Message #71077

[Bianca]

p. 107



his craving for beauty in shape and form, and for ecstatic religious emotion.

Though lavish in the rewards in good gold and silver to all those who ministered to this craving,
he was mean and niggardly when it came to spending money for the benefit of his country.

The Tell al-'Amarnah Letters make this fact quite clear.

The peoples of Western Asia might think and say that the King of Egypt had "turned Fakir," but
there was little asceticism in his life. His boast of "living in reality," or "living in truth," which
suggests that he lived a perfectly natural and simple life, seeing things as they really were, on
the face of it seems to be ludicrous.

Aakhunaten had much in common with Hakim, the Fatimid Khalifah of Egypt (A.D. 996-1021).

Each was the son of a wealthy, pleasure-loving, luxurious father, and each succeeded to the
throne when he was a boy. Each had a strange face, each was moved to break with tradition
and introduce new ideas, but the spirit in which each made changes was that of a mad reformer.

 Christians and Jews were to Al-Hakim what the Amenites were to Aakhunaten.

Both king and Khalifah were pious in an intolerant and arrogant fashion, and each was a builder of places for worship.

Each thought that he was the incarnation of God, and each usurped the attributes of the Deity,
and prescribed rules for worship.

Each was a patron of the arts, but there is no evidence that the Pharaoh encouraged learned men
to flock to his Court as did the Khalifah. Al-Hakim frequently had his enemies murdered, and in his
fits of rage had people killed wholesale.

Though we have no knowledge that such atrocities were committed at Aakhutaten, yet it would
be rash to assume that persons who incurred the king's displeasure