As has been said above, Oriental archæology has already disclosed sufficient to show us to which of these two alternatives we must lean. On the one hand, much of the history contained in the book of Genesis has been shown, directly or indirectly, to be authentic; on the other hand, the new-fangled theory of the composition of the Hexateuch has been decisively ruled out of court. Let us take the second point first. In 1887 a large collection of clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform characters was found by the Egyptian fellahin among the ruins of the ancient city now known as Tel el-Amarna, on the eastern bank of the Nile, about midway between Minieh and Siût. The city had enjoyed but a brief existence. Towards the close of the eighteenth dynasty, the Pharaoh, Amenophis III., had died, leaving the throne to his son, Amenophis IV., a mere lad, who was still under the influence of his mother Teie. Teie was of Asiatic extraction, and fanatically devoted to an Asiatic form of faith. This devotion was shared by her son, and soon began to bear fruit. Amon of Thebes had to make way for a new deity, who was worshipped under the visible form of the solar disk, and the old religion of Egypt of which the Pharaoh was the official head was utterly proscribed. It was not long before the Pharaoh and the powerful hierarchy of Thebes were at open war; the very name of Amon was erased from the monuments where it occurred, and the king changed his own name to that of Khu-n-Aten, ‘the glory of the Solar Disk.’ But in the end, Khu-n-Aten had to quit the capital of his fathers and establish himself with his adherents and courtiers in a new city further north. This city, Khut-Aten, as. it was called, is now represented by the mounds of Tel el-Amarna. Here the Pharaoh was surrounded by his followers, a large proportion of whom were Asiatics, chiefly from Canaan. The court of Egypt, as well as its religion, became Asiatised. The revolution in religion was also accompanied by a revolution in art. The old hieratic canon of Egyptian art was cast aside, and an excessive realism was aimed at, sometimes even to the verge of caricature. In the centre of the new city a temple was raised to the new divinity of Egypt, and hard by the temple rose the palace of the king. Its ornamentation was surpassingly gorgeous. Its walls and columns were inlaid with precious stones, with coloured glass and gold; even its floors were painted with scenes from nature which are of the highest artistic excellence, and statues were erected, some of which remind us of the best work of classical Greece.[130]