Monotheism had a short life in the Valley of the Nile

When young Amenhotep succeeded to the throne, he tried to be tolerant. But Egypt was not ready for monotheism in the fourteenth century B. C., and hatred expressed against his god gradually turned the king into a religious fanatic. He ordered the star worship discontinued, and the star priests persecuted. Even his old teachers fell under his displeasure, and he changed his own royal name to Iknaton, "The Sun God is satisfied," because his patronymic was too suggestive of an earlier deity. The pity was, that he had wanted rather desperately to make his religion kind and beautiful. The new city which he built to the Sun contained the finest work of skilled Egyptian craftsmen--sculpture, including the head of his lovely wife, Nefratiti, and superb architecture. Carved on the walls were his own hymns, describing the Sun God as universal creator of all life. "Even the birds in the marshes are aware of his kindness, and lift up their wings like arms to praise him," reads a line in one of lknaton's hymns. He thought of the Sun as the kindly father of foreigners as well as Egyptians; and that thought was in itself heresy.

Undoubtedly he did much damage. The priests vouched for that and so did the nobles, like most visionaries he had very little practical sense and during his reign the Asiatic conquests of his father were lost. After his death his city was abandoned, his inscriptions covered up and obliterated, the people returned to their old religions, but their fervor had gone and the decline of Egypt was at hand.

For three thousand years all remembrance of him was evil: he was called a persecutor, a fanatic, "that criminal, Iknaton." Recent explorations however have recovered his hymns, and today some reverence is paid to the young King and his wonderful idea, which for a brief, too brilliant moment, dazzled Egypt.

Monotheism had a short life in the Valley of the Nile, but many anthropologists have thought that it had a very long-lived effect on some foreigners who were living in Egypt at the time. There is very little evidence that the Hebrews were anything but nature worshipers when they began their long sojourn under the Pharaohs. The Books of the Old Testament were written long after they had settled in Canaan. If Iknaton inspired or even strengthened the Hebrew religion, not even he could have wished a purer conception than his God attained in Israelite hands. But unfortunately the followers of Moses allowed none of his universality of scope; and they forgot the origin.

The history of the Jewish race is one long fight against the cults of Sun worship in neighboring lands. Their wrath raged against Baal, who was in part a Sun God, against golden Sun calves and golden Sun horses. They even threatened to destroy the city of Heliopolis where the idea had its birth. But the chief god against whom their anger rose was Tammuz, the Sun God who dies every fall and is resurrected every spring.

Laments for the departed Sun and joy in his resurrection fill the Babylonian hymns and echo with horror through the Bible:

"Then he brought me to the door of the gate of the Lord's house which was toward the north; and, behold, there sat women weeping for Tammuz.

"And he brought me into the inner court of the Lord's house, and, behold, at the door of the temple of the Lord between the porch and the altar, were about five and twenty men, with their back toward the temple of the Lord, and their faces toward the east; and they worshipped the sun toward the east."

That happened in Babylon about 570 B. C., and Ezekiel thought such abominations would end in general slaughter. Tammuz was so powerful that he was called "The Lord" just as Jehovah was, even the same name, "Adonai" was applied to him, and in Greek mythology he became the famous "Adonis" who gathered countless legends about him. But first and last, Tammuz was the Sun God who died with the approach of winter and was resurrected in the spring. It was a slightly more subtle conception than Helios or Ra, who were simply the Sun itself, more subtle even than Phoebus Apollo whose name signified the radiance of sunlight, and who stood for justice, fair dealing and equity.

Since so much worship was offered to the Sun, and so many temples built to his honor, it seems curious that the most famous of all his emblems was purely accidental. In the Egyptian Thebes, behind the great temple of Karnak, stood the three "Statues to Memnon." In 27 B. C. an earthquake struck the most northerly statue and caused a fracture which narrowed as the metal expanded during the heat of day, and widened when the metal contracted at night. The Egyptian Sun is hot, and at sunrise each morning air rushed through the swiftly narrowing crack. Then the astonished spectators heard the statue emit a sound. Pausanias wrote that it resembled a broken chord from a harp or lute. Small wonder that it was regarded as an emblem of the Sun and became a marvel to all who heard it, so that it has been renowned in literature and mythology down through the ages. Visitors to Egypt can still hear a similar sound, though the crack itself was repaired in 170 A. D., and the modern version is only a trick of priests or perhaps the wind passing through pores of stone. Still the statue is emblematic of bright sunlight and of all the worship due to the Sun. "The years are unreturning," sings Stephen Vincent Benét, "but here and there, there were days. Days when the sun so shone that the statue gave its cry. . . ."

The speaking statue was an accident, but quite extraordinary, and in a way it was more symbolic of the Sun's power than all the other statues purposely constructed to his honor.