The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

86 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

noteworthy development of solar worship in Egypt.
It is perhaps hardly correct to apply to it the term development.
It was rather a break in the religious tradition of Egypt, an
interruption in the normal evolution of the Egyptian creed, which
accordingly made but little permanent impression on the religious
history of the nation. But in the religious history of mankind
it is one of the most interesting of episodes. Like Mosaism
in Israel, it preached the doctrine of monotheism in Egypt;
but unlike Mosaism, its success was only temporary. Unlike
Mosaism, moreover, it was a pantheistic monotheism, and it
failed accordingly in its struggle with the nebulous polytheism
of Egypt.
One of the last Pharaohs of the Eighteenth Dynasty was Amon-
hotepIV. Since the conquest of Syria by his ancestor Thothmes
III., and the establishment of an empire which extended to the
banks of the Euphrates, Asiatic manners and customs had poured
into Egypt in an ever-increasing flood, and with them the ideas
and religious beliefs of the Semitic East. Amon-hotepIII., the
[093] father of Amon-hotepIV., had maintained the older traditions
of the Egyptian court, so far at least as religion was concerned,
though his mother and wife had alike been foreigners. But his
son appears to have been young at the time of his father's death.
He was accordingly brought up under the eye and influence of
his mother Teie, and his temperament seems to have seconded
the teaching he received from her. His features are those of
a philosophic visionary rather than of a man of action, of a
religious reformer rather than of a king. He flung himself eagerly
into a religious movement of which he was the mainspring and
centre, and for the first time in history there was persecution for
religion's sake.
For numberless centuries the Egyptian had applied the title of
“the one god”to the divinity he was adoring at the moment, or
who presided over the fortunes of his city or nome. But he did
not mean to exclude by it the existence of other deities. The“one