Egyptian religious poetry

INTRODUCTION 29

in the Book of the Dead the reader is the only person concerned. In the Pyramid Texts the chief pronoun is “ he”’, in the Book of the Dead it is always “‘I’’. In the Pyramid Texts the King is born of God, is equated with God, and ascends to God at death ; in the Book of the Dead every reader has the same privileges. This shows a democratic tendency in the religion quite unexpected at so early atime. The Pharaohs still retained their high position as God Incarnate, but it is possible that the many campaigns in which they led their armies in person and in which they shared the hardships and dangers as well as the victories with their soldiers were the ultimate cause of the change. In the early periods the King was more divine than human, in and after the xviiith dynasty he was more man than god. The victories of Thothmes III (xviiith dynasty) were voiced in the great Triumph-song which ascribes his triumphs to God alone. This is the more remarkable, for Thothmes appears to have suffered no defeats, and he might well have regarded himself as the sole author of his victories.

For more than a century Egypt maintained her high position and her level of civilization, keeping the peace strictly in all parts of her great empire. Then came disaster in the shape of a religious fanatic, to whom his own special form of worship was more than the welfare of his people. Akhenaten was the ruin of his country. He began his career as a devout worshipper of Amon ; his name was then Amon-hotep, ““ Amon is content”. After four years he became violently opposed to the worship of Amon, whose name he erased from every monument. With equal violence he adopted a special form of sun-worship. The actual visible disc of the sun, the Aten, was the object that he adored, not the abstract idea of divinity immanent in the sun, which was the essence of Ré-worship. He moved the capital from Thebes to an uninhabited part of the country, where he