DISCOVERY 



253 



assembled in Tcll-cl-Amama, building and adorning the 

 vast temple of the Disk. Here the king founded his 

 new city, Akhetaton {Brightness of the Disk), in a place 

 " which belonged to no ijod and to no goddess, to no 



prince and to no princess," at the same time changing 

 his name from Amcnhotep (" Anion is satisfied "), to 

 Akhenaton (" The Disk is pleased "). 



It will at once be observed that the new religion has 

 a point of contact with the old, for the new god is, hke 

 the old, a Sun-god. To this extent the new creed 

 cannot rightly be called, as it often is, a heresy. But 

 the presentation of the god was entirely altered. He 

 was now represented, not in the old form of a hawk- 

 headed man with the sun's disk on his head, an image 

 bom of a ver\' ancient syncretism of Ra with the hawk- 

 deity Horus, but under the form of a disk overhead, 

 from which shoot down earthward numerous rays, 

 terminating in hands offering s\Tnbol3 of life to the 

 worshipper. 



A large crop of problems has naturally sprung from 

 the scanty account which has come down to us of 

 this revolution. Here we must do little more than 

 state them, hinting at the conclusions which on our 

 present e\-idence appear most probable. Thus we are 

 told by the anatomists who have examined Akhenaton's 

 mummy, found not many years ago in the tomb of 

 his mother, Ti, at Thebes, that the king cannot have 

 been more than thirty j'ears of age at death, and was 

 very probably several years younger. As we know 

 him to have reigned at least ' seventeen years, this gives 

 him a maximum of thirteen years at his accession, and 

 of nineteen years at the moment of the revolution. 

 Can a boy of nineteen have conceived and carried out 

 so huge a scheme, or was there someone else behind it, 



' The wine jars from the royal stores at Akhetaton were 

 inscribed with the year of the king's i;eign in which they were 

 laid down. They run in an unbroken series up to year 17. 



possibly his mother, Ti ? Having regard to the greater 

 precocity of youth in the East, it seems by no means 

 impossible that the king should have been himself 

 responsible both for the conception and for the 

 working out. Ti had probably little to do with it, 

 and there seems some reason for believing that she 

 remained at Thebes. Attempts to trace the origin 

 of the heresy, through Ti and her supposed Asiatic 

 parentage, to Syria are ill-advised, for the discovery 

 a few years back of the mummies of Ti's parents 

 in their untouched tomb at Thebes shows them to have 

 been both of perfectly normal Egyptian type. On the 

 other hand, recent discoveries have shown that the 

 Disk, or Aton, had already a temple at Karnak under 

 Amenhotep HI, in which, though he w-as not as yet 

 represented under the new form, he already bore the 

 new and complicated name, formerly believed to have 

 been given to him by Akhenaton, " Horus-of-the- 

 Horizon, who rejoices in the horizon, in his name of 

 Brilliance which is in the Disk." 



An equally difficult question is this : Was the heresy 

 a purely political move, initiated by Akhenaton in order 

 to escape from the ever-increasing power and intrigue 

 of the priesthood of Amon-Ra ; or was it in truth a 

 new philosophy with an improved ethical code, which 

 the king felt himself called upon to preach to his 

 people ? Probably the truth lies in a combination of 

 these two views. We do know that the priesthood of 

 the .\mon-Ra, into whose coffers the booty of almost 

 annual victorious campaigns in Asia was poured, was 

 already a menace to the throne which it eventually 

 overthrew and usurped. On the other hand, no one 

 who has read the wonderful Hymn to the Disk, probably 

 composed by the king himself, one of the most remark- 

 able documents in the early literature of the world, can 

 doubt that the words are those of a man inspired by and 



liuTTI.K (jK VAKIEu.\Ti;d Gl.ASh I.N THIC IDKM Ul' \ FISU. 

 {Reproduced by courtesy of the Egypt Exploration Society^) 



convinced of the beauty and importance of his mission. 

 Attempts have been made to deny him the credit of 

 having reduced polytheism to monotheism, but there 



