2. AKHNATON OBLITERATES THE NAME OF AMON.
Up till this time it will have been observed that Akhnaton had behaved with great leniency towards the worshippers of the older gods, and had not even persecuted the priesthood of Amon-Ra. It now becomes apparent that this restraint was due to his mother’s influence, for no sooner was she dead than Akhnaton turned with the fierceness of a fanatic upon the latter institution. He issued an order that the name of Amon was to be erased wherever it occurred, and this order was carried out with such amazing thoroughness that hardly a single occurrence of the name was overlooked. Although thousands of inscriptions, accessible to Akhnaton’s agents, are now known in which the name of Amon occurs, there are but a few examples in which the god’s name has not been mutilated. His agents hammered the name out on the walls of the temples throughout Egypt; they penetrated into the tombs of the dead to erase it from the texts; they searched through the minute inscriptions upon small statuettes and figures, obliterating the name therefrom; they made journeys into the distant deserts to cut out the name from the rock-scribbles of travellers; they clambered over the cliffs beside the Nile to erase it from the graffiti; they entered private houses to rub it from small utensils where it chanced to be inscribed.
Akhnaton was always thorough in his undertakings, and half-measures were unknown to him. When it came to the question of his own father’s name, he seems not to have hesitated to order the obliteration of the word Amon in it, though one may suppose that in most cases he painted over it the king’s second name, Nebmaara. His agents burst their way into the tomb of Queen Tiy and removed the name Amonhotep from the inscriptions upon the shrine, writing Nebmaara in red ink over each erasure. Having scratched out the name even upon one of the queen’s toilet-pots of minute size they retired from the tomb, building up the wall at the entrance, and continued their labours elsewhere. The king was now asked whether his own name, Amonhotep,--which had been used before he adopted the better known Akhnaton,--was to suffer the same fate, and the answer seems to have been in the affirmative. Upon the quarry tablet at Gebel Silsileh[62] the king’s discarded name is thus erased, though it was not damaged in the tomb of Rames. The names of the various nobles and officials, male and female, which were compounded with Amon--Amonhotep, Setamon, Amonemhat, Amonemapt, and so on--were ruthlessly destroyed; while living persons bearing such names were often obliged to change them.