founded a new capital which he called the city of Aton; he installed there a new priesthood which he richly endowed, and then erased the name of Amon from all the monuments throughout Egypt and even at Thebes. But the worship of Amon had its roots too deeply implanted in the land, and his priests were too powerful, for the king to prevail against them. When he was dead, his successors gave up the struggle: Aton returned into obscurity, his city was deserted, and the name of the king, proscribed by sacerdotal hatred, vanished with the buildings on which it had been engraved. His attempt was not without influence on art. The necropolis of El-Amarna has told us the names of two of the sculptors who helped to adorn the city during its brief existence. Their works are distinguished from earlier ones by a greater freedom of composition, and particularly by greater realism in the reproduction of the persons. The Amenôphis IV of the Louvre does honour to their talent; it is the more valuable since their works, treated with great ferocity by the Theban reaction, have become very rare. We have a certain number of bas-reliefs more or less mutilated, but very few statues; that of the Louvre is, so far, a unique work of its kind. XIII FOUR CANOPIC HEADS FOUND IN THE VALLEY OF THE KINGS AT THEBES[61] Among the principal objects discovered by Theodore Davis in 1907 in the Valley of the Kings, in the secret chamber where the heretic Pharaoh Khouniatonou was buried with an equipment partly consisting of objects that had belonged to his mother, Tîyi, there are four alabaster Canopic jars of a rare perfection even for that period of perfect execution. The body of the jar is a little longer than is usual, slender at the base, bulging out at the top, with a polish at once unobtrusive and pleasing to the eye. An inscription had been engraved on it, and so far as may be judged by the place it occupied, was the ordinary dedication to the deities protecting the entrails; but it has been effaced, then the place smoothed over, and tinted with the colour of the surrounding part. The touching up is accomplished with so much skill that we can only here and there, beneath the transparence of the glazing, guess at a few marks of the old writing. The four lids are in the form of a human head, a very refined head framed in the short wig with close rows of little flat locks of hair: a golden uræus, now vanished, stood on the forehead. As the face is beardless, and the whole of the equipment except the coffin bears the name of Tîyi, the Canopic jars have been attributed to the queen. I do not share that opinion; I maintain that they belonged to the Pharaoh, and that we should see his authentic portrait in them. [Illustration: KING KHOUNIATONOU. Alabaster Canopic head found at Thebes.] [Illustration: KING KHOUNIATONOU. Alabaster Canopic head found at Thebes.]