254 



DISCOVERY 



is not iiiiich to be said in tlu'ir favour. The man 

 who was wise enough to write the Hymn to the Disk 

 was probably also wise enough to see that some 

 temporar\' concessions to popular belief were not only 

 advisable but necessary, and to make them in those 

 directions where they least mattered to the essence 

 of his doctrine. To call him a jwlytheist because 

 he allowed the word " truth " to be written, as of old, 

 by means of a hieroglj'ph which was a figure of the 

 Goddess of Truth is mere stupidity. 



Such was the man and such was the episode in which 

 he figured. We may now turn to tlie scene on which 

 it was enacted. Near the village of Et Till the hills 

 which form the beginning of the high desert in Egypt 

 come down to the river edge both to the north and 

 south, thus enclosing a semicircular sandy plain whose 

 diameter is the Nile and whose circumference is the 

 barrier of desert cliff. This was the spot which Akhcna- 

 ton chose for his new capital. The ruins, covered with 

 a thin laj^er of sand, lie not half a mile from the river, 

 and are five miles in length by half a mile in breadth. 

 In the face of the cliffs, between two and three miles 

 from the town, lie the rock-hewn tombs of the nobles, 

 some finished and probably never used, others not even 

 finished, for the town was inhabited for no more than 

 about twenty years. Several striking valleys run far 

 eastward into the desert, and in one of these are the 

 royal tombs, two unfinished, and the third in part at 

 least finished, and used for the burial of one or more of 

 the king's numerous daughters, perhaps also for that of 

 Akhenaton himself, though his body was, as we have 

 seen, after^vards removed to Thebes. At various 

 points in the cliffs tablets are cut in the rock marking 

 out the boundaries of Akhetaton, and bearing long and 

 important inscriptions. Three of these tablets are also 

 found in the cliffs on the western side of the Nile, for 

 Akhetaton in theory extended on both sides of the 

 river. 



As earlj' as 1824 an English explorer, Wilkinson, 

 visited the tombs of the nobles, and also re-discovered 

 the famous alabaster quarry of Hatnub away in the 

 desert behind them. The town mounds, however, 

 attracted less attention until 1887, when a happy, or 

 unhappy, accident brought them before the notice of 

 the archfeological world. A native of Et Till, digging 

 among the ruins for the rich manure-earth known as 

 sebakh, found in the ruins of a house a large number 

 of baked clay tablets covered with cuneiform writing. 

 These were taken to Cairo and declared forgeries by the 

 museum experts, and a similar judgment was passed 

 on some specimens sent to Paris for examination. 

 Thereupon the antiquity dealer into whose hands they 

 had fallen loaded them into sacks, and hawked them 

 up and down Eg\'pt in the attempt to get a few piastres 

 for them. After some had been lost, some ground to 



powder, and nearly all injured, a lucky chance brought 

 them into hands which could appreciate them, and 

 they now lie partly in our British Museum, and partly 

 in other museums. These tablets, when translated, 

 turned out to be nothing less than the archives of the 

 Egyptian Foreign Office during the reign of Akhenaton 

 and part of that of his father. They consist of a 

 series of letters, written in Babylonian — the diplomatic 

 language of the period, just as French is to-day — 

 passing between Egypt and the various powers and 

 cities of nearer Asia. They constitute an almost 

 complete history of Syria in this period, in which we 

 see the Hittites and Khabiri pressing on, detaching 

 one by one the various members of the Egyptian 

 empire in Asia, whose frenzied appeals to Egypt for 

 help went unheeded by Akhenaton and his court, 

 busy singing their hymns to the Disk in Akhetaton. 

 The end of the story may be told here. One by one the 

 conquests of Akhenaton's warrior fathers were lost, 

 and despite a scene in one of the nobles' tombs which 

 represents the Syrian tribute as still arriving in the 

 twelfth year of the reign, no attempt was made to meet 

 the crisis, and within twenty years the conquests of two 

 himdred were lost. 



The finding of the tablets gave promise of exciting 

 discoveries at Tell-el-Amama, and in 1891 Flinders 

 Petrie made there an excavation of considerable 

 importance. Among the towTi mounds he discovered 

 the Disk-temple and the Royal Palace with its famous 

 painted plaster pavement, which attracted tourists 

 to the spot until, in 1913, it was virtually destroyed 

 by a foolish native to spite a fellow-villager entrusted 

 with its protection. In the waste-heaps of the Palace 

 Petrie found fragments of imported painted vases 

 of a kind known in Crete and elsewhere, while the 

 various houses which he laid bare gave us our first 

 knowledge of the plan of the Eg\'ptian dwelling, and 

 large quantities of objects of the beautiful glass for 

 which the spot has ever since been renowned. 



There is next a gap in the history of discovery on 

 the site until 1906, when the appearance of fine objects 

 of Akhenaton's reign in the shops of the Cairo dealers 

 tempted a German archa-ological society, the Deutsche 

 Orient-Gesellschaft, to make a trial excavation there. 

 This gave such promising results that the Society 

 decided on undertaking the complete clearance of the 

 town mounds, which was begun in 1910 and was still in 

 progress in 1914. During this time about one-fifth 

 of the to\vn area had been excavated and planned, 

 ven*' great additions had been made to our knowledge 

 of Egyptian domestic architecture and town-planning, 

 a wonderful group of statues in the peculiar style of the 

 period had been found, but, it must be admitted, no 

 vePj' striking contribution had been made to the history 

 of the " heretic " and his " heresj'." 



