14 ANNUAL ADDRESS—PROFESSOR SAYCE. 
not long before rulers and people alike returned to the old 
paths. The faith which Khu-en-Aten had endeavoured to 
introduce was left without worshippers, the Asiatic strangers 
whom he and his father had promoted to high offices of State 
were driven from power, and the new capital was deserted, 
never to be inhabited again. The great temple of the Solar 
Disk fell into decay like the royal palace, and the archives of 
Khu-en-Aten were buried under the ruins of the chamber 
wherein they had been kept. Here they remained, concealed 
by the friendly sand, until the fellahin, searching for sebahh, 
or nitrous earth, with which to manure their fields, at last 
brought them to light. 
I happened to arrive at Cairo shortly after the discovery 
was made, and as no cuneiform scholar had as yet seen the 
tablets, I was of course very anxious to examine them. A few 
had already been secured by the Boulaq Museum ; the rest of 
those which had been brought to Cairo had passed into pri- 
vate hands, and had been carried away elsewhere. Owing 
to an unfortunate misunderstanding, I failed to see those 
which were in the Museum, and it was not until a little before 
my departure from Egypt, in April, 1888, that M. Bouriant, 
the Director of the French Archeological School, obtained 
possession of about a dozen, which he kindly allowed me to 
copy. M. Bouriant’s tablets were all, unfortunately, more or 
less injured, and I sought in them in vain for an indication of 
date. One of them, however, contained a reference to ‘the 
conquest of Amasis” (Kasad Amasi), and as Hgyptian history 
knows of only two kings of that name,—the founder of the 
Highteenth Dynasty, and the contemporary of Nebuchad- 
nezzar,—l was bound to conclude that the latter was referred 
to. We already knew that Egypt had been invaded by the 
great Chaldzean monarch ; and, since the forms of the characters 
found upon the tablets belonged to the Babylonian and not 
to the Assyrian variety of cuneiform script, it appeared 
necessary to see in M. Bouriant’s tablets relics of Nebuchad- 
nezzar’s Egyptian campaign. The Boulaq Museum already 
possessed three cylinders, which came from the neighbour- 
hood of the Suez Canal, probably from Tel Defenneh or 
Tahpanhes, and bore the name and titles of Nebuchadnezzar. 
One difficulty, however, stood in the way of ascribing the 
tablets of Tel el-Amarna to so late a date. On one of those 
belonging to M. Bouriant, the name of Gimti or Gath occurs, 
and it is pretty certain that Gath had ceased to exist before 
the sixth century B.C. 
After my departure from Egypt, the question was finally 
cleared up. More than 160 tablets had been offered for sal 
