rmined, on monument and
wall, the substitution of Amon-Ra's name for that of previously
superior gods.

The pharaohnate of Amonhoteph began about 1500 B.C. It is from that
period, therefore, that dates the divinity's accession to the
pharaohnate of the skies. There is, or should be, a reason for all
things. There is one for that. Amonhoteph regarded himself as Amon's
son. It was one of the traits of the pharaohs, as it was also of the
Incas, to believe, or at least to assert, that their fathers,
therefore themselves, were divine. As a consequence of the idea they
prayed to their own images and likened their palaces to inns.

Originally foreigners, invaders from Akkad or Sumer, the pharaohs
first conquered, then surprised. It was they that embanked the Nile,
turned morasses into meadows and piled the pyramids. More exactly, it
was by their commands that these miracles were contrived. To the
neolithic people whom they subjugated their divinity was clear. So
elsewhere was that of the kings of Akkad. Like them, like the Incas,
the pharaohs were of the solar race and so remained from the first
dynasty to the Greek conquest, when Alexander, to legitimatize his
sovereignty, had himself acknowledged as Amon's son.

The ceremony had its precedents. An inscription in eulogy of the great
Rameses states that Amon, when possessing the pharaohs august mother,
engendered him as a god. On a wall of the Temple of Luxor an earlier
inscription sets forth that the god of Thebes, incarnating himself in
the person of Thotmes IV., appeared in his divine form to the
pharaoh's queen, who, at sight of his beauty, conceived.

It was therefore not in the beast alone, but in man, that divinity
revealed itself in Egypt. That in Judea a similar revelation should
have been withheld until after the Roman occupation is hardly
explicable on the theory, general among scholars, that Moses is not a
historical character, for an identical revelation had been received in
Babylonia where Israel twice loitered. Moreover, a curious parallelism
exists between post-Mosaic prophecy and Egyptian clairvoyance. In a
papyrus of the Thotmes III. epoch--about 1600 B.C.--it is written:
"The people of the age of the son of man shall rejoice and establish
his name forever. They shall be removed from evil and the wicked shall
humble their mouths." In commenting the passage an Egyptologist noted
that the words _son of man_ are a literal translation of the original
_si-n-s