At Khut-Aten, as the “heretic” Pharaoh called his new capital, he was surrounded by the adherents of the new faith.  Many of them were doubtless Egyptians, but many, perhaps the majority, were of Asiatic extraction.  Already under his father and grandfather the court had been filled with Canaanites and other natives of Asia, and the great offices of state had been occupied by them.  Now under Khu-n-Aten the Asiatic character of the government was increased tenfold.  The native Egyptian had to make way for the foreigner, and the rule of the Syrian stranger which seemed to have been expelled with the Hyksos was restored under another form.  Canaan was nominally a subject province of Egypt, but in reality it had led its conqueror captive.  A semi-Asiatic Pharaoh was endeavouring to force an Asiatic form of faith upon his subjects, and entrusting his government to Asiatic officials; even art had ceased to be Egyptian and had put on an Asiatic dress.

The tombs of Khu-n-Aten’s followers are cut in the cliffs at the back of the city, while his own sepulchre is towards the end of a long ravine which runs out into the eastern desert between two lofty lines of precipitous rock.  But few of them are finished, and the sepulchre of the king himself, magnificent in its design, is incomplete and mutilated.  The sculptures on the walls have been broken, and the granite sarcophagus in which the body of the great king rested has been shattered into fragments before it could be lifted into the niche where it was intended to stand.  The royal mummy was torn into shreds, and the porcelain figures buried with it dashed to the ground.

It is clear that the death of Khu-n-Aten must have been quickly followed by the triumph of his enemies.  His capital was overthrown, the stones of its temple carried away to Thebes, there to adorn the sanctuary of the victorious Amon, and the adherents of his reform either slain or driven into exile.  The vengeance executed upon them was national as well as religious.  It meant not only a restoration of the national faith, but also the restoration of the native Egyptian to the government of his country.  The feelings which inspired it were similar to those which underlay the movement of Arabi in our own time, and there was no English army to stand in the way of its success.  The rise of the nineteenth dynasty represents the triumph of the national cause.

The cuneiform letters of Tel el-Amarna show that already before Khu-n-Aten’s death his empire and power were breaking up.  Letter after letter is sent to him from the governors in Canaan with urgent requests for troops.  The Hittites were attacking the empire in the north, and rebels were overthrowing it within.  “If auxiliaries come this year,” writes Ebed-Tob of Jerusalem, “the provinces of the king my lord will be preserved; but if no auxiliaries come the provinces of the king my lord will be destroyed.”  To these entreaties no answer could be returned.  There was civil and religious war in Egypt itself, and the army was needed to defend the Pharaoh at home.