The Hittites Author:Archibald Henry Sayce Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Thothmes III, was directed against the Hittites, and Amenophis III, the son and successor of Thothmes IV, found it necessary to support himself by entering into ... more »matrimonial alliance with the king of Naharina. The marriage had strange consequences for Egypt. The new queen brought with her not only a foreign name and foreign customs, but a foreign faith as well. She refused to worship Amon of Thebes and the other gods of Egypt, and clung to the religion of her fathers, whose supreme object of adoration was the solar disk. The Hittite monuments themselves bear witness to the prevalence of this worship in Northern Syria. The winged solar disk appears above the figure of a king which has been brought from Birejik on the Euphrates to the British Museum; and even at Boghaz Keui, far away in Northern Asia Minor, the winged solar disk has been carved by Hittite sculptors upon the rock. Amenophis IV, the son of Amenophis III, was educated in the faith of his mother, and after his accession to the throne endeavoured to impose the new creed upon his unwilling subjects. The powerful priesthood of Thebes withstood him for a while, but at last he assumed the name of Khu-n-Aten, ' the refulgence of the solar disk,' and quitting Thebes and its ancient temples he built himself a new capita] dedicated to the new divinity. It stood on the eastern bank of the Nile, to the north of Assiout, and its long line of ruins is now known to the natives under the name of Tel el-Amarna. The city was filled with the adherents of the new creed, and their tombs areyet to be found in the cliffs that enclose the desert on the east. Its existence, however, was of no long duration. After the death of Khu-n-Aten, ' the heretic king,' his throne was occupied by one or two princes who had embraced his faith; but their ...« less