Breaking entirely with the priests, Akhnaton left Thebes and set up his capital at Aton, one hundred and sixty miles south of Cairo on the eastern bank of the Nile. He died at the age of twenty-eight, leaving only daughters to succeed him. They reëstablished the court at Thebes, the city of Aton was abandoned, and its temples and palaces were left to crumble and decay. I had thought of the Pharaoh who forced the Israelites to make bricks without straw as living at Memphis, near where Cairo now stands. The truth is, he had a great city there, but his capital and favourite home was at Thebes, over four hundred and fifty miles farther up the Nile valley. Thebes was one of the greatest cities of antiquity. It covered almost as much ground as Paris does now and is said to have had more than a million people. The metropolis had walls so thick that chariots drawn by half-a-dozen horses abreast could easily pass as they galloped along them. It had one hundred gates, and temples and residences which were the wonder of the world. Some of the houses were five stories high, the skyscrapers of those days. The riches of Thebes were increased by the successful wars which the kings waged with other nations. The monarchs of that day had mighty armies of infantry and cavalry. Some of the kings had twenty thousand war chariots, and ancient writers say that there were scattered along the Nile from here to Memphis one hundred stone stables, each large enough to accommodate two hundred horses. [Illustration: Avenues of sphinxes guarded the approach to the ancient Egyptian temple. Between the paws of each of the ram-headed sphinxes at the great temple at Karnak, Rameses II placed a statue of one of his predecessors.] [Illustration: The Aswan Dam is a huge granite barrier a mile and a quarter long which now controls the waters of the Nile after centuries of alternate flood and drought, saves Egypt from famine, and adds millions of acres to her irrigable lands.] It brings one close to the days of the Scriptures when he can put his hand on the very same things that were touched by old Pharaoh; and can visit the temples in which he worshipped, or sit on the monuments erected in his honour, and look at the tomb in which his royal bones were laid away. One feels closer still when he can look at the royal mummy itself and actually see the hardhearted old heathen almost as he was when alive, as I did at the museum the other day.