e sovereignty by his father-in-law;* he
showed himself a zealous partisan of the "Disk," and he continued to
reside in the new capital during the few years of his sole reign.** The
second son-in-law was a son of Amenothes III., probably by a concubine.
He returned to the religion of Amon, and his wife, abjuring the creed
of her father, changed her name from Ankhnasaton to that of Ankhnasamon.
Her husband abandoned Khuitatonu*** at the end of two or three years,
and after his departure the town fell into decadence as quickly as it
had arisen. The streets were unfrequented, the palaces and temples stood
empty, the tombs remained unfinished and unoccupied, and its patron god
returned to his former state, and was relegated to the third or fourth
rank in the Egyptian Pantheon.

* He and his wife are represented by the side of Khuniatonu,
with the protocol and the attributes of royalty. Petrie
assigns to this double reign those minor objects on which
the king's prenomen Ankhkhopiruri is followed by the epithet
beloved of Uanira, which formed part of the name of
Khuniatonu.

** Petrie thinks, on the testimony of the lists of Manetho,
which give twelve years to Akenkheres, daughter of Horos,
that Saakeri reigned twelve years, and only two or three
years as sole monarch without his father-in-law. I think
these two or three years a probable maximum length of his
reign, whatever may be the value we should here assign to
the lists of Manetho.

*** Petrie, judging from the number of minor objects which
he has found in his excavations at Tel el-Amarna, believes
that he can fix the length of Tutankhamon's sojourn at
Khuitatonu at six years, and that of his whole reign at nine
years.

The town struggled for a short time against its adverse fate, which
was no doubt retarded owing to the various industries founded in it by
Khuniatonu, the manufactories of enamel and coloured glass requiring the
presence of many workmen; but the latter emigrated ere long to Thebes
or the neighbouring city of Hermopolis, and the "Horizon of Atonu"
disappeared from the list of nomes, leaving of what might have been the
capital of the Egyptian empire, merely a mound of crumbling bricks with
two or three fellahin villages scattered on the eastern bank of the
Nile.*

* Petrie thinks that the temples and palaces were
systematically destroyed by Harmhabi,