For it has
been discovered that in the time of Amenôphis II and Amenôphis III
the artists for some years employed pink tones for the flesh of their
personages, both men and women, and the confirmation of that fact takes
away any value from the reasoning deduced from Taîa’s colour. Taîa has
pink flesh in the monuments because the fashion of the day required
that she should so have it, and not because she possessed the fair
complexion of the northerner. As to the names of the members of her
family, Iouaa, Touaa, they do not seem to me to be Asiatic. Doubtless
they are not constructed in the Theban manner, but they are found, and
many like them, in the tombs of the Ancient Empire. Far from proving
a Canaanitish or Libyan extraction, they take us back to the oldest
periods of the history of Egypt and denote a Memphian or Heliopolitan
origin.
If, as everything indicates, Taîa is not a foreigner, we no longer have
any cause to seek beyond Egypt for the motives that made Amenôphis
IV decide to proscribe the worship of Amon. In fact, the religion of
Aton that he professed is indigenous in its formulas and ceremonies.
Aton is the solar disk, the shining globe lighted every morning in
the east in order to be extinguished every evening in the west; for
some theologians it was the visible body in which Râ, the solar god
_par excellence_, was the soul; for others the actual god, and not the
shining manifestation of the god. The Theban priesthood had adopted the
first theory, which better harmonized with its monotheistic tendencies,
and it had developed it to the utmost: it had fused together all the
forms of the divinity, and only recognized in it the aspects, the
diverse conditions of one and the same being who was the soul of the
Sun, Amonrâ. The schools of Memphis and Heliopolis, older than those of
Thebes, had remained more closely attached to the ancient polytheism,
and interpreted its doctrines in a more material sense. A fact that,
so far, no one has ever brought forward, proves incontestably that the
worship rendered by Amenôphis IV to Aton was connected with that of the
sun as practised at Heliopolis: the high priest of Aton, the supreme
head of the royal religion, bore the same official name and the same
titles as that of Râ at Heliopolis.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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