Towards the northern side of it rose the palace of the Pharaoh, whose ruins have been explored by Professor Flinders Petrie. It was one of the most gorgeous edifices ever erected by man. The walls and columns were inlaid with gold and bronze and stones of various colours, and adorned with statuary and painting. Even the floors were frescoed; and, if we may judge from the one discovered by Professor Petrie, the art was of the highest order. The plants and animals and fish depicted on it are drawn with a perfection and a truthfulness to nature which seem to belong to the nineteenth century of our era rather than to the fifteenth century before Christ. The public offices of the government adjoined the palace, and around it were the houses of the nobles and officers of the court. They too reflected the gay and brilliant adornment of the royal palace, and their walls were enlivened by frescoes, which represented the scenes of every-day life. Among the public offices was the archive-chamber, to which the documents of state had been transferred from Thebes, as well as the foreign office, where scribes were busily engaged in correspondence with the governors of the Asiatic provinces of the empire and the princes of foreign states. In the centre of the city rose the great temple of Aten, the solar disk, the new object of the Pharaoh’s adoration. Though the name was Egyptian, the deity and his cult were alike of Asiatic origin. The Aten, in fact, to whom the temple had been reared, was the Asiatic Baal. He was the Sun-god, whose visible manifestation was the solar disk. But it was a Sun-god who was not only supreme over all other gods; they were absorbed into him, and existed only in so far as he endowed them with divine life. It is thus that Aten-Ra, the solar disk of the Sun-god, is addressed by the Pharaoh’s queen: “Thou disk of the Sun, thou living god, there is none other beside thee! Thou givest health to the eyes through thy beams, Creator of all things!” One of Khu-n-Aten’s officers, on the walls of his tomb, speaks in similar terms: “Thou, O god, who in truth art the living one, standest before the two eyes. Thou art he which createst what never was, which formest everything, which art in all things: we also have come into being through the word of thy mouth.” The new faith of Egypt was a combination of the worship of Baal with the philosophic conceptions which had gathered round the worship of the Egyptian Sun-god, Ra, at Heliopolis. The worship of Baal had lost its grossness, and been refined into a form of monotheism. But the monotheism was essentially pantheistic; there was, indeed, but one god to whom adoration was paid, but he was universally diffused throughout nature. The personal character of the Asiatic Baal seems to have disappeared in the Aten worship of Egypt.