Work for them was not lacking, for houses had to be built for all the courtiers and government officials who had been obliged to follow the king, and in a few years a large town had sprung up, which was called Khuitatonu, or the "Horizon of the Disk." It was built on a regular plan, with straight streets and open spaces, and divided into two separate quarters, interspersed with orchards and shady trellises. Workmen soon began to flock to the new city--metal-founders, glass-founders, weavers; in fine, all who followed any trade indispensable to the luxury of a capital. The king appropriated a territory for it from the ancient nome of the Hare, thus compelling the god Thot to contribute to the fortune of Atonu; he fixed its limits by means of stelae placed in the mountains, from Gebel-Tunah to Deshluit on the west, and from Sheikh-Said to El-Hauata on the eastern bank;* it was a new nome improvised for the divine _parvenu_. * We know at present of fourteen of these stelae. A certain number must still remain to be discovered on both banks of the Nile. [Illustration: 082.jpg THE DECORATED PAVEMENT OF THE PALACE] Atonu was one of the forms of the Sun, and perhaps the most material one of all those devised by the Egyptians. He was defined as "the good god who rejoices in truth, the lord of the solar course, the lord of the disk, the lord of heaven, the lord of earth, the living disk which lights up the two worlds, the living Harmakhis who rises on the horizon bearing his name of Shu, which is disk, the eternal infuser of life." His priests exercised the same functions as those of Heliopolis, and his high priest was called "Oirimau," like the high priest of Ra in Aunu. This functionary was a certain Marirl, upon whom the king showered his favours, and he was for some time the chief authority in the State after the Pharaoh himself. Atonu was represented sometimes by the ordinary figure of Horus,* sometimes by the solar disk, but a disk whose rays were prolonged towards the earth, like so many arms ready to lay hold with their little hands of the offerings of the faithful, or to distribute to mortals the _crux ansata_, the symbol of life. The other gods, except Amon, were sharers with humanity in his benefits. Atonu proscribed him, and tolerated him only at Thebes; he required, moreover, that the name of Amon should be effaced wherever it occurred, but he respected Ra and Horus and Harmakhis--all, in fact, but Amon: he was content with being regarded as their king, and he strove rather to become their chief than their destroyer.** * It was probably this form of Horus which had, in the temple at Thebes, the statue called "the red image of Atonu in Paatoml." ** Prisse d'Avennes has found at Karnak, on fragments of the temple, the names of other divinities than Atonu worshipped by Khuniatonu.