Page 324 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

[137O-13°° b,c,1 The Philosopher King 271

east, and later o£ the succession of his son Muwatallis to a united
empire and a loyal army.
A new king, too, was on the throne of Assyria, Adad-nirari.

And he had secured his southern frontier by a campaign against
the Kassite king of Babylon and was marching through Mitanni
country to Assur-uballit’s old frontier, the upper Euphrates.
Seti was not unconscious of the danger of these three powers
facing each other in north Syria, but Assyria and the Hittites

were hereditary enemies, and Egypt, with treaties of friendship
with both, could afford to wait. Seti devoted these years to public
works. By raising monuments on a scale which outshone the works
of the previous pharaohs, he would give an air of permanence
to the new dynasty and divert attention from the glories of the

former line, now represented only by the aged princess in the
palace at Thebes. The great pillared hall of the new temple at
Thebes, three hundred feet long with its rows of eighty-foot pil­
lars, was to be one of the wonders of the world, and on its walls

Seti ordered a pictorial record of his Syrian campaign to be
carved. And to provide material and finance for these projects he
reopened the imperial gold mines four days’ journey south of
Thebes and the stone quarries along the Nile.
For many years, in her old age, Ankhesenamon could sit and

watch the stone barges pass along the river. As she saw the
colossal temple buildings rising on the farther bank, she recalled
her earliest childhood, and the building of the graceful temples
of Akhetaten. Akhetaten, the accursed city, was no more, swal­

lowed up long ago by the desert sand. And with it had disap­
peared the stillborn idea of a peaceful and gracious world, united
under one all-loving and all-merciful god.
The old ex-queen, who in her lifetime had seen six pharaohs,
and herself been married to two of them, saw a seventh before
her seventieth year. In 1301 b.c. Seti died, and, in a swift palace

revolution, his eldest son, who had been nominated as his suc­
cessor, was deposed. A younger son, a clever and ambitious man,
was proclaimed as Rameses II. And in the splendor of his corona­
tion few noted the passing of the last of the royal line of Amose.