But how came Akhenaten, the heretic king, “that criminal of Akhetaten,”[1] as the priests of Amen always called him, to be buried, not in his own heretic capital at Tell el-Amarna, but in orthodox Thebes, and in his mother’s tomb? There is, of course, no certain explanation of the facts; but from what is known of the history of the period an explanation may at least be suggested with a reasonable amount of confidence that it is not very far from the truth. When Akhenaten died, his body was no doubt buried at Tell el-Amarna, as he had decreed. When his son-in-law, Tutankhaten, and his daughter, Ankh. s. en. pa Aten, found the pressure of circumstances too strong for them, and were obliged to return to Thebes, to restore the old religion, and to change their names to Tutankhamen and Ankh. s. en. Amen, they carried with them, doubtless, the body of the reformer, still revered and beloved, and gave it honourable burial in the tomb of Tiy--the most fitting place, since no royal tomb could have been prepared in Thebes. But as time went on, the reactionary priests of Amen became more and more the dominant element in the kingdom, and they had none of the chivalrous spirit which prompted Charles V’s “I war not with the dead,” at the tomb of Luther. The only way in which they could strike at the dead heretic was also, to an Egyptian mind, the most certain and the most deadly; they could destroy his hopes of immortality by desecrating his tomb, and blotting out his name from it. So the body of Queen Tiy was removed from the tomb which had been polluted by the presence of her son, his name was erased from the inscriptions, and the entrance of the tomb was blocked with stones and sealed with the seal of Tutankhamen. Then the body of “the world’s first great idealist and the world’s first _individual_” was left in solitude, and, as his enemies fondly believed, in eternal oblivion and shame, to await its resurrection, thirty centuries later, at the hands of a generation which has at least learned to appreciate and to honour the ideals for which he sacrificed so much. [1] Akhetaten, the town created by Akhenaten, the man.