"double," and transformed
it into an animated body.

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 Amenothes, "he to whom Amon is united,"
the king assumed after a time the name of Khuniatonu, "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 Mut, which expressed the idea
of mother, was also avoided.**

* The altar on which the king stands upright is one of those
cubes of masonry of which Naville discovered such a fine
example in the temple of Hatshopsitu at Deir el-Bahari.

** We find, however, some instances where the draughtsman,
either from custom or design, had used the vulture to
express the word mailt, "the mother," without troubling
himself to think whether it answered to the name of the
goddess.

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 ex