representation of
the king in the old regular style, and on the other side one in the new
realistic style, which depicts him in all the native ugliness in which
this strange truth-loving man seems to have positively gloried. We
find, too, that he caused a temple to the Aten to be erected in far-away
Napata, the capital of Nubia, by Jebel Barkal in the Sudan. The facts
as to the Theban and Napata temples have been pointed out by Prof.
Breasted, of Chicago.

But the opposition of the Theban priesthood was too strong. Akhunaten
shook the dust of the capital off his feet and retired to the isolated
city of Akhet-aten, "the Glory of the Disk," at the modern Tell
el-Amarna, where he could philosophize in peace, while his kingdom was
left to take care of itself. He and his wife Nefret-iti, who seems to
have been a faithful sharer of his views, reigned over a select court
of Aten-worship-ping nobles, priests, and artists. The artists had under
Akhunaten an unrivalled opportunity for development, of which they had
already begun to take considerable advantage before the end of his reign
and the restoration of the old order of ideas. Their style takes on
itself an almost bizarre freedom, which reminds us strongly of the
similar characteristic in Mycenaean art. There is a strange little
relief in the Berlin Museum of the king standing cross-legged, leaning
on a staff, and languidly smelling a flower, while the queen stands
by with her garments blown about by the wind. The artistic monarch's
graceful attitude is probably a faithful transcript of a characteristic
pose.

We see from this what an Egyptian artist could do when his shackles were
removed, but unluckily Egypt never produced another king who was at the
same time an original genius, an artist, and a thinker. When Akhunaten
died, the Egyptian artists' shackles were riveted tighter than ever.
The reaction was strong. The kingdom had fallen into anarchy, and the
foreign empire which his predecessors had built up had practically
been thrown to the winds by Akhunaten. The whole is an example of the
confusion and disorganization which ensue when a philosopher rules. Not
long after the heretic's death the old religion was fully restored, the
cult of the disk was blotted out, and the Egyptians returned joyfully
to the worship of their myriad deities. Akhunaten's ideals were too high
for them. The debris of the foreign empire was, as usual in such
cases, put together again, and cu