Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt

It was inevitable that the priests should now take the momentous step of permitting such agencies to enter also the world of moral values. Magic might become an agent for moral ends. The Book of the Dead is chiefly a book of magical charms, and the section pertaining to the judgment did not continue to remain an exception. The poignant words addressed by Ani to his heart as it was weighed in the balances, " O my heart, rise not up against me as a witness," were now written upon a stone image of the sacred beetle, the scarabeus, and placed over the heart as a mandate of magical potency preventing the heart from betraying the character of the deceased. The words of this charm became a chapter of the Book of the Dead, where they bore the title, " Chapter of Preventing that the Heart of a Man Oppose Him in the Nether World." x The scenes of the judgment and the text of the Declaration of Innocence were multiplied on rolls by the scribes and sold to all the people. In these copies the places for the name of the deceased were left vacant, and the purchaser filled in the blanks after he had secured the document. The words of the verdict, declaring the deceased had successfully met the judgment and acquitting him of evil, were not lacking in any of these rolls. Any citizen whatever the character of his life might thus secure from the scribes a certificate declaring that Blank was a righteous man before it was known who Blank would be. He might even obtain a formulary so mighty that the Sun-god, as the real power behind the judgment, would be cast down from heaven into the Nile, if he did not bring forth the deceased fully justified before his court.2 Thus the earliest moral development which we can trace in the ancient East was suddenly arrested, or at least seriously checked, by the detestable devices of a corrupt priesthood eager for gain.

It is needless to point out the confusion of distinctions involved in this last application of magic. It is the old failure to perceive the difference between that which goeth in and that which cometh out of the man. A justification mechanically applied from without, and freeing the man from punishments coming from without, cannot, of course, heal the ravages that have taken place within. The voice within, to which the Egyptian was more sensitive than any people of the earlier East, and to which the whole idea of the moral ordeal in the hereafter was due, could not be quieted by any such means. The general reliance upon such devices for escaping ultimate responsibility for an unworthy life must have seriously poisoned the life of the people. While the Book of the Dead discloses to us more fully than ever before in the history of Egypt the character of the moral judgment in the hereafter, and the reality with which the Egyptian clothed his conception of moral responsibility, it is likewise a revelation of ethical decadence. In so far as the Book of the Dead had become a magical agency for securing moral vindication in the hereafter, irrespective of character, it had become a positive force for evil.

So strong was the moral sense of the Egyptian, however, that he did not limit the value of a worthy life to its availability in rendering him acceptable to Osiris in the next life. Herein lies the limitation of the Osirian ethics which bade a man think only of moral consequences beyond the grave. After all, Osiris was a god of the dead. The old social philosophers of the Feudal Age had preached the righteousness of Re, the Sun-god, and demanded social justice here because Re demanded it.

They were not without their descendants in the Empire — men who found in the Solar faith an obligation to righteous living here and now, and who discerned earthly rewards in so living. The Sun-god was not chiefly a god of the dead. He reigned in the earthly affairs of men, and during the earthly life men felt the moral obligation which he placed upon them hourly. One of the architects of Amenhotep III, addressing a hymn of praise to the Sun-god, says: "I was a valiant leader among thy monuments, doing righteousness for thy heart. I know that thou art satisfied with righteousness. Thou makest great him who doeth it on earth. I did it and thou didst make me great." l Similarly, when the Pharaoh made oath he swore, "As Re loves me, as my father Anion (long since identified with Re) favors me;" 2 and the conqueror Thutmose III in making this oath to the truth of what he says, and affirming his respect for the truth in the sight of his god, refers to the Sun-god's presence thus : " For he knoweth heaven and he knoweth earth, he seeth the whole earth hourly." 3 While it is true that the subterranean hereafter of the Osiris faith depicts the Sungod as journeying from cavern to cavern beneath the earth, passing through the realm of Osiris and bringing light and joy to the dead who dwell there, this is a conception unknown to the early Solar theology as found in the Pyramid Texts.4 In the Empire the Sun-god is preeminently a god of the world of living men, in whose aftions of the Soc. of Bib. Arch., VIII, 143; and in Pierret's Recueil, I.

I had also my own copy of the original. any connection with the subterranean caverns of the Osirian faith. fairs he is constantly present and active. Men feel their responsibility to him here and now, and that dominion deepening constantly in the hearts of men is now also to expand with the expanding horizon of the imperial age until, for the first time in history, there dawns upon the eyes of these early Nile-dwellers the vision of the world-god.

In the Feudal Age the social realm had made its impression upon religion as in the Pyramid Age the Egyptian state, the political realm had done. Both these were limited to the territory of Egypt. The Pyramid Age had gained a dim vision of the vast extent of the Sun-god's domain, and had once addressed him by the sounding title "Limitless." l But this remained, as it were, a momentary glimpse without effect upon the Solar theology as a whole. The Sun-god ruled only Egypt, and in the great Sun-hymn of the Pyramid Texts 2 he stands guardian on the Egyptian frontiers, where he builds the gates which restrain all outsiders from entering his inviolable domain. In the Pyramid Age, too, the Sun-god had already begun the process of absorbing the other gods of Egypt, a process resulting even at so remote a date in a form of national pantheism, in which all the gods ultimately coalesced into forms and functions of one. But even this process, though it did not cease, had left the supreme god's dominion still restricted to Egypt. He was very far from being a world-god. The Egyptians indeed had not as yet gained the world-idea, the worldempire over which they might install the world-ruler.

The influences of an environment restricted to the limits 312 of the Nile valley had now, however, gone as far as they could, when a career of imposing foreign expansion of national power enlarged the theatre of thought and action. The Solar theology had been sensitively responsive to conditions in the Nilevalley world. It proved to be not less sensitive to the larger world, to include which the Egyptian horizon had now expanded.

Egypt's imperial expansion northward and southward until the Pharaoh's power had united the contiguous regions of Asia and Africa into the first stable Empire in history is the commanding fact in the history of the East in the sixteenth century B. C. The consolidation of that power by Thutmose Ill's twenty years' campaigning in Asia is a stirring chapter of military imperialism in which for the first time in the East we can discern the skilfully organized and mobile forces of a great state as they are brought to bear with incessant impact upon the nations of western Asia, until the Egyptian supremacy is undisputed from the Greek Islands, the coasts of Asia Minor, and the highlands of the Upper Euphrates on the north to the Fourth Cataract of the Nile on the south. This great military leader himself made the remark which we have quoted above regarding his god : " He seeth the whole earth hourly." If this was true it was because the sword of the Pharaoh had carried the power of Egypt's god to the limit of Egypt's Empire.1 Fifty years earlier, indeed, Thutmose I proclaimed his kingdom as far as "the circuit of the sun." 2 In the Old Kingdom the Sun-god was conceived as a Pharaoh, whose kingdom was Egypt. With the expansion of the Egyptian kingdom into a worldempire it was inevitable that the domain of the god should likewise expand. As the kingdom had long since found expression in religion, so now the Empire was a powerful influence upon religious thought.

While this was a more or less mechanical and unconscious process, it was accompanied by an intellectual awakening which shook the old Egyptian traditions to the foundations and set the men of the age to thinking in a larger world. Thutmose III was the first character of universal aspects, the first world-hero. As such he made a profound impression upon his age. The idea of universal power, of a world-empire, was visibly and tangibly bodied forth in his career. There is a touch of universalism now discernible in the theology of the Empire which is directly due to such impressions as he and his successors made. Egypt is forced out of the immemorial isolation of her narrow valley into wTorld-relations, with which the theology of the time must reckon — relations with which the Sun-god, as we have seen, was inextricably involved. Commercial connections, maintained from an immemorially remote past, had not sufficed to bring the great world without into the purview of Egyptian thinking.

The limits of the dominion of the Egyptian gods had been fixed as the outer fringes of the Nile valley long before the outside world was familiar to the Nile-dwellers; and merely commercial intercourse with a larger world had not been able to shake the tradition. Many a merchant had seen a stone fall in distant Babylon and in Thebes alike, but it had not occurred to him, or to any man in that far-off age, that the same natural force reigned in these widely separated countries. The world was far indeed from the lad lying beneath the apple-tree and discovering a universal force in the fall of an apple. Many a merchant of that day, too, had seen the sun rise behind the Babylonian ziggurats as it did among the clustered obelisks of Thebes, but the thought of the age had not yet come to terms with such far-reaching facts as these. It was universalism expressed in terms of imperial power which first caught the imagination of the thinking men of the Empire, and disclosed to them the universal sweep of the Sun-god's dominion as a physical fact. Monotheism is but imperialism in religion.

It is no accident, therefore, that about 1400 B. C, in the reign of Amenhotep III, the most splendid of the Egyptian emperors, we find the first of such impressions. Two architects, Suti and Hor, twin brothers, whom Amenhotep III was employing at Thebes, have left us a Sun-hymn on a stela now in the British Museum,1 which discloses the tendency of the age and the widening vision with which these men of the Empire were looking out upon the world and discerning the unlimited scope of the Sun-god's realm. "Hail to thee, beautiful god of every day! Rising in the morning without ceasing, [•Not1] wearied in labor. When thy rays are visible, Gold is not considered, It is not like thy brilliance.

Thou art a craftsman shaping thine own limbs; Fashioner without being fashioned; 2 much needs an adequate publication. It is accessible only in two very incorrect copies, published by Birch, Trans. Soc. Bib. Arch., VIII, 143, and Pierret, in his Recueil, I. I had also my own copy made in student days, and not much more reliable than the publications. I have not yet seen Scott-Moncrieff's recent volume of British Museum stelse, and do not know whether it was included by him. The above translation could undoubtedly be corrected in parts on the basis of a better text. Kingdom; see above, p. 274. Unique in his qualities, traversing eternity; Over ways rwith1 millions under his guidance. Thy brilliance is like the brilliance of the sky, Thy colors gleam more than the hues of it.1 When thou sailest across the sky all men behold thee, (Though) thy going is hidden from their sight. When thou showest thyself at morning every day, . . . under thy majesty, though the day be brief, Thou traversest a journey of leagues, Even millions and hundred-thousands of time. Every day is under thee. When thy setting •comes1, The hours of the night hearken to thee likewise. When thou hast traversed it There comes no ending to thy labors.

All men, they see by means of thee. Nor do they finish when thy majesty sets, (For) thou wakest to rise in the morning, And thy radiance, it opens the eyes (again). When thou settest in Manu, Then they sleep like the dead. Hail to thee! O disk of day, Creator of all and giver of their sustenance, Great Falcon, brilliantly plumaged, Brought forth to raise himself on high of himself, Self-generator, without being born. First-born Falcon in the midst of the sky, To whom jubilation is made at his rising and his setting likewise. Fashioner of the produce of the soil, Taking possession of the Two Lands (Egypt), from great to small, A mother, profitable to gods and men, A craftsman of experience, . . . Valiant herdman who drives his cattle, Their refuge and giver of their sustenance, Who passes by, running the course of Khepri (the Sun-god), it has the meaning "hue" or similar is shown by similar passages in Naville, Mythe aVHorus, pi. xii, 1. 2; Amarna Hymn of Tutu% 1. 2, and Amarna Hymn of Api, 11. 2-3.

Who determines his own birth, Exalting his beauty in the body of Nut, Illuminating the Two Lands (Egypt) with his disk, The primordial being, who himself made himself; Who beholds that which he has made, Sole lord taking captive all lands every day, As one beholding them that walk therein; Shining in the sky ra being as the sun1. He makes the seasons by the months, Heat when he desires, Cold when he desires. He makes the limbs to languish When he enfolds them, Every land is in rejoicing At his rising every day, in order to praise him." It is evident in such a hymn as this that the vast sweep of the Sun-god's course over all the lands and peoples of the earth has at last found consideration, and the logical conclusion has also followed. The old stock phrases of the earlier hymns, the traditional references to the falcon, and the mythological allusions involved have not wholly disappeared, but the momentous step has been taken of extending the sway of the Sun-god over all lands and peoples. No earlier document left us by the thought of Egypt contains such unequivocal expression of this thought as we find here: "Sole lord, taking captive all lands every day, As one beholding them that walk therein."

It is important to observe also that this tendency is connected directly with the social movement of the Feudal Age. Such epithets applied to the Sun-god as "Valiant herdman who drives his cattle, Their refuge and the giver of their sustenance," of course carry us back to the address of Ipuwer and his "shepherd of all men." l The other remarkable epithet, "A mother, profitable to gods and men," carries with it the idea of similar solicitude for mankind. The humane aspects of the Sun-god's sway, to which the social thinkers of the Feudal Age chiefly contributed, have not disappeared among the powerful political motives of this new universalism.

This hymn of the two architects is, however, likewise a revelation of one of the chief difficulties in the internal situation of the Pharaoh at this time. The hymn bears the title: "Adoration of Amon when he rises as Harakhte (Horus of the Horizon) "; that is to say, the hymn is addressed to Amon as Sun-god. Amon, the old obscure local god of Thebes, whose name is not to be found in the great religious documents of the earlier age like the Pyramid Texts,2 had by this time gained the chief place in the state theology, owing to the supreme position held by the ruling family of his native town in the Empire. Theologically, he had long succumbed to the ancient tendency which identified the old local gods with the Sun-god, and he had long been called " Amon-Re." His old local characteristics, whatever they may have been, had been supplanted by those of the Sun-god, and the ancient local Amon had been completely Solarized. In this way it had been possible to raise him to the supreme place in the pantheon. At the same time this supremacy was ^ee above, p. 211. lished by Lepsius. It does not occur at all in the Pyramid Texts, unless the reference in Pyr. § 1095 is to him, which seems to me not entirely certain. not confined to theological theory. Economically and administratively, Amon actually received the first place among the gods. For the first time in the history of the country the great organizer, Thutmose III, seems to have merged the priesthoods of all the temples of the land into one great sacerdotal organization, at the head of which he placed the High Priest of Amon.1 This is the earliest national priesthood as yet known in the early East, and the first pontifex maximus. This Amonite papacy constituted a powerful political obstacle in the way of realizing the supremacy of the ancient Sun-god.

When Amenhotep Ill's son, Amenhotep IV, succeeded his father, about 1375 B. C, a keen struggle arose between the royal house, on the one hand, and the sacerdotal organization dominated by Amon, on the other. It is evident that the young king favored the claims of the old Sun-god as opposed to those of Amon, but early in his reign we find him ardently supporting a new form of the old Solar faith, which may have been the result of a compromise between the two. At a time when the Asiatic situation was exceedingly critical, and the Pharaoh's supremacy there was threatened, he devoted himself with absorbing zeal to the new Solar universalism which we have discerned under his father. The Sun-god was given a designation which freed the new faith from the compromising polytheistic tradition of the old Solar theology.

He was now called "Aton," an ancient name for the physical sun, and probably designating his disk. It ocxHapuseneb, the first High Priest of Amon, who occupied the position at the head of the new sacerdotal organization, was grand vizier under queen Hatshepsut, but it is more likely that her husband, Thutmose III, effected this organization than that she should have done it. However this may be, the evidence will be found in BAR, II, 388 #. curs twice in the hymn of the two architects of Amenhotep III, translated above, and it had already gained some favor under this king, who named one of his royal barges " Aton-Gleams." l There was an effort made to make the name "Aton" equivalent in some of the old forms to the word "god"; thus the traditional term "divine offering" (lit. "god's offering") was now called "Aton offering."2 Not only did the Sun-god receive a new name, but the young king now gave him a new symbol also. The most ancient symbol of the Sun-god, as we have seen, was a pyramid, and as a falcon the figure of that bird was also used to designate him. These, however, were intelligible only in Egypt, and Amenhotep IV had a wider arena in view. The new symbol depicted the sun as a disk from which diverging beams radiated downward, each ray terminating in a human hand. It was a masterly symbol, suggesting a power issuing from its celestial source, and putting its hand upon the world and the affairs of men.

As far back as the Pyramid Texts the rays of the Sun-god had been likened to his arms and had been conceived as an agency on earth: "The arm of the sunbeams is lifted with king Unis," 3 raising him to the skies. Such a symbol was suited to be understood throughout the world which the Pharaoh controlled. There was also some effort to define the Solar power thus symbolized. The full name of the Sun-god was "Harakhte (Horizon-Horus), rejoicing in the horizon in his name 'Heat which is in Aton.'" It was enclosed in two royal cartouches, like the double name of the Pharaoh, a device suggested by the analogy of the Pharaoh's power, and another clear evidence of the impression which the Empire as a state had now made on the Solar theology. But the name enclosed in the cartouches roughly defined the actual physical force of the sun in the visible world, and was no political figure. The word rendered "heat" sometimes also means "light." It is evident that what the king was deifying was the force by which the Sun made himself felt on earth. In harmony with this conclusion are the numerous statements in the Aton hymns, which, as we shall see, represent Aton as everywhere active on earth by means of his "rays."

While it is evident that the new faith drew its inspiration from Heliopolis, so that the king assuming the office of High Priest of Aton called himself "Great Seer," the title of the High Priest of Heliopolis, nevertheless most of the old lumber which made up the externals of the traditional theology was rejected. We look in vain for the sun-barques, and in the same way also later accretions, like the voyage through the subterranean caverns of the dead, are completely shorn away.1 To introduce the Aton faith into Thebes, Amenhotep IV erected there a sumptuous temple of the new god, which, of course, received liberal endowments from the royal treasury. If the Aton movement was intended as a compromise with the priests of Amon, it failed. The bitterest enmities soon broke out, culminating finally in the determination on the king's part to make Aton sole god of the Empire and to annihilate Amon. The effort to obliterate all trace of the existence of the upstart Amon resulted in the most extreme measures. The king changed his own name from "Amenhotep" ("Amen rests" ro "is satisfied") at Amarna (Davies, Amarna, V, p. 30) is clearly a compromise with the Heliopolitan priests, but of course does not mean " animal worship." to "Ikhnaton," which means "Aton is satisfied," and is a

translation of the king's old name into a corresponding idea in the Aton faith.1 The name of Amon, wherever it occurred on the great monuments of Thebes, was expunged, and in doing so not even the name of the king's father, Amenhotep III, was respected. These erasures were not confined to the name of Amon. Even the word "gods" as a compromising plural was expunged wherever found, and the names of the other gods, too, were treated like that of Amon.2 Finding Thebes embarrassed with too many theological traditions, in spite of its prestige and its splendor, Ikhnaton forsook it and built a new capital about midway between Thebes and the sea, at a place now commonly known as Tell el-Amarna. He called it Akhetaton, "Horizon of Aton." The name of the Sun-god is the only divine name found in the place, and it was evidently intended as a centre for the dissemination of Solar monotheism. Here several sanctuaries3 of Aton were erected, and in the boundary landmarks, imposing stelse which the king set up in the eastern and western cliffs, the place was formally devoted to his exclusive service. A similar Aton city was founded in Nubia, and in all likelihood there was another in Asia. The three great portions of the Empire, Egypt, Nubia, and Syria, were thus

each given a centre new rendering of the name is demonstrated. The rendering in the author's history, p. 364, is to be changed accordingly. 2tIt has been widely stated that the hostility of Ikhnaton did not extend beyond his erasure of Amon; but this is an error. I found other gods expunged in Nubia. See also my remarks in Zeitschr. fiir aegypt. Sprache, 40, 109-110. (Davies, Amarna, V, p. 30), but one is evidently a dittography of the preceding in the ancient scribes copy. of the Aton faith. Besides these sanctuaries of Aton were also built at various other places in Egypt.1 This was, of course, not accomplished without building up a powerful court party, which the king could oppose, to the evicted priesthoods, especially that of Amon. The resulting convulsion undoubtedly affected seriously the power of the royal house. The life of this court party, which now unfolded at Akhetaton, centred about the propagation of the new faith, and as preserved to us in the wall reliefs which fill the chapels of the cliff tombs, excavated by the king for his nobles in the face of the low cliffs of the eastern plateau behind the new city, it forms, perhaps, the most interesting and picturesque chapter in the story of the early East.2 It is to the tombs of

these partisans of the king that we owe our knowledge of the content of the remarkable teaching which he was now propagating. They contain a series of hymns in praise of the Sun-god, or of the Sun-god and the king alternately, which afford us at least a glimpse into the new world of thought, in which we behold this young king and his XA list of the Aton temples will be found in my essay in the Zeitschr. fur aegypt. Sprache, 40, 106-113. The Nubian city of Ikhnaton was found in 1907 by the University of Chicago Expedition. See my Monuments of Sudanese Nubia, pp. 51-82. days of Egyptology, and fragmentarily published. No complete publication, however, was issued until 1903-8, when N. de G.

Davies published his valuable Rock Tombs of El Amarna, vols. I-VI, London, 1903-8, which includes everything at Amarna except the town site and the tomb of the king. I copied the most important hymns there in 1895, and these two sources are the bases of the renderings given above. For a presentation of the Amarna situation, historically considered, especially the life of the court in the new environment, the reader may refer to the author's History of Egypt, pp. 358-378. A popular discussion and description of the remarkable reliefs in the tombs will be found in the author's Two Thousand Miles Up the Nile, soon to be published. associates lifting up their eyes and endeavoring to discern God in the illimitable sweep of his power — God no longer of the Nile valley only, but of all men and of all the world. We can do no better at this juncture than to let these hymns speak for themselves. The longest and most important is as follows:1 "Thy dawning is beautiful in the horizon of the sky, O living Aton, Beginnmg-xiliifeJ When thou risest in the eastern horizon, Thou fillest every land with thy beauty. Thou art beautiful, great, glittering, high above every land, Thy rays, they encompass the lands, even all that thou hast made.

Thou art Re, and thou earnest them all away captive; 2 Thou bindest them by thy love. Though thou art far away, thy rays are upon earth; Though thou art on high, thy [footprints are the day\ NIGHT "When thou settest in the western horizon of the sky, The earth is in darkness like the dead; They sleep in their chambers, Their heads are wrapped up, Their nostrils are stopped, And none seeth the other, While all their things are stolen xThe best text is that of Davies, Amarna, VI, pi. xxix. Full commentary will be found in my De hymnis in solem sub rege Amenophide IV. conceptis, Berlin, 1894, though unfortunately based on the older text of Bouriant. Some changes in the above translation, as compared with that in the author's History, are due to a few new readings in Davies's text, as well as to further study of the document also. The division into strophes is not in the original, but is indicated here for the sake of clearness. The titles of the strophes I have inserted to aid the modern reader. word used for "all." Which are under their heads, And they know it not. Every lion cometh forth from his den, All serpents, they sting. Darkness . . .

The world is in silence, He that made them resteth in his horizon. "Bright is the earth when thou risest in the horizon. When thou shinest as Aton by day Thou drivest away the darkness. When thou sendest forth thy rays, The Two Lands (Egypt) are in daily festivity, Awake and standing upon their feet When thou hast raised them up. Their limbs bathed, they take their clothing, Their arms uplifted in adoration to thy dawning. (Then) in all the world they do their work. "All cattle rest upon their pasturage, The trees and the plants flourish, The birds flutter in their marshes, Their wings uplifted in adoration to thee. All the sheep dance upon their feet, All winged things fly, They live when thou hast shone upon them. "The barques sail up-stream and down-stream alike. Every highway is open because thou dawnest. The fish in the river leap up before thee. Thy rays are in the midst of the great green sea. "Creator of the germ in woman, Maker of seed in man, Giving life to the son in the body of his mother, Soothing him that he may not weep, Nurse (even) in the womb, Giver of breath to animate every one that he maketh!

When he cometh forth from the body ... on the day of his birth, Thou openest his mouth in speech, Thou suppliest his necessities. "When the fledgling in the egg chirps in the shell, Thou givest him breath therein to preserve him alive. When thou hast r brought him together1, To (the point of) bursting it in the egg, He cometh forth from the egg To chirp rwith all his might1. He goeth about upon his two feet When he hath come forth therefrom. "How manifold are thy works! They are hidden from before (us), O sole God, whose powers no other possesseth.1 Thou didst create the earth according to thy heart 2 While thou wast alone : Men, all cattle large and small, All that are upon the earth, That go about upon their feet; [All] that are on high, That fly with their wings. The foreign countries, Syria and Kush, The land of Egypt; tion, "beside whom there is no other" (see Davies, Amarna, I, XXXVI, 1. 1, and III, XXIX, 1. 1).

This use of the word sp for "quality" or "power" will be found also in the hymn of Suti and Hor translated above (Brit. Mus. Stela 826, 1. 3); Great Hymn to Amon (1, 5), and similarly on the late statue of Hor (Louvre 88, Brugsch, Thes., VI, 1251, 1. 1). standing" here. Thou settest every man into his place, Thou suppliest their necessities. Every one has his possessions, And his days are reckoned. The tongues are divers in speech, Their forms likewise and their skins are distinguished. (For) thou makest different the strangers. "Thou makest the Nile in the Nether World, Thou bringest it as thou desirest, To preserve alive the people.1 For thou hast made them for thyself, The lord of them all, resting among them; Thou lord of every land, who risest for them, Thou Sun of day, great in majesty. All the distant countries, Thou makest (also) their life, Thou hast set a Nile in the sky; When it falleth for them, It maketh waves upon the mountains, Like the great green sea, Watering their fields in their towns. "How excellent are thy designs, 0 lord of eternity!

There is a Nile in the sky for the strangers And for the cattle of every country that go upon their feet. (But) the Nile, it cometh from the Nether World for Egypt. "Thy rays nourish2 every garden; When thou risest they live, They grow by thee. Thou makest the seasons In order to create all thy work: Winter to bring them coolness, And heat that rthey may taste1 thee. Thou didst make the distant sky to rise therein, In order to behold all that thou hast made, Thou alone, shining in thy form as living Aton, Dawning, glittering, going afar and returning. Thou makest millions of forms Through thyself alone; Cities, towns, and tribes, highways and rivers. All eyes see thee before them, For thou art Aton of the day over the earth. "Thou art in my heart, There is no other that knoweth thee Save thy son Ikhnaton. Thou hast made him wise In thy designs and in thy might. The world is in thy hand, Even as thou hast made them. When thou hast risen they live, When thou settest they die; For thou art length of life of thyself, Men live through thee, While (their) eyes are upon thy beauty Until thou settest. All labor is put away When thou settest in the west.

Thou didst establish the world, And raise them up for thy son, Who came forth from thy limbs, The king of Upper and Lower Egypt, Living in Truth, Lord of the Two Lands, Nefer-khepru-Re, Wan-Re (Ikhnaton), Son of Re, living in Truth, lord of diadems, Ikhnaton, whose life is long; (And for) the chief royal wife, his beloved, Mistress of the Two Lands, Nefer-nefru-Aton, Nof retete, Living and flourishing for ever and ever."

This great royal hymn doubtless represents an excerpt, or a series of fragments excerpted, from the ritual of Aton, as it was celebrated from day to day in the Aton temple at Amarna. Unhappily, it was copied in the cemetery in but one tomb, where about a third of it has perished by the vandalism of the modern natives, leaving us for the lost portion only a very inaccurate and hasty modern copy of thirty years ago (1883). The other tombs were supplied, with their devotional inscriptions, from the current paragraphs and stock phrases which made up the knowledge of the Aton faith as understood by the scribes and painters who decorated these tombs. It should not be forgotten, therefore, that the fragments of the Aton faith which have survived to us in the Amarna cemetery, our chief source, have thus filtered mechanically through the indifferent hands, and the starved and listless minds of a few petty bureaucrats on the outskirts of a great religious and intellectual movement. Apart from the Royal Hymn, they were elsewhere content with bits and snatches copied in some cases from the Royal Hymn itself, or other fragments patched together in the form of a shorter hymn, which they then slavishly copied in whole or in part from tomb to tomb. Where the materials are so meagre, and the movement revealed so momentous, even the few new contributions furnished by the short hymn are of great value.1 In four cases the hymn is attributed to the king himself; that is, he is represented as reciting it to Aton.

The lines are as follows : sions in the second (unpublished) portion of my De hymnis in solem, and this was later supplemented by my own copies. Davies has also put together a composite text from five tombs in his Amarna, IV, pis. xxxii-xxxiii. The above translation is based on both sources. "Thy rising is beautiful, O living Aton, lord of Eternity; Thou art shining, beautiful, strong; Thy love is great and mighty, Thy rays rare cast1 into every face. Thy glowing hue brings life to hearts, When thou hast filled the Two Lands with thy love. O God who himself fashioned himself, Maker of every land, Creator of that which is upon it: Men, all cattle large and small, All trees that grow in the soil. They live when thou dawnest for them, Thou art the mother and the father of all that thou hast made. As for their eyes, when thou dawnest, They see by means of thee. Thy rays illuminate the whole earth, And every heart rejoices because of seeing thee, When thou dawnest as their lord.

"When thou settest in the western horizon of the sky, They sleep after the manner of the dead, Their heads are wrapped up, Their nostrils are stopped, Until thy rising comes in the morning, In the eastern horizon of the sky. Their arms are uplifted in adoration of thee, Thou makest hearts to live by thy beauty, And men live when thou sendest forth thy rays, Every land is in festivity: Singing, music, and shoutings of joy Are in the hall of the Benben^house, Thy temple in Akhet-Aton, the seat of Truth, Wherewith thou art satisfied. Food and provision are offered therein; Thy pure son performs thy pleasing ceremonies, O living Aton, at his festal processions. All that thou hast made dances before thee, Thy august son rejoices, his heart is joyous, lSee above, p. 71. O living Aton, born in the sky every day. He begets his august son Wanre (Ikhnaton) Like himself without ceasing, Son of Re, wearing his beauty, Nefer-khepru-Re, Wanre (Ikhnaton), Even me, thy son, in whom thou art satisfied, Who bears thy name. Thy strength and thy might abide in my heart, Thou art Aton, living forever. . . . Thou hast made the distant sky to rise therein, In order to behold all that thou hast made, While thou wast alone.

Millions of life are in thee to make them live, It is the breath of life in the nostrils to behold thy rays.1 All flowers live and what grows in the soil Is made to grow because thou dawnest. They are drunken before thee. All cattle skip upon their feet; The birds in the marsh fly with joy, Their wings that were folded are spread, Uplifted in adoration to the living Aton, The maker . . ." 2 In these hymns there is an inspiring universalism not found before in the religion of Egypt. It is world wide in its sweep. The king claims that the recognition of the Sun-god's universal supremacy is also universal, and that all men acknowledge his dominion. On the great boundary stela likewise he says of them, that Aton made them "for his own self; all lands, the iEgaeans bear their dues, their tribute is upon their backs, for him who made their life, him by whose rays men live and breathe the air." 3 self to them." which exist from the beginning goes as far as this point. It also stopped at this place, so that only part of a line has been lost.

It is clear that he was projecting a world religion, and endeavoring to displace by it the nationalism which had preceded it for twenty centuries. Along with this universal power, Ikhnaton is also deeply impressed with the eternal duration of his god; and although he himself calmly accepts his own mortality and early in his career at Amarna makes public and permanently records on the boundary stelse instructions for his own burial, nevertheless he relies upon his intimate relation with Aton to insure him something of the Sun-god's duration. His official titulary always contains the epithet after his name, "whose lifetime (or duration) is long." But in the beginning of all, Aton called himself forth out of the eternal solitude, the author of his own being.

The king calls him "My rampart of a million cubits, my reminder of eternity, my witness of the things of eternity, who himself fashioned himself with his own hands, whom no artificer knew." l In harmony with this idea, the hymns love to reiterate the fact that the creation of the world which followed was done while the god was yet alone. The words "while thou wert alone" are almost a refrain in these hymns. He is the universal creator who brought forth all the races of man and distinguished them in speech and in color of the skin. His creative power still goes on calling forth life, even from the inanimate egg. Nowhere do we find more marked the naive wonder of the king at the Sun-god's life-giving power than in this marvel, that within the egg-shell, which the king calls the "stone" of the egg — within this lifeless stone, the sounds of life respond to the command of Aton, and, nourished by the breath which he s;ives, a living creature issues forth.

This life-giving power is the constant source of life and sustenance, and its immediate agency is the rays of the Sun. It is in these rays that Aton is present on earth as a beneficent power. Thus manifested, the hymns love to dwell upon his ever-present universal power. "Thou art in the sky, but thy rays are on earth; " "Though thou art far away, thy rays are on earth;" "Thy rays are in the midst of the great green sea;" "Thy rays are on thy beloved son;" "He who makes whole the eyes by his rays;" "It is the breath of life in the nostrils to behold thy rays;" "Thy child (the king), who came forth from thy rays;" "Thou didst fashion him (the king) out of thine own rays;" "Thy rays carry a million royal jubilees;"

"When thou sendest forth thy rays, the Two Lands are in festivity;" "Thy rays embrace the lands, even all that thou hast made;" l "Whether he is in the sky or on earth, all eyes behold him without [ceasing] ; he fills [every land] with his rays, and makes all men to live; with beholding whom may my eyes be satisfied daily, when he dawns in this house of Aton and fills it with his own self by his beams, beauteous in love, and lays them upon me in satisfying life for ever and ever." 2 In these last words the king himself expresses his own consciousness of the god's presence, especially in the temple, by his rays. The obvious dependence of Egypt upon the Nile made it impossible to ignore this agency of life, and there is nothing which discloses more clearly the surprising rationalism of Ikhnaton than the fact that he strips off without hesitation the venerable body of myth and tradition which deified the Nile as Osiris, and attributes the inundation to natural forces controlled by his god, who in like solicitude for other lands has made a Nile for them in the sky.

It is this recognition of the fatherly solicitude of Aton for all creatures which lifts the movement of Ikhnaton far above all that had before been attained in the religion of Egypt or of the whole East before this time. " Thou art the father and the mother of all that thou hast made" is a thought which anticipates much of the later development in religion even down to our own time. The picture of the lily-grown marshes, where the flowers are "drunken" in the intoxicating radiance of Aton, where the birds unfold their wings and lift them " in adoration of the living Aton," where the cattle dance with delight in the sunshine, and the fish in the river beyond leap up to greet the light, the universal light whose beams are even "in the midst of the great green sea" — all this discloses a discernment of the presence of God in nature, and an appreciation of the revelation of God in the visible world such as we find a thousand years later in the Hebrew psalms, and in our own poets of nature since Wordsworth.

It is evident that, in spite of the political origin of this movement, the deepest sources of power in this remarkable revolution lay in this appeal to nature, in this admonition to "consider the lilies of the field." Ikhnaton was a "God-intoxicated man," whose mind responded with marvellous sensitiveness and discernment to the visible evidences of God about him. He was fairly ecstatic in his sense of the beauty of the eternal and universal light. Its beams enfold him on every monument of his which has survived. He prays, "May my eyes be satisfied daily with beholding him, when he dawns in this house of Aton and fills it with his own self by his beams, beauteous in love, and lays them upon me in satisfying life for ever and ever." In this light— which more than once, as here, he identifies with love, or again with beauty, as the visible evidence of the presence of God — he revels with an intoxication rarely to be found, and which may be properly compared to the ecstatic joy felt by such a soul as Ruskin in the contemplation of light. Ruskin, as he sees it playing over some lovely landscape, calls it "the breathing, animated, exulting light, which feels and receives and rejoices and acts — which chooses one thing and rejects another — which seeks and finds and loses again — leaping from rock to rock, from leaf to leaf, from wave to wave, glowing or flashing or scintillating according to what it strikes, or in its holier moods absorbing and enfolding all things in the deep fulness of its repose, and then again losing itself in bewilderment and doubt and dimness, or perishing and passing away, entangled in drifting mist, or melted into melancholy air, but still — kindling or declining, sparkling or still — it is the living light, which breathes in its deepest, most entranced rest, which sleeps but never dies." * That is the loftiest modern interpretation of light, a veritable gospel of the beauty of light, of which the earliest disciple was this lonely idealist of the fourteenth century before Christ.

To Ikhnaton, too, the eternal light might sleep, when he that made the world has "gone to rest in his horizon," but to him also as with Ruskin it "sleeps but never dies."

In this aspect of Ikhnaton's movement, then, it is a gospel of the beauty and beneficence of the natural order, a recognition of the message of nature to the soul of man, which makes it the earliest of those revivals which we call in the case of such artists as Millet and the Barbizon school, or of Wordsworth and his successors, "a return to nature." As the earliest of such movements known to us, however, we cannot call it a "return." We should not forget also that this intellectual attitude of the king was not confined to religion. The breath of nature had also touched life and art at the same time, and quickened them with a new vision as broad and untrammelled as that which is unfolded in the hymns. The king's charmingly natural and unrestrained relations with his family, depicted on public monuments without reserve, is another example of his powerful individuality and his readiness to throw off the shackles of tradition without hesitation in the endeavor to establish a world of things as they are, in wholesome naturalness. The artists of the time, one of them indeed, as he says, under the king's own instructions, put forth works dominated by the same spirit.

Especially do they reflect to us that joy in nature which breathes in the religion of Ikhnaton. We have come to speak habitually of an Amarna age, in religion, in life, in art, and this fact of itself is conclusive evidence of the distinctive intellectual attitude of Ikhnaton. It is remarkable that the hymns as an expression of religious aspiration contain so little reference to character and to ethical matters. We have seen that the Solar theology was closely identified from the beginning with the development of the moral consciousness in Egypt. Recognizing as it does more clearly than ever was done before the beneficent goodness of the Sun-god's sway, it is inconceivable that the Amarna movement should have rejected the highly developed ethics of Heliopolis. Its close connection with the Heliopolitan theology is evident throughout. The identification of the royal line with that of the Sun-god by the Heliopolitan priests in the Pyramid Age had resulted, as we have seen, in transferring to Re the humane qualities of beneficent dominion with which the Pharaohs of the Feudal Age were imbued.

The Pharaoh was the "good shepherd" or "good herdman," and this figure of the paternal and protecting sovereign had been transferred to Re. Re had thus gained wondrously in qualities of humane and paternal sympathy, as a result of this development in the conception of the kingship in the Feudal Age. The social forces which had contributed this high ideal of kingship were thus the ultimate influences, which, through the kingship, enriched and humanized the otherwise rather mechanical and perfunctory political conception of Re's dominion. The human appeal which he now made was thus akin to that of Osiris himself. This tendency of the Solar faith was entirely in sympathy with the teaching of Ikhnaton. Under his father we have found a Sun-hymn calling the Sun-god "the valiant herdman driving his herds," a hint clearly connecting the Aton faith with the social and moral movement of the Feudal Age, which we have just recalled. Nevertheless it is evident that it was the beneficence and beauty rather than the righteousness of the Sun-god, on which Ikhnaton loved to dwell, in the hymns to his god. Outside of the hymns, however, there is a marked prominence of the ancient word "truth," or, as we have observed so often, "justice" or "righteousness."

To the official name of the king, there is regularly appended the epithet, "living in truth," x and although it is difficult Sun-god was the father of the goddess who personified Truth, and his close connection with truth is evident throughout. In the sixtyfifth chapter of the Book of the Dead, he lives "in truth" or "on truth," using the same words applied to Ikhnaton. But the passage exhibits a very materialistic conception of truth, for the Sun-god lives " on truth" as the Nile lives "on fish." (See Grapow, Zeitschr. to interpret the phrase exactly, it is evident that the conception of Truth and Right, personified as a goddess, the daughter of the Sun-god at a remote age, occupied a prominent place in the Aton movement, and not least in the personal faith of the king. The new capital was called the "seat of truth" in the short hymn, and we frequently find the men of Ikhnaton's court glorifying truth.

One of his leading partisans, Eye, says: "He (the king) put truth in my body and my abomination is lying. I know that Wanre (Ikhnaton) rejoices in it (truth)."1 The same man affirms that the Sun-god is one " (whose) heart is satisfied with truth, whose abomination is falsehood." 2 Another official states in his Amarna tomb: "I will speak truth to his majesty, (for) I know that he lives therein. ... I do not that which his majesty hates, (for) my abomination is lying in my body. ... I have reported truth to his majesty, (for) I know that he lives therein.

Thou art Re, begetter of truth. . . . I took not the reward of lying, nor expelled the truth for the violent." 3 Re was still the author of truth or righteousness at Amarna as before, and if we hear of no judgment hereafter in the Amarna tombs, it was clearly only the rejection of the cloud of gods and demi-gods, with Osiris at their head, who had been involved in the judgment as we find it in the Book of the Dead. These were now banished, and the dramatic scene of the judgment seems to have disappeared with them, although it is clear that the ethical requirements of the Solar faith, the faith in which they emerged and developed, were not relaxed in Ikhnaton's fiir aegypt. Sprache, 49, 51.) The chapter is a magical charm to force the Sun-god to justify the deceased. It was doubtless such materialistic notions of ethical concepts which led the priests to employ magic in the realm of ethics and ethical values. i BAR, II, 993, 1002. 2 BAR, II, 994. 3 BAR, II, 1013. teaching. The sacerdotal invasion of the moral realm with mechanical magical agencies for insuring justification was also evidently repelled by Ikhnaton. The familiar heart scarab now no longer bears a charm to still the accusing voice of conscience, but a simple prayer, in the name of Aton, for long life, favor, and food.1 Such fundamental changes as these, on a moment's reflection, suggest what an overwhelming tide of inherited thought, custom, and tradition had been diverted from its channel by the young king who was guiding this revolution.

It is only as this aspect of his movement is clearly discerned that we begin to appreciate the power of his remarkable personality. Before his time religious documents were usually attributed to ancient kings and wise men, and the power of a belief lay chiefly in its claim to remote antiquity and the sanctity of immemorial custom. Even the social prophets of the Feudal Age attribute the maxims of Ptahhotep to a vizier of the Old Kingdom, five or six centuries earlier. Until Ikhnaton the history of the world had been but the irresistible drift of tradition. All men had been but drops of water in the great current.

Ikhnaton was the first individual in history. Consciously and deliberately, by intellectual process he gained his position, and then placed himself squarely in the face of tradition and swept it aside. He appeals to no myths, to no ancient and widely accepted versions of the dominion of the gods, to no customs sanctified by centuries — he appeals only to the present and visible evidences of his god's dominion, evidences open to all, and as for tradition, wherever it had left material manifestations of any sort in records which could be reached, he endeavored to anJSee Schaefer, Zeitschr. fur aegypt. Sprache, 48, 45/., and Proceedings of the Soc. of Biblical Arch., XVII, 155, No. 3. nihilate it. The new faith has but one name at Amarna. It is frequently called the "teaching," and this "teaching" is attributed solely to the king. There is no reason to question this attribution. But we should realize what this "teaching" meant in the life of the Egyptian people as a whole.

Here had been a great people, the onward flow of whose life, in spite of its almost irresistible momentum, had been suddenly arrested and then diverted into a strange channel. Their holy places had been desecrated, the shrines sacred with the memories of thousands of years had been closed up, the priests driven away, the offerings and temple incomes confiscated, and the old order blotted out. Everywhere whole communities, moved by instincts flowing from untold centuries of habit and custom, returned to their holy places to find them no more, and stood dumfounded before the closed doors of the ancient sanctuaries. On feast days, sanctified by memories of earliest childhood, venerable halls that had resounded with the rejoicings of the multitudes, as we have recalled them at Siut, now stood silent and empty; and every day as the funeral processions wound across the desert margin and up the plateau to the cemetery, the great comforter and friend, Osiris, the champion of the dead in every danger, was banished, and no man dared so much as utter his name.1 Even in their oaths, absorbed from childhood with their mothers' milk, the involuntary names must not wholly to eradicate the old customs. The heart scarab is mentioned above; "ushcbti" statuettes were also known. There is one in Zurich, see Wiedemann, Proceed, of the Soc. of Bib. Arch., VII, 200-3; also one in Cairo, see Maspero, Musee egyptien, III, pi. xxiii, pp. 27-28. They contain prayers for sustenance at the tomb, in the name of Aton. Osiris is not named. be suffered to escape the lips; and in the presence of the magistrate at court the ancient oath* must now contain only the name of Aton. All this to them was as if the modern man were asked to worship X and swear by Y.

Groups of muttering priests, nursing implacable hatred, must have mingled their curses with the execration of whole communities of discontented tradesmen — bakers who no longer drew a livelihood from the sale of ceremonial cakes at the temple feasts; craftsmen who no longer sold amulets of the old gods at the temple gateway; hack sculptors whose statues of Osiris lay under piles of dust in many a tumble-down studio; cemetery stone-cutters who found their tawdry tombstones with scenes from the Book of the Dead banished from the cemetery; scribes whose rolls of the same book, filled with the names of the old gods, or even if they bore the word god in the plural, were anathema; actors and priestly mimes who were driven away from the sacred groves by gendarmes on the days when they should have presented to the people the "passion play," and murmuring groups of pilgrims at Abydos who would have taken part in this drama of the life and death and resurrection of Osiris; physicians deprived of their whole stock in trade of exorcising ceremonies, employed with success since the days of the earliest kings, two thousand years before; shepherds who no longer dared to place a loaf and a jar of water under yonder tree and thus to escape the anger of the goddess who dwelt in it, and who might afflict the household with sickness in her wrath; peasants who feared to erect a rude image of Osiris in the field to drive away the typhonic demons of drought and famine; mothers soothing their babes at twilight and fearing to utter the old sacred names and prayers learned in childhood, to drive away from their little ones the lurking demons of the dark. In the midst of a whole land thus darkened by clouds of smouldering discontent, this marvellous young king, and the group of sympathizers who surrounded him, set up their tabernacle to the daily light, in serene unconsciousness of the fatal darkness that enveloped all around and grew daily darker and more threatening.

In placing the movement of Ikhnaton against a background of popular discontent like this, and adding to the picture also the far more immediately dangerous secret opposition of the ancient priesthoods, the still unconquered party of Amon, and the powerful military group, who were disaffected by the king's peace policy in Asia and his lack of interest in imperial administration and maintenance, we begin to discern something of the powerful individuality of this first intellectual leader in history.

His reign was the earliest age of the rule of ideas, irrespective of the condition and willingness of the people upon whom they were to be forced. As Matthew Arnold has so well said, in commenting on the French Revolution: "But the mania for giving an immediate political application to all these fine ideas of the reason was fatal. . . . Ideas cannot be too much prized in and for themselves, cannot be too much lived with; but to transfer them abruptly into the world of politics and practice, violently to revolutionize the world at their bidding — that is quite another thing." But Ikhnaton had no French Revolution to look back upon. He was himself the world's first revolutionist, and he was fully convinced that he might entirely recast the world of religion, thought, art, and life by the invincible purpose he held, to make his ideas at once practically effective. And so the fair city of the Amarna plain arose, a fatuous island of the blest in a sea of discontent, a vision of fond hopes, born in a mind fatally forgetful that the past cannot be annihilated.

The marvel is that such a man should have first arisen in the East, and especially in Egypt, where no man except Ikhnaton possessed the ability to forget. Nor was the great Mediterranean world which Egypt now dominated any better prepared for an international religion than its Egyptian lords. The imperial imagination of Ikhnaton reminds one of that of Alexander the Great, a thousand years later, but it was many centuries in advance of his age. We cannot wonder that when the storm broke it swept away almost all traces of this earliest idealist. All that we have to tell us of him is the wreck of his city, a lonely outpost of idealism, not to be overtaken and passed till six centuries later those Bedouin hordes who were now drifting into Ikhnaton's Palestinian provinces had coalesced into a nation of social, moral, and religious aspirations, and had thus brought forth the Hebrew prophets.

The fall of Ikhnaton is shrouded in complete obscurity.

The ultimate result was the restoration of Amon by Tutenkhamon, one of Ikhnaton's feeble successors. The old regime returned. Tutenkhamon's account of his restoration of the gods is an interesting revelation of the religious and intellectual attitude of the leading men of affairs when Ikhnaton had passed away. The new king refers to himself as "the good ruler, who did excellent things for the father of all gods (Amon), who restored for him that which was in ruin as everlasting monuments; cast out for him sin in the Two Lands (Egypt), so that righteousness endured . . .; and made lying to be the abomination of the land, as in the beginning. For when his majesty was crowned as king, the temples of the gods and goddesses were [desolat]ed from Elephantine as far as the marshes of the Delta l . . . (hammered out). Their holy places were ^forsaken1 and had become overgrown tracts, . . . their sanctuaries were like that which has never been, and their houses were trodden roads. The land was in an evil pass, and as for the gods, they had forsaken this land. If people were sent to Syria to extend tion of the text, but close study of a large-scale photograph shows that it is still discernible, though with great difficulty, on the stone. 344 the borders of Egypt, they prospered not at all; if men prayed to a god for succor, he came not; ... if men besought a goddess likewise, she came not at all. Their hearts were ^deaf in their bodies, and they diminished what was done. Now, after days had passed by these things, [his majesty] appeared upon the throne of his father, he ruled the regions of Horus. . . . His majesty was making the plans of this land and the needs of the two regions were before his majesty, as he took counsel with his own heart, seeking every excellent matter and searching for profitable things for his father Amon, fashioning his august emanation of pure gold, and giving to him more than was done before." 1 Thus was the memory of the great idealist execrated.

When in a state document it was necessary to refer to him, he was called "the criminal of Akhetaton." The reestablished priesthood of Amon rejoiced in the restoration of their power, especially when the ephemeral successors of Ikhnaton were followed by the able rule of Harmhab, a military leader who had contrived gradually to secure control of the situation. A hymn to Amon from this period reveals the exultant triumph of his devotees as they sing to him: "Thou findest him who transgresses against thee; Woe to him who assails thee! Thy city endures; Tutenkhamon found by Legrain in the Karnak temple in 1905, and published by him in Recueil de trav., XXIX, 162-173. I am indebted to M. Legrain for kind permission to make a series of large-scale photographs of the monument, on which it is possible to read the important northern limits of the persecution of the gods by Ikhnaton, not before noted. The stela was usurped by Harmhab, who inserted his name over that of Ikhnatonrrv But he who assails thee falls. Fie upon him who transgresses against thee in every land. The sun of him who knows thee not goes down, O Amon! But as for him who knows thee, he shines.

The forecourt of him who assailed thee is in darkness, But the whole earth is in light.

Whosoever puts thee in his heart, O Amon, Lo, his sun dawns." * This very hymn, however, betrays its connection with the old Solar faith and the paternal interpretation of Re, as it goes on to the praise of Amon as the " good shepherd " and the " pilot," ideas which, we recall, arose in the social movement of the Feudal Age. Indeed, notwithstanding the restoration of Amon, the ideas and the tendencies which had given birth to the revolution of Ikhnaton were far from disappearing. It was not possible to carry them on, under a monotheistic form, involving the annihilation of the old gods; but the human and beneficent aspects of Aton, in his care for all men, had taken hold upon the imagination of the thinking classes, and we find the same qualities now attributed to Amon. Men sang of him: "Lord of truth, father of gods, Maker of men and creator of animals, Lord of that which is, Creator of the tree of life, Maker of herbs, sustaining the cattle alive/' a The hymn from which these lines are quoted does not hesitate to call the god thus praised Re or Atum, showing Inscriptions in the Hieratic Character, pi. xxvi. The historical connection of the passages cited was first noted in a brilliant interpretation by Erman, Zeitschr. fur aegypt. Sprache, 42, 106 ff. pis. 11-13). that the Aton movement had left the traditional prestige of the Heliopolitan Re unblemished. Another passage contains evident echoes of the Aton faith: "Hail to thee! Re, lord of Truth, Whose sanctuary is hidden, lord of gods, Khepri in the midst of his barque, Who commanded and the gods became; Atum, who made the people, Who determined the fashion of them, Maker of their sustenance, Who distinguished one color (race) from another; Who hears the prayer of him who is in captivity, Who is kindly of heart when one calls upon him, Who saves the timid from the haughty, Who separates the weak from the 'strong1, Lord of Knowledge, '"in1 whose mouth is Taste; For love of whom the Nile comes, Lord of sweetness, great in love, At whose coming the people live."

Even the old monotheistic phrases have here and there survived, and this hymn employs them without compunction, though constantly referring to the gods. It says: "Sole likeness1, maker of what is, Sole and only one, maker of what exists. From whose eyes men issued, From whose mouth the gods came forth, Maker of herbs for the cattle, And the tree of life for mankind, Who maketh the sustenance of the fish [in] the stream, And the birds that traverse1 the sky, Who giveth breath to that which is in the egg, And maketh to live the son of the worm, Who maketh that on which the gnats live, The worms and the insects likewise, Who supplieth the needs of the mice in their holes, Who sustaineth alive the ^irds1 in every tree. Hail to thee, who hast made all these, Thou sole and only one, with many arms, Thou sleeper waking while all men sleep, Seeking good things for his cattle. Amon, enduring in all things, Atum-Harakhte, Praise to thee in all that they say, Jubilation to thee, for rthy tarrying with us1, Obeisance to thee, who didst create us, 'Hail to thee,' say all cattle; 'Jubilation to thee,' says every country, To the height of heaven, to the breadth of earth, To the depths of the sea."

A hymn to Osiris of the same age says to him: "Thou art the father and the mother of men, they live from thy breath." 1 There is a spirit of humane solicitude in all this, which, as we have seen, appeared as early as the social teaching of the Feudal Age. Especially the preference for the "timid" as over against the "haughty" and overbearing, and the discerning "taste" and "knowledge," which are the royal and divine prerogatives, we have already discovered in social tractates like Ipuwer, and even in a state document like the Installation of the Vizier in the Twelfth Dynasty. That God is the father and mother of his creatures was, of course, a doctrine of the Aton faith. Such hymns also still preserve the universalism, the disregard for national lines, which was so prominent in the teaching of Ikhnaton. As we look further into the simpler and less ecclesiastical professions of the thirteenth and twelfth centuries before Christ, the two centuries after Ikhnaton, the confidence of the worshipper in the solicitude of the Sun-god for all, even the least of his creatures, has developed into a devotional spirit, and a consciousness of personal relation with the god, which was already discernible in Ikhnaton's declaration to his god: "Thou art in my heart." The surviving influence of

the Aton faith and the doctrines of social justice of the Feudal Age now culminated, therefore, in the profoundest expression or revelation of the devotional religious spirit ever attained by the men of Egypt. Furthermore, although rooted in the teaching of an exclusive few heretofore, these beliefs in an intimate and personal relation between the worshipper and his god had now, with the lapse of centuries and by slow and gradual process, become widespread among the people. An age of personal piety and inner aspiration to God now dawned among the masses. It is a notable development and, like so many of the movements which we have followed in these lectures, the earliest of its kind as yet discernible in the history of the East, or for that matter in the history of man. We are able to follow it only at Thebes, and it is not a little interesting to be able to look into the souls of the common folk who thronged the streets and markets, who tilled the fields and maintained the industries, who kept the accounts and carried on the official records, the hewers of wood and the drawers of water, the men and women upon whose shoulders rested the great burden of material life in the vast capital of the Egyptian Empire during the twelfth

and thirteenth centuries before Christ.

A scribe in one of the treasury magazines of the Theban necropolis prays to Amon, as to him "Who cometh to the silent, Who saveth the poor, Who giveth breath to every one he loveth, Give to me [thy] hand, Save me, Shine upon me, For thou makest my sustenance. Thou art the sole god, there is no other, Even Re, who dawneth in the sky, Atum maker of men, Who heareth the prayers of him who calls to him, Who saveth a man from the haughty, Who bringeth the Nile for him who is among them, Who leadeth — for all men, When he riseth, the people live, Their hearts live when they see him Who giveth breath to him who is the egg, Who maketh the people and the birds to live, Who supplieth the needs of the mice in their holes, The worms and the insects likewise." 1 To a god, the least of whose creatures are the object of his care, these men of Thebes might bring their misfortunes and their daily cares, confident in his kindness and beneficence.

A painter of tomb scenes in the necropolis erected a stela in one of the necropolis sanctuaries, telling how Amon, in gracious mercy, had saved his son from sickness.2 Amon is to him the "august god, who heareth petitions, who cometh at the cry of the afflicted poor, and giveth breath to him who is bowed down," and the story of Amon's goodness he tells thus: "Praise to Amon! I make hymns in his name, I give to him praise, To the height of heaven, Preuss. Akad., 1911, XLIX, pp. 1087 ff. Erman first called attention to the character of this group of necropolis votive stelse in an essay, Denksteine aus dem thebanischen Grdberstadt, ibid., pp. 1086 .If. And iie breadth of earth; I tell of his prowess To him who sails down-stream, And to him who sails up-stream. "Beware of him! Repeat it to son and daughter, To great and small, Tell it to generation after generation, Who are not yet born. Tell it to the fishes in the stream, To the birds in the sky, Repeat it to him who knoweth it not And to him who knoweth it. Beware of him. "Thou, O Amon, art the lord of the silent, Who cometh at the cry of the poor.

When I cry to thee in my affliction, Then thou comest and savest me. That thou mayest give breath to him who is bowed down, And mayest save me lying in bondage.1 Thou, Amon-Re, Lord of Thebes, art he, Who saveth him that is in the Nether World, When men cry unto thee, Thou art he that cometh from afar." "Nebre, painter of Amon in the necropolis, son of Pai, painter of Amon in the necropolis, made this in the name of his lord, Amon, Lord of Thebes, who cometh at the cry of the poor; making for him praises in his name, because of the greatness of his might, and making for him prayers before him and before the whole land, on behalf of the painter Nakht-Amon,2 when he lay sick unto death, being rin^ the power of Amon, because of his sin." " I found that the lord of gods came as the north wind, while fragrant air was before him, that he might save the painter Nakht-Amon, son of the painter of Amon in the necropolis, Nebre, born of the housewife, Peshed."

"He saith, 'Though the servant be wont to commit sin, yet is the lord wont to be gracious. The lord of Thebes spends not the whole day wroth. If he be wroth for the space of a moment, it remaineth not . . . turns to us in graciousness, Amon turns 'with1 his breath."' l "By thy ka, thou wilt be gracious, and that which is turned away will not be repeated.'' "He saith, 'I will make this stela in thy name, and I will record this hymn in writing upon it, if thou wilt save for me the painter Nakht-Amon.' Thus I spake to thee, and thou hearkenedst to me. Now behold I do that which I said. Thou art the lord of the one who calls upon him, who is satisfied with righteousness, the lord of Thebes." "Made by the painter, Nebre and [his] son Khai." Similarly in a year of unseasonable weather and resulting distress a man prays: "Come to me, O Amon, save me in this year of distress. As for the sun, when it happens that he shines not, then winter comes in summertime, the months are 'retarded1 and the days are belated.

The great cry out to thee, O Amon, and the small seek after thee. Those who are in the arms of their nurses say, ' Give us breath, 0 Amon.' Then is Amon found coming in peace with the sweet air before him. He transforms me into a vulture-wing, like a barque manned, 'saying1, 'Strength to the shepherds in the field, the washers on the dike, the 'guards1 who come forth from the district, the gazelles in the desert."

"Thou findest that Amon doeth according to thy desire, in his hour of peace, and thou art praised in the midst of the officials and established in the place of truth. AmonRe, thy great Nile ascendeth the mountains, thou lord of fish, rich in birds; and all the poor are satiated." 1 The Sun-god, or his supplanter, Amon, has thus become the champion of the distressed, "Who heareth the petition, who heareth the prayers of him who crieth out to him, who cometh at the voice of him who mentions his name,"2 "the loving god who heareth prayers, [who giveth the hand] to the poor, who saveth the weary." 3 So the injured mother, neglected by her son, "raises her arms to the god, and he hears her cry." 4 The social justice which arose in the Middle Kingdom is now a claim which every poor man pleads before the god, who has himself become a " just judge, not accepting a bribe, uplifting the insignificant, [protecting] the poor, not extending thy hand to the rich."5 And so the poor man prays: "O Amon, lend thine ear to him who stands alone in the court (of justice), who is poor while his [opponent] is rich.

The court oppresses him (saying), ' Silver and gold for the scribes! Clothing for the servants!' But Amon transforms himself into the vizier, that he may cause the poor man to triumph; the poor man is just and the poor man •overcomes1 the rich. Pilot [in] front who knoweth the water, Amon, thou Rudder, . . . who giveth bread to him who has none, and preserveth alive the servant of his house."6 For the god is now that "Amon-Re who first became king, O god of the beginning, thou vizier of the poor man, not taking the corrupt reward, not saying, his finger, whose words are before the heart. He assigneth him that sinneth against him to the fire, and the just [to] the West." l Rich and poor alike may suffer the displeasure of the god aroused by sin. An oath taken lightly or falsely calls down the wrath of the god, and he smites the transgressor with sickness or blindness, from which relief may be obtained as we have seen, if repentance follows and the offender humbly seeks the favor of his god.2 Now for the first time conscience is fully emancipated.

The sinner pleads his ignorance and proneness to err. "Thou sole and only one, thou Harakhte who hath none other like him, protector of millions, savior of hundred-thousands, who shieldeth him that calleth upon him, thou lord of Heliopolis; punish, me not for my many sins. I am one ignorant of his own body, I am a man without understanding. All day I follow after my own dictates as the ox after his fodder." 3 This is in striking contrast with the Book of the Dead, in which the soul admits no sin and claims entire innocence. But now in this posture of unworthiness and humility there is inner communion with God night and day. " Come to me, O Re-Harakhte, that thou may est guide me; for thou art he that doeth, and none doeth without thee, but thou art he who doeth it. Come to me, Atum, thou art the august god. My heart goes out to Heliopolis. . . . My heart rejoiceth and my bosom is glad. My petitions are heard, even my daily prayers, and my hymns by night. My supplications shall flourish in my mouth, for they are heard this day." 4 2Erman, ibid., 1102-3, 1104, 1098-1110, 1101-2, 1107. \_8_Paj?yrus Ar^stRsj, Hj io, 5-1 1; 2.

In the old hymns, made up of objective descriptions, quotations from the myths, and allusions to mythical incidents, all matters entirely external to the life of the worshipper, every man might pray the same prayer; but now prayer becomes a revelation of inner personal experience, an expression of individual communion with God. It is a communion in which the worshipper discerns in his god one nourishing the soul as a shepherd feeds his flock.

"O Amon, thou herdman bringing forth the herds in the morning, leading the suffering to pasture; as the herdman leads the herds [to] pasture, so dost thou, O Amon, lead the suffering to food, for Amon is a herdman, herding him that leans upon him. ... 0 Amon-Re, I love thee and I have filled my heart with thee. . . . Thou wilt rescue me out of the mouth of men in the day when they speak lies; for the Lord of Truth, he liveth in truth. I will not follow the anxiety in my heart, (for) that which Amon hath said flourisheth.', l There are, to be sure, external and material means which will further this spiritual relation with the god. The wise man sagely admonishes to" celebrate the feast of thy god, repeat his seasons; the god is wroth [with] him who transgresses [against] him." 2 Nevertheless, even in the opinion of the sages, who are wont to compromise with traditional customs, the most effective means of gaining the favor of God is contemplative silence and inner communion. "Be not of many words, for in silence shalt thou gain good. ... As for the precinct of God, his abomination is crying out; pray thou with a desiring heart whose every word is hidden, Ostrakon, No. 5656 a,

11. 6-7, 14-15, verso 11. 1-3 (after a collation by Erman. Cf. Zeitschr. fiir aegypt. Sprache, 42, 106). and he will supply thy need, and hear thy speech and receive thy offering." l It is in such an attitude as this that the worshipper may turn to his God as to a fountain of spiritual refreshment, saying, "Thou sweet Well for him that thirsteth in the desert; it is closed to him who speaks, but it is open to him who is silent. When he who is silent comes, lo, he finds the well." 2 This attitude of silent communion, waiting upon the gracious goodness of God, was not confined to the select few, nor to the educated priestly communities. On the humblest monuments of the common people Amon is called the god "who cometh to the silent," or the "lord of the silent," as we have already observed.3 It is in this final development of devotional feeling, crowning the religious and intellectual revolution of Ikhnaton, and also forming the culmination of the doctrines of social justice emerging in the Feudal Age, that the religion of Egypt reached its noblest and most exalted period. The materials for the age of the decadence which followed are too scanty to reveal clearly the causes of the stagnation which now ensued, a decline

from which the religious life of Egypt never recovered.

In morals and in the attitude toward life the sages continued to maintain a spirit of wholesome regard for the highest practical ideals, an attitude in which we discern a distinct advance upon the teachings of the fathers. Reputation was strictly to be guarded. "Let every place which thou lovest be known," says the sage; 4 and drunkenness and dissolute living are exhibited in all their disastrous consequences for the young. To the young man the dangers of immorality are bared with naked frankness. "Guard thee from the woman from abroad, who is not known in her city; look not on her, . . . know her not in the flesh; (for she is) a flood great and deep, whose whirling no man knows. The woman whose husband is far away, 'I am beautiful,' says she to thee every day. When she has no witnesses, she stands and ensnares thee. O great crime worthy of death when one hearkens, even when it be not known abroad. (For) a man takes up every sin [after] this one" l As for the good things of life, they are to be regarded with philosophical reserve.

It is foolish to count upon inherited wealth as a source of happiness. "Say not, 'My maternal grandfather has a house on the estate of So and So.' Then when thou comest to the division (by will) with thy brother, thy portion is (only) a storage-shed." 2 In such things indeed there is no stability. "So it is forever, men are naught. One is rich, another is poor. ... He who was rich last year, he is a vagrant this year. . . . The watercourse of last year, it is another place this year. Great seas become dry places, and shores become deeps." 3 We have here that Oriental resignation to the contrasts in life which seems to have developed among all the peoples of the early East.4 The speculations of the thinking class, especially those which we have found in intimations of pantheism as far back as the Pyramid Age, had also now gained currency among the common people, although of course in the concrete form in which such reflections always find expression in the East. A picturesque tale of the twelfth century « Ibid., 2, 13-17. 2 Ibid., 5, 7-8. 3 Ibid., 7, 8-9. the rich man's house. Algiers edition of Sindebad the Sailor, Arabic text, p. 4.

B. C. expresses in graphic form the thought of the people concerning these complicated and elusive matters. It is now commonly known as the Tale of the Two Brothers.1 The two gods who appear as the chief characters in the tale are pictured in the naive imagination of the folk as two peasants, whose names, Anubis and Bata, have disclosed them as gods of the town of Kasa,2 who had a place in the religion of Egypt at an enormously remote date.3 Anubis, the elder brother, is married; Bata, the younger, lives with them almost as their son, when the idyllic round of picturesque rustic life is forever ended by an attempt on the part of the wife, enamoured of the younger brother, to establish improper relations with him. The youth indignantly refuses, exemplifying the current wisdom of the wise man as we have already met it. The incident later found place in the Hebrew tradition of Joseph in Egypt. Deceived by his wife into believing a perverted version of the affair foisted upon him by the false woman, Anubis lies in wait to slay his brother. Warned by his cattle, however, the youth flees, and his brother's pursuit D'Orbiney; published in Select Papyri . . . in the British Museum, London, 1860, part II, pis. ix-xix. It has been often translated. A good rendering by Griffith will be found in Petrie's Egyptian Tales, London, 1895, Second Series, pp. 36-65. 1905, p. 185, and Spiegelberg, Zeitschr. fur aegypt. Sprache, 44, pp. 98-99. in the Pyramid Texts (Zeitschr. fur aegypt. Sprache, 43, 77-83).

Naville seems to have overlooked the fact that Bata occurs as early as Menes's time. Indeed he is to be found on a tablet of Menes published by Naville in the very article in question (p. 79, fig.'3); for the bird represented there perched on the building or sanctuary has before him a "t." The bird is to be read "BY' which with the "t" gives us the reading Bata. is cut off by the Sun-god, who places between them a torrent filled with crocodiles. Then Bata, calling upon the Sun-god "who distinguisheth between good and evil" to judge between them, reproaches his brother with his easy credulity as they converse across the stream and tells him that all is now over. As for the youth himself, he must depart to the "Valley of the Cedar," a place which must have been on the Phoenician coast, as there were no cedars in Egypt. There he will await the coming of Anubis to succor him, whenever Anubis observes commotion in the jar of beer which he drinks. Anubis returns and slays his unfaithful wife, while the youth wanders on to the Valley of the Cedar. Maintaining himself there as a hunter, the Sun-god sends him a beautiful wife to solace his loneliness. Although she escapes the sea that would have carried

her away, a stray lock of her perfumed hair wandering to Egypt betrays her to the Pharaoh, who searches for her far and wide, and, like Cinderella, she is at last brought to the palace. She at once prays the king to send emissaries to cut down the cedar with which the life of Bata, her husband, is mysteriously involved. When this is done, Bata falls dead, and his treacherous wife feels free to live in splendor at the court. Then Bata's brother, Anubis, observes a commotion in the beer he is drinking, and he sets out at once to search for Bata, whose body he soon finds in the "Valley of the Cedar." For three years he sought the cedar blossom in which was the soul of Bata, and wearying, he was about to return to Egypt, when in the fourth year, as he was walking by the cedar, he chanced upon it. Then he hastened to place it in a jar of water, and having given the water to Bata to drink, his dead brother revived, and they embraced each other and talked together. Bata now informs his brother that he must assume the form of a sacred bull, and going in this guise to the court, he will reckon with the faithless beauty whom the gods gave

him. But the court beauty compasses the death of the bull, and from his blood which spatters the door-posts of the palace two beautiful perseatrees spring up, one on either side of the doorway. When the Pharaoh's favorite induces him to cut these down, a chip from one of them flies into her mouth, and as a result she bears a son, who proves to be Bata himself. The Pharaoh makes him heir to the throne, to which Bata finally succeeds, and after a long and happy reign is followed as king by his brother, the faithful Anubis.

It is easy to discern in the imperishable life of Bata, as it emerges in one form after another, especially in the cedar and the persea-tree, a folk version of some of the Osiris incidents interwoven with the myth of the Sun-god. But it will be noticed that Bata is alternately the persea of Osiris and the bull of the Sun, who still remains, as he has been throughout its history, the great god of Egypt. "The god of this land is the Sun in the horizon, (while) his statues are on earth," says the sage;1 but the other gods have now in the thought of the time completely coalesced with him. This Solar pantheism now took definite form in the thought of the theologian, and we ultimately find an "

Amon-Re-Wennofer (Osiris)" as king of Egypt, with his name inclosed in a cartouche like an earthly ruler.2 Amon as Sun-god becomes the allpervasive, life-giving air. "He emits air, refreshing the throat, in his name of 'Amon/ who abides (mn) in all things, the soul of Shu (god of the air) for all gods, the substance of life, who created the tree of life, . . . flooding the Two Lands (Egypt), without whom none liveth in Egypt."1 As god of the universal air, "his voice is heard though he is not seen, refreshing every throat, strengthening the heart of the pregnant woman in travail, and the man-child born of her." 2 In the words of an old Sun-hymn of Aton times, the worshipper says, " Thou art he who fashions his body with his own hands in any form he desires;" 3 and Amon, "lord of Thebes shines in his forms, which are in every province,"4 indicating that the local gods of the provinces or nomes are but forms and names of Amon. The priests narrated too how this had come to pass. "Thou didst establish thy throne in every place thou lovest, in order that thy names might be many. Cities and nomes bear thy beauty, and there is no 'region1 without thy image." Then they told how in the beginning Amon had gone from one great sanctuary to the other, and how in each one he had established himself as the god of the place. At Heliopolis he had become Atum, at Memphis he had become Ptah, at Heracleopolis he had become Harsaphes. Not only are the gods but forms of Amon, Amon is in all, and he is all. "Thy form is the Nile, the first-born, older than the gods; thou art the great waters, and when they penetrate into the soil, thou makest it to live by thy flood. Thou art the sky, thou art the earth, thou art the Nether World, thou art the water, thou art the air that is between them. Men rejoice because of thee, (for) thou ceasest not 5 to care for all that is." 6 Grosse Oase are from the temple of Hibeh in the oasis of el Khargeh, and date from the reign of Darius II, the last quarter of the fifth century B. C.

Thus those pantheistic speculations which we found as far back as the Pyramid Age, after two thousand years of slow development have finally resulted in identifying the world with God. In form all the old faiths went on as before, maintaining all the old externals. This was especially true of mortuary practices, which developed under the Empire as never before. All men of whatever class, no matter how poor and needy, desired and received some mortuary equipment, when laid away in the grave, which might enable the departed to share in the blessed destiny of Osiris. The material equipment of the dead for eternity, in spite of the impressive demonstration of its futility furnished by the desolate pyramid cemeteries, had now become a vast industry which all classes of society called into requisition. The sages cautioned even the young to make ready their tombs. " Say not ' I am (too) young to be taken.' Thou knowest not thy death. Death comes and takes the child who is in his mother's arms, like the man who has reached old age." l "Adorn thy seat which is in the valley, the tomb which shall hide thy body.

Put it before thee in thy affairs, which are made account of in thy eyes, like the very old whom thou layest to rest in the midst of their dwelling1. There is no blame to him who doeth it, it is good that thou be likewise equipped. When thy messenger comes rto take thee he shall find thee equipped1." 2 Neither should a man forget those who already lie there: "Put water for thy father and thy mother who rest in the valley. . . . Thy son shall do likewise for thee." 3 Under such influences as these grew up the vast cemetery of Thebes, in which myriads of the common people 1Maximes d'Ani, 4, 2-4. 2Ibid.} 3, 14-4, 2. zIbid., 3, 4r-6. of a class who had never before enjoyed Osirian burial were now laid away. The great mass of material remains from such cemeteries, however, reveals only the popularization of tendencies and beliefs long before observable among the higher and the educated classes. It is rarely that such tendencies were more than mechanically and thoughtlessly followed by the common folk, and seldom do we find such important developments among them as those manifestations of personal piety among the poor, to which we have already given attention.

With the decline of the Empire from the thirteenth century onward, the forces of life both within and without were exhausted and had lost their power to stimulate the religion of Egypt to any further vital development. Stagnation and a deadly and indifferent inertia fell like a stupor upon the once vigorous life of the nation. The development which now ensued was purely institutional and involved no progress in thought. The power of the priesthood as a political influence is observable as far back as the rise? of the Fifth Dynasty, in the middle of the twenty-Sfth century B. C. In the Empire, however, vast temples, richly endowed, became an economic menace. Moreover, the great Pharaohs of this age began to recognize oracles of Amon as mandatory. Thutmose III was seated on his throne by a conspiracy of the priests of Amon, supported by an oracle of the great god recognizing him as king.1 When Thutmose III, therefore, made the High Priest of Amon primate of all the priesthoods of Egypt, the chief sacerdotal official of the state, he was but paying his political debts. This Amonite papacy suffered severely at the hands of Ikhnaton, as we have seen.

After his overthrow, however, it recovered all it had lost i BAR, II, 131-149. and much more. Ramses II even allowed an oracle of Amon to guide him in the appointment of the god's high priest,1 and under such circumstances it was easy for the high priests of Amon to make the office hereditary. Unable to resist the political power of this state within the state, a constant victim of its economic encroachments, Egypt rapidly degenerated into a sacerdotal state, and by 1100 B. C. the Pharaoh had yielded the sceptre to the head of the state church. It was in the course of this long development which placed the sacerdotal party in control of the throne, that the outward and official manifestations of religion took on those forms of dignity and splendor such as no Oriental religion had before displayed.

The sanctuaries of this age will always form one of the most imposing survivals from the ancient world. Not only in their grandeur as architecture, but also in their sumptuous equipment, these vast palaces of the gods lifted the external observances of religion to a plane of splendor and influence which they had never enjoyed before. Enthroned in magnificence which not even the sumptuous East had ever seen, Amon of Thebes became in the hands of his crafty priesthood a mere oracular source for political and administrative decisions. Even routine legal verdicts were rendered by the nod of the god, and such matters as wills and testaments were subject to his oracles.2 The old prayer of the oppressed, that Amon might become the vizier of the poor man, was receiving a very literal fulfilment, and with results little foreseen by the men who had framed this prayer. As Thebes degenerated into a sacerdotal principality after 1000 B. C, IV, 650-8, 725-8, 795, etc. and the great cities of the north, especially of the Delta, eclipsed the splendor of the old imperial capital, Anion slowly lost his pre-eminence, although he was not wholly neglected. Even the venerable supremacy of the Sungod was encroached upon by the other gods of the north.

On the other hand, it is evident that Osiris, who was more independent of state patronage and support, rather gained than lost in popularity.

When the decadence, which had continued for five hundred years, was slowly transformed into a restoration, after 700 B. C, the creative age of inner development was forever past. Instead of an exuberant energy expressing itself in the spontaneous development of new forms and new manifestations, as at the beginning of the Empire, the nation fell back upon the past, and consciously endeavored to restore and rehabilitate the vanished state of the old days before the changes and innovations introduced by the Empire.1 Seen through the mist of two thousand years, what was to them ancient Egypt was endowed with the ideal perfection of the divine regime which had preceded it. In the endeavor to reconstitute modern religion, society, and government upon ancient lines, the archaizers must consciously or unconsciously have been constantly thwarted by the inevitable mutability of the social, political, and economic conditions of a race. The two thousand years which had elapsed since the Pyramid Age could not be annihilated. Through the deceptive mantle of antiquity with which they cloaked contemporary conditions, the inexorable realities of the present were discernible. The solution of the difficulty, when perceived, was the same as that attempted by the Hebrews History of Egypt, pp. 570 jf. in a similar dilemma: it was but to attribute to the modern elements also a hoary antiquity, as the whole body of Hebrew legislation was attributed to Moses. The theoretical revival was thus rescued.

The ancient mortuary texts of the pyramids were revived, and although frequently not understood, were engraved upon the massive stone sarcophagi. The Book of the Dead, which now received its-last redaction, shows plain traces of this influence. In the tomb-chapels we find again the fresh and pleasing pictures from the life of the people in marsh and meadow, in workshop and ship-yard. They are perfect reproductions of the relief scenes in the mastaba tombs of the Pyramid Age, so perfect indeed that at the first glance one is not infrequently in doubt as to the age of the monument. Indeed a man named Aba, at Thebes, sent his artists to an Old Kingdom tomb near Siut to copy thence the reliefs for use in his own Theban tomb, because the owner of the ancient tomb was also named Aba. There is a large black granite stela in the British Museum,1 a copy, dating from the dawn of the Restoration, of an ancient papyrus book of the Old Kingdom, a "work of the ancestors, which was eaten of worms."

Thus the writings and sacred rolls of bygone days were now eagerly sought out, and, with the dust of ages upon them, they were collected, sorted, and arranged. The past was supreme. The priest who cherished it lived in a realm of shadows, and for the contemporary world he had no vital meaning. Likewise in Babylon the same retrospective spirit was now dominant in the reviving empire of Nebuchadnezzar. It was soon to take possession Tafel I, II, and infra, pp. 41-47, especially p. 4G, note. of the returning Hebrew exiles. The world was growing old, and men were dwelling fondly and wistfully on her far-away youth. In this process of conserving the old, the religion of Egypt sank deeper and deeper in decay, to become, what Herodotus found it, a religion of innumerable external observances and mechanical usages, carried out with such elaborate and insistent punctiliousness that the Egyptians gained the reputation of being the most religious of all peoples. But such observances were no longer the expression of a growing and developing inner life, as in the days before the creative vitality of the race was extinct. To be sure, many of the finest of the old teachings continued as purely literary survivals, and new ones unconsciously crept in, chiefly due to foreign influence.1 In the days of the Greek kings, the Osirian faith finally submerged the venerable Sun-god, with whose name the greatest movements in the history of Egyptian religion were associated, and when the Roman emperor became an Oriental Sun-god, sol inmctus, the process was in large measure due to the influence of Asiatic Solar religion rather than to the Solar Pharaoh, who, as we have seen in the Pyramid Texts, had been sovereign and Sun-god at the same time many centuries before such doctrines are discernible in Asia. Whether they are in Asia the result of Egyptian influence is a question still to be investigated.

In any case, as Osiris-Apis or Serapis, Osiris gained the supreme place in the popular as well as the state religion, and through him the subterranean hereafter, rather than Especially Babylonian astrology, see Cumont's brilliant book, Astrology and Religion Among the Greeks and Romans, New York, 1912, pp. 73-77, although the Egyptian origin of Ikhnaton's movement is too evident to make possible M. Cumont's suggestion of influences from Asia in it. the Sun-god's glorious celestial kingdom of the dead, passed over into the Roman world. The imposing melee of thought and religion from the most remote and racially divergent sources, with which the historian is confronted as he surveys the Mediterranean world at the beginning of the Christian era, was not a little modified by the current which constantly mingled with it from the Nile. It has not been the purpose of these lectures to include this period of far-reaching syncretism of the GrsecoRoman world; but as we stand at the close of the long religious development which we have been endeavoring to trace, we may ask ourselves the question whether the ancient religion of Egypt, as we have found it in old native sources long antedating Greek civilization, now passed out unalloyed into the great Mediterranean world.

It has of course long since been evident that the religions of the Mediterranean, from the fourth century B. C. onward, or beginning perhaps even earlier, were gradually Orientalized, and in this process of Orientalization the progress of Christianity was but a single phenomenon among others like it. We all know that it was not the Christianity of Judea in the first decades after the crucifixion which conquered the Roman world. It seems equally evident that it was the religion of Egypt as viewed, interpreted, and apprehended by generations of Greeks, it was this Hellenized composite of old Egyptian religion and Greek preconceptions l which passed out into the Mediterranean world to make Isis a household word in Athens, to give her a sanctuary even in such a provincial city as Pompeii, and to leave such monuments in Rome had invaded Egypt from Syria, and after being Egyptianized passed on to Rome. See Cumont, ibid., pp. 76-77. as Hadrian's obelisk on the Monte Pincio, which in Egyptian hieroglyphs still proclaims to the modern world not only the deification of the beautiful Greek youth, Hadrian's favorite, as " OsirisAntinous," but at the same time the enthronement of the ancient mortuary god of Egypt in the palace of the Csesars.

I believe it was Louis Agassiz who, after studying the resistless action of the Swiss glaciers and watching the massive boulders and fragments of rock brought down in the grip of the ice, to be dropped at the bidding of the summer sun in a wandering rampart of tumbled rocks skirting the mouth of the valley, at length realized that this glacial action had been going on for ages, and the imposing truth burst upon him that the geological processes of past seons which have made the earth are still going on at the present day, that they have never ceased, that they will never cease.

We have been tracing in broad lines the development of the religion of a great people, unfolding in the course of over three thousand years as the forces within and the forces around this ancient man wrought and fashioned his conception of the divine powers. God as discerned everywhere in the ancient Oriental world was a human experience. The ancient ideas of God are but the expression of the best that man has felt and thought embodied in a supreme character of which he dreamed. What was intended by Ingersoll, I suppose, as a biting gibe, "An honest god is the noblest work of man," is nevertheless profoundly true. We have seen the Egyptian slowly gaining his honest god. We gained ours by the same process, beginning among the Hebrews. It would be well if we of the modern world as we look back over these ages lying behind us might realize with Agassiz in the geological world,1 that religion is still in the making, that the processes which brought forth inherited religion have never ceased, that they are going on around us every day, and that they will continue as long as the great and complex fabric of man's life endures. never accepted evolution in the organic world.