But the opposition of the Theban priesthood was too strong.  Akhunaten shook the dust of the capital off his feet and retired to the isolated city of Akhet-aten, “the Glory of the Disk,” at the modern Tell el-Amarna, where he could philosophize in peace, while his kingdom was left to take care of itself.  He and his wife Nefret-iti, who seems to have been a faithful sharer of his views, reigned over a select court of Aten-worship-ping nobles, priests, and artists.  The artists had under Akhunaten an unrivalled opportunity for development, of which they had already begun to take considerable advantage before the end of his reign and the restoration of the old order of ideas.  Their style takes on itself an almost bizarre freedom, which reminds us strongly of the similar characteristic in Mycenaean art.  There is a strange little relief in the Berlin Museum of the king standing cross-legged, leaning on a staff, and languidly smelling a flower, while the queen stands by with her garments blown about by the wind.  The artistic monarch’s graceful attitude is probably a faithful transcript of a characteristic pose.

We see from this what an Egyptian artist could do when his shackles were removed, but unluckily Egypt never produced another king who was at the same time an original genius, an artist, and a thinker.  When Akhunaten died, the Egyptian artists’ shackles were riveted tighter than ever.  The reaction was strong.  The kingdom had fallen into anarchy, and the foreign empire which his predecessors had built up had practically been thrown to the winds by Akhunaten.  The whole is an example of the confusion and disorganization which ensue when a philosopher rules.  Not long after the heretic’s death the old religion was fully restored, the cult of the disk was blotted out, and the Egyptians returned joyfully to the worship of their myriad deities.  Akhunaten’s ideals were too high for them.  The debris of the foreign empire was, as usual in such cases, put together again, and customary law and order restored by the conservative reactionaries who succeeded him.  Henceforth Egyptian civilization runs an uninspired and undeveloping course till the days of the Saites and the Ptolemies.  This point in the history of Egypt, therefore, forms a convenient stopping-place at which to pause, while we turn once more to Western Asia, and ascertain to what extent recent excavations and research have thrown new light upon the problems connected with the rise and history of the Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian Empires.

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CHAPTER VIII—­THE ASSYRIAN AND NEO-BABYLONIAN EMPIRES IN THE LIGHT OF RECENT RESEARCH