istence in which he had lived before
the expulsion of the Hyksos. 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 Atonu 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
Atonu. 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 political character of this reaction against the
growing power of the high priests and the town of Amon was
pointed out for the first time by Masporo in 1878. Ed. Meyer
and Tiele blond with the political idea a monotheistic
conception which does not seem to me to be fully justified,
at least at present, by anything in t