The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

88 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

had given them their empire over the world, and upon whose city
of Thebes the spoils of Asia had been lavished. A fierce contest
broke out between the Theban priesthood and the heretical king.
The worship of Amon was proscribed, his very name was erased
from the monuments on which it was engraved, and a shrine of
the rival deity was erected at the very gates of his ancient temple.
The Pharaoh changed his own name to that of Khu-n-Aten,“the
glory of the solar disc,”and thereby publicly proclaimed his
renunciation of the religion of which he was the official head.
But in the end the priests of Amon prevailed. Khu-n-Aten was
[095] forced to leave the capital of his fathers, and, carrying with him
the State archives and the adherents of the new faith, he built a
new city for himself midway between Minia and Siût, where the
mounds of Tel el-Amarna now mark its site. Here, surrounded by
a court which was more than half Asiatic in blood and belief, he
raised a temple to the new God of Egypt, and hard by it a palace
for himself. The new creed was accompanied by a new style of
art; the old traditions of Egyptian art were thrown aside, and a
naturalistic realism, sometimes of an exaggerated character, took
their place. The palace and temple were alike made glorious
with brilliant painting and carved stone, with frescoed floors and
walls, with columns and friezes inlaid with gold and precious
stones, with panels of pictured porcelain, and with statuary which
reminds us of that of later Greece.^63 Gardens were planted by
the edge of the Nile, and carriage roads constructed in the desert,
along which the king and his court took their morning drives.
Then, returning to his palace, the Pharaoh would preach or lecture
on the principles and doctrines of the new faith.
It was officially called“the doctrine,”which, as Professor
Erman remarks, shows that it possessed a dogmatically-
formulated creed. Its teachings are embodied in the hymns
inscribed on the walls of the tombs of Tel el-Amarna. The God,

(^63) For the architectural plan of the temple, see Erman,Life in Ancient Egypt,
Eng. tr., p. 287.