aged father, Yuaa, died; and Tuau soon followed him to the grave.
They were buried in a fine sepulchre in the Valley of the Tombs
of the Kings at Thebes; and if they are not to be considered as
royal, this will have been the first time that persons not of royal
blood had been buried in a tomb of large size in this valley.
A quantity of funeral furniture was placed around the splendid
coffins in which their mummies lay, and amongst this there were
a few objects which evidently had been presented by the bereaved
king and queen and by the young princesses, Setamon and another
whose name is now lost. Yuaa and his wife had evidently been much
beloved at the court, and as the parents of the great queen they
had commanded the respect of all men. To us they are remarkable as
the grandparents of that great teacher, Akhnaton, whose birth has
now to be recorded.
II.
THE BIRTH AND EARLY YEARS OF AKHNATON.
1. THE BIRTH OF AKHNATON.
It has been seen that Queen Tiy presented several children to the
king; but it was not until they had reigned some twenty-five or
twenty-six years that the future monarch was born. As the years
had passed the queen must have grown more and more anxious for a
son, and many must have been the prayers she offered up that a
male child might be vouchsafed to her. In Egypt at the present
day the desire to bear a son holds dominion in the heart of every
young woman; and those to whom this privilege has not been granted
forsake the laws of the prophet and still lay their passionate
appeal before the old gods. The present writer was asked recently
by a young peasant to allow his wife to walk round the outer wall
of an ancient temple, in order that she might perchance bear a male
child thereafter; and on another occasion three young women were
seen sliding down the plinth of an overturned statue of Rameses
the Great for the same purpose. With similar emotion, though with
greater intelligence, Queen Tiy must have turned in her grief from
one god to another, promising them all manner of gifts if they
would grant her desire. To Ra-Horakhti Aton she appears to have
turned with the most confidence; and perhaps, as will presently
be seen, she vowed that if a son were granted to her she would
dedicate him to the service of that god.
It is probable that the little prince first saw the light in the
royal palace at Thebes, which was situated on the edge of the
desert at the foot of the western hills. It was, as has been said,
an extensive building, lightly constructed and gaily decorated.
The ceilings and pavements of its halls were fantastically painted
with scenes of animal life: wild cattle ran through reedy swamps
beneath the royal feet, and there many-coloured fish swam in the
water; while overhead flights of pigeons, white against a blue sky,
passed across the hall, and wild duck hastened towards the open
casements. Through curtained doorways one might obtain glimpses of
the garden planted with flowers foreign to Egypt; and on the east
of the palace shone the great pleasure-lake, surrounded by the
trees of Asia.
In all the world there are few places more beautiful than the site
of this palace. Here one may sit for many an hour watching the
changing colours on the wonderful cliffs, the pink and the yellow
of the rocks standing out from the blue and the purple of the deep
shadows. In the fields which now surround the ruined palace, where
the royal gardens were laid out, one obtains an impression of
colour, of beauty, and of gaiety--if it can be so expressed--which
is not easily equalled. The continuous sunshine and the bracing
wind render one intensely awake to natural joys; and here, indeed,
was a fitting birthplace, one feels, for a king who taught his
people to study the beauties of nature.
2. THE RISE OF ATON.
The little prince was named Amonhotep,[14] “the Peace-of-Amon,”
after his father; but though the supremacy of Amon was thus
acknowledged, the Heliopolitan deity appears to have been
considered as the protector of the young boy. While the luxurious
court rejoiced at the birth of their future king, one feels that
the ancient priesthood of Amon-Ra must have looked askance at the
baby who was destined one day to be their master. This priesthood
still demanded implicit obedience to its stiff and ancient
conventions, and it refused to recognise the growing tendency
towards religious speculation.
Probably stronger measures would have been taken by it to resist
the growing power of Ra-Horakhti, had it not been for the fact that
Ra was also a form of Amon, and had been identified with him under
the name of Amon-Ra. The god Amon was originally but the local
deity of Thebes; and, when the Theban Pharaohs of the Eighteenth
Dynasty had elevated him to the position of the state god of all
Egypt, they made him acceptable to the various provinces, as we
have seen, by pointing to his identification with Ra, the sun-god,
who, under one form or another, found a place in every temple and
held high rank in every variety of mythology. As Amon-Ra he was
able to be appreciated by the sun-worshippers of Syria and by those
of Nubia, for there were few races who would not do homage to the
great giver of warmth and light.
It is possible that those more thoughtful members of the court
who were quietly attempting to undermine the influence of the
priesthood of Amon, and who were beginning to carry into execution
the schemes of emancipation which we have already noticed, now
endeavoured to strip Amon of his association with the sun; for
that identity was really his simple claim to acceptance by any
but Thebans. The priesthood, on their part, it may be supposed,
drew as much attention as possible to the connection of their
deity with Ra; for they knew that none but the Heliopolitan god
could be advanced with success as a rival of Amon by those who
desired to overthrow the Theban god. Thus one finds that the High
Priest of Ra at Heliopolis was given, and was obliged to accept,
the honorary office of Second Priest of Amon at Thebes,[15] which
at once placed him under the thumb of the Theban High Priest. The
propounders of the new thought, however, met this move by bringing
into greater prominence the claims, not of Ra-Horakhti, but of
Aton, which was merely a more elusive form of the sun-god. The
priesthood of Amon had always checked the individual growth of
Ra-Horakhti by regarding him simply as an aspect of Ra, and hence
of Amon-Ra. One of the essential features of the new movement was
the regarding of Ra as an aspect of Ra-Horakhti, and the calling
of Ra-Horakhti by the uncontaminated name of Aton. Aton, in fact,
was originally introduced into the matter largely for the purpose
of preventing any identification between Amon-Ra and Ra-Horakhti.
Soon the name of Aton, entirely supplanting that of Atum, was heard
with some frequency at Thebes and elsewhere, but always, it must
be remembered, as another word for Ra-Horakhti.
The desire of the court for a change of religion is understandable.
The cult of the god Amon, as has been said, was so hedged about
with conventionalities that free thought was impossible. We have
seen, however, that the upper classes were passing through a phase
of religious speculation, and they were ready to revolt against the
domination of a priesthood which forbade criticism. The worship of
the intangible power of the sun, under the name of Aton, offered
endless possibilities for the exercise of those tendencies towards
the abstract which were now beginning to be felt all over the
civilised world. This was man’s first age of philosophical thought,
and for the first time in history the gods were being endued with
ideal qualities.
Apart from all questions of religion, the priesthood of Amon had
obtained such power and wealth that it was a very serious menace
to the dignity of the throne. The great organisation which had its
headquarters at Karnak had become an incubus which weighed heavily
upon the state. For political reasons alone, therefore, it was
desirable to push the priests of Heliopolis into a more prominent
position.
There was, moreover, a third consideration. The god Aton, with
whom Ra and Ra-Horakhti were now being identified, was, we have
seen, originally the same as the Syrian and Greek Adonis, the word
“Adon” or “Aton” meaning simply “lord.” Thus the propounders of the
new doctrines must have dreamt of an Egypto-Syrian empire bound
together by the ties of a common religion. With one god understood
and worshipped from the cataracts of the Nile to the distant
Euphrates, what power could destroy the empire?
3. THE POWER OF QUEEN TIY.
In Amonhotep III. one may see the lazy, speculative Oriental, too
opinionated and too vain to bear with the stiff routine of his
fathers, and yet too lacking in energy to formulate a new religion.
On the other hand, there is every reason to suppose that Queen
Tiy possessed the ability to impress the claims of the new thought
upon her husband’s mind, and gradually to turn his eyes, and those
of the court, away from the sombre worship of Amon, “the unknown
god,” into the direction of the brilliant cult of the sun. Those
who have travelled in Egypt will realise how completely the land
is dominated by the sun. The blue skies, the shining rocks, the
golden desert, the verdant fields, all seem to cry out for joy of
the sunshine. The extraordinary energy which one may feel in Egypt
at sunrise, and the deep melancholy which sometimes accompanies the
red nightfall, must have been felt by Tiy also in her palace at
Thebes.
As the years passed the power and influence of Queen Tiy increased;
and now that she had borne a son to the king there was added to
her great position as royal wife the equally great _rôle_ of
royal mother. Never before had a queen been so freely represented
on all the king’s monuments, nor had so fine a series of titles
been given before to the wife of a Pharaoh. At Sedênga, far up in
the Sudan, her husband erected a temple for her; and in distant
Sinai a beautiful portrait head of her was recently found. All
visitors to Thebes have seen her figures by the side of the legs of
the two great colossi at the edge of the Western Desert; and the
huge statues of herself and her husband, now in the Cairo Museum,
will have been seen by those who have visited that collection. Of
Grilukhipa,[16] however, and the king’s other wives, one hears
nothing at all: Queen Tiy relegated them to the background almost
before their marriage ceremonies were over.
By the time that Amonhotep III. had reigned for thirty years or
so, he had ceased to give much attention to state affairs, and
the power had almost entirely passed into the capable hands of
Tiy. Already an influence, which we may presume to have been to a
large extent hers, was being felt in many directions: Ra-Horakhti
and Aton were being brought into the foreground, a tone of
thought which can hardly be regarded as purely Egyptian was being
developed, the art was undergoing modifications and had risen to a
pitch of excellence never attained before or after. The exquisite
low-reliefs of the end of the reign of Amonhotep III.--for example,
those to be seen at Thebes in the tombs of Khaemhat and Rames,[17]
both of which are definitely dated to the close of the reign--stir
one almost as do the works of the early Florentine masters. There
is an elusive grace in the dainty figures there sculptured, which,
through another medium and under other laws of convention, cause
them to appeal with the same force of indefinable sweetness as do
the figures in the works of Filipino Lippi and Botticelli. In the
mass of Egyptian painting and sculpture of secondary importance
such gems as these have been overlooked and have not been
appreciated by the public; but the present writer ventures to think
that some day they will set the heart of all art-lovers dancing as
danced those of Queen Tiy’s great masters.
The court in which the little prince passed his earliest years was
more brilliant than ever it had been before, and Queen Tiy presided
over scenes of indescribable splendour. Amonhotep III. has been
truly called “the Magnificent”; and at no period, save that of
Thothmes III., were the royal treasuries so full or the nobles so
wealthy. Out of a pageant of festivities, from amidst the noise
of song and laughter, the little sad-eyed prince first emerges on
to the stage of history, led by the hand of Queen Tiy; but as he
appears before us, above the clink of the golden wine-bowls, above
the sound of the timbrels, one seems to hear the lilt of a more
simple song, and the peaceful singing of a lark.
4. AKHNATON’S MARRIAGE.
During the last years of his reign the Pharaoh, although well under
fifty years of age,[18] seems to have suffered from permanent
ill-health. On two occasions the King of Mitanni sent to Egypt a
miracle-working statuette of the goddess Ishtar, apparently in the
hope that Amonhotep might be cured of his illness by it. It is
probable that the king had never been a very strong man. Having
been born when his father--himself extremely delicate--was but
a child, he had had little chance of enjoying a robust middle
age, and he passed on to his children this inherent weakness. One
hears no more of his daughters,[19] whom we have seen mourning for
their grandparents Yuaa and Tuau, and there is some likelihood
that they died young. The little Prince Amonhotep was already
developing constitutional weaknesses which rendered his life very
precarious. His skull was misshapen, and he must have been subject
to occasional epileptic fits. And now Queen Tiy gave birth to a
daughter, who was named Baketaton in honour of the new god, and who
seems to have lived less than a score of years, since nothing more
is heard of her after her twelfth or thirteenth year.
[Illustration: _Amonhotep III._]
As Amonhotep, at the age of forty-eight or forty-nine, felt his
end approaching, he seems to have shown considerable anxiety in
regard to the succession. Here was his only son--now a boy of ten
or eleven years of age--in so sad a state of health that he could
not be expected to live to manhood, and in the event of his
death the throne would be without an occupant in the direct line.
Obviously it was necessary that he should be married as soon as
possible, in order that he might become a father as early as that
was naturally possible. Amonhotep III. himself had been married to
Tiy when he was about twelve years of age, and his father Thothmes
IV. had likewise been married at that early age.[20] The little
Prince Amonhotep should, therefore, also be given a wife at once;
and the Pharaoh now began to look around for a suitable consort
for him. He had heard that Dushratta, King of Mitanni, had a small
daughter who was said to be a comely maiden; but it appears that
she was only eight or nine years of age,[21] and therefore could
not be expected to provide an heir for at least another four years.
Nevertheless there were many political reasons for proposing the
union. Mitanni was, as we have seen, the buffer state between
the Pharaoh’s Syrian possessions and the lands of the Hittites
and of the Mesopotamians. Thothmes IV. had asked a bride from
Mitanni, and Amonhotep III. himself had obtained Gilukhipa from
thence, if not Queen Tiy also: both these being probably political
matches, designed for the welfare of the Syrian empire. The Pharaoh
therefore decided upon this marriage for his sickly son, and sent
an embassy to Dushratta to negotiate the union between these two
children.
The reply of Dushratta has, fortunately, been preserved to us. The
Mitannian king acknowledges the arrival of the envoy, and is much
rejoiced at this further binding together of the two countries. In
a subsequent letter it is evident that the princess has already
been sent to Egypt, and we are led to suppose that Prince Amonhotep
has at once been married to her. The little princess was named
Tadukhipa, but on her arrival in Egypt she was renamed Nefertiti.
Her age, as mentioned above, is apparent from the fact that,
although in after life she gave birth to children at very regular
intervals, her first child was not born until nearly five years
after her marriage.[22] So young was she that she did not at once
cohabit with the prince, but was put under the care of a certain
lady of the court named Ty, the wife of a noble of the name of Ay,
who afterwards usurped the throne. This lady Ty called herself in
later years “great nurse and nourisher of the Queen,” and Ay always
called himself the king’s father-in-law (_neter at_). It would thus
seem that they had become the actual foster-parents of the little
Syrian girl. It was not at all unusual in Egypt for a child to be
adopted thus; and it is a curious fact that if a woman gave the
breast to a child of any age but for a moment, or if a man placed
his finger in the child’s mouth, a formal adoption was considered
to have been made.[23]
The court had hardly settled down after the celebration of the
marriage of Amonhotep and Tadukhipa-Nefertiti, when it was thrown
into mourning by the death of Amonhotep “the Magnificent,” which
occurred in the thirty-sixth year of his reign. Queen Tiy at
once assumed control of state affairs, on behalf of her barely
eleven-year-old son, who as Amonhotep IV. now ascended the throne
of the Pharaohs.
5. THE ACCESSION OF AKHNATON.
On coming to the throne the young king fixed his titulary in the
following manner:--
Mighty Bull, Lofty of Plumes; Favourite of the Two Goddesses,
Great in Kingship in Karnak; Golden Hawk, Wearer of Diadems
in the Southern Heliopolis; King of Upper and Lower Egypt,
Beautiful-is-the-Being-of-Ra, the Only-One-of-Ra; Son of the
Sun, Peace-of-Amon (Amonhotep), Divine Ruler of Thebes; Great in
Duration, Living for Ever and Ever, Beloved of Amon-Ra, Lord of
Heaven.
These titles were drawn up on more or less prescribed lines, and
conformed to the old custom of the Pharaohs. Like his ancestors,
he was called “Beloved of Amon-Ra,” although, as we have seen, the
power of that god was already much undermined. To counterbalance
this reference to the god of Thebes, however, one finds the
surprising title--
High Priest of Ra-Horakhti, rejoicing in the horizon in his name,
“Heat-which-is-in-Aton.”
Let the boy be said to be beloved of Amon-Ra till the walls of
Thebes reverberate with the cry; let Amon-Ra be called Lord of
Heaven till the priestly heralds can shout no more: the doom of the
god of Thebes cannot now be averted, for the reigning Pharaoh is
dedicated to another god.
[Illustration: _Akhnaton._]
It is obvious that a boy of eleven years of age could not himself
have claimed the office of the High Priest of Ra-Horakhti.
Queen Tiy and her advisers must have deliberately endowed the
youthful king with this office, largely in order to set the seal
upon the fate of Amon. There were, perhaps, other reasons why
this remarkable step was decided upon. It may be, as has been
said, that the queen, before the birth of her son, had vowed him
to Ra-Horakhti. Again, the boy was epileptic, was subject to
hallucinations; and it may be that while in this condition he had
seen visions or uttered words which led his mother to believe
him to be the chosen one of the Heliopolitan god, whose name the
prince must have been constantly hearing. In a palace where the
mystical “Heat-which-is-in-Aton,” which was the new elaboration of
the god’s name, was being daily invoked, and where the youthful
master of Egypt was constantly falling into what appeared to be
holy frenzy, it is not unlikely that the rising deity would be
connected with the eccentricities of the young Pharaoh. The High
Priest of Ra-Horakhti was always called “The Great of Visions,” and
was thus essentially a visionary prophet either by nature or by
circumstance; and the unfortunate boy’s physical condition may have
been turned, thus, to account in the struggle against Amon-Ra.
One may now imagine the Pharaoh as a pale, sickly youth. His head
seemed too large for his body; his eyelids were heavy; his eyes as
one imagines them were wells of dream. His features were delicately
moulded, and his mouth, in spite of a somewhat protruding lower
jaw, is reminiscent of the best of the art of Rossetti. He seems
to have been a quiet, studious boy, whose thoughts wandered in
fair places, searching for that happiness which his physical
condition had denied to him. His nature was gentle; his young heart
overflowed with love. He delighted, it would seem, to walk in the
gardens of the palace, to hear the birds singing, to watch the fish
in the lake, to smell the flowers, to follow the butterflies, to
warm his small bones in the sunshine. There was a grave dignity
in his gait, or the artists have lied; and his words were already
fraught with wisdom. The great crown of the Pharaohs sat easily
upon his head, for his every movement was royal. He accepted as
his due the homage of the court; yet he does not seem to have
acted with arrogance, and was ever a tender-hearted, impulsive
child. Already he was sometimes called “Lord of the Breath of
Sweetness”;[24] and already he was so much beloved by his subjects
that their adherence to him through the rough places of his future
life was assured. For the first years of his reign he was, of
course, entirely under the regency of his mother. Dushratta, the
King of Mitanni, writing to congratulate the boy on his accession,
addressed himself to Queen Tiy, as though he thought the king
would hardly yet be able to understand a letter; and in a later
communication he asks the Pharaoh to inquire of his mother as to
certain matters of international policy. But although so young, the
king was wise beyond his years, as the reader will presently see.
6. THE FIRST YEARS OF AKHNATON’S REIGN.
In a subsequent chapter it will be the writer’s purpose to show
to what heights of ideal thought, and to what profundities of
religious and moral philosophy, this boy, in the years of his
early manhood, attained; and it will but enhance our respect for
his abilities when he reached maturity, if we find in his early
training all manner of shortcomings. The beautiful doctrines of
the religion with which this Pharaoh’s name is identified were
productions of his later days; and until he was at least seventeen
years of age neither his exalted monotheism nor any of his future
principles were really apparent. Some time after the eighth year of
his reign one finds that he had evolved a religion so pure that one
must compare it with Christianity in order to discover its faults;
and the reader will presently see that this superb theology was not
derived from his education.
One of the first acts of the king’s reign, undertaken at the
desire of Queen Tiy or of the royal advisers, was the erection of
a temple to Ra-Horakhti Aton at Karnak.[25] This was in no way an
insult to Amon, for Thothmes III. and other Pharaohs had dedicated
temples at Karnak to gods other than Amon. The priesthood of
Amon-Ra recognised the existence of the many deities of Egypt, and
gave them their place in the constitution of heaven, reserving for
their own god the title of “King of the Gods.” There was a temple
of Ptah here; there were shrines set apart for the worship of Min;
and other gods, unconnected with Amon, were here accommodated. The
priests of Amon-Ra thus could not offer any serious objection to
the project. The building[26] was to be constructed of sandstone,
and therefore various officials were dispatched to the great
quarries of Gebel Silsileh, which lie on the river between Edfu
and Kom Ombo, and to those near Esneh. Large tablets were there
carved upon the cliffs towards the close of the work, and on them
the figure of the Pharaoh was represented worshipping Amon, who
was thus still the state god. Above the king’s figure, however,
the disk of the sun is seen, and from it a number of lines,
representing rays, project downwards towards the royal figure.
These rays terminate in hands, which thus seem to be distributing
the “Heat-which-is-in-Aton” around the Pharaoh. This is the first
representation of the afterwards famous symbol of the religion of
Aton, and it is significant that it should make its _début_ in a
scene representing the worship of Amon.