Roughly fourteen hundred years before Christ, at the time Egypt was at the height of her power, King Akhnaton ruled over that great country for a few years.
Akhnaton was born in Thebes, in about 1395 B.C.1 in a world already as old, as civilised and as sophisticated as our own. And he was the son of the greatest monarch of that world; the last offspring, in direct descent, of a long and glorious line of warriors over-loaded with the spoils of conquest; the heir of an empire that stretched, in modern words, from the Sudan to the borders of Armenia, and of a culture more than four thousand years old.
He was a thinker; he was an artist; he was a saint--the world’s first rationalist, and the oldest Prince of Peace. Through the visible disk of the Sun--Aton--he worshipped "the Energy within the Disk"--the ultimate Reality which men of all creeds still seek, knowingly or unknowingly, under a thousand names and through a thousand paths. And he styled himself as the Son of that unseen, everlasting Source of all life. "Thou art in my heart," he said in one of his hymns, "and no one knoweth Thee save I, Thy Son." And his words, long forgotten, have come down to us, recorded upon the walls of a nobleman’s tomb--these amazing words in what is perhaps the earliest poem which can be ascribed with certainty to any particular author: "I, Thy Son. . . ."
When he was a child, the famous Pyramids of Gizeh were nearly as ancient as the Roman remains in England are today, and the first empire-builder of whom we know something definite--Sargon of Agade--was already as remote in time as Nebuchadnezzar is now.2 And beyond the glories of which the oldest monuments bore witness, and beyond the mighty shadows of half-forgotten heroes and king-gods lost in the midst of legend, a still remoter antiquity, with its immemorial art and wisdom, extended over centuries, down to the dim beginnings of the Neolithic Age, and further still. Crete and the Ægean Isles had flourished for over two thousand years, and Babylonia and Elam for several millenniums more, while, unaware of each other and of the rest of mankind, distant India and China counted long centuries of polished life.
Other great souls have had disciples to preach their message, martyrs to bear testimony to their greatness in torture and death, missionaries to carry their name and domination to the limits of the earth; they have had commentators, admirers, detractors--philosophers, poets, artists--to keep their memory alive century after century. But Akhnaton’s fate was different. He had no sooner died than the fervour of his followers seems to have been spent out. Within a few years, his name was anathematised, his new city pulled down stone by stone, his remains profaned and his memory systematically destroyed, without, apparently, a single cry of protest on the part of any of those eighty thousand1 or more who had, in their zeal, left Thebes with him, thirteen years before. Ever since then, until a part of his foreign correspondence and fragments of his hymns were brought to light, some fifty years ago, there was not a man on earth who knew of his existence. (!!)
Akhnaton, in his love of truth, seems to have deliberately stripped himself of all the mystery that had helped his fathers to appear as gods in the eyes of their prostrate people. He was of unconventional manners and of kindly approach. His divinity was not the showy privilege of a Sun-born king, or of a prophet, asserted by external signs, but rather the innermost perfection of a man whose heart, will and understanding were in complete harmony with the eternal laws of life; of a man who had fulfilled man’s divine purpose as naturally as others drift away from it. He felt therefore no need of ascertaining it by a fastidious pomp, any more than by strange renunciations. There was no excess in him; nothing that the vulgar eye could look upon as "striking," nothing that popular enthusiasm could catch hold of and magnify. He wrought no extraordinary deeds, as other teachers are said to have done. The only wonder of which he spoke was the everlasting miracle of order and of fertility--the rhythm of day and night, the growth of a bird or of a baby.
And to this very day, notwithstanding the genuine admiration of a learned few for his rational religion, there are hardly any people in the world whose daily life he fills with his presence. ('Twould the Torah bearers recognize Mos!)
http://members.tripod.com/~neuro_net/asonfgod.htm
