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
Shekh 'Abd el-Kurna 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
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.
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