Page 299 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

THE PHILOSOPHER KING

1370-1300 B.C.

T n her earliest childhood years the princess Ankh-

esenpa-Aten believed that the city stretched to the ends of the
earth. It was but rarely that she went outside the palace grounds,

which themselves seemed limitless, but when she occasionally
drove out with her father and mother in the chariot, the wide
streets seemed to go on for ever. And even when the houses and

temples ended and the desert sand began, there was always the
bustle of new buildings going up, and streets marked out into
the distance, with architects busy with their red-painted cords
marking out the plans of additional houses, and gangs of slaves

pulling the sledges with piles of stones and bricks.
When Ankh-esenpa-Aten was born in 1370 b.c., the third
daughter of the pharaoh Akhenaten and his divine wife Nefer-

titi, the capital of the two realms of Egypt was a new city, and
growing fast. Akhetaten it was called, the city of the rising of
the sun-god, and where it lay there had been, until but a few

years before, only open desert between the Nile and the moun­
tains. The court had moved in even before the palace was com­
pleted, living in the luxurious tents which still, in the heat of

summer, were often pitched in the palace gardens, and her fa­
ther had himself supervised the building of the palace and of the
temple of the sun-god, the first buildings to be erected.
They were a happy family in these first years. Her father,

tall, slim, and willowy, was most often gay, though he could be
moody and preoccupied, and occasionally inexplicably ill. Her
mother was the most beautiful woman Ankh-esenpa-Aten had