to which religious ideas had attained before the days of the Hebrew
prophets.

This religion seems to have been developed out of the philosophical
speculations of the priests of the Sun at Heliopolis. Akhunaten with
unwise iconoclastic zeal endeavoured to root out the worship of the
ancient gods of Egypt, and especially that of Amen-Bà, the ruler of the
Egyptian pantheon, whose primacy in the hearts of the people made him
the most redoubtable rival of the new doctrine. But the name of the
old Sun-god Bà-Harmaehis was spared, and it is evident that Akhunaten
regarded him as more or less identical with his god.

It has been supposed by Prof. Petrie that Queen Tii, the mother of
Akhunaten, was of Mitannian (Armenian) origin, and that she brought the
Aten religion to Egypt from her native land, and taught it to her son.
Certainly it seems as though the new doctrine had made some headway
before the death of Amenhetep III, but we have no reason to attribute it
to Tii, or to suppose that she brought it with her from abroad. There is
no proof whatever that she was not a native Egyptian, and the mummies of
her parents, Iuaa and Tuaa, are purely Egyptian in facial type. It
seems undoubted that the Aten cult was a development of pure Egyptian
religious thought.

At first Akhunaten tried to establish his religion at Thebes alongside
that of Amen and his attendant pantheon. He seems to have built a temple
to the Aten there, and we see that his courtiers began to make tombs for
themselves in the new realistic style of sculptural art, which the king,
heretical in art as in religion, had introduced. The tomb of Barnes at
Shêkh 'Abd el-Kûrna has on one side of the door a representation of
the king in the old regular style, and on the other side one in the new