Amenhotep III married a wife of foreign origin and religion, Thi. He had by her a son who succeeded him under the name of Amenhotep IV. The figure of Amenhotep IV, as made known to us by the monuments, exhibits those peculiar and strange characteristics which mutilation impresses upon the face, chest, and abdomen of eunuchs. On the other hand, we know that at an early age he married Queen Nefert-Thi and had by her seven daughters. It is therefore probable that if he really did experience the misfortune of which his features seem to bear the evidence, it happened during the wars of Amenhotep III and among the black people of the South. The custom of mutilating prisoners and wounded is, among these people, as old as the world. Amenhotep IV doubtless imbibed religious ideas from his mother, for he manifested a great horror of the cult of Amen and gave his homage to the solar divinities, chiefly to the disk itself. But the fear of arousing his subjects to revolt restrained him at first from too openly avowing his heresy. He contented himself with changing his name, which contained that of Amen, for that of Khun-aten, “Splendour of the Sun’s disk,” and continued to worship his father Amenhotep and the god Amen himself. Later, his religious fanaticism got the better of his prudence. The cult of Amen was forbidden and his name erased wherever it could be reached. The pure-blooded Egyptians came under suspicion on account of their religion and disappeared from the king’s entourage, giving place to Asiatic personages who resembled Pharaoh and were deprived like him of their virility. Thebes, so full of monuments consecrated to the fallen god, lost its rank of capital. Khun-aten built a new capital at a place in Middle Egypt which to-day bears the name of Tel-el-Amarna, and which he called Khut-aten, where there was nothing to recall the old religion. The sun was the principal god of the old religion; all the ancient solar divinities, Ra-Horemkhu, Hor, were recognised and respected. Monuments show us the god in the form of a disk whose rays descend toward the earth, each ray terminating in a hand holding the ansated cross--the emblem of life. The disk is called Aten. Wherever the king goes, the solar disk accompanies him and sheds its benediction upon him. But with all the attention he paid to religion, Khun-aten was, like his ancestors, a great builder and conqueror. Ethiopia, Thebes, and Memphis were fields of his activity, and he continued to exercise sovereign authority in Syria as well as in Africa.