Читать книгу The Life and Times of Akhnaton, Pharaoh of Egypt онлайн

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“I have come, giving thee to smite the princes of Zahi,

I have hurled them beneath thy feet among their highlands....

Thou hast trampled those who are in the districts of Punt,

I have made them see thy majesty as a circling star....

Crete and Cyprus are in terror....

Those who are in the midst of the great sea hear thy roarings;

I have made them see thy majesty as an avenger,

Rising upon the back of his slain victim....

I have made them see thy majesty as a fierce-eyed lion,

While thou makest them corpses in their valleys....”

It was a fierce and a splendid age—the zenith of Egypt’s great history. The next king, Amonhotep II., carried on the conquests with a degree of ferocity not previously apparent. He himself was a man of great physical strength, who could draw a bow which none of his soldiers could use. He led his armies into his restless Asiatic dominions, and having captured seven rebellious Syrian kings, he hung them head downwards from the prow of his galley as he approached Thebes, and later sacrificed six of them to Amon with his own hand. The seventh he carried up to a distant city of the Sudan, and there hung him upon the gateway as a warning to all rebels. Dying in the year 1420 B.C., he left the throne to his son, Thothmes IV., the grandfather of Akhnaton, who at his accession was about eighteen years of age.[7]