40 (Heliopolis) and identified with the well-known Ra. As noticed by some authors, the Pharaoh never attempted to conceal the identity of his God with the antique solar deity1; rather he gave the immemorial deity a new interpretation. The compound name which we have just recalled was therefore but another designation of the god Aton. Why was that designation specially chosen to figure in the titulary of the newly-crowned Pharaoh? Why not simply the words “High-priest of Aton”? It may be that the compound name, being of more current use, was considered more suitable in an official document. It may be, also, that the king was already conscious that the real God whom he loved was something more subtle than the visible Sun; the expression “Shu” (heat, or heat and light)2 “which-is-in-the-Disk” rendered the idea of that unknown Reality as adequately as language permitted. One might think that such a consciousness was well-nigh impossible in a boy not yet in his ’teens. Most writers do, in fact, insist on the king’s extreme youth, and seem to believe that the religious views of which we find the evidence in documents dating from this early period of his reign, were mostly, if not entirely, those of the dowager queen and of her entourage.3 That Amenhotep the Fourth was a mere child in years, and consequently in worldly experience, is beyond doubt. The letters in which Dushratta (or Tushratta), king of Mitanni, asks him to refer to his mother concerning all matters previously discussed with Amenhotep the Third, prove that, at least for some time after his accession, he still acted practically as a minor, under the tutelage of Queen Tiy.4 1 Breasted: Cambridge Ancient History (Edit. 1924), Vol. II, p. 111. 2 Sir Wallis Budge: Tutankhamen, Amenism, Atenism, and Egyptian Monotheism (Edit. 1923), p. 80. 3 Sir Flinders Petrie: History of Egypt (Edit. 1899), Vol. II, p. 211. Arthur Weigall: Life and Times of Akhnaton (New and Revised Edit. 1922), pp. 50-51. 4 “As to the words of Nimmuria (Neb-maat-ra, i.e., Amenhotep the Third), thy father, which he wrote to me, Tiy, the great wife of Nimmuria, the beloved, thy mother, she knows all about them. Enquire of Tiy, thy mother, about all the words of thy father, which he spake to me . . .” “All the words together which I discussed with thy father, Tiy, thy mother, knows them all; and no one else knows them. . . .”                                                                                                                                                          (Letters of Dushratta, Amarna Letters, K.28)

41 It is likely that the messages addressed to him by foreign kings and by vassals were first read by her, and not handed over to him without ample comments about the intentions of their writers, whom she had learnt to know through and through and to tackle with all the shrewdness of a diplomat. It is possible that certain changes in the dealings of the Egyptian court with foreigners, the reluctance of the young king, for instance, to lavish his gold on his neighbours, in extravagant presents, as his father had done — a change of which the monarchs all complain in their letters — were partly due to the influence of Queen Tiy. But religious and philosophical matters were quite a different thing. On that plane, as we remarked before, Amenhotep the Fourth, though still a child in years, probably showed signs of an extraordinary power of intuition and of both analytical and creative intelligence far beyond his age. We cannot, it is true, assert on the sole ground of a few words in his titulary that he had already conceived the idea of a God of a more subtle nature than the material Sun. But we can no more reasonably deny him the capacity of conceiving such an idea on the sole ground that he was not more than twelve years old. It is quite possible that it was he himself who insisted on being called, in the list of titles that was soon to remain officially attached to his name, “High-priest of Ra-Horakhti” (i.e., of Aton), as other Pharaohs had been called “High-priest of Amon.” Other titles of his, such as “Wearer of diadems in the Southern Heliopolis,” “Son of Ra,” etc., emphasise his close connection with the old Sun-cult of On, in which his religion has its roots; while his names “Nefer-kheperu-ra” (Beautiful Essence of the Sun) and “Ua-en-ra” (Only One of the Sun), are to be found throughout his reign in all inscriptions concerning him. Other expressions in the titulary, however (such as “Favourite of the Two Goddesses,” “Beloved of Amon-Ra”), seem to indicate that even if, to some extent, he was already conscious of the subtle nature of his God and of His superiority over other gods, the king had not yet reached the stage at which he was soon to look upon all special, partial or local — limited — ideas of Godhead as absurd no less than sacrilegious.

42 It is likely that Queen Tiy, though herself no fervent devotee of Amon, inserted into the titulary of her son one or two typically orthodox expressions in order to please the powerful local priesthood. Even if it be so, the king does not appear to have too strongly objected, since the sentences were, in fact, inserted. Moreover, we see that at the present stage of his history, he still bore the name of Amenhotep, and that the most distinctive of all the titles which accompanied his name in later days — that of “Living in Truth” — was not yet mentioned in the inscriptions. * * * Amenhotep the Fourth was greeted on his accession by the kings of the North and of the East — the rulers of the civilised world outside Egypt. Their letters, fortunately preserved to posterity, are interesting in their diversity. That of Burnaburiash of Babylon is friendly; that of Shubbiluliuma, king of the Hittites, is formal, somewhat stiff; that of Dushratta of Mitanni is touching in its unaffected sincerity. Dushratta had been the friend as well as the cousin and brother-in-law of Amenhotep the Third; it was he who had sent the Pharaoh the miraculous statue of Ishtar of Nineveh, in the hope that the goddess would re-give him his health, and if she had failed to do so, it was not his fault. Each monarch, however, considered the accession of the new king of Egypt as an important event because Egypt was a very powerful country; also, perhaps, because they imagined that the son of Amenhotep the Third — so mighty, so amiable in his dealings with them, and so fabulously rich — was no ordinary prince. They expected handsome presents from him — “more gold,” and still “more gold,” for gold in his land was “as common as dust.” They sought his alliance, for they knew he had soldiers garrisoned along their frontiers and strongholds overlooking the roads that led to their kingdoms. But none of them had the slightest idea of the actual greatness of the child to whom they were writing. None knew that the main event of the world in which they

43 lived was the rapid dawning of eternal truths in the consciousness of that lad of twelve, and that the splendour of his kingship was nothing compared with that of his priceless individuality. Nobody knew it. It takes time to become aware of what is really important. Meanwhile, in the palace of his fathers in Thebes, the young Pharaoh thought of his God. He was now less free than before, being a king — and a god, in the eyes of his people. His daily round of duties was fixed by rigid custom. From his stately visits to the temples and his reception of high officials and foreign envoys down to the minute details of his private life, all his actions were regulated, with implacable exactitude, by a time-honoured etiquette little short of a religious ritual. He could neither do what he pleased at the time he pleased, nor be alone whenever he wished. He probably appreciated all the more the moments allowed to him for rest or recreation, and used them to feel the presence of the divine in the beauty of the visible world and in the silence of his own soul. As we once remarked with reference to the Pharaoh’s childhood, that which is psychologically the most important in a man’s life is generally left out from recorded history, however detailed. Of the period extending from the coronation of Amenhotep the Fourth to the erection of the earliest temple to Aton of which we know — completed before the sixth year, and therefore begun not later than the fourth year of his reign — there is no written information. And were there any, still we would probably know nothing of the actual process by which the dominant idea of the oneness of an immaterial God came to fill the king’s consciousness; still the history of the king’s religious life in those years immediately preceding his great struggle against tradition — by far the most interesting thing — would necessarily have to be conjectured. Though already from his childhood he had been, to no little extent, of a contemplative nature, susceptible of unusual inspiration, we may suppose that it was between the age of eleven and that of fifteen or sixteen that the eminently intelligent and intuitive young monarch went through some

44 particular religious experience, after which the basis of his doctrine was fixed. The sudden determination with which he pursued his aims, from the erection of Aton’s temple onwards, seems to indicate that there was a change in his inner outlook; that what had been, up to then, at most a strong feeling, had become to him a truth — nay, the truth — overwhelming his mind and heart, and most probably his finer senses, with all the power of logical, moral and physical evidence. What his experience actually was, nobody will ever know. Some historians, on the authority of certain remarks of Professor Elliot Smith, who examined his skeleton, suggest that the young Pharaoh was possibly subject to fits and hallucinations. Several truly great individuals are said to have shared the direct knowledge of those singular nervous states, and there may be some relevance in the expression of “divine” illness that served in former days to designate them. It seems difficult, however, even for a medical expert such as Elliot Smith, to assert after so many centuries the exact nature of those temporary lapses out of normal consciousness, if any. The pathological names given to their supposed cause — epilepsy,1 “water on the brain,”2 etc. — help us very little to guess what they meant, in fact, not to the outward observer, but to the particular adolescent who is said to have undergone them. Nor can their abnormal character throw the slightest discredit either upon Amenhotep the Fourth or upon the teaching which he was led to conceive, perhaps partly through their agency, as some all-too-normal creatures might be inclined to believe. Whatever it be, we must remember that Sun-worship had never meant to Amenhotep the Fourth what it meant to everybody else. Enraptured, from the very start, by the beauty of light, which seems to have made upon him an extraordinary impression all through his life, he saw in our Parent Star neither a god among many other gods, nor a physical body among many other physical bodies, but the 1 Arthur Weigall: Life and Times of Akhnaton (New and Revised Edit. 1922), p. 51. 2 Sir Wallis Budge: Tutankhamen, Amenism, Atenism, and Egyptian Monotheism (Edit. 1923), p. 75.

45 supreme source and embodiment of all that appeared to him worth adoring: beauty, power, heavenly majesty; and that sweetest complement of all these things — kindness. It is likely that he had once associated all the divine attributes of the Sun with the material Disk, but that very soon he had conceived a more subtle idea of Godhead by considering the “Heat” or “Heat-and-Light”-(Shu)-which-is-in-the-Disk. The god Ra-Horakhti of the Two Horizons of which, in his titulary, he proclaims himself the high-priest, is referred to under that particular name. We should, it seems, suppose that the king’s third step was to identify the “Heat within the Disk” with the Disk itself — the invisible form of Godhead with the visible; the immaterial, or apparently such, with the material, or apparently such. Sir Wallis Budge1 tells us that the old god Tem, or Atem, the lord of the sacred city of On (Heliopolis), whose supremacy is asserted in the Pyramid Texts, formed a trinity with the deities Shu (heat, or heat and light) and Tefnut (the watery element). In the identification of Aton (the Disk) — the same as Atem or Tem, according to Budge — with “Shu-which-is-in-the-Aton,” we may see the outcome of a process towards unity, perhaps already latent in the trinitarian teachings), but brought to its full effect in a direct consciousness of the One in the complementary three no less than in the infinite diversity of the many. This explanation, whatever be its value, seems far more in accordance with all that is known of religious experience than Sir Wallis Budge’s own version that Amenhotep the Fourth worshipped all along but the material Sun, and that there was “nothing spiritual” either in his hymns or in his religion.2 All religious geniuses seem to have become aware, in their meditations, of some indefinable Oneness, the nature of which it is impossible to convey to those who have not lived through the mystic state. In the case of Amenhotep the Fourth, the 1 Sir Wallis Budge: Tutankhamen, Amenism, Atenism, and Egyptian Monotheism (Edit. 1923), pp. 57-58. 2 Ibid., p. 79, also p. 112 and following.

46 truth he was to set as the foundation of his teaching (if not the experience that led him to the knowledge of it) can be expressed to-day in scientific terms. Originally, the object of his meditations was neither a metaphysical entity, nor an idea, nor a symbol, nor anything abstract, but solely the visible Sun — the Father from whom our material earth and its sister planets sprang. Therefore, any discovery concerning Him, through whatever channel it be made, was, in the long run, susceptible of being tested by the ordinary scientific means by which we test all knowledge of the material world. And, as Sir Flinders Petrie has admirably pointed out,1 the young Pharaoh’s discovery of the equivalence of light and heat, and of the Sun as source of all power has been tested in recent times, and proved accurate. It is nothing else but an anticipation of the principle of equivalence of all forms of energy, which is the basis of modern science. We may add that, if such be the correct interpretation of the king’s conception of the Sun, we may regard his identification of Aton (originally, the material Disk) with Ra-Horakhti of the Two Horizons, rejoicing in His name, “Shu (heat, or heat and light)-which-is-in-the-Aton,” as an equally bold anticipation of the fundamental identity of “energy” with what appears to the senses as “matter” — the latest great scientific generalisation. In other words, Amenhotep the Fourth reached, through some direct realisation of the Essence of all things — through an experience of which we can say nothing — the ultimate result that scientific thought was one day to attain, after thirty-three centuries of patient labour. Whether such occurrences as fits or trances helped him to leap into supernormal stages of consciousness, or whether he reached those stages simply through an unusual aptitude for concentrated meditation, it makes little difference. The fact that, by sole means of direct insight, he grasped the fundamental truth concerning the material no less than the spiritual world, and opened to himself the only outlook on nature and on divinity which can be called scientific in all times, is perhaps the most illustrative historic proof of the unity of all truth; the 1 Sir Flinders Petrie: History of Egypt (Edit. 1899), Vol. II, p. 214.

47 most illustrative instance, also, of the ultimate equivalence of all methods which lead to its knowledge. * * * The Pharaoh’s first important act of which there is any record was the erection in Thebes of a temple to Aton. Like all the buildings consecrated to the Disk, that temple was utterly destroyed in subsequent years by the enemies of the king’s faith, and nothing is left of it save a few blocks of sandstone, detached from one another, which were mostly re-used in the construction of later monuments. It appears to have been a large building, if we judge by the size of the fragments of bas-reliefs that can still be seen on some of the blocks. (In one such fragment, for instance, the width of the king’s leg, at the lower edge of his kilt, is of twenty inches.) An inscription — invaluable for the study of this period of the reign of Amenhotep the Fourth — states that new quarries were opened at Silsileh, in the South, to provide sandstone for the construction of this temple. High officials of the court were appointed to supervise the transport of the stone to Thebes. We also know from an inscription that a scribe named Hatay was made “overseer of the granaries in the House of Aton.” From the little that remains of it, it is hardly possible to tell whether the temple was built in the traditional style or whether it resembled the temples of Tell-el-Amarna, of which we shall speak later on. In the writing upon the stones that belonged to the new building, as well as in the well-known inscription of Silsileh, the king is referred to as Amenhotep, which shows that he had not yet changed his name. The name of Aton is not surrounded by a “cartouche,” as it is in all later inscriptions; and the expression “Living in Truth” — which recurs continually in all documents dated after the sixth year of the reign — has not yet been found, and possibly had not yet been incorporated by the king into the list of his most usual titles. Moreover, references to several of the gods recognised by orthodox Egyptians — such as Horus, Set, Wepwat — are to be read

48 upon the fragments of stone that once formed the temple walls. Apart from that, above the commemorative inscription of Silsileh, there was originally a figure of the king praying to Amon while the Sun-disk with rays ending in hands — the distinctive symbol of the new religion — shed its life-giving beams upon him. The image of the national deity has been afterwards effaced; but traces of it are still visible. In the tomb of Ramose, in Thebes, which dates from about the same time apparently, there is an image of the goddess Maat; and Horus of Edfu is invoked in an inscription. And, in a letter addressed to the king in the fifth year of his reign, by a royal steward named Apiy, who lived in Memphis, Ptah and “the gods and goddesses of Memphis” are mentioned without Apiy seeming to suspect in the least that his sovereign no longer adhered to the traditional religion — an instance all the more impressing that here, in that letter, Amenhotep the Fourth is for the first time referred to as “Living in Truth,” the motto which he kept to the very end of his reign. Finally, on the scarabs of this period, the Pharaoh is spoken of as “beloved of Thot,” the god of wisdom.1 From these various data, most authors have inferred that, when he built this first temple to Aton of which history tells us, the king had not yet conceived his religion in its definitive form. This interpretation presupposes that the changing of the king’s name, the abolition of all cults save that of the imageless Aton, the erasure of the name and figure of Amon and the plural word “gods” from every stone, were all unavoidable consequences of the new faith — a translation into action of its essential tenets. And it is generally in that light that those facts are viewed. It has been written that Aton was “a jealous god,”2 as if the Pharaoh, in waging war upon the gods of his fathers, was but implicitly obeying some rigorous religious dictate similar to the first of the Ten 1 Arthur Weigall: Life and Times of Akhnaton (New and Revised Edit. 1922), p. 74. 2 Sir Flinders Petrie: Religious Life in Ancient Egypt (Edit. 1924), p. 95. Arthur Weigall: Life and Times of Akhnaton (New and Revised Edit. 1922), pp. 168-170. Tutankhamen and Other Essays (Edit. 1923), p. 82. James Baikie: The Amarna Age (Edit. 1926), p. 251.

49 Commandments that Moses was one day to give his wandering Israelites in the name of their tribal deity. Perhaps a certain resemblance between one of the king’s hymns to the Sun and a psalm of David, written centuries later1; perhaps, also, some unconscious desire of seeing in Amenhotep the Fourth the forerunner of a religion out of which Christianity was one day to spring, has prompted many modern authors to attribute to him a monotheism of the same nature as that of the Jews.2 The data concerning the construction of the earliest temple to Aton, and the whole of the monarch’s reign up to his sixth year, do not point to such a religious conception. Therefore the writers conclude that the king did not know his own mind before the sixth year of his reign, or at least that his faith evolved after that period in the sense of a more and more rigorous monotheism. But, to a man with no preconceived idea whatsoever as to what sort of a god Aton should be, it does not appear at all necessary to suppose anything of the kind. For if, indeed, as Sir Flinders Petrie has pointed out,3 Aton be none other but Radiant Energy deified — that is to say, an all-pervading reality of an immanent character — there is no reason to attribute to Him the all-too-human desire of being worshipped alone. On the contrary, it would seem natural that one who sees divinity in the “Heat-which-is-in-the-Disk” (and which is of the same essence as the Disk itself), far from proscribing the time-honoured gods of his land, should look upon them as man’s halting attempts to reach the Unreachable; as imperfect symbols of the One true God. It is thus that sages of all times have looked upon the traditional deities in lands where popular polytheism prevails side by side with the most exalted religious realisations. And it seems to us most probable that Amenhotep the Fourth considered 1 Psalm 104. See Arthur Weigall: Life and Times of Akhnaton (New and Revised Edit. 1923), pp. 134-136; Tutankhamen and Other Essays (Edit. 1923), p. 82; The Glory of the Pharaohs (Edit. 1923), p. 147; Short History of Ancient Egypt (Edit. 1934), p. 154. 2 It has been asserted — and that by an Israelite — that Jewish Monotheism was entirely derived from the worship of Aton. See Sigmund Freud’s Moses and Monotheism. See also Arthur Weigall’s Tutankhamen and Other Essays (Edit. 1923), p. 93. 3 Sir Flinders Petrie: History of Egypt (Edit. 1899), Vol. II, p. 214.

50 the gods of his country — and of all countries — in that very light. It may be that the figure of Amon was carved out on the slab bearing the Silsileh inscription by a sculptor who “simply followed the time-honoured custom.”1 But, had the king found the slightest objection to its presence, he would certainly have had it effaced — as he did, in fact, later on. The thing is that he had no quarrel with any of the gods, not even with Amon. His God was above them all and contained them all as He contained all existence; He was not against them. At most, the king may have felt a little contempt for the man-made deities, on account of their local character and of their alleged petty interferences in human affairs. He did not love them. But, at first, he tolerated them — as a pure Vedantist tolerates to-day the popular gods and goddesses of India — knowing that most men can never rise to a higher and more comprehensive idea of Godhead. It seems that he would easily have tolerated them to the end, had it not been for the serious opposition of the Egyptian priests — especially of those of Amon — to the execution of his legitimate designs. The series of steps he was soon to take, and the new aspect of his religion in the eyes of whoever considers it from outside, can be explained as a masterful reaction to unwelcome priestly interference rather than as signs of a religious evolution towards a new and narrower idea of God. This view receives confirmation from the fact that, even after the abolition of the public cult of Amon and of the other gods, still, as we shall see, the Pharaoh made no attempt to spread his own faith beyond a small circle of disciples. * * * It is also supported by the inscription in the tomb of Ramose at Thebes — an early document, no doubt, for the tomb is decorated in the “old” style, and wherever the king’s name appears, it is still Amenhotep. The general tone of the inscription plainly indicates that, at the time the tomb was built, not only was the king already in possession of a 1 Baikie: The Amarna Age (Edit. 1926), p. 254.

51 definite truth which he had received directly from God — that is to say, which he had grasped intuitively; which had forced itself upon his mind with all the strength of evidence — but that he was, also, fully conscious of being, himself, substantially identical with the Essence of all life, the Sun. He addresses himself to Ramose in the inscription, and says: “The words of Ra are before thee, of my august Father who taught me their essence. All that is His . . . since He equipped the land . . . in order to exalt me since the time of the god. . . . It was known in my heart, opened to my face — I understood.” And Ramose answers: “Thy monuments shall endure like the heavens, for thy duration is that of Aton therein. The existence of thy monuments is like the existence of His designs. Thou hast laid the mountains; their secret chambers. The terror of thee is in the midst of them as the terror of thee is in the hearts of the people; they hearken to thee as the people hearken.”1 The old Sun-god Ra, the divine Ancestor of the most ancient Pharaohs, is clearly regarded here as the same as Aton. But if we bear in mind all that we already know of the religion of Amenhotep the Fourth — his idea of the “Heat-which-is-in-the-Disk” identical with the Disk itself, his conception of a thoroughly immanent Godhead — then we cannot but see much more than customary dynastic boasting in the king’s assertion that Ra is his “august Father,” and much more, also, than the polite exaggerations of a courtier in Ramose’s reply: “Thou art the Only One of Aton, etc. . . .” This document, the earliest one perhaps in which the king and his God are as boldly identified as in so many later texts, is a further proof that, even in this first part of his reign, the Pharaoh’s religious views already appeared to other men as something decidedly new, and that they probably were very little, if at all, different from what we know them to have been at the time he lived in his new capital and wrote his famous hymns. 1 Breasted: Ancient Records of Egypt (Edit. 1906), Vol. II, p. 389.

52 The king’s next step was to decree that the quarter of Thebes in which the newly-built temple stood would henceforth be called “Brightness of Aton, the Great One,” and that Thebes itself — the proud City of Amon, whose patron-deity had become the god of a whole empire — would henceforth be known as the “City-of-the-Brightness-of-Aton.” One need not see in this a deliberate insult to the local god on the part of Amenhotep the Fourth. There is, at least, no evidence suggesting that such might have been the monarch’s intention; and if our interpretation of his religious views be right, there is every reason to believe that it was not so. The Pharaoh did not endeavour to crush the Theban deity out of existence, or even to defy it, as the worshipper of a “jealous god” would have done. He only wished to keep it in its place — to relegate it among the partial symbols of Godhead which a man who thinks and feels must sooner or later learn to transcend. He did not suppress the cult of Amon or of any other gods; nor, probably, did he intend to do so at this stage of his career. But he surely wished that the One invisible, intangible God, Essence of all things, Whom he had come to realise through his contemplation of the visible Sun, should be honoured above all the minor deities, protectors of families, cities, or even nations, whose power was limited and whose nature was apparently finite, like that of their human devotees. And, in giving its new name to the capital of his fathers, he paid a public homage to the true God of the whole universe, as opposed to all the man-made tribal gods. It is likely that the priests of Amon failed to understand this attitude — or perhaps did the most intelligent among them understand it but too well? As a result, they were unable to accept the change with equanimity. They and their god had been receiving such extraordinary honours in Thebes and throughout Egypt, for so many centuries, that it was hard for them to realise that a new order was dawning, in which their unchallenged domination would no longer have a meaning, and therefore a place. Amon, whom they had identified with the old Heliopolitan god Ra — the Sun — so as to legitimise his sway over all Egypt, was in their eyes the actual sovereign of the land. It was he who had rendered

53 his sons, the Theban Pharaohs, invincible in war, magnificent in peace. And it was the custom that they should visit every day his shrine, and, through the performance of certain traditional rites, receive from him the breath of life — justify, so as to say, through a daily renewed supply of divine power, their age-old claim to divinity.1 We know not at what time Amenhotep the Fourth ceased to conform himself to this practice. But we may conjecture that he did so very early in his reign if, as suggested in the inscription in Ramose’s tomb, he already realised that his oneness with the Sun (and, through Him, with ultimate Cosmic Energy) was a fact, and that therefore he needed no rites to maintain it or even to assert it. Doubtless the priests resented bitterly this break with immemorial tradition. What they resented no less — if not more — was the steady decrease in the revenues of their temples, now that the king had started encouraging the sole cult of the Disk, and had withdrawn from them the habitual royal gifts, which were enormous. They had not, however, been able to show their displeasure openly, as long as Amenhotep the Fourth had contented himself with honouring his God without stressing His priority over their and over the other national deities. But when, by the change of the capital’s name, he made public his intention to place his own intuitive conception of Godhead above the established gods of the land, their fury burst out. We do not know how, nor exactly when, they began to show stern opposition to the Pharaoh’s designs. The only record of that opposition is a later inscription in which the king tells of the priest’s wickedness. The inscription is mutilated, and the reference therefore vague, though vehement.2 In all probability, however, the step we just spoke of — the renaming of the City of Amon (Nut-Amon, or 1 Sir Wallis Budge: Tutankhamen, Amenism, Atenism, and Egyptian Monotheism (Edit. 1923), pp. 34-35. 2 “For as my Father liveth . . . more evil are they (the priests) than those things which I have heard in the fourth year; more evil are they than those things which King . . . heard; more evil are they than those things which Men-kheperu-ra (Thotmose the Fourth) heard . . . in the mouth of Negroes, in the mouth of any people.” — (From a mutilated inscription on one of the boundary-stones of Tell-el-Amarna.)

54 Thebes) as the “City-of-the-Brightness-of-Aton” — was the signal of a bitter conflict between the king and the ministers of the Theban god. It is difficult to say what the priests actually did to assert what they considered to be their god’s rights. Did they try to frighten the people by foretelling calamities which they ascribed beforehand to the wrath of the deity? Did they start spreading rumours against the king, in order to create disaffection? Or did they use men in their pay to do more effective mischief — to try, for instance, to destroy the newly-erected temple of Aton, or even to make an attempt on the monarch’s life? We shall never know; but they appear to have been capable of anything, once their fanaticism was stirred. And, if we judge by the extreme measures which the king took immediately in reply to their intrigues, and also by the bitterness he still seems to feel in recalling his experience with them, even after having broken their power, we may believe that the servants of Amon and of the other gods acted with unusual harshness towards him who, until then, had tolerated their faith and who, even afterwards, was never to seek to harm their persons. The outcome of the struggle was a change not in the king’s actual religious outlook, but in his practical attitude towards the national forms of worship, and a series of new decrees of an uncompromising spirit, by which all hopes of future reconciliation were annihilated at one stroke. The priests of Amon were dispossessed of their fabulous wealth; the name of Amon and the plural word “gods” were erased from every stone where they were found, whether in public monuments or in private tombs. Even the compound proper names which contained that of the Theban god were not allowed to remain; and, carrying out his decision to its ultimate logical consequences, the Pharaoh did not hesitate to have the name of his own father erased, even from the inscriptions in his tomb, and replaced by one of the other names by which he had been well known: Neb-maat-ra. And by the sixth, perhaps even the end of the fifth year of his reign, the young king changed his own name from Amenhotep — meaning, as we have seen: “Amon is pleased,” or “Amon is at rest” — to

55 Akhnaton — “Joy of the Disk,” that is to say, “Joy of the Sun” — the name under which he has become immortal. The cult of Amon, and finally that of the innumerable other national gods and goddesses, was abolished, and images were destroyed. It is these measures which seem to have stirred the indignation of Akhnaton’s modern detractors, and prompted them to call him a “fanatic,” an “iconoclast,” and so forth. But we believe it would be more in keeping with historical truth to see in them, as we have said, a vigorous reaction against sacerdotal interference, a determined assertion of the Pharaoh’s rights, as a ruler, against a class of ambitious men who, under the cover of religion, had been grabbing more and more power for centuries. The man who conceived God as the all-pervading impersonal Life-force — the Energy within the Sun — cannot have shared the aggressive piety of such later believers as Charlemagne or Mahmud of Ghazni, the Idol-breaker. It is unreasonable — nay, absurd — to attribute to him a zeal of the same nature as theirs. Nor can we suppose that he suddenly changed his idea of God by the fifth or sixth year of his reign, just after completing the first temple which he built to Him. All subsequent evidence — in particular that of the king’s admirable hymns to the Sun — goes to prove that he worshipped till the end of his life that all-pervading Energy which he had discovered intuitively and which he adored already in his early adolescence. Apart from being stern efforts to free himself and his country from the ever-tightening grip of the priests, these measures against the national cults of Egypt seem, however, to indicate a phase in Akhnaton’s psychology. We have just said that his religious views remained the same. But his estimation of man’s capacity to realise, within the frame of traditional symbolism, the Truth that he had grasped apart from it, had changed a lot. Until then, he had tolerated the time-honoured deities of the land either because he had seen in them possible steps towards a higher Reality, or simply because he looked upon human superstition with the kindly smile of many a philosopher: that is to say, because he considered

56 those gods helpful to most men’s religions progress, or at least harmless. The time had now come when he found out that they were neither. The trouble stirred up by the servants of Amon after the renaming of Thebes was to him both a revelation and a warning. It suddenly thrust upon him the fact that the generous toleration which he had shown until then would find no imitators among the professed religious leaders of the people. It taught him that the national gods were indeed “jealous gods,” in the sense that, as long as their priests remained in power, no truer and broader conception of the divine could find its way to the hearts of the worshippers; that, far from leading gradually to the knowledge of the One God, they would continually be used to keep the people away from Him — to bind them to a state of satisfied religious routine; to kill both criticism and inspiration under the weight of a vain formalism; to prevent the dawning of a sense of universal values, by constant stress upon local, or at the most national, concerns. It warned him that, if he allowed the priests to hold their sway, his God would never receive the whole-hearted public worship due really to Him alone; that His truth would never be made manifest. One of the two had to be pushed into the background: either national tradition, or universal truth. It is this dilemma which seems to have forced itself upon the king’s consciousness from the time of his first open conflict with the priests of Amon. Had these men let him organise, unopposed, as he pleased, the religious life of the whole country, around the central truth which he had discovered; had they admitted that their gods were but partial aspects of the One ultimate Reality — the Heat or Energy within the Disk — or steps in quest of it, and had they acted up to that belief, it is probable that he would never have gone to the extremities which history has recorded. But now, the only reasonable course before him was that which he took and followed, in fact, to its utmost implications. It was not “religious fanaticism,” but a clear understanding of the situation that prompted him to act. The “fanatics” were not he, but the priests; they who, by their violent hostility to a teaching of exceedingly broad significance (which,

57 religiously speaking, should not have upset them at all), set forth the dilemma which we have just recalled. The thoroughness with which Akhnaton followed his course is one of the early recorded instances of that unbending determination that he showed all his life, once he felt sure which way he was to act in accordance with truth. * * * In fact, it is not exactly for what one could call religious reasons that the priests of Amon and of the other gods showed such stubborn opposition to the king’s projects. It has been said1 that “the religious thought of the period just preceding the reign of Akhnaton was distinctly monotheistic in its tendencies,” and that, with all its startling originality, the new movement was the natural outcome of the long unconscious evolution of the Egyptian mind. The universal power of the Sun is already asserted in the famous “Hymn to Amon as he riseth as Horus of the Two Horizons,” inscribed upon the stele of the two brothers Hor and Suti, architects of Amenhotep the Third. He is called there: “Sole Lord, taking captive all lands, every day” — an expression hardly different from that which we find later on in Akhnaton’s hymns, and which may well be much older than the inscription quoted. In the same inscription, the name of Aton appears as practically identical with that of Amon, for the “Hymn of Amon” runs: “Hail to thee, O Aton of the day, Thou creator of mortals and maker of their life.”2 It has even been proved that, under Amenhotep the Third, a temple to a god bearing the full title of “Horus of the Two Horizons, rejoicing in his horizon in his name ‘Shu-(heat)-which-is-in-the-Aton-(Disk)’” — the title we find in Akhnaton’s inscriptions — existed, with the sole difference that this god was there represented in the traditional style, with a falcon’s head. Both the figure and the title are to be found on one of the blocks re-used by King Horemheb in his pylon at 1 By Blackman; quoted by James Baikie in The Amarna Age (Edit. 1926), p. 314. 2 Sir Wallis Budge: Tutankhamen, Amenism, Atenism, and Egyptian Monotheism (Edit. 1923), p. 49.

58 Karnak; and in the royal cartouche can be seen the name of Nefer-kheperu-ra (one of Akhnaton’s names) altered from that of Amenhotep the Third.1 The elements of the new faith were therefore, to some extent, latent within the old. What Akhnaton did was to assert that such a conception of divinity as that of the “Heat (or Energy)-within-the-Disk” at once transcended and comprehended all others. And he possibly preferred to worship his God under the older name of Aton — the Disk — so as to point out, as we have said, the identity of the visible Sun and of the Heat within it — ultimately, the oneness of the Visible and the Invisible; of Matter and Energy. Religiously speaking, there was no radical antagonism between his pantheistic monism (for such it seems to be) and the popular polytheism of the priests with the underlying monotheistic tendency that burst out, now and then, in its most intellectual aspects. The truth appears to be that the priests did not really mind Akhnaton going further than any of the former Egyptian thinkers in his conception of the divine. But they cared a good deal when, as a logical result of his new lofty idea of Godhead, he decreed that the City of Amon should henceforth be called: City of the Brightness of Aton; when, in other words, he made public his desire to do all he could to urge Egypt and the empire to look upon the cosmic God as God, the other city-gods, national gods, etc., being nothing, if not secondary aspects of Him, to be merged into His infinity. They objected to his purely religious — and therefore individual — idea of God being given priority over their mainly customary, ritualistic, and therefore national one. The struggle between the king and them was not a struggle between two different religious conceptions, but perhaps the oldest recorded phase of the still enduring age-long conflict between individual inspiration and collective tradition; between real religion and state religion; between the insight of the religious genius and the vested interests of the spiritual shepherds of the crowd — and of the crowd itself, one might add. 1 T. Eric Peet: Cambridge Ancient History (Edit. 1924), Vol. II, p. 205.

59 Sir Wallis Budge has criticised Akhnaton in the most violent language for not having upheld the cult of Amon, already popular throughout the Egyptian empire. “None but one half insane,” says he, “would have been so blind to facts to attempt to overthrow Amon and his worship, round which the whole of the social life of the country centred.”1 Professor H. R. Hall, apparently for a similar reason, brings also against the enlightened Pharaoh the same accusation of being “half insane.”2 It is the expression used, in last resort, by most average men, about the spiritual giants whom they hate without knowing why, but in fact because they are incapable of understanding their greatness. It only shows how irredeemably average even learned scholars can be where religious insight is concerned. The authors of the foolish statements just quoted seem to have entirely missed the meaning of Akhnaton’s efforts. If Aton and Amon were but two Egyptian deities like any other, then indeed the exaltation of the former at the expense of the latter could perhaps be interpreted as the whim of a “fanatic.” But if, as evidence forces one to believe, Aton be the name given to deified Cosmic Energy, while Amon, as everyone knows, is the patron-god of Thebes, promoted to the position of a god of all the empire only through the victories of the Theban Dynasty, then the whole perspective changes, and one understands how Akhnaton could not look upon the local deity as identical with the ultimate Essence of all existence. He could not do so, because of the close association of Amon with all the limited interests of nation and church — because of his political miracles, his partiality in war, his satisfaction in man-ordained rituals and sacrifices. He could not merge his own religion of the Universe into the existing religion of the State; his own intuitive truth of all times into the narrow framework of custom, which had no meaning to him. What he wanted to do, on the contrary, was to have the true religion recognised as State religion — pushing the existing one into the background. And that seems to have been 1 Sir Wallis Budge: Tutankhamen, Amenism, Atenism, and Egyptian Monotheism (Edit. 1923), p. 78. 2 H. R. Hall: Ancient History of the Near East (Ninth Edit. 1936), p. 298.

60 the reason for his giving a new name to the very stronghold of the national cult, the City of Amon. He wanted to start a new tradition — more rational, more scientific, more beautiful, more truly religious — on the basis of his extraordinary individual insight; to raise the State religion of the future to his own level; to make himself — the consciously divine Man — the spiritual head of the nation, to which he would teach how to transcend nationhood. The priests of the nation stood in his way; he brushed them aside — without, however, persecuting them. * * * The struggle between Akhnaton and the priests was to be a deadly one precisely because it was less a conflict of ideas than a conflict of values. Had the quarrel merely been about the attributes of divinity or some other such question, a compromise might have taken place, if not during the king’s life, at least after him. His message, even if rejected, would have left some trace in history. With time, Amon, while still continuing to protect Egypt in war and peace, might have taken over some of the more subtle qualities of Aton. But there was no possible compromise between the values that the inspired Individual, Akhnaton, stood for, and those represented by the priests of the deified State. As we shall see later on, it is the practical implications of his teaching that were finally to estrange the Pharaoh from his people, from his age, from the average men of all ages. In the meantime, his conception of religion was, from the start, a greater barrier between him and his contemporaries than the lofty philosophical tenets of his religion; his attitude towards his God, something more unusual to them even than his incredibly advanced idea of the nature of God. The priests would have remained content had he paid a lip homage to tradition — had he, for instance, continued to accept his divinity as a Pharaoh from a daily ceremonial contact with the divine patron of the Pharaonic State, in his temple. It would have mattered little if, while doing so, he

61 worshipped the “Heat-within-the-Disk” as the One supreme Reality. But he could not do so. His devotion to the Sun, deeply coloured by an artist’s emotion if we judge it by the fragments of hymns that have survived, must have had the character of mystic rapture. There was a sort of mysterious understanding, a strange intimacy between the young king and the fiery Disk — something quite different from the official filiation of any prince priding in his solar descent, with any man-made Sun-god. Whether stretching out his hands in praise to the rising or setting Sun, or gazing during the middle of the day into the cloudless abyss which He filled with burning light, Akhnaton was in tune — and consciously so — with Something intangible, shapeless, unnameable, and yet undeniably real; Something that was, at the same time, within the vibrating waves of existence all round him, within the deep rhythmic life of his body, within the silence of his soul. He experienced his oneness with the Sun, and through Him, with all that is. This experience made him, in fact, what other Pharaohs were merely by name and by tradition: the true Son of the Sun. What need had he of receiving his divinity from the patron-god of the State, when he was conscious of sharing by nature the life of the real Sun — of being in tune with the Essence of all things: one with It? “The heat of Aton gave him life and maintained it in him,” writes Sir Wallis Budge; “and whilst that was in him, Aton was in him. The life of Aton was his life, and his life was Aton’s life, and therefore he was Aton.” . . . “His spiritual arrogance made him believe that he was an incarnation of Aton — that he was God; not merely a god, or one of the gods of Egypt — and that his acts were divine.”1 Budge is right, with the difference that there was no “spiritual arrogance” on the part of Akhnaton. The series of beliefs — or rather the successive stages of consciousness — which his detractor ascribes to him, are nothing more than those reached by all men who have the privilege to go through the ultimate religious experience — through that which the Hindus call “realisation” of the divine — and who 1 Sir Wallis Budge: Tutankhamen, Amenism, Atenism, and Egyptian Monotheism (Edit. 1923), p. 82.

62 are bold enough to draw to the end the conclusions that it implies. Unknowingly (for he does not seem to have had, himself, a similar experience), and also unwillingly (for he does not seem to like the young Pharaoh of the Disk), Budge only proves that Akhnaton was a genuine spiritual genius at the same time as an intellectual one, the greatest tribute which a man — and especially a detractor — can pay to another man. The king’s contemporary enemies, apparently, did not understand him any better than his twentieth-century critics. Deeply attached as they were to their ideology of dynastic Sun-worship — of royalty created, protected, and deified by the gods of the State, through the intermediary of their traditional priesthoods — they could hardly imagine what was going on in the monarch’s consciousness. They opposed him for the new values he set forth. They did not even share with him that which enemies often hold in common: an ultimate similarity of purpose if not of views. The people, who doubtless considered their Pharaoh in the same light as their fathers had done — as the son and embodiment on earth of the national god Amon — must have been at a loss to make sense of what appeared to them as meaningless, sacrilegious novelties. Queen Tiy herself, who had probably played the greatest part in the early formation of the king’s soul, could perhaps hardly recognise the distant result of her influence (combined with his personal genius) in the present expression of his faith. It is noteworthy that all the drastic steps taken by Akhnaton against the cult of Amon are posterior to the fifth year of his reign. Even in supposing, as some authors have done, that, still as a king, he remained for some time virtually under the tutelage of his mother, it is probable that this state of dependence had already come to an end before he promulgated his first religious decrees. Those decrees are not the dowager queen’s, but decidedly and fully his. The king’s opposition to Amon’s public cult seems indeed to have became more stern as his personal part in the government became more unquestionable. We may even believe that, as long as she had any say in the matter, the dowager queen

63 tried to check rather than to prompt her son on the path of open conflict with the priests. She was first a queen — and a shrewd one, with long experience of the world, and great ambitions — and then only the devotee of a particular deity; perhaps also, to some extent, an initiate into a particular esoteric philosophy, originated among the priests of On. But he was, first and last, a man who had realised the truth, both in the mystic and in the intellectual sense. He happened to be the ruler of the greatest empire of his time. But the truth he had discovered always passed, and was always to pass, with him, before the interests and “obligations” he had inherited. And it is possible that this attitude of his alienated him from his mother, in a certain measure. We know positively that she did not follow him when he left Thebes for good. We doubt if even Akhnaton’s followers — and they appear to have been numerous in the beginning1 — were able to grasp the full significance of his message. The inscriptions which some of the most prominent of them have left in their tombs, at Tell-el-Amarna, tend to point out that many did not. Most of them seem to have joined the Religion of the Disk for motives either of material interest or of personal attachment to the king — perhaps sometimes for both. It is possible that Akhnaton saw through their minds but accepted their allegiance all the same, hoping, with the natural confidence of youth, to make them sooner or later his true disciples. Yet he had probably already found out how difficult it is to create higher aspirations in men who do not have them, and one may believe that he was not totally ignorant of the enormity of the task before him. He must have realised the strength of tradition, the inborn apathy of the human herd (which includes men of all classes), the frequent incomprehension even of the best intentioned of friends; and, at times, he must have felt desperately alone. Each time he threw a glance across Thebes from the flat roof of his palace; each time he passed through the streets in his chariot — and we infer, from pictorial evidence, that he did so more usually than any other Pharaoh, even in this 1 Arthur Weigall: Short History of Ancient Egypt (Edit. 1934), p. 149.

64 early part of his reign — it certainly struck him how little the capital was worthy of its new lofty name: “City-of-the-Brightness-of-Aton.” The great temple of Amon towered above all the buildings of the immense city. It was now closed by the king’s orders; its splendid halls were silent; and the name of the god had been erased from every pillar, from every wall, from every statue, whether inscribed upon granite or alabaster, or bronze, or lapis lazuli. Still, there it stood, in all its defiant grandeur. It had taken a hundred years to build; a thousand years to adorn, to enrich, to complete. Forty generations of kings had lavished upon it the wealth of the Nile, the treasures of conquered lands, the workmanship of the best artists from all the known world, and had made it a thing unsurpassed in magnificence. The people bowed down before the closed gates to the hidden deity whom they still revered and feared. The temple remained the heart of Thebes. And there were shrines to other gods within its sacred enclosure — to Mut, Amon’s consort; to Khonsu, the Moon-god, Amon’s son; to Ptah; to Min — and other temples, all over the city. Every house, in fact, was a temple in which the traditional gods and goddesses were honoured daily, and propitiated occasionally, with magic incantations and ritual offerings. Akhnaton gazed at it all in a bird’s-eye view, and understood that Thebes would never be his. What could he do? Destroy all those temples of the man-made gods? He could have done it if he liked. His word was law. And it was not more difficult for him — and hardly more sacrilegious, perhaps, in the eyes of many orthodox Egyptians — to pull down Karnak stone by stone than to have the name of Amon erased from his own father’s tomb. But the idea seems never to have occurred to him. In spite of the hasty judgments passed on him by so many modern critics, he was not an iconoclast. He was too much of an artist ever to dream of becoming one. He gazed at the sober, majestic architecture of Amon’s dwelling-place, and was impressed by its beauty. Then he gazed at the sky — the simple blue depth, without a line,

65 without a spot, without a shade; the void, luminous, fathomless abyss; the dwelling-place of the real Sun in front of which all the splendours and uglinesses of the earth seem equally to vanish into nothingness. And the well-known feeling of absorption into the vibrating infinity, of oneness with that intangible existence that contains all existence, would take him over once more. If only he could have made people understand what he knew, he would not have needed to take steps against the traditional cults. The man-made gods would have automatically sunk into their place as mere symbols, far below the One Reality. But at the sight of the magnificent City of Amon stretched before him, with its temples, its pylons, its avenues bordered with great rams of granite, he knew that he could not. These dazzling earthly glories, with their all-powerful collective associations, would always mean more to the people and the priests — to the herd and its shepherds — than the transparent truth, unconnected with national pride, hopes, or fears, which he had come to realise and to reveal. And no matter how brilliantly and how long he would preach to its thousands the message of the One God made manifest in the real Sun, Thebes would never follow him. The men of the capital — in fact, of all the great centres of traditional worship — represented that intellectually lazy, superficially artistic, prejudiced, irresponsible, apathetic, uninteresting crowd upon whose stupidity and for whose guidance governments and priesthoods — states and churches — are established. Perhaps, indeed, the city-gods that they made so much of were good enough for them; perhaps any new god they would start worshipping would finally become to them a city-god hardly any better than the old ones; perhaps gorgeous architectural structures of polished granite and gold — the signs of wealth and power — would always represent the supreme acquisitions that nations take pride in, and live for, and die for. But he could not be content with improving on those, as his fathers had. He had raised his senses from the fascination of sculptured curbs and painted colours and resounding formulas, to the inner vision of intangible waves of heat and

66 light; from the spell of the temple service to the clear and joyous understanding of the silence of the sky. James Breasted has most appropriately called him “the first individual in human history.” He was indeed the oldest historic embodiment of the outstanding Individual as opposed to the dull majority of mediocre men; of the Individual whose aspirations, whose experience, whose raison d’être are different from anything the crowd can understand and accept; of the Individual who, in his own singular logic and beauty, stands alone against the background of all times and all countries, in tune with absolute realities and absolute standards forever inaccessible to the many. Thebes would never side with him — nor would any city, any state, any crowd with age-long collective associations. And yet, in his youthful desire for success, in his inherited consciousness of unchecked power, he wished to be a leader; to proclaim far and wide the truth that was to him as clear as daylight, and make the cult of intangible Energy the official State religion of Egypt and of the empire; to spread it still further, if possible. He needed the collaboration of men for that great purpose. And if Thebes was not the place where the first seeds of truth could be sown; if it clung to Amon, its patron-god, even in his downfall, there would perhaps be, somewhere down the Nile, an out-of-the-way spot where a new City could be founded — a City, the capital of a new State, which one day, possibly, could become the model of a new world. He would build that ideal State with the help of the few who, if they did not always understand him to perfection, at least seemed to love him. The cult of the One impersonal God would prevail there, and the standards of the enlightened few would be the official standards. The name of Amon and all it stood for would be unknown there from the start. Thus Akhnaton decided to leave Thebes for good, and to build himself a new capital.