* Breasted points out the decisive influence exercised by the solar hymns of Amenôthes IV. on the development of the solar ideas contained in the hymns to Amon put forth or re- edited in the XXIIIrd dynasty. The idea of a single god, lord and maker of all things, continued to prevail more and more throughout Egypt--not, indeed, among the lower classes who persisted in the worship of their genii and their animals, but among the royal family, the priests, the nobles, and people of culture. The latter believed that the Sun-god had at length absorbed all the various beings who had been manifested in the feudal divinities: these, in fact, had surrendered their original characteristics in order to become forms of the Sun, Amon as well as the others--and the new belief displayed itself in magnifying the solar deity, but the solar deity united with the Theban Amon, that is, Amon-Râ. The omnipotence of this one god did not, however, exclude a belief in the existence of his compeers; the theologians thought all the while that the beings to whom ancient generations had accorded a complete independence in respect of their rivals were nothing more than emanations from one supreme being. If local pride forced them to apply to this single deity the designation customarily used in their city--Phtah at Memphis, Anhûri-Shû at Thinis, Khnûmû in the neighbourhood of the first cataract--they were quite willing to allow, at the same time, that these appellations were but various masks for one face. Phtah, Hâpi, Khnûmû, Râ,--all the gods, in fact,--were blended with each other, and formed but one deity--a unique existence, multiple in his names, and mighty according to the importance of the city in which he was worshipped. Hence Amon, lord of the capital and patron of the dynasty, having more partisans, enjoyed more respect, and, in a word, felt himself possessed of more claims to be the sole god of Egypt than his brethren, who could not claim so many worshippers. He did not at the outset arrogate to himself the same empire over the dead as he exercised over the living; he had delegated his functions in this respect to a goddess, Marîtsakro, for whom the poorer inhabitants of the left bank entertained a persistent devotion. She was a kind of Isis or hospitable Hathor, whose subjects in the other world adapted themselves to the nebulous and dreary existence provided for their disembodied “doubles.” The Osirian and solar doctrines were afterwards blended together in this local mythology, and from the XIth dynasty onwards the Theban nobility had adopted, along with the ceremonies in use in the Memphite period, the Heliopolitan beliefs concerning the wanderings of the soul in the west, its embarkation on the solar ship, and its resting-places in the fields of Ialû. The rock-tombs of the XVIIIth dynasty demonstrate that the Thebans had then no different concept of their life beyond the world from that entertained by the inhabitants