Tadu-khipa, was indeed married to Amenophis, but she did not rank as
chief queen. In the reign of Meneptah of the nineteenth dynasty the
vizier was a native of Bashan, Ben-Mazana by name, whose father was
called Yu the elder. Yua may therefore be a word of Amorite origin; and
a connection has been suggested between it and the Hebrew Yahveh. This,
however, though possible, cannot be proved.

When Amenophis III. died his son Amenophis IV. seems to have been still
a minor. At all events the queen-mother Teie became all-powerful in the
government of the state. Her son, the new Pharaoh, had been brought up
in the religious beliefs of his mother, and had inherited the ideas and
tendencies of his Asiatic forefathers. A plaster-cast of his face, taken
immediately after death, was discovered by Prof. Petrie at Tel
el-Amarna, and it is the face of a refined and thoughtful theorist, of a
philosopher rather than of a king, earnest in his convictions almost to
fanaticism.

Amenophis IV. undertook no less a task than that of reforming the State
religion of Egypt. For many centuries the religion of the priests and
scribes had been inclining to pantheism. Inside the temples there had
been an esoteric teaching, that the various deities of Egypt were but
manifestations of the one supreme God. But it had hardly passed outside
them. With the accession of Amenophis IV. to the throne came a change.
The young king boldly rejected the religion of which he was officially
the head, and professed himself a worshipper of the one God whose
visible semblance was the solar disk. Alone of the deities of Egypt Ra,
the ancient Sun-god of Heliopolis, was acknowledged to be the
representative of the true God. It was the Baal-worship of Syria,
modified by the philosophic conceptions of Egypt. The Aten-Ra of the
"heretic" Pharaoh was an Asiatic Baal, but unlike the Baal of Canaan he