Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 7.djvu/762

738 738 EGYPT [HISTORY. If they were marked by barbarity, there is no boast of ought but conquest and the levying of tribute. The tribute no less than a contemporary painting shows the great material civilization of the Asiatic states. Throughout, the Ruten are the most formidable enemies ; the Kheta only appear. The first great achievement was the defeat before Megiddo of a confederacy led by the prince of Ketesh, or Kadesh on the Orontes. In the battle only 83 of the enemy were killed, and 340 taken prisoners ; but the magnitude of the success is proved by the capture of 2232 horses, 924 chariots, and the speedy surrender of Megiddo. This town, as in Josiah s time, was the key of the route to the Euphrates, and on its capture the king of the Ruten and the king of Assur are mentioned as becoming tributaries. In the course of the wars Kadesh was captured twice, and the king of Egypt marched as far as Nineveh, and the name of Babel is mentioned. The reign of Thothmes was also marked by expeditions in Ethiopia, and then we first meet with the supposed Egyptian name of the Danai, with whom he came in contact during some expedition in the Mediterranean. Great buildings commemorate this active reign, and we have a glimpse of the personal character of the king in the eccentric architecture of one of his additions to the temple of Amen-ra at Thebes. After a reign of 54 years 1 1 months, reckoning from the accession of Hatshepu, Thothmes III. was succeeded by his son Amenophis II. The accession of the new king was marked by a war in Assyria, in which he captured Nineveh. An incident of his eastern campaigns is remarkable for its Oriental barbarism. He brought back to Egypt the bodies of seven kings whom he had slain with his own hands. The heads of six were placed on the walls of Thebes ; the seventh was sent to remote Napata in Ethiopia to be hung on the walls to strike terror into the negroes. After a prosperous but probably short reign, Amenophis II. was succeeded by his son Thothmes IV., of whom we only know that he main tained his father s empire during a reign that probably did not exceed the nine years assigned to him by Manetho. Ameuophis III. succeeded his father, and, during a long and it seems mainly pacific reign, occupied himself in great architectural works. Two temples at Thebes owe their origin to him, that on the western bank, which was the funereal temple of his tomb in the western valley beyond, and of which little now remains but the two great statues i:i the plain, the Vocal Memnon and its fellow, and also the temple of El-Uksur on the eastern bank. In his time the dimensions of the structures of the earlier kings are surpassed, and the proportions of the greatest monuments of the Empire are almost attained. Probably he was the first of the family after Aahnies who took a foreigner to wife. On the great scarabsei which commemorate his marriage with Queen Tai, we are informed that his rule extended from Mesopotamia to Southern Ethiopia. Amenophis IV., the son of this foreign marriage, is the most perplexing character in ancient Egyptian history. Under his mother s influence he introduced a new religion, the worship of Aten, the solar disk, and after a time wholly suppressed the national religion, even changing his name to Khu-n-aten. Abandoning Thebes as the capital, he founded a new city in Middle Egypt, where he con structed a chief temple to Aten, and near which his officials excavated their tombs in the mountain. The type under which the king and his family and subjects are represented is unlike any other in Egyptian art. They are all of emaci ated and distended figure, and surpassing ugliness. The king is treated with a servile respect nowhere else seen on the monuments. His troops are mixed with foreign mercen aries. But we do not hear of foreign expeditions ; every one is occupied in the duties of the new religion, without poly theism or idols. Flowers are the chief offerings and adorn the temple throughout ; hymns chanted to the sound of harps are the form of worship. Was this a foreign religion, or an Egyptian restoration of primitive belief] If it were Egyptian why was the sun called Aten, not Ra 1 The king was the son of a foreigner, and his type and that which marks his court, probably because some were of his mother s race, and art assumed the fashionable type for the rest, is not recognizable in any of the characteristic representations of foreign races. It is neither Ethiopian nor Shemite nor Libyan. The names of his mother and of her parents, the name of the sun-god, which is Egyptian, and the character of the worship, do not as far as we know point to any of these races. Certainly they are not Semitic. For race and religion we must probably look beyond the horizon of the Egyptian conquests. The type is not without an Indian aspect, and the religion has in its simplicity and the character of its worship a striking likeness to Vedism. Khu-n-aten had seven daughters and no son. His successor Ai was his foster-brother and the husband of his eldest daughter. Under him the national religion was tolerated. Two other sons-in-law succeeded. Their line then or soon after came to an end, on the accession of Har- em-heb, or Horus, who claimed to be the legitimate successor of Amenophis III., either by descent or on account of the innovations of Khu-n-aten, who with the kindred kings does not appear in the monumental lists, in which Har-em-heb is seen as the immediate successor of Amenophis III. The same order is followed in Manetho s list, in which the house of Khu-n-aten follows Horus. What time this line lasted we do not know. Probably it did not exceed a generation. Horus occupied himself in destroying the monuments of Khu-n-aten and his succes sors, and no doubt in fully restoring the national religion. Another family gained the throne after the reign of Horus, that of the Ramessides, forming Dynasties XIX. and XX. 1 Ramses I., who seems to have been of Lower Egyptian extraction, and not impossibly connected by ancestry with the Shepherd kings, seized the royal power, maintained his authority abroad by campaigns in the south and the east, and concluded a treaty of peace with the king of the Hittites. After a very short reign he left the crown to his son Setee I., or Sethos, who strengthened his rights by marrying Tai, a granddaughter of Amenophis III. Ramses II., the son of this marriage, thus became legitimate king, and Setee made him his colleague at a very early age, no doubt to conciliate the Egyptians, a position at first ignored, evidently owing to the difficulty of defining it, but which ended in the virtual abdication of Setee (Maspero, Hist. Anc., 215-217). The troubles that preceded the reign of Ramses I. must have weakened the foreign dominion of Egypt. Wars in the east occupied the earliest years of Setee. The Kheta had now succeeded to the Ruten in the supremacy of Northern Syria. Although Setee conquered the Kheta and captured Kadesh, now their chief town, the war ended by the conclusion of a second treaty between the Egyptian and Hittite kings. It is not necessary to suppose, with M. Maspero (Hist. Anc., 215), that the Egyptian Empire was already waning, because it was thus barred off from Further Asia and obliged to meet the Hittite king on 1 The chronology of Dynasty XIX. presents one great difficulty. We cannot determine the length of the reign of Setee I. Manetho assigns him more than 50 years, which is most improbable, as Ilamses reigned 67 years, and his father and mother were married before his father s succession. Ramses dates from his accession as sole king, and there fore we cannot include a period of co-regency in the Manethonian numbers for Sethos. The size and beauty of Setee s tomb would imply a reign of not under 30 years. The length of the Dynasty cannot have been less than 130 years, and was perhaps as much as 150. Jt comprised three generations and the rest of the probably long life of the king (Setee II.) whose birth marked the third, which would give 100 + 40 ?) about 140 years for the total duration.