By these alterations the harmonious proportion between the main buildings and the façade had been destroyed, and the exterior wall was now too wide for the pylon at the entrance. Amenôthes III. remedied this defect by erecting in front a fourth pylon, which was loftier, larger, and in all respects more worthy to stand before the enlarged temple. Its walls were partially covered with battle-scenes, which informed all beholders of the glory of the conqueror.*

Progress had been no less marked on the left bank of the river. As long as Thebes had been merely a small provincial town, its cemeteries had covered but a moderate area, including the sandy plain and low mounds opposite Karnak and the valley of Deîr el-Baharî beyond; but now that the city had more than doubled its extent, the space required for the dead was proportionately greater. The tombs of private persons began to spread towards the south, and soon reached the slopes of the Assassîf, the hill of Sheikh-Abd-el-Qurnah and the district of Qûrnet-Mûrraî—in fact, all that part which the people of the country called the “Brow” of Thebes. On the borders of the cultivated land a row of chapels and mastabas with pyramidal roofs sheltered the remains of the princes and princesses of the royal family. The Pharaohs themselves were buried either separately under their respective brick pyramids or in groups in a temple, as was the case with the first three Thûtmosis and Hâtshopsîtû at Deîr el-Baharî. Amenôthes II. and Thûtmosis IV. could doubtless have found room in this crowded necropolis,* although the space was becoming limited, but the pride of the Pharaohs began to rebel against this promiscuous burial side by side with their subjects. Amenôthes III. sought for a site, therefore, where he would have ample room to display his magnificence, far from the vulgar crowd, and found what he desired at the farther end of the valley which opens out behind the village of Qurnah. Here, an hour’s journey from the bank of the Nile, he cut for himself a magnificent rock-tomb with galleries, halls, and deep pits, the walls being decorated with representations of the Voyage of the Sun through the regions which he traverses during the twelve hours of his nocturnal course.

A sarcophagus of red granite received his mummy, and Ushabti’s of extraordinary dimensions and admirable workmanship mounted guard around him, so as to release him from the corvée in the fields of Ialû. The chapel usually attached to such tombs is not to be found in the neighbourhood. As the road to the funeral valley was a difficult one, and as it would be unreasonable to condemn an entire priesthood to live in solitude, the king decided to separate the component parts which had hitherto been united in every tomb since the Memphite period, and to place the vault for the mummy and the passages leading to it some distance away in the mountains, while the necessary buildings for the cultus of the statue and the accommodation of the priests were transferred to the plain, and were built at the southern extremity of the lands which were at that time held by private persons. The divine character of Amenôthes, ascribed to him on account of his solar origin and the co-operation of Amon-Râ at his birth, was, owing to this separation of the funerary constituents, brought into further prominence. When once the body which he had animated while on earth was removed and hidden from sight, the people soon became accustomed to think only of his Double enthroned in the recesses of the sanctuary: seeing him receive there the same honours as the gods themselves, they came naturally to regard him as a deity himself.

The arrangement of his temple differed in no way from those in which Amon, Maût, and Montû were worshipped, while it surpassed in size and splendour most of the sanctuaries dedicated to the patron gods of the chief towns of the nomes. It contained, moreover, colossal statues, objects which are never found associated with the heavenly gods. Several of these figures have been broken to pieces, and only a few scattered fragments of them remain, but two of them still maintain their positions on each side of the entrance, with their faces towards the east. They are each formed of a single block of red breccia from Syenê,* and are fifty-three feet high, but the more northerly one was shattered in the earthquake which completed the ruin of Thebes in the year 27 B.C. The upper part toppled over with the shock, and was dashed to pieces on the floor of the court, while the lower half remained in its place. Soon after the disaster it began to be rumoured that sounds like those produced by the breaking of a harp-string proceeded from the pedestal at sunrise, whereupon travellers flocked to witness the miracle, and legend soon began to take possession of the giant who spoke in this marvellous way. In vain did the Egyptians of the neighbourhood declare that the statue represented the Pharaoh Amenôthes; the Greeks refused to believe them, and forthwith recognised in the colossus an image of Memnon the Ethiopian, son of Tithonus and Aurora, slain by their own Achilles beneath the walls of Troy—maintaining that the music heard every morning was the clear and harmonious voice of the hero saluting his mother.

Towards the middle of the second century of our era, Hadrian undertook a journey to Upper Egypt, and heard the wonderful song; sixty years later, Septimus Severus restored the statue by the employment of courses of stones, which were so arranged as to form a rough representation of a human head and shoulders. His piety, however, was not rewarded as he expected, for Memnon became silent, and his oracle fell into oblivion. The temple no longer exists, and a few ridges alone mark the spot where it rose; but the two colossi remain at their post, in the same condition in which they were left by the Roman Cæsar: the features are quite obliterated, and the legs and the supporting female figures on either side are scored all over with Greek and Latin inscriptions expressing the appreciation of ancient tourists. Although the statues tower high above the fields of corn and bersîm which surround them, our first view of them, owing to the scale of proportion observed in their construction, so different from that to which we are accustomed, gives us the impression that they are smaller than they really are, and it is only when we stand close to one of them and notice the insignificant appearance of the crowd of sightseers clustered on its pedestal that we realize the immensity of the colossi.

The descendants of Ahmosis had by their energy won for Thebes not only the supremacy over the peoples of Egypt and of the known world, but had also secured for the Theban deities pre-eminence over all their rivals. The booty collected both in Syria and Ethiopia went to enrich the god Amon as much as it did the kings themselves; every victory brought him the tenth part of the spoil gathered on the field of battle, of the tribute levied on vassals, and of the prisoners taken as slaves. When Thûtmosis IIL, after having reduced Megiddo, organised a systematic plundering of the surrounding country, it was for the benefit of Amon-Eâ that he reaped the fields and sent their harvest into Egypt; if during his journeys he collected useful plants or rare animals, it was that he might dispose of them in the groves or gardens of Amon as well as in his own, and he never retained for his personal use the whole of what he won by arms, but always reserved some portion for the sacred treasury.

His successors acted in a similar manner, and in the reigns of Amenôthes II., Thût-mosis IV., and Amenôthes III., the patrimony of the Theban priesthood continued to increase. The Pharaohs, perpetually called upon as they were to recompense one or other of their servants, were never able to retain for long their share of the spoils of war. Gold and silver, lands, jewels, and slaves passed as quickly out of their hands as they had fallen into them, and although then fortune was continually having additions made to it in every fresh campaign, yet the increase was rarely in proportion to the trouble expended. The god, on the contrary, received what he got for all time, and gave back nothing in return: fresh accumulations of precious metals were continually being added to his store, his meadows were enriched by the addition of vineyards, and with his palm forests he combined fish-ponds full of fish; he added farms and villages to those he already possessed, and each reign saw the list of his possessions increase. He had his own labourers, his own tradespeople, his own fishermen, soldiers, and scribes, and, presiding over all these, a learned hierarchy of divines, priests, and prophets, who administered everything. This immense domain, which was a kind of State within the State, was ruled over by a single high priest, chosen by the sovereign from among the prophets. He was the irresponsible head of it, and his spiritual ambition had increased step by step with the extension of his material resources. As the human Pharaoh showed himself entitled to homage from the lords of the earth, the priests came at length to the conclusion that Amon had a right to the allegiance of the lords of heaven, and that he was the Supreme Being, in respect of whom the others were of little or no account, and as he was the only god who was everywhere victorious, he came at length to be regarded by them as the only god in existence. It was impossible that the kings could see this rapid development of sacerdotal power without anxiety, and with all their devotion to the patron of their city, solicitude for their own authority compelled them to seek elsewhere for another divinity, whose influence might in some degree counterbalance that of Amon. The only one who could vie with him at Thebes, either for the antiquity of his worship or for the rank which he occupied in the public esteem, was the Sun-lord of Heliopolis, head of the first Ennead. Thûtmosis IV. owed his crown to him, and ‘displayed his gratitude in clearing away the sand from the Sphinx, in which the spirit of Harmakhis was considered to dwell; and Amenôthes III., although claiming to be the son of Amon himself, inherited the disposition shown by Thûtmosis in favour of the Heliopolitan religions, but instead of attaching himself to the forms most venerated by theologians, he bestowed his affection on a more popular deity—Atonû, the fiery disk. He may have been influenced in his choice by private reasons. Like his predecessors, he had taken, while still very young, wives from among his own family, but neither these reasonable ties, nor his numerous diplomatic alliances with foreign princesses, were enough for him. From the very beginning of his reign he had loved a maiden who was not of the blood of the Pharaohs, Tîi, the daughter of Iûîa and his wife Tûîa.*

* For the last thirty years Queen Tîi has been the subject of many hypotheses and of much confusion. The scarabasi engraved under Amenôthes III. say explicitly that she was the daughter of two personages, Iûîa and Tûîa, but these names are not accompanied by any of the signs which are characteristic of foreign names, and were considered Egyptian by contemporaries. Hincks was the first who seems to have believed her to be a Syrian; he compares her father’s name with that of Levi, and attributes the religious revolution which followed to the influence of her foreign education. This theory has continued to predominate; some prefer a Libyan origin to the Asiatic one, and latterly there has been an attempt to recognise in Tîi one of the princesses of Mitanni mentioned in the correspondence of Tel el-Amarna. As long ago as 1877, I showed that Tîi was an Egyptian of middle rank, probably of Heliopolitan origin.

Connexions of this kind had been frequently formed by his ancestors, but the Egyptian women of inferior rank whom they had brought into their harems had always remained in the background, and if the sons of these concubines were ever fortunate enough to come to the throne, it was in default of heirs of pure blood. Amenôthes III. married Tîi, gave her for her dowry the town of Zâlû in Lower Egypt, and raised her to the position of queen, in spite of her low extraction. She busied herself in the affairs of State, took precedence of the princesses of the solar family, and appeared at her husband’s side in public ceremonies, and was so figured on the monuments. If, as there is reason to believe, she was born near Heliopolis, it is easy to understand how her influence may have led Amenôthes to pay special honour to a Heliopolitan divinity. He had built, at an early period of his reign, a sanctuary to Atonû at Memphis, and in the Xth year he constructed for him a chapel at Thebes itself,* to the south of the last pylon of ïhûtmosis III., and endowed this deity with property at the expense of Anion.

He had several sons;* but the one who succeeded him, and who, like him, was named Amenôthes, was the most paradoxical of all the Egyptian sovereigns of ancient times.**

He made up for the inferiority of his birth on account of the plebeian origin of his mother Tîî,* by his marriage with Nofrîtîti, a princess of the pure solar race.** Tîi, long accustomed to the management of affairs, exerted her influence over him even more than she had done over her husband. Without officially assuming the rank, she certainly for several years possessed the power, of regent, and gave a definite Oriental impress to her son’s religious policy. No outward changes were made at first; Amenôthes, although showing his preference for Heliopolis by inscribing in his protocol the title of prophet of Harmakhis, which he may, however, have borne before his accession, maintained his residence at Thebes, as his father had done before him, continued to sacrifice to the Theban divinities, and to follow the ancient paths and the conventional practices.***

He either built a temple to the Theban god, or enlarged the one which his father had constructed at Karnak, and even opened new quarries at Syene and Silsileh for providing granite and sandstone for the adornment of this monument. His devotion to the invincible Disk, however, soon began to assert itself, and rendered more and more irksome to him the religious observances which he had constrained himself to follow. There was nothing and no one to hinder him from giving free course to his inclinations, and the nobles and priests were too well trained in obedience to venture to censure anything he might do, even were it to result in putting the whole population into motion, from Elephantine to the sea-coast, to prepare for the intruded deity a dwelling which should eclipse in magnificence the splendour of the great temple. A few of those around him had become converted of their own accord to his favourite worship, but these formed a very small minority. Thebes had belonged to Amon so long that the king could never hope to bring it to regard Atonû as anything but a being of inferior rank. Each city belonged to some god, to whom was attributed its origin, its development, and its prosperity, and whom it could not forsake without renouncing its very existence. If Thebes became separated from Amon it would be Thebes no longer, and of this Amenôthes was so well aware that he never attempted to induce it to renounce its patron. His residence among surroundings which he detested at length became so intolerable, that he resolved to leave the place and create a new capital elsewhere. The choice of a new abode would have presented no difficulty to him had he been able to make up his mind to relegate Atonû to the second rank of divinities; Memphis, Heracleopolis, Siût, Khmûnû, and, in fact, all the towns of the valley would have deemed themselves fortunate in securing the inheritance of their rival, but not one of them would be false to its convictions or accept the degradation of its own divine founder, whether Phtah, Harshafîtû, Anubis, or Thot. A newly promoted god demanded a new city; Amenôthes, therefore, made selection of a broad plain extending on the right bank of the Nile, in the eastern part of the Hermopolitan nome, to which he removed with all his court about the fourth or fifth year of his reign.*

He found here several obscure villages without any historical or religious traditions, and but thinly populated; Amenôthes chose one of them, the Et-Tel of the present day, and built there a palace for himself and a temple for his god. The temple, like that of Eâ at Heliopolis, was named Haît-Banbonû, the Mansion of the Obelisk. It covered an immense area, of which the sanctuary, however, occupied an inconsiderable part; it was flanked by brick storehouses, and the whole was surrounded by a thick wall. The remains show that the temple was built of white limestone, of fine quality, but that it was almost devoid of ornament, for there was no time to cover it with the usual decorations.*

The palace was built of brick; it was approached by a colossal gateway, and contained vast halls, interspersed with small apartments for the accommodation of the household, and storehouses for the necessary provisions, besides gardens which had been hastily planted with rare shrubs and sycamores. Fragments of furniture and of the roughest of the utensils contained in the different chambers are still unearthed from among the heaps of rubbish, and the cellars especially are full of potsherds and cracked jars, on which we can still see written an indication of the reign and the year when the wine they once contained was made. Altars of massive masonry rose in the midst of the courts, on which the king or one of his ministers heaped offerings and burnt incense morning, noon, and evening, in honour of the three decisive moments in the life of Atonû.*

A few painted and gilded columns supported the roofs of the principal apartments in which the Pharaoh held his audiences, but elsewhere the walls and pillars were coated with cream-coloured stucco or whitewash, on which scenes of private life were depicted in colours. The pavement, like the walls, was also decorated. In one of the halls which seems to have belonged to the harem, there is still to be seen distinctly the picture of a rectangular piece of water containing fish and lotus-flowers in full bloom; the edge is adorned with water-plants and flowering shrubs, among which birds fly and calves graze and gambol; on the right and left were depicted rows of stands laden with fruit, while at each end of the room were seen the grinning faces of a gang of negro and Syrian prisoners, separated from each other by gigantic arches. The tone of colouring is bright and cheerful, and the animals are treated with great freedom and facility. The Pharaoh, had collected about him several of the best artists then to be found at Thebes, placing them under the direction of Baûki, the chief of the corporation of sculptors,* and probably others subsequently joined these from provincial studios.

Work for them was not lacking, for houses had to be built for all the courtiers and government officials who had been obliged to follow the king, and in a few years a large town had sprung up, which was called Khûîtatonû, or the “Horizon of the Disk.” It was built on a regular plan, with straight streets and open spaces, and divided into two separate quarters, interspersed with orchards and shady trellises. Workmen soon began to flock to the new city—metal-founders, glass-founders, weavers; in fine, all who followed any trade indispensable to the luxury of a capital. The king appropriated a territory for it from the ancient nome of the Hare, thus compelling the god Thot to contribute to the fortune of Atonû; he fixed its limits by means of stelæ placed in the mountains, from Gebel-Tûnah to Deshlûît on the west, and from Sheikh-Said to El-Hauata on the eastern bank;* it was a new nome improvised for the divine parvenu.

Atonû was one of the forms of the Sun, and perhaps the most material one of all those devised by the Egyptians. He was defined as “the good god who rejoices in truth, the lord of the solar course, the lord of the disk, the lord of heaven, the lord of earth, the living disk which lights up the two worlds, the living Harmakhis who rises on the horizon bearing his name of Shû, which is disk, the eternal infuser of life.” His priests exercised the same functions as those of Heliopolis, and his high priest was called “Oîrimaû,” like the high priest of Râ in Aunû. This functionary was a certain Marirl, upon whom the king showered his favours, and he was for some time the chief authority in the State after the Pharaoh himself. Atonû was represented sometimes by the ordinary figure of Horus,* sometimes by the solar disk, but a disk whose rays were prolonged towards the earth, like so many arms ready to lay hold with their little hands of the offerings of the faithful, or to distribute to mortals the crux ansata, the symbol of life. The other gods, except Amon, were sharers with humanity in his benefits. Atonû proscribed him, and tolerated him only at Thebes; he required, moreover, that the name of Amon should be effaced wherever it occurred, but he respected Râ and Horus and Harmakhis—all, in fact, but Amon: he was content with being regarded as their king, and he strove rather to become their chief than their destroyer.**

His nature, moreover, had nothing in it of the mysterious or ambiguous; he was the glorious torch which gave light to humanity, and which was seen every day to flame in the heavens without ever losing its brilliance or becoming weaker. When he hides himself “the world rests in darkness, like those dead who lie in their rock-tombs, with their heads swathed, their nostrils stuffed up, their eyes sightless, and whose whole property might be stolen from them, even that which they have under their head, without their knowing it; the lion issues from his lair, the serpent roams ready to bite, it is as obscure as in a dark room, the earth is silent whilst he who creates everything dwells in his horizon.” He has hardly arisen when “Egypt becomes festal, one awakens, one rises on one’s feet; when thou hast caused men to clothe themselves, they adore thee with outstretched hands, and the whole earth attends to its work, the animals betake themselves to their herbage, trees and green crops abound, birds fly to their marshy thickets with wings outstretched in adoration of thy double, the cattle skip, all the birds which were in their nests shake themselves when thou risest for them; the boats come and go, for every way is open at thy appearance, the fish of the river leap before thee as soon as thy rays descend upon the ocean.” It is not without reason that all living things thus rejoice at his advent; all of them owe their existence to him, for “he creates the female germ, he gives virility to men, and furnishes life to the infant in its mother’s womb; he calms and stills its weeping, he nourishes it in the maternal womb, giving forth the breathings which animate all that he creates, and when the infant escapes from the womb on the day of its birth, thou openest his mouth for speech, and thou satisfiest his necessities. When the chick is in the egg, a cackle in a stone, thou givest to it air while within to keep it alive; when thou hast caused it to be developed in the egg to the point of being able to break it, it goes forth proclaiming its existence by its cackling, and walks on its feet from the moment of its leaving the egg.” Atonû presides over the universe and arranges within it the lot of human beings, both Egyptians and foreigners. The celestial Nile springs up in Hades far away in the north; he makes its current run down to earth, and spreads its waters over the fields during the inundation in order to nourish his creatures. He rules the seasons, winter and summer; he constructed the far-off sky in order to display himself therein, and to look down upon his works below. From the moment that he reveals himself there, “cities, towns, tribes, routes, rivers—all eyes are lifted to him, for he is the disk of the day upon the earth.” * The sanctuary in which he is invoked contains only his divine shadow;** for he himself never leaves the firmament.

His worship assumes none of the severe and gloomy forms of the Theban cults: songs resound therein, and hymns accompanied by the harp or flute; bread, cakes, vegetables, fruits, and flowers are associated with his rites, and only on very rare occasions one of those bloody sacrifices in which the other gods delight. The king made himself supreme pontiff of Atonu, and took precedence of the high priest. He himself celebrated the rites at the altar of the god, and we see him there standing erect, his hands outstretched, offering incense and invoking blessings from on high.* Like the Caliph Hakim of a later age, he formed a school to propagate his new doctrines, and preached them before his courtiers: if they wished to please him, they had to accept his teaching, and show that they had profited by it. The renunciation of the traditional religious observances of the solar house involved also the rejection of such personal names as implied an ardent devotion to the banished god; in place of Amenôthes, “he to whom Amon is united,” the king assumed after a time the name of Khûniatonû, “the Glory of the Disk,” and all the members of his family, as well as his adherents at court, whose appellations involved the name of the same god, soon followed his example. The proscription of Amon extended to inscriptions, so that while his name or figure, wherever either could be got at, was chiselled out, the vulture, the emblem of Mût, which expressed the idea of mother, was also avoided.**

The king would have nothing about him to suggest to eye or ear the remembrance of the gods or doctrines of Thebes. It would consequently have been fatal to them and their pretensions to the primacy of Egypt if the reign of the young king had continued as long as might naturally have been expected. After having been for nearly two centuries almost the national head of Africa, Amon was degraded by a single blow to the secondary rank and languishing existence in which he had lived before the expulsion of the Hyksôs. He had surrendered his sceptre as king of heaven and earth, not to any of his rivals who in old times had enjoyed the highest rank, but to an individual of a lower order, a sort of demigod, while he himself had thus become merely a local deity, confined to the corner of the Said in which he had had his origin. There was not even left to him the peaceful possession of this restricted domain, for he was obliged to act as host to the enemy who had deposed him: the temple of Atonû was erected at the door of his own sanctuary, and without leaving their courts the priests of Amon could hear at the hours of worship the chants intoned by hundreds of heretics in the temple of the Disk. Amon’s priests saw, moreover, the royal gifts flowing into other treasuries, and the gold of Syria and Ethiopia no longer came into their hands. Should they stifle their complaints, and bow to this insulting oppression, or should they raise a protest against the action which had condemned them to obscurity and a restricted existence? If they had given indications of resistance, they would have been obliged to submit to prompt repression, but we see no sign of this. The bulk of the people—clerical as well as lay—accepted the deposition with complacency, and the nobles hastened to offer their adherence to that which afterwards became the official confession of faith of the Lord King.* The lord of Thebes itself, a certain Ramses, bowed his head to the new cult, and the bas-reliefs of his tomb display to our eyes the proofs of his apostasy: on the right-hand side Amon is the only subject of his devotion, while on the left he declares himself an adherent of Atonû. Religious formularies, divine appellations, the representations of the costume, expression, and demeanour of the figures are at issue with each other in the scenes on the two sides of the door, and if we were to trust to appearances only, one would think that the two pictures belonged to two separate reigns, and were concerned with two individuals strangers to each other.**

The rupture between the past and the present was so complete, in fact, that the sovereign was obliged to change, if not his face and expression, at least the mode in which they were represented.

The name and personality of an Egyptian were so closely allied that interference with one implied interference with the other. Khûniatonû could not continue to be such as he was when Amenôthes, and, in fact, their respective portraits differ from each other to that degree that there is some doubt at moments as to their identity. Amenôthes is hardly to be distinguished from his father: he has the same regular and somewhat heavy features, the same idealised body and conventional shape as those which we find in the orthodox Pharaohs. Khûniatonû affects a long and narrow head, conical at the top, with a retreating forehead, a large aquiline and pointed nose, a small mouth, an enormous chin projecting in front, the whole being supported by a long, thin neck.

His shoulders are narrow, with little display of muscle, but his breasts are so full, his abdomen so prominent, and his hips so large, that one would think they belonged to a woman. Etiquette required the attendants upon the king, and those who aspired to his favour, to be portrayed in the bas-reliefs of temples or tombs in all points, both as regards face and demeanour, like the king himself. Hence it is that the majority of his contemporaries, after having borne the likeness of Amenôthes, came to adopt, without a break, that of Khûniatonû. The scenes at Tel el-Amarna contain, therefore, nothing but angular profiles, pointed skulls, ample breasts, flowing figures, and swelling stomachs. The outline of these is one that lends itself readily to caricature, and the artists have exaggerated the various details with the intention, it may be, of rendering the representations grotesque. There was nothing ridiculous, however, in the king, their model, and several of his statues attribute to him a languid, almost valetudinarian grace, which is by no means lacking in dignity.

He was a good and affectionate man, and was passionately fond of his wife, Nofrîtîti, associating her with himself in his sovereign acts. If he set out to visit the temple, she followed him in a chariot; if he was about to reward one of his faithful subjects, she stood beside him and helped to distribute the golden necklaces. She joined him in his prayers to the Solar Disk; she ministered to him in domestic life, when, having broken away from the worries of his public duties, he sought relaxation in his harem; and their union was so tender, that we find her on one occasion, at least, seated in a coaxing attitude on her husband’s knees—a unique instance of such affection among all the representations on the monuments of Egypt.

They had six daughters, whom they brought up to live with them on terms of the closest intimacy: they accompanied their father and mother everywhere, and are exhibited as playing around the throne while their parents are engaged in performing the duties of their office. The gentleness and gaiety of the king were reflected in the life of his subjects: all the scenes which they have left us consist entirely of processions, cavalcades, banquets, and entertainments. Khûniatonû was prodigal in the gifts of gold and the eulogies which he bestowed on Marirî, the chief priest: the people dance around him while he is receiving from the king the just recompense of his activity. When Hûîa, who came back from Syria in the XIIth year of the king’s reign, brought solemnly before him the tribute he had collected, the king, borne in his jolting palanquin on the shoulders of his officers, proceeded to the temple to return thanks to his god, to the accompaniment of chants and the waving of the great fans. When the divine father Aï had married the governess of one of the king’s daughters, the whole city gave itself up to enjoyment, and wine flowed freely during the wedding feast. Notwithstanding the frequent festivals, the king found time to watch jealously over the ordinary progress of government and foreign affairs. The architects, too, were not allowed to stand idle, and without taking into account the repairs of existing buildings, had plenty to do in constructing edifices in honour of Atonû in the principal towns of the Nile valley, at Memphis, Heliopolis, Hermopolis, Hermonthis, and in the Fayûm. The provinces in Ethiopia remained practically in the same condition as in the time of Amenôthes III.;* Kûsh was pacified, notwithstanding the raids which the tribes of the desert were accustomed to make from time to time, only to receive on each occasion rigorous chastisement from the king’s viceroy.