398 
NATURE 
[Marcu 24, 1923 
The Egyptian World in the Time of Tutankhamen. 
By Dr. H. R. Hatt. 
bi Crea name of Tutankhamen, king of Egypt, whose 
reign may with comparative certainty be 
placed in the decade 1360-1350 B.c., is now a household 
word, and is probably known to many who have never 
heard of Thothmes or Rameses. The discovery of his 
tomb at Thebes by Lord Carnarvon and Mr. Howard 
Carter, with its wealth of funerary furniture and the 
magnificent state which probably enshrines the actual 
body of the king, has made Tutankhamen familiar to 
all; so that, at any rate for the time, we regard him 
as the typical Egyptian pharaoh of his age. But, asa 
matter of fact, he was an ephemeral and undistinguished 
monarch personally, and his short reign is only remark- 
able for one fact, the return of Egypt to the polytheistic 
faith of her forefathers after the short episode of the 
Disk-worshipping heresy of his father-in-law, Akhenaten, 
the artist, poet, and pacificist, one of the most extra- 
ordinary figures of the ancient world. 
Akhenaten is the outstanding figure of his century, 
but he, again, is not the typical great king of his time : 
it is his father, Amanhatpe or Amenhotep III., the 
Memnon of the Greeks, who can nightly claim that 
position. Akhenaten was too strange and unconven- 
tional a figure. Tutankhamen began by following the 
heresy of his father-in-law, but in his day the reaction 
came, and the great god Amen of Thebes, king of the 
gods and head of the imperial pantheon, returned to his 
own. It is probably on this account that Tutankhamen 
was buried in the magnificent splendour that we see: 
Amen-Ra and his triumphant priests saw to it that the 
returned prodigal received fitting burial, with all the 
provision that the old religion could give him to ensure 
his dignity and well-being in the next world. 
It is at the moment of his return to the national 
religion’s fold that we survey the state of the world as 
known to the Egyptians, for to go further afield would 
bear us into endless paths of speculation. Egypt and 
Mesopotamia give us the only known chronological 
bases for real history at this time ; to go outside their 
world, into the Bronze Age of Western Europe, for 
example, would be to cast loose from the control of 
known dates and events and to speculate merely as to 
the probable growth of civilisation, not to write history. 
What was the world like outside Egypt, as known to 
the Egyptians, in Tutankhamen’s day ? 
About 1580 B.c. the Syrian and Canaanite invaders 
who had dominated Egypt for at least two centuries, 
the Hyksos or Shepherd-Kings, had been expelled by 
force, and the Egyptians, filled with the spirit of 
vevanche, had in their turn imposed their rule on the 
lands .of their oppressors. The raids of the earlier 
kings of the XVIIIth Dynasty, which now occupied 
the throne of Thebes, had crystallised under Thutmases, 
or Thothmes, III. into a settled policy of conquest and 
empire, and Amenhotep III. was the undisputed ruler 
of Syria, Palestine, and Pheenicia. 
These countries were regarded by the kings of 
Babylon and Assyria as the rightful domains of the 
king of Egypt, their peoples as his subjects. He was 
their lord in peace and war. Egyptian residents and 
generals controlled the native princes. The Egyptian 
frontier ran from the Amanus and north of the Aleppan 
NO. 2786, VOL. 111] 


district to the Euphrates near Carchemish, and thence 
down the river for some distance, till it turned off and 
ceased in the undefined wastes ofithe desert, reappearing 
at the head of the gulf of Akabah, in the land of Edom. 
The great historical cities of Syria, Aleppo, Carchemish, 
Damascus, and Jerusalem ; the Phcenician cities of the 
coast from Arvad in the north, past Byblos, of old an 
Egyptian centre, Tyre, and Sidon to Akko in the 
south ; the towns of the Philistine coast, from Dor to 
Gaza ; had already existed for centuries. But though 
the Phoenicians were there, the Philistines were not 
yet in the land which afterwards bore their name, 
Palestine. They did not arrive in Canaan till nearly 
two centuries later. 
Outside the Egyptian border to the west, in the days 
of Amenhotep III., the ancient kingdom of Babylonia 
existed in august but somewhat faded and inert 
majesty, as old as Egypt and as proud, but weak 
and querulous, trusting to the power of old renown as 
her protection against attack rather than to warlike 
prowess. Officially she now bore the name of Karduni- 
yash, an appellation given her by the kings of her 
foreign Kassite dynasty, a race of conquerors, probably 
of Indo-European origin, who had come from beyond — 
the Zagros some four centuries before. 
North of her, on the Tigris, was Assyria, also an 
ancient power, but younger; Babylonian in culture, 
but more purely Semitic in race; and rejecting the 
claim to suzerainty which Babylon sought to impose 
on her. To the west of Assyria was the ill-defined 
kingdom of Mitanni, the land of Northern Mesopotamia 
between the Khabar, the Euphrates, and the moun- 
tains of Diarbekir, inhabited by an intrusive race of 
uncertain origin ruled by kings probably, like ne 
Kassites, of Aryan origin. 
Farther west, beyond Taurus, was the confetaaainly 
of tribes of the Anatolian Hittites, who owed allegiance 
to an overlord, the “Sun” of Khatti, reigning in 
central Anatolia, at a city represented by the modern 
Boghaz K@6i, east of the Halys. The ancient Semitic 
population of Cappodocia no longer existed, having 
been destroyed or expelled by the Hittites. 
Hittite tribes had already crossed the Taurus, in- 
habited the districts of Aleppo and Carchemish, and 
had even pushed outposts down as far south as 
Palestine, where they lived under Egyptian rule, side 
by side with the Canaanites and with Aryans from 
Mitanni. 
South of the Aketolan Hittites was Cilicia, in- 
habited by a kindred race, of whose culture we know ~ 
little, but that it owed much, probably, both to the 
Hittite and to the Syrian. 
The island of Cyprus, the people of which also were 
racially related to the Anatolians, probably, had re- 
cently been conquered by Aigean tribes from Rhodes 
and Greece itself, who brought with them the Mycenzean 
culture, now beginning in Greece to take the place of 
the Minoan civilisation of Crete from which it was 
derived. The Minoan civilisation was now eclipsed on 
account of the collapse of the dominion of Knossos, 
which had sent ambassadors to Egypt in the days of 
Thothmes III. 
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