuary was now lavished on the intruder. The priesthood of Amon was now a rich and influential body, and the high-priest of Amon was also the supreme head of the organization including all the priests of the nation, besides sometimes holding the chief treasurership of the empire, or even the office of grand vizier. The Amonite priesthood, had installed Thutmose III as king; and could they have supplanted with one of their own tools the young dreamer who now held the throne, they would of course have done so at the first opportunity. But Amenhotep IV possessed unlimited personal force of character, and he was moreover the son of a line of rulers too strong and too illustrious to be thus set aside, even by the most powerful priesthood in the land. A hitter conflict ensued, in which the issue was sharply drawn between Aton and the old gods. It rendered Thebes intolerable to the young king. He decided to break with the priesthoods and to make Aton the sole god, not merely in his own thought, but in very fact. As far as their external and material manifestations and equipment were concerned, the annihilation of the old gods could be and was accomplished without delay. The priesthoods, including that of Amon, were dispossessed, the official temple-worship of the various gods throughout the land ceased, and their names, were erased wherever they could be found upon the monuments.

The persecution of Amon was especially severe. The cemetery of Thebes was visited and in the tombs of the ancestors the hated name of Amon was hammered out wherever it appeared upon the stone. The rows on rows of statues of the great nobles of the old and glorious days of the empire ranged along the walls of the Karnak temple, were not spared, and the god's name was invariably erased. Stone-cutters climbed to the tops of Hatshepsut's lofty obelisks and cut out the name of Amon to the very apex. The royal statues of his ancestors, including even the king's father, were not respected; and, what was worse, as the name of that father, Amenhotep, contained the name of Amon, the young king was placed in the unpleasant predicament of being obliged to cut out his own father’s name in order to prevent the name of Amon from appearing “writ large” on all the temples of Thebes. Even the private living apartments of Amenhotep III in his splendid Theban palace at modern Medinet Habu were invaded, and the king’s name erased in the sumptuous wall decorations. Frequently the word “gods” was not permitted to remain on the old monuments; and the walls of the temples at Thebes were painfully searched in order that the compromising word might be blotted out. And then there was the embarrassment of the king's own name, likewise Amenhotep, meaning “Amon rests” or “is satisfied” which could not be spoken or placed on a monument. It was of necessity also banished and the king assumed in its place the name “Ikhnaton”, which means “Aton is satisfied” or “He in whom Aton is satisfied”.

This terrible revolution, violating all that was dearest and most sacred in Egyptian life, must have been a devastating experience for the youthful king, perhaps not yet nineteen at this time. Thebes had become an impossible place of residence. In his father's palace, which he doubtless occupied, he found unsightly gaps in the lovely wall decorations where once his father’s cartouche had stood. As he looked across the city he saw stretching along the western plain that imposing line of mortuary temples of his fathers which he had violated. They now stood silent and empty. The towering pylons and obelisks of Karnack and Luxor were not a welcome reminder of all that his fathers had contributed, to the glory of Amon, and the unfinished hall of his father at Luxor, with the superb columns of the nave, still waiting for the roof, could hardly have stirred pleasant memories in the heart of the young reformer. A doubtless long contemplated plan was therefore undertaken. Aton, the god of the empire, should possess his own city in each of the three great divisions of the empire: Egypt, Asia and Nubia, and the god's Egyptian city should be made the royal residence. It must have been an enterprise requiring some time, but the three cities were duly founded. The Aton-city of Nubia was located on the east side of the river somewhere in the vicinity of the third cataract, and was thus in the heart of the Egyptian province. It was named “Gem-Aton” after the Aton-temple in Thebes. In Syria the Aton-city is unknown, but Ikhnaton will not have done less for Aton there than his fathers had done for Amon.

CITY OF AKHENATON: TELL EL-AMARNA 1

In the sixth year of his reign, and shortly after he had changed his name, the king was living in his own Aton-city in Egypt. He chose as its site a fine and spacious bay in the cliffs about one hundred and sixty miles above the Delta and nearly three hundred miles below Thebes. He called it Akhenaton, “Horizon of Aton”. It is known in modern times as Tell el-Amarna. In addition to the town, which was about a mile wide and some four miles long, the territory around it was demarked as a domain belonging to the god, and included the plain on both sides of the river. In the cliffs on either side, fourteen large stelae, one of them no less than twenty-six feet in height, were cut into the rock, bearing inscriptions determining the limits of the entire sacred district around the city. As thus laid out the district was about eight miles wide from north, to south, and from twelve to over seventeen miles long from cliff to cliff. The region thus demarked was then legally conveyed to Aton by the king's own decree, saying: “Now as for the area within the...landmarks from the eastern mountain (cliffs) to the western mountain of Akhetaton opposite, it belongs to my father, Aton, who is given life forever and ever: whether mountains or cliffs, or swamp....or uplands, or fields, or waters, or towns, or shores, or people, or cattle, or trees, or anything which Aton, my father, has made—I have conveyed it to Aton, my father, forever and ever”

The city thus established was to be the real capital of the empire, for the king himself said: “The whole land shall come hither, for the beautiful seat of Akhetaton shall be another seat (capital), and I will give them audience whether they be north or south or west or east” The royal architect, Bek, was sent to the first cataract to procure stone for the new temple, or we should rather say temples, for no less than three were now built in the new city, one for the queen-mother, Tiy, and another for the princess Beketaton (“Maidservant of Aton”), besides the state-temple of the king himself. Around the temples rose the palace of the king and the chateaux of his nobles, one of whom describes the city thus: “Akhetaton, great in loveliness, mistress of pleasant ceremonies, rich in possessions, the offerings of Re in her midst. At the sight of her beauty there is rejoicing. She is lovely and beautiful; when one sees her it is like a glimpse of heaven. Her number cannot be calculated. When the Aton rises in her he fills her with his rays, and he embraces (with his rays) his beloved son, son of eternity, who came forth from Aton and offers the earth to him who placed him on his throne, causing the earth to belong to him who made him”.

It becomes more and more evident that all that was devised and done in the new city and in the propagation of the Aton faith bears the stamp of Ikhnaton’s individuality. A king who did not hesitate to erase his own father’s name on the monuments in order to destroy Amon, the great foe of his revolutionary movement, was not one to stop halfway; and the men about him, in spite of his youth, must have been irresistibly swayed by the young Pharaoh’s unbending will. But Ikhnaton understood enough of the old policy of the Pharaohs to know that he must hold his party by practical rewards, and the leading partisans of his movement, like Merire, enjoyed liberal bounty at his hands. Thus one of his priests of Aton, and at the same time his master of the royal horse, named Eye, who had by good fortune happened to marry the nurse of the king, renders this very evident in such statements as the following: “He doubles to me my favors in silver and gold”; or again, addressing the king, “How prosperous is he who hears thy teaching of life! He is satisfied with seeing thee without ceasing”. The general of the army, Mai, enjoyed similar bounty, boasting of it in the same way: “He hath doubled to me my favors like the numbers of the sand, I am the head of the officials, at the head of the people; my lord has advanced me because I have carried out his teaching, and I hear his word without ceasing. My eyes behold thy beauty every day, O my lord, wise like Aton, satisfied with truth. How prosperous is he who hears thy teaching of life!”. Although there must have been a nucleus of men who really appreciated the ideal aspects of the king’s teaching, it is thus evident that many were not uninfluenced by “the loaves and the fishes”.

Among such royal favors there was one which no Egyptian noble could fail to welcome. This was the beautiful cliff-tomb which the king commanded his craftsmen to hew out of the eastern cliffs for each one of ins favorites. The old mortuary practices were not all suppressed by Ikhnaton, and it was still necessary for a man to be buried in the eternal house, with its endowment for the support of the deceased in the hereafter. But that eternal house was no longer disfigured with hideous demons and grotesque monsters which should confront the dead in the future life; and the magic paraphernalia necessary to meet and vanquish the dark powers of the nether world, which filled the tombs of the old order at Thebes, were completely banished. The tomb now became a monument to the deceased; the walls of its chapel bore fresh and natural pictures from the life of the people in Akhetaton, particularly the incidents in the official career of the dead man, and preferably his intercourse with the king. Thus the city of Akhetaton is now better known to us from its cemetery than from its ruins.

Throughout these tombs the nobles take delight in reiterating, both in relief and inscription, the intimate relation between Aton and the king. Over and over again they show the king and the queen standing together under the disk of Amon, whose rays, terminating in hands, descend and embrace the king. The vultures-goddess, Mut, who, since the hoary age of the Thinites had appeared on all the monuments extending her protecting wings over the Pharaoh's head, had long since been banished. The nobles constantly pray to the god for the king, saying that he “came forth from thy rays” or “thou hast formed him out of thine own rays”; and interspersed through their prayers were numerous current phrases of the Aton faith, which had now become conventional, replacing those of the old orthodox religion, which it must have been very awkward for them to cease using. Thus they demonstrated, how zealous they had been in accepting and appropriating the king’s new teaching. On state occasions, instead of the old stock phrases, with innumerable references to the traditional gods, every noble who would enjoy the king's favor was evidently obliged to show his familiarity with the Aton faith and the king’s position in it by a liberal use of these allusions. The source of such phrases was really the king himself, as we have before intimated, and something of the “teaching” whence they were taken, so often attributed to him, is preserved in the tombs to which we have referred.

Of all the monuments left by this unparalleled revolution, the Aton hymns are by far the most remarkable; and from them we may gather an intimation of Ikhnaton’s beliefs. Two hymns to Aton, both of which the nobles had engraved on the walls of their tomb chapels, were probably written by the king; and the longer and finer of the two is worthy of being known in modern literature. The titles of the separate strophes are the addition of the present writer, and in the translation no attempt has been made to do more than to furnish an accurate rendering. It will be observed that Psalm104 shows a notable similarity to our hymn both in the thought and the sequence:

NIGHT

When thou settest in the western horizon of the sky,

The earth is in darkness like the dead,

They sleep in their chambers,

Their heads are wrapped

Their nostrils are stopped,

And none seeth the other.

While all their things are stolen,

Which are under their heads,

And they know it not.

Every lion cometh forth from his den,

All serpents, they sting.

Darknsss...  

The world is in silence,

He that made them resteth in his horizon.

DAY AND MAN

Bright is the earth when thou risest in tile horizon.

When thou shinest as Aton by day

Thou drivest away the Darkness.

When thou sendest forth thy rays,

The Two Lands (Egypt) are in daily festivity,

Awake and standing upon their feet

When thou hast raised them up.

Their limbs bathed, they take their clothing,

Their arms uplifted in adoration to thy dawning

(Then) in all the world they do their work.

DAY AND THE ANIMALS AND PLANTS

All cattle rest upon their pasturage,

The trees and the plants flourish,

The birds flutter in their marshes,

Their wings uplifted in adoration to thee.

All the sheep dance upon their feet,

All winged things fly,

They live when thou hast shone upon them.

DAY AND THE WATERS

The barques sail up-stream and down-stream alike.

Every highway is open because thou dawnest.

The fish m the river leap up before thee.

Thy rays are hi the midst of the great green sea,

CREATION OF MAN

Creator of the germ in woman!

Maker of seed in man,

Giving life to the son in the body of his mother,

Soothing him that he may not weep,

Nurse (even) in the womb,

Giver of breath to animate every one that he maketh!

When he cometh forth from the womb...on the day of his birth,

Thou openest his mouth in speech,

Thou suppliest his necessities,

CREATION OF ANIMALS

When the fledgling in the egg chirps in the shell,

Thou givest him breath therein to preserve him alive.

When thou hast brought him together (?)

To (the point of) bursting it in the egg

He cometh forth from the egg

To chirp with all his might (I).

He goeth about upon his two feet

When he hath come forth therefrom.

THE WHOLE CREATION

How manifold are thy works.

They are hidden from before (us),

O sole God, whose powers no other possesseth.

Thou didst create the earth according to thy heart

While thou wast alone:

Men, all cattle, large and small,

All that are upon the earth,

That go about upon their feet;

(All) that are on high,

That fly with their wings.

The foreign countries, Syria and Kush,

The land of Egypt,

Thou settest every man into his place,

Thou suppliest their necessities

Every one has his possessions.

And his days are reckoned.

The tongues are divers in speech,

Their forms likewise and their skins are distinguished.

(For) thou makest different the strangers.

This royal hymn, of which the above lines are a part, doubtless represents an excerpt, or a series of fragments excerpted from the ritual of Aton, as it was celebrated, from day to day in the Aton temple at Amarna. Unhappily, it was copied in the cemetery in but one tomb. The other tombs were likewise supplied with their devotional inscriptions, from the current paragraphs and stock phrases which made up the knowledge of the new faith as understood by the scribes and painters who decorated these tombs. It should not be forgotten, therefore, that the fragments of the Aton faith, which have survived to us in the Amarna cemetery, our chief source, have thus filtered mechanically through the indifferent hands and the starved and listless minds of a few petty bureaucrats on the outskirts of a great religious and intellectual movement. Nevertheless in this great hymn the universalism of the empire finds full expression and the royal singer sweeps his eye from the far-off cataracts of the Nubian Nile to the remotest lands of Syria. It is clear that he is projecting a world-religion and endeavoring to displace by it the nationalism which had preceded it for twenty centuries. He bases the universal sway of God upon his fatherly care of all men alike, irrespective of race or nationality, and he calls Aton “the father and the mother of all that he had made”. To the proud and exclusive Egyptian he points to the all-embracing bounty of the common father of humanity, even placing Syria and Nubia before Egypt in his enumeration.

Ikhnaton thus grasped the idea of a world-lord, as the creator of nature; but the king likewise saw revealed the creator’s beneficent purpose for all his creatures, even the meanest. He discerned in some measure the goodness of the All-Father as did He who bade us consider the lilies. The picture of the lily-grown marshes, where the flowers are drunken in the intoxicating radiance of Aton, where the birds unfold their wings and lift them  “in adoration of the living Aton”, where the cattle dance with delight in the sunshine, and the fish in the river beyond leap up to greet the light, the universal light whose beams are even in the midst of the great green sea —all this discloses a discernment of the presence of God in nature, and an appreciation of the revelation of God in the visible world such as we find centuries later in the Hebrew psalms, and in our own poets of nature since Wordsworth.

While Ikhnaton recognized clearly the power, and especially the beneficence of God, it may be due to the accidents of preservation that our surviving sources for the Aton faith do not disclose a very spiritual conception of the deity nor any attribution to him of ethical qualities beyond those which Re had long been supposed to possess. Our sources do not show us that the king had perceptibly risen from a discernment of the beneficence to a conception of the righteousness in the character of God, nor for His demand for this in the character of men. Nevertheles, there is in Ikhnaton's teaching, as it is fragmentarily preserved in the hymns and tomb-inscriptions of his nobles, a constant emphasis upon truth such as is not found before or since. The king always attaches to his name the phrase “living in truth” and that this phrase was not meaningless is evident in his daily life. To him it meant acceptance of the daily facts of living in a simple and unconventional manner. For him what was was right, and its propriety was evident by its very existence. Thus, his family life was open and unconcealed before the people. He took the greatest delight in his children, and appeared with them and the queen, their mother, on all possible occasions, as if he had been but the humblest scribe in the Aton-temple. He had himself depicted on the monuments while enjoying the most familiar and unaffected intercourse with his family, and whenever he appeared m the temple to offer sacrifice the queen and the daughters she had borne him participated in the service. All that was natural was to him true, and he never failed practically to exemplify this belief, however radically he was obliged to disregard tradition.

The art of the age was unavoidably affected by this extraordinary revolution, and the king’s interest in the new art is evident. Bek, his chief sculptor, appended to his title the words, whom, his majesty himself taught. Thus, the artists of his court were taught to make the chisel and the brush tell the story of what they actually saw. The result was a simple and beautiful realism that saw more clearly than any art had ever seen before. They caught the instantaneous postures of animal life: the coursing hound, the fleeing game, the wild bull leaping in the swamp; for all these belonged to the truth in which Ikhnaton lived. The king's person, as we have indicated, was no exception to the law of the new art; the artists represented Ikhnaton as they saw him. The monuments of Egypt bore what they had never borne before, a Pharaoh depicted in the natural and unaffected relations of life, not frozen in the conventional posture demanded by the traditions of court propriety.

This unparalleled revolution in art has now been unexpectedly revealed to us in all its wondrous beauty and freedom by the extraordinary worlds of the artist-craftsman preserved in the tomb of Tutenkhamon. Of the finest pieces found among this sumptuous furniture of Ikhnaton’s son-in-law several were made at Amarna, and were carried back thence by Tutenkhamon to Thebes on his return thither.

II. THE FOREIGN SITUATION AND THE FALL OF IKHNATON

Wholly absorbed in the exalted religion to which he had given his life, stemming the tide of tradition that was daily as strong against him as at first, this young revolutionary of twenty-five was beset with too many enterprises and responsibilities of a totally different nature, to give much attention to the affairs of the empire abroad. Indeed, as we shall see, he probably did not realize the necessity of doing so until it was far too late. On his accession his sovereignty in Asia had immediately been recognized by the Hittites and the powers of the Euphrates valley. Tushratta of Mitanni wrote to the queen-mother, Tiy, requesting her influence with the new king for a continuance of the old friendship which he had enjoyed with Ikhnaton's father, and to the young king he wrote a letter of condolence on the death of his father, Amenhotep III, not forgetting to add the usual requests for plentiful gold. Burraburiash of Babylon sent similar assurances of sympathy, and a son of his later sojourned at Ikhnaton's court and married a daughter of the latter, and her Babylonian father-in-law sent her a noble necklace of over a thousand gems. But such intercourse did not last.

The advance of the Hittites across the Syrian frontiers of the Egyptian empire, already threatening in Amenhotep III’s time, had now created a serious situation in Asia. The leading group of these remarkable peoples of Asia Minor, who still form one of the greatest problems in the study of the early Orient, had now coalesced into a powerful empire with which the Egyptians had first come into contact under Thutmose III, who called the new power “Great Kheta”, as perhaps distinguished from the less important independent Hittite peoples. We shall use the word Hittite to designate this empire of Great Kheta. When Ikhnaton ascended the throne, Seplel (cuneiform, Shubbiluliuma), the king of the Hittites, wrote him a letter of congratulation, and to all appearances had only the friendliest intentions toward Egypt. For the first invasions of the most advanced Hittites, like that which Tushratta of Mitanni repulsed, he may indeed not have been responsible. Even after Ikhnaton’s removal to Akhetaton, his new capital, some Hittite embassy appeared there with gifts and greetings; and the tomb of Merire provides us with the first Egyptian representation of Hittites. But Ikhnaton must have regarded the old relations as no longer desirable, for the Hittite king asks him why he has ceased the correspondence which his father had maintained. If he realized the situation, the Pharaoh had good reason indeed for abandoning the connection; for the Hittite empire now stood on the northern threshold of Syria, the greatest power in Asia, and the most formidable enemy which had ever confronted Egypt.

At this juncture Egypt lost her staunchest friend and supporter on the upper Euphrates, the kingdom of Mitanni, whose rulers had been close relatives of the Egyptian sovereigns since the reign of Ikhnaton’s grandfather. Tushratta, the reigning king of Mitanni, was suddenly slain by one of his own sons, and a ruinous civil war followed. Taking advantage of Mitanni's internal weakness, Shubbiluliuma, who had long been fighting with Tushratta, gave his daughter in marriage to Tushratta's son, Mattiuaza, and then forced Mitanni to accept his new son-in-law as king. Mitanni, Egyp'’s northern ally, was thus suddenly shifted to the Hittite side in the international struggle in western Asia. Among the Pharaoh's Asiatic vassals, likewise, the situation had meantime gone from bad to worse. Immediately on Ikhnaton's accession the disaffected dynasts, who had been temporarily suppressed by his father, resumed their operations against the faithful vassals of Egypt. The exact sequence of events is not clear. With the co-operation of the unfaithful Egyptian vassals Abd-Ashirta and his son Aziru, who were at the head of an Amorite kingdom on the upper Orontes, together with Itakama, a Syrian prince who had been conquered by the Hittites and who had seized Kadesh as his kingdom, the Hittites took possession of Amki, the plain on the north side of the lower Orontes, between Antioch and the Amanus. Three faithful vassal Kings of the vicinity marched to recover the Pharaoh’s lost territory for him, but were met by Itakama at the head of Hittite troops and driven back. All three wrote immediately to the Pharaoh of the trouble and complained of Itakama. Aziru of Amor had meantime advanced upon the Phoenician and north Syrian coast cities, which he captured as far as Ugarit at the mouth of the Orontes, slaying their kings and appropriating their wealth. Simyra and Byblos held out, however, and, as the Hittites advanced into Nukhashshi, on the lower Orontes, Aziru co-operated with them and captured Niy, whose king he slew. Tunip was now im such grave danger that her elders wrote the Pharaoh a pathetic letter beseeching his protection.

Meanwhile, Rib-Addi, a faithful vassal of Byblos, where there was an Egyptian temple, writes to the Pharaoh the most urgent appeals, stating what is going on, and asking for help to drive away Aziru's people from Simyra, knowing full well that, if it falls, his own city of Byblos is likewise doomed. But no help comes. Several Egyptian deputies have been charged with the investigation of affairs at Simyra, but they did not succeed in doing anything, and the city finally fell. Aziru had no hesitation in slaying the Egyptian deputy resident in the place, and having destroyed it, was now free to move against Byblos. Rib-Addi wrote in horror of these facts to the Pharaoh, stating that the Egyptian deputy, resident in Kumidi in northern Palestine, was now in danger. But the wily Aziru so used his friends at court that he escaped. With Machiavellian skill and cynicism, he explains in letters to the Pharaoh that he is unable to come and give an account of himself at the Egyptian court, as he had been commanded to do, because the Hittites are in Nukhashshi, and he fears that Tunip will not be strong enough to resist them. Fortunately the letter from the elders of Tunip shows what they thought about his presence in Nukhashshi. To the Pharaoh's demand that he immediately rebuild Simyra, which he had destroyed (as he claimed, to prevent it from falling into the hands of the Hittites), he replies that he is too hard pressed in defending the king's cities in Nukhashshi against the Hittites; but that he will do so within a year. Ikhnaton is reassured by Aziru’s promises to pay the same tribute as that paid by the cities which he has taken. Such acknowledgment of egyptian suzerainty by the turbulent dynasts everywhere must have left in the Pharaoh a feeling of security which the situation by no means justified. He therefore wrote Aziru granting him the year which he had asked for before he appeared at court, but Aziru contrived to evade Khani, the Egyptian bearer of the king's letter, which was thus brought back to Egypt without being delivered. It shows the astonishing leniency of Ikhnaton in a manner which would indicate that he was opposed to measures of force such as his fathers had employed. Aziru immediately wrote to the king expressing his regret that an expedition against the Hittites in the north had deprived him of the pleasure of meeting the Pharaoh’s envoy, in spite of the fact that he had made all haste homeward as soon as he had heard of his coming. The claims of the hostile dynasts were so skillfully made that the resident Egyptian deputies actually did not seem to know who were the faithful vassals and who the secretly rebellious. In particular, a large collection of letters from Rib-Addi to Egypt throw astonishing light upon the network of intrigue and the difficulty of distinguishing friend from foe.

In the south, where the movement of the Habiru (Aramaean Semites?) may be compared with that of the Hittites in the north, similar conditions evidently prevailed. Knots of their warriors were now appearing everywhere and taking service as mercenary troops under the dynasts. Under various adventurers the Habiru were frequently the real masters, and Palestinian cities like Megiddo, Askalon and Gezer wrote to the Pharaoh for succor against them. The last-named city, together with Askalon and Lachish, united against Abdi-Khiba, the pro-Egyptian dynast in Jerusalem, already at this time an important stronghold of southern Palestine; and the faithful officer sent urgent dispatches to Ikhnaton explaining the danger and appealing for aid against the Habiru and their leaders. Abdi-Khiba was well acquainted with Ikhnaton's cuneiform scribe, and he adds to several of his dispatches a postscript addressed to his friend in which the urgent sincerity of the man is evident: “To the scribe of my lord, the king, Abdi-Khiba thy servant. Bring these words plainly before my lord the king: The whole land of my lord, the king, is going to ruin”.

THE HABIRU 

Fleeing in terror before the Habiru, who burned the towns and laid, waste the fields, many of the Palestinians forsook their towns and took to the hills, or sought refuge in Egypt, where (as we learn from Egyptian sources) the Egyptian officer in charge of some of them said of them:”They have been destroyed and their town laid waste, and fire has been thrown (into their grain?)... Their countries are starving, they live like goats of the mountain ... A few of the Asiatics, who knew not how they should live, have come begging a home in the domain? of Pharaoh, after the manner of your father’s fathers since the beginning....Now the Pharaoh gives them into your hand to protect their borders”. The task of those to whom the last words are addressed was hopeless. Both in Syria and Palestine the provinces of the Pharaoh had gradually passed entirely out of Egyptian control, and in the south a state of complete anarchy had resulted, in which the hopeless Egyptian party at last gave up any attempt to maintain the authority of the Pharaoh, and those who had not perished joined the enemy. The caravans of Burraburiash of Babylonia were plundered by the king of Accho and a neighboring confederate, and Burraburiash wrote peremptorily demanding that the loss be made good and the guilty punished, lest his trade with Egypt become a constant prey of such marauding dynasts. But what he feared had come to pass, and the Egyptian empire in Asia was for the time at an end.

At Akhetaton, the new and beautiful capital, the splendid temple of Aton resounded with hymns to the new god of the empire, while the empire itself was no more. The tribute of Ikhnaton's twelfth year was received at Akhetaton as usual, and the king, borne in his gorgeous palanquin on the shoulders of eighteen soldiers, went forth to receive it in state. The habit of generations, and a fast vanishing apprehension lest the Pharaoh might  appear in Syria with his army, still prompted a few sporadic letters from the dynasts, assuring him of their loyalty, which perhaps continued in the mind of Ikhnaton the illusion that he was still lord of Asia. The storm which had broken over his Asiatic empire was not more disastrous than that which threatened the fortunes of his house in Egypt. But he was steadfast as before in the propagation of his new faith. At his command temples of Aton had now arisen all over the land. He devoted himself to the elaboration of the temple ritual and the tendency to theologize somewhat dimmed the earlier freshness of the hymns to the god.

Meanwhile, the national convulsion which his revolution had precipitated, was producing the most disastrous consequences throughout the land. The Aton faith disregarded some of the most cherished beliefs of the people, especially those regarding the hereafter. Osiris, their old time protector and friend in the world of darkness, was banished from the tomb, and the magical paraphernalia which was to protect them from a thousand foes was gone. Some of them tried to put Aton into their old usages; but he was not a folk-god who “lived out in yonder tree or spring”, and he was too far from their homely round of daily needs to touch their lives. The people could, understand nothing of the refinements involved in the new faith. They only knew that the worship of the old gods had been interdicted, and a strange deity of whom they had no knowledge and could gain none was forced upon them. Such a decree of the state could have had no more effect upon their practical worship in the end than did that of Theodosius when he ban shed the old gods of Egypt in favor of Christianity, eighteen hundred years after Ikhnaton's revolution. Long after the death of Theodosius the old so-called pagan gods continued to be worshipped by the people in Upper Egypt; for in the course of such attempted changes in the customs and traditional faith of a whole people, the span of one man’s life is insignificant indeed. The Aton-faith remained but the cherished theory of the idealist, Ikhnaton, and a little court-circle; it never really became the religion of the people.

Added to the secret resentment and opposition of the people, we must consider also far more dangerous forces. During all of Ikhnaton's reign a powerful priestly party, openly or secretly, did all in its power to undermine him. Among the army and its leaders, the neglect and loss of the Asiatic empire must have turned against the king many a strong man, and aroused indignation among those whose grandfathers had served under Thutmose III. The memory of what had been done in those glorious days must have been sufficiently strong to fire the hearts of the military class and set them looking for a leader who would recover what had been lost. Ikhnaton might appoint one of his favorites to the command of the army, but his ideal aims and his high motives for peace would be as unpopular as they were unintelligible to his commanders. One such man, an officer named Harmhab, had now been long in the service of Ikhnaton and enjoying the royal favor; he contrived not only to win the support of the military class, but he also gained the favor of the priests of Amon, who were of course looking for someone who could bring them the opportunity they coveted. Thus, both the people and the priestly and military classes alike were fomenting plans to overthrow the hated dreamer in the palace of the Pharaohs, of whose thoughts they understood so little.

To increase Ikhnaton’s danger, fortune had decreed him no son, and he was obliged to depend for support, as the years passed, upon his son-in-law, a noble named Sakere, who had married his eldest daughter, Meritaton, “Beloved of Aton”. Ikhnaton had probably never been physically strong; his spare face, with the lines of an ascetic, shows increasing traces of the cares which weighed so heavily upon him. He finally nominated Sakere as his successor and appointed him at the same time co-regent. He survived but a short time after this, and about 1358 BC, having reached his seventeenth regnal year, he succumbed to the over­whelming forces that were against him. In a lonely valley some miles to the east of his city he was buried in a tomb which he had excavated in the rock for himself and family, and where his second daughter, Meketaton, already rested. His coffin was eventually carried by his friends to Thebes, where it was found by modern excavation in the tomb of his mother, Queen Tiy. Elliot Smith’s examination of the skeleton, for such the body found in his coffin now is, has shown it to be that of a man less than thirty years of age at his death. And he had reigned at least sixteen years!

Thus disappeared the most remarkable figure in earlier oriental history. The sumptuous inscriptions on his beautiful coffin, now in the Museum at Cairo, call him “the living Aton’s beautiful child who lives forever, and is true (or just, or righteous) in sky and earth”. To his own nation he was afterwards known as the criminal of Akhetaton; but however much we may censure him for the loss of the empire, which he allowed to slip from his fingers, however much we may condemn the fanaticism with which he pursued his aim, even to the violation of his own father’s name and monuments, there died with him such a spirit as the world had never seen before—a brave soul, undauntedly facing the momentum of immemorial tradition, and thereby stepping out from the long line of conventional and colorless Pharaohs, that he might disseminate ideas far beyond and above the capacity of his age to understand. Among the Hebrews, seven or eight hundred years later, we look for such men; but the modern world has yet adequately to value or even acquaint itself with this man, who, in an age so remote and under conditions so adverse, became not only the world’s first idealist and the world’s first individual but also the earliest monotheist, and the first prophet of internationalism—the most remarkable figure of the Ancient World before the Hebrews.

Ikhnaton’s followers had prayed that his teaching might endure “till the swan be black and the raven white, till the mountains rise up and move away and water flows uphill”—and who shall say that it has not survived in modern belief? But the young king's death left it politically helpless. Sakere was quite unequal to the task before him, and after an obscure and ephemeral reign at Akhetaton he disappeared, to be followed by Tutenkhaton (“Living-Image-of-Aton”), another son-in-law of Ikhnaton, who had married the king's third daughter, Enkhosnepaaton (“She-lives-by-the-Aton”). Compeled to compromisw, he forsook his father-in-law’s city and transferred the court to Thebes, which had not seen a Pharaoh for twenty years. For a time Akhetaton maintained a precarious existence, and the manufactures of colored glass and faience which had flourished there during the reign of Ikhnaton soon languished. Then the place was gradually forsaken, until not a soul was left in its solitary streets. The roofs of the houses fell in, the walls tottered and collapsed, the temples fell a prey to the vengeance of the Theban party, and the once beautiful city of Aton was gradually transformed into a desolate ruin. Known today as Tell el-Amarna, it still stands as time and the priests of Amon left it. One may walk its ancient streets, where the walls of the houses are still several feet high, and strive to recall to its forsaken dwellings the life of the Aton-worshippers who once inhabited them. Here in a low brick room, which had served as an archive-chamber for Ikhnaton’s Foreign Office, were found in 1887 more than three hundred and fifty cuneiform letters and dispatches in which we can trace his intercourse and dealings with the kings and rulers of Asia, and the gradual disintegration of his empire there. Here were the more than fifty dispatches of the unfortunate Rib-Addi of Byblos. After the modern name of the place, the whole correspondence is generally called the Tell el-Amarna Letters. The systematic excavation of the place has cleared street after street and revealed such houses as the studio of the royal architect Thutmose, with the finest works of sculpture which have survived from the revolution. All the other Aton-cities likewise perished utterly; but Gem-Aton in Nubia flourished for a thousand years, and—strange irony!—there was afterward a temple there to “Amon, lord of Gem-Aton”.

On reaching Thebes, Tutenkhaton was soon obliged by the priests of Amon to permit the resumption of Amon-worship, and to begin restoring the disfigured names of Amon and the other gods, expunged from the monuments by Ikhnaton. His restorations are found as far south as Soleb in Nubia. Of this work of restoration Tutenkhaton left a record in which he says: “When his majesty (i.e. he himself) was crowned as king, the temples of the gods and goddesses wer desolated from Elephantine as far as the marshes of the Delta... Their holy places were forsaken (?) and had become overgrown tracts… their sanctuaries were like that which has never been, and their houses were trodden roads. The land was in an evil pass, and as for the gods, they had for­saken this land. If people were sent to Syria to extend the borders of Egypt, they prospered not at all; if men prayed to a god for succor, he came not;…I f men besought a goddess likewise, she came not at all”. He was at the same time forced to change his name to Tutenkhamon, “Living-Image-of-Amon”, while his wife's name similarly became Enkhosnamon (“She-lives-by-Amon), showing that the new king was at last completely in the hands of the priestly party. The empire which he ruled was still no mean one, extending as it did from the Delta of the Nile to the fourth cataract. He even received occasional tribute from the north which, as his viceroy of Kush, Huy, claimed, came from Syria. He may thus have recovered sufficient power in Palestine to collect some tribute or at least some spoil, which fact may then have been interpreted to include Syria also.

Tutenkhamon reigned at least six years, and it is improbable that he survived much longer. His name is better known than that of any other Pharaoh, owing to the fact that in October, 1922, his tomb and its magnificent equipment were discovered almost intact—the first royal burial ever so found in Egypt. It soon became evident that the new material furnished a surprising revelation of the art of that revolutionary movement in Egyptian life, religion and art, which reached its tragic close in the reign of Tutenkhamon. In this revelation lies their chief importance, rather than in any new and direct light on the political history of this troubled time. The condition of the tomb itself is an important item of evidence on political conditions, for the indications are quite clear that Tutenkhamon's tomb was robbed not long after his death, and this fact is a significant revelation of the unsafe conditions which followed his reign .

Tutenkhamon was succeeded by another of the worthies of the Akhetaton court. Eye, the master of horse, who had married Ikhnaton's nurse, Tiy. He had laid Tutenkhamon away in his tomb, and one cannot but wonder how much he or his subordinates had to do with its early robbery at a time when all the court and functionaries who officiated at the royal funeral still vividly remembered the splendor of Tutenkhamon's burial equipment. Ere long Eye too passed away, and it would appear that one or two other ephemeral pretenders gained the ascendency either now or before his accession. Anarchy ensued. Thebes was a prey to plundering bands, who forced their way into the royal cemetery and robbed the tombs of the great emperors. The prestige of the old Theban line which had been dominant for two hundred and fifty years, the illustrious family which two hundred and thirty years before had cast out the Hycsos and built the greatest empire the east had ever seen, was now totally eclipsed (1350 BC). Manetho places Harmhab, the restorer who now gained the throne, at the close of the XVIIIth Dynasty; but, so far as we know, he was not of royal blood nor any kin of the now fallen house. His accession marks the complete restoration of the old order and the beginning of a new epoch.