married the third daughter of Akhenaten, the heretic king, and bore rule when the kingdom was falling to pieces. Of Akhenaten we do know more, and the story, wrapped as it is in mystery, clothed with details giving full play to the imagination, makes him one of the most fascinating personalities of the old world. His mother was the great Queen Thi, wife of Amenhotep III, a Mittanian princess, beautiful and intelligent. His wife was Nefertiti, who also appears to have been not of Egyptian origin. Her portrait bust, discovered at Akhenaten's own city and, unfortunately, now at Berlin, shows her to have been singularly beautiful. Concerning the bust itself, Professor Peet has said that no age or country has ever produced a finer work of art.

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Akhenaten is known as the heretic king because he broke away from the old religion of Egypt with its 2,000 deities and its powerful hierarchy of priests. To escape them he left Thebes and founded a new city nearly 300 miles away, which he planned himself, fixed its boundaries, hewed out chambers in the rock, built a palace for himself and made a temple for the God that he worshipped, Aten, the Sun God. This city was never finished. Here I quote from an article which appeared in the "Times": Physically a weakling, almost deformed, gentle hearted, devoted to his wife and family, a lover of all created things, a poet and a dreamer, he deserted the religion of his Fathers, dethroned the great God Amen and all the Pantheon, and in their stead set up the worship of the one God Aten, beneficial and omnipresent. For the purposes of worship, Aten was personified by the Sun, but the king himself struggled to make it plain that the true Deity was not the sun itself, but the vital force residing in the Sun's creative warmth, and it is difficult not to believe that he himself saw further than this. In elaborating the new religion he built up the fabric of a faith which in many things. foreshadowed Christianity with extraordinary closeness. In its entirety Aten worship was infinitely more beautiful and spiritual than any religion held by man of which we have knowledge at so early a date. He lived in his new capital engrossed in religion, and under him grew up a new school of art to which we owe the incomparable beauty of the objects discovered in the tomb of Tutankhamen." The article from which I quote concludes with the following words: "The gentleness of Akhenaten spelt wreckage. He left no son. Eight years of chaos followed, in which the names of three usurpers appear, one of whom was he whose tomb has just been discovered, of whom all we know is

that he undid the work of Akhenaten, destroyed the pure worship he had set up and reverted to the old religion of Amen, dominated by a powerful and numerous priestly caste."

Tutankhamen's motive in thus acting may have been to spare the country from political ruin and to restore it to somewhat of its former power and glory.

question with the events It is universally acknowJacob into Egypt took

The task of equating the period in recorded in Exodus is not an easy one. ledged that the entry of Joseph and place during the reign of the Shepherd Kings and the date of 1580 B.C. for the accession of Ahmes I, who expelled these rulers, is not contraverted. More difficulty arises in fixing the date of the Exodus, and opinions on this point are divided fairly equally. By many the Pharaoh of the oppression is considered to be Rameses II and the Pharaoh of the Exodus Meneptah, in the second year of whose reign, 1233 B.C., the event is said to have taken place. If we accept this, we remove the occurrence into the next, or XIXth dynasty, and are far away from the days of Akhenaten and Tutankhamen.

The difficulty of fixing the date of the Exodus arises from the uncertainty which hangs round the duration of the period of the sojourning of the children of Israel in the land of Egypt. In Exodus xii, 40, we are told that the "sojourning of the children of Israel who dwelt in Egypt was 430 years." The Septuagint and the Samaritan versions add "and in the land of Canaan." The two versions differ as to the position of this insertion and by many it is considered as a gloss. If, however, we accept this explanation and give a total of about 200 years for the lives of the patriarchs we can shorten the sojourn by half. Again, in Genesis xv, 13, 16, we read, and the passage is quoted by Stephen in his address to the Sanhedrim, "Thy seed shall be a stranger in a land that is not theirs, and shall serve them and they shall afflict them 400 years, and in the fourth generation they shall come hither again." This passage may surely be dismissed from the reckoning as affording a date for the Exodus. As the Rev. I. S. Griffiths points out,* it is manifestly contradictory. A generation is not of a hundred years' duration. The figures have evidently been misread in transcribing and the passage may be fairly paraphrased, "They shall be slaves for a period of years and in the fourth generation they shall return." And now as to

* "The Exodus in the light of archæology."

an alternative date. In the 1st Kings vi, 1, we find the statement that the period from the Exodus to the building of the temple in the 4th year of Solomon was 480 years. Without much difficulty the 4th year of King Solomon can be fixed at 966 B.C. Counting back 480 years we come to the reign of Amenhotep II, the successor of the great warrior King Thothmes III, and the date 1446 B.C. It is argued by some that the number 480 is of an artificial character, 40 multiplied by 12 and, therefore is used, as in some other cases, not as an arithmetical expression but as a vague statement of number. Those who criticise the statement, however, point out that in Chron. v, 3, 8, twelve generations are recorded as having elapsed between the Exodus and foundation of the temple. The twelve generations may be accepted as historical, but in order to bring the Exodus into the days of Meneptah it is necessary to estimate a generation as twenty-two years, not forty. The earlier date is accepted for the purposes of this Essay and thus the departure of Israel is brought into the XVIIIth dynasty and before the days of Akhenaten and Tutankhamen. There is yet a third possible date for the Exodus, which is very fascinating, favoured by the well-known Egyptologist, Mr. Arthur Weigall, in an interesting article on Tutankhamen in the "Empire Review" for May last. In the passage from Chronicles just referred to, if we estimate the twelve generations at less than forty for each or at about three to a century, we are brought to a date between 1360 and 1330 B.C. and to the days of Tutankhamen. Admitting this interpretation, Mr. Weigall supposes Moses to have been born in the reign of Amanhotep III, that he fled to Midian in the reign of Akhenaten, that Akhenaten's death is referred to in Exodus ii, 23. "It came to pass in process of time, the King of Egypt died" and that Tutankhamen was the Pharaoh under whom Moses returned to Egypt and organised the exodus of his enslaved countrymen. The arguments by which Mr. Weigall supports his theory are reasonable but not convincing.

I have briefly stated the reasons for placing the Exodus in the reign of Amenhotep II and for accepting the date of 1446 B.C. We are attracted to this view because it enables us to place the birth and education of Moses in that period which we know now, more than ever we knew before, represents the highest period of Egypt's culture and refinement and the highest pitch she attained in the development of art. Moreover, we can best realise, as we contemplate the enormous wealth of the country, how when

Israel departed, they went not empty-handed but took from those with whom they sojourned, jewels of gold and silver and spoiled the Egyptians. As we look into the open tomb of Tutankhamen and behold its treasures, despoiled and robbed though they were in dynastic times, the words of Holy Writ come home to us with peculiar force: "By faith Moses when he was come to years refused to be called the Son of Pharaoh's daughter, choosing rather to suffer affliction with the people of God than to enjoy the pleasures of Sin for a season, esteeming the reproach of Christ greater riches than all the treasures of Egypt, for he had respect unto the recompense of the reward."

Who was Pharaoh's daughter who saw, among the paper reeds of the Nile's brink, the cot which contained Israel's future lawgiver? It is satisfactory to know that if we accept the chronology we have adopted it was Queen Hatshepset, daughter of Thothmes I, married to her half-brother; reigning apparently at one time by herself and in part with Thothmes III she figured as one of the most remarkable queens of history. The record of her life and talents, her learning and prowess, makes it possible for us to say that no better woman could in the order of God's providence have been chosen to make Moses "Learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians and mighty in word and in deed." The temple at Der-al-Bahri remains as a monument of her genius, and still standing at Karnak is one of the magnificent obelisks she erected, a monolith 97 feet high and weighing 350 tons. Equally interesting it is to speculate as to where Akhenaten, the heretic king, acquired the wonderful religion he practised. We cannot admit the possibility that it was evolved out of his own consciousness. He has been called a man a thousand years before his time. The worship he set up and strove to maintain was really monotheistic. Nearly half a century had elapsed since the departure of Israel and any attempt to connect his belief with their sojourn cannot be very successful. Yet surely in some way we are tempted to associate the two and to picture to ourselves the poet king, the dreamer and the visionary living in his own capital, far away from the old worship he had set at nought, inheriting in part the great religious truths made known to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and practised by the race when they sojourned in Egypt. Among the literary remains of Akhenaten is a Nature poem, which Professor Breasted prints with parallel passages from the 104th Psalm. The mother of Akhenaten, as we have said, was Queen Thi, wife of Amenhotep III,

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a Mittanian princess, beautiful and learned. His wife was Nefertiti who, if we may judge from her portrait bust, was also not an Egyptian. In the paintings that adorn the walls of Akhenaten's own palace, these two women figure largely and may have shared his religious views and perhaps in some way was responsible for them.

Passing to Tutankhamen, the one act by which he is known is the restoration by him of the Old Amen worship and the reinstatement of the powerful priestly machinery which ruled and engineered it. At this religion we may afford to give a glance. To describe it would require a more capable pen than mine. It is fairly well summarised by the apostle Paul when he speaks in the Epistle to the Romans of those who "changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like unto corruptible man and to birds and four-footed creatures and creeping things." Dominated by magic the priestly caste held the keys of death and of the hereafter. In the tomb of Princess Set Hathor, Petrie found an alabaster vase on which was an inscription that the priests had endowed it with magical powers and anything the Princess required in the tomb or the underworld, if she put her hand in the vase she would find it there. Let me on this subject quote Professor Breasted* : "This magic which the priests were supposed to work ruled everything in the after life which in most respects was a reflection of the present. Lentils and wheat grew in the fields of Yaru but the Lords of the empire escaped all personal labour in the happy fields. Ushebti figures, inscribed with a potent charm, performed these duties for them. These figures were placed in the tombs by scores and hundreds. This means of obtaining material good was transferred to the moral world to secure exemption from the consequences of an evil life. A sacred beetle, cut from stone and inscribed with a charm beginning with the words, 'Oh, my heart, rise not up against me as a witness,' was laid on the breast of the mummy and was so powerful that when the guilty soul stands in the judgment hall in the awful presence of Osiris, the accusing voice of the heart is silenced and the great God does not perceive the evil. Likewise in the book of the dead, besides all the other charms, the welcome verdict of acquittal was sold by priestly scribes to any one with the means to buy. The purchaser's name was inserted in the blanks left for the purpose, securing to