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THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE 



the Aten was beginning to make head- 

 way at the court. 



But when, on the death of Amenhotep, 

 his son x\menhotep IV, a mere boy, as- 

 cended the throne, the full extent of this 

 influence speedily began to make itself 

 felt. Doubtless influenced at first to a 

 large extent by his mother. Queen Tyi, 

 but driven also by the convictions of his 

 own keenly religious and even fanatical 

 nature, Amenhotep IV drifted away from 

 the accepted Egyptian creed and substi- 

 tuted for it as the court religion a purely 

 monotheistic and spiritual system, the 

 worship of the Aten, or vital energy of 

 the solar disc. 



He endeavored to thrust his new re- 

 ligion upon the nation to the exclusion of 

 all other cults. The worship of Amen 

 and the other gods of Egypt was pro- 

 scribed, the temples were shut up, and 

 even the name of Amen was hammered 

 out of all inscriptions. As it occurred in 

 his own name, the king discarded the 

 title which his ancestors had made glori- 

 ous, and named himself Akhenaten, 

 "Spirit of the Aten." To complete the 

 religious revolution, he abandoned The- 

 bes and built for himself a new capital at 

 Tell-el-Amarna, naming it "Khut-Aten," 

 ''Horizon of the Aten." 



The importance of the change which 

 the young king contemplated can scarcely 

 be overestimated. It was the first at- 

 tempt in human history to set up a gen- 

 uinely spiritual religion and to substitute 

 for the old polytheistic congeries of gods 

 the conception of one universal deity — 

 invisible, intangible, and spiritual. Ak- 

 henaten's religious conceptions were em- 

 bodied in two beautiful hymns to the 

 Aten which have come down to us, and 

 whose authorship has, with great proba- 

 bility, been ascribed to the king himself. 



THIv HEBREW PROPHETS ANTICIPATED 



A study of these hymns reveals the 

 fact that he had reached very much the 

 same beliefs with regard to the nature 

 of God which animated the Hebrew 

 psalmists of seven centuries later. Pro- 

 fessor Breasted, of Chicago, who has 

 presented a brilliant sketch of Akhenaten 

 in his ''History of Egypt," thus sums up 



the man and his daring attempt to revo- 

 lutionize religion : 



"Such a spirit as the world had never 

 seen before — a brave soul, undauntedly 

 facing the momentum of immemorial 

 tradition, and thereby stepping out from 

 the long line of conventional and color- 

 less Pharaohs that he might disseminate 

 ideas far beyond and above the capacity 

 of his age to understand. Among the 

 Hebrews, seven or eight hundred years 

 later, we look for such men; but the 

 modern world has yet adequately to 

 value or even acquaint itself with this 

 man, who in an age so remote and under 

 conditions so adverse became the world'a 

 first' idealist and the world's first indi- 

 vidual." 



Akhenaten, however, was a man born 

 out of due time. The world was not 

 ready for him and his advanced ideas. 

 The empire of Egypt required at the 

 moment not a religious idealist, but a 

 practical soldier for its ruler, and the re- 

 sults of the king's devotion to his new 

 ideas were disastrous in the extreme to 

 the empire which he ruled. In the north 

 of Syria the rising power of the Hittites 

 was pressing upon the nations border- 

 ing upon the Egyptian empire ; within 

 the Syrian province of the empire itself 

 revolutionary and rebel forces were at 

 work, and the Tell-el-Amarna corre- 

 spondence reveals to us the process by 

 which the empire which the great soldier 

 kings of the eighteenth dynasty had built 

 up crumbled to pieces during a single 

 short reign. 



A PATHETIC CRY l^OR HEI.P 



Tetter after letter came from the vas- 

 sal princes and governors of Syria, de- 

 tailing the progress of the enemies of 

 Egypt and vainly imploring the king to 

 send help. The letters of Rib-addi of 

 Gubla, Abi-milki of Tyre, and Abd- 

 Khiba of Jerusalem are infinitely pathetic 

 in their hopeless loyalty. Again and 

 again they sound in the king's ears the 

 note of warning. If he will only bestir 

 himself, only send them even a handful 

 of Egyptian soldiers, the situation may 

 yet be saved. Such a cry as the follow- 

 ing, from a loyal town hard pressed by 



