THE PREHISTORIC EAST 177 



gives us the whole story of the country, unless 

 some chance memorial of a population belonging to 

 the post-glacial age should in future be found. There 

 are, however, things in Egypt which illustrate pre- 

 historic times in other countries, and some of these 

 have lately thrown a new and strange light on the 

 early history of Palestine, and especially on the Bible 

 history. 



One of the kings of the eighteenth dynasty, 

 whose historical position was probably between the 

 time of Joseph and that of Moses, Amunoph III., is 

 believed to have married an Asiatic wife, and under 

 her influence, he and his successor, Amunoph IV., or 

 Khu en-Aten, seem to have swerved from the old 

 polytheism of Egypt, and introduced a new worship, 

 that of Aten,. a god visibly represented by the disk 

 of the sun, and, therefore, in some sense identical 

 with Ra, the chief god of Egypt ; but there was 

 something in this new worship offensive to the priests 

 of Ra. Perhaps it was regarded as a Semitic or 

 Asiatic innovation, or led to the introduction of un- 

 popular Semitic priests and officers. Amunoph IV. 

 consequently abandoned the royal residence at 

 Thebes, and established a new capital at a place 

 now called Tel-el-Amarna, almost at the boundary 

 of Upper and Lower Egypt, and from this place he 

 ruled not only Egypt but a vast region in Western 

 Asia, which had been subjected to the Egyptian 

 government in the re'gn of the third Amunoph. 

 From these subject districts, extending from the 



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