Idylls and Lyrics of The Nile :: :: University of Virginia Library

Who through this solemn wilderness may stray
Beyond the river and its belt of palm,
May feel still fresh the wonder and the calm
Of greatness passed away.

All the new world of Art with Nature one,
All the young city's restless upward strife,
Its higher truth, its happier, homelier life,—
All like a phantom gone.

No more the draughtsman from the furthest Ind
Casts on the palace-floor his vermeil dyes,
No more the scribe from clay syllabaries
Will spell Assyria's mind.

Not here the potter from the Grecian Isles
Throws the new shape or plies the painter's reed,
No kiln-man melts the glaze or bakes the tiles
Or spins the glassy bead.

The Master-sculptor Bek, from Aptu brought,
No longer bids his pupil, line on line,
With copying chisel grave the marble fine
To beauty and to thought.

But he who enters yonder mountain cave
May see the form of that courageous king,
Who felt that light was life for everything,
And should outlast the grave.

And that dream-city Khuenâten made—
The boy-reformer by the banks of Nile
Who broke with Thebes, her priestly power and guile—
Shall never surely fade.

Still in our desert it renews its youth,
Still lifts its beauty out of barren sands,—
City, thought-built, eternal, not with hands,
For Light that lives in Truth.

Note.—The recent discoveries by Flinders Petrie at Tel El-Amarna Show that there must have arisen there, about 1400 b.c., at the bidding of the young reformer-king, Chut-en-âten, or Khuenâten (‘the glory of the sun’), a city filled with men of new art, new social and new religious ideas.

The remains of the painted pavements of the palace, with their glowing colours, their unconventional treatment of natural forms, the remains of the glass-blowers' shops, the sculpture schools, the Greek vase fragments, bits of portrait sculpture, as fine in execution as sculpture of the best Greek time, all bespeak that in honour of the new religion of the Sun's-Disk-worshipping king and queen, there must have been gathered here the best art of the time from all parts of the world.

The Tel El-Amarna tablets and bi-lingual syllabaries found show that scribes were engaged to decipher the communications that passed between the courts of Khuenâten and the courts of Assyria. The architect who designed the Temple buildings was Bek, son of Men, who had worked under Amenophis iii. at Thebes, or Aptu, as it was called. Cf. Budge's Nile, p. 172.

Young Amen-Hotep iv. broke with the Theban priests and their worship of Amen-Ra to establish a new Thebes in this plain, and to honour the sun's disk as a spirit—the embodiment of the principle of life. He was not then more than eighteen years old, and died at the age of thirty. Within a generation after his death his whole city was swept away, but the young reformer's motto still survives, and is found constantly repeated. It is this, ‘Living in Truth.’