When Amenophis III. died his son Amenophis IV. seems to have been still a minor.  At all events the queen-mother Teie became all-powerful in the government of the state.  Her son, the new Pharaoh, had been brought up in the religious beliefs of his mother, and had inherited the ideas and tendencies of his Asiatic forefathers.  A plaster-cast of his face, taken immediately after death, was discovered by Prof.  Petrie at Tel el-Amarna, and it is the face of a refined and thoughtful theorist, of a philosopher rather than of a king, earnest in his convictions almost to fanaticism.

Amenophis IV. undertook no less a task than that of reforming the State religion of Egypt.  For many centuries the religion of the priests and scribes had been inclining to pantheism.  Inside the temples there had been an esoteric teaching, that the various deities of Egypt were but manifestations of the one supreme God.  But it had hardly passed outside them.  With the accession of Amenophis IV. to the throne came a change.  The young king boldly rejected the religion of which he was officially the head, and professed himself a worshipper of the one God whose visible semblance was the solar disk.  Alone of the deities of Egypt Ra, the ancient Sun-god of Heliopolis, was acknowledged to be the representative of the true God.  It was the Baal-worship of Syria, modified by the philosophic conceptions of Egypt.  The Aten-Ra of the “heretic” Pharaoh was an Asiatic Baal, but unlike the Baal of Canaan he stood alone; there were no other Baals, no Baalim, by the side of him.

Amenophis was not content with preaching and encouraging the new faith; he sought to force it upon his subjects.  The other gods of Egypt were proscribed, and the name and head of Amon, the patron god of Thebes, to whom his ancestors had ascribed their power and victories, were erased from the monuments wherever they occurred.  Even his own father’s name was not spared, and the emissaries of the king, from one end of the country to the other, defaced that portion of it which contained the name of the god.  His own name was next changed, and Amenophis IV. became Khu-n-Aten, “the splendour of the solar disk.”

Khu-n-Aten’s attempt to overthrow the ancient faith of Egypt was naturally resisted by the powerful priesthood of Thebes.  A religious war was declared for the first time, so far as we know, in the history of mankind.  On the one side a fierce persecution was directed against the adherents of the old creed; on the other side every effort was made to impede and defeat the Pharaoh.  His position grew daily more insecure, and at last he turned his back on the capital of his fathers, and built himself a new city far away to the north.  The priests of Amon had thus far triumphed; the old idolatrous worship was carried on once more in the great temple of Karnak, though its official head was absent, and Khu-n-Aten with his archives and his court had fled to a safer home.  Upper Egypt was left to its worship of Amon and Min, while the king established himself nearer his Canaanite possessions.