About the end of the Hyksos rule the patriarch Joseph was sold into Egypt. King Nubti (B.C. 1750) is supposed to have been the Pharaoh of that time, and the Hyksos king, Apepa II., is supposed to have been the king that raised Joseph to power. The explorer, M. Jacques de Morgan, expresses the opinion that the Shepherd Kings were the tomb-robbers, who, either from cupidity, or a wish to annihilate the last traces of a conquered race, pillaged every pyramid of its dead, and the treasures there concealed, for not a single pyramid has been found unviolated that was built before the Hyksos Dynasty. Thothmes III. (B.C. 1600) was a powerful and warlike king who compelled Assyria to pay him tribute. In the Eighteenth Dynasty, Egypt was more powerful than at any other period of her history. The great Temples of Thebes, Karnak, and Luxor were built during this dynasty. A later monarch of this dynasty, Amenophis III., erected on the west of the Nile at Thebes two colossal statues of himself, that the Greeks have named the statues of Memnon, the fabled king of Egypt that was supposed to have been slain in the Trojan wars (Fig. 92). Another king of this dynasty, Amenophis IV., made himself exceedingly notorious by trying to introduce a new religion, and for this he had his memory execrated, and was deeply cursed as a heretic by priests and people of the succeeding generations. It appears he had imbibed from his mother, Ti, who was an Assyrian princess, certain religious opinions which he determined to force on his own people. In order to do this he removed his capital from Thebes, where the national worship of the great god Amen was celebrated, to Khu-en-aten, the modern Tell-el-Amarna, which name he took for himself, and which means the “splendour of the sun-disk”; there he set up the sun-disk god, Aten (the radiant sun). The new religion, however, was obnoxious to the conservative Egyptians, and soon died out (Fig. 94). The Nineteenth Dynasty (B.C. 1400-1200) was founded by Rameses I. He was a successful king, but his son Seti (Fig. 95) was a greater one, and had the reputation of being a great builder. It was he who built the great “Hall of Columns,” at Karnak, which joins the pylon of Amenophis III. (Fig. 96). [Illustration: Fig. 94.—The Adoration of the Solar-disk by Amenophis IV. (P.)]