Word: pharaoh
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Because the modern world tends to monotheism, the reign (circa 1375-1358 B.C.) of Pharaoh Ikhnaton is usually described in comparative-religion courses as a brief but glorious false dawn of theological enlightenment. Novelist Stacton will have none of this. In an astringent tale that examines men's motives and man's fate as closely-and coldly-as any historical novel in recent years, he presents his own view of the matter...
...true, Stacton writes, that Ikhnaton set aside the prevailing pantheism, in which the god Amon and Amon's priests ruled over a motley array of other deities. It is also true that the Pharaoh moved his capital downriver from Thebes to a new city built in honor of the new sun god Aton. But his actions had little to do with religion. They were the work of an inbred neurotic, a king of erratic, often clouded mind, whose strange, troubled life was set on its eccentric course by an obsessive fear of the dark...
...have to pay for order." Her son might have realized it too, had he possessed only that measure of insanity normal to a bloodline transmitted for generations through the marriage of brother and sister. But when the priests of Amon, in the traditional coronation ceremony, pushed the new Pharaoh alone into the pitch-dark holy of holies and touched him with the dry hands of a jointed wooden idol, the royal mind snapped...
Since courtiers must have a court, the nobility followed Ikhnaton to the half-finished city and mumbled nimbly when priests chanted new hymns. But however fervent the chanting and however often the courtiers assured Pharaoh that he would not die (death was expunged in the new theology), Aton worship was never more than a plaything, tolerated because it kept Ikhnaton from more destructive games...
...Nasser fills the earth with plots and corruption," answered King Hussein in a broadcast. "His voice and his radios rave both morning and night like one stricken with fever." Hussein's radio labeled Nasser the "new pharaoh," "Communism's first agent in the Middle East . . . pilgrimaging to his Mecca in Moscow time after time," and Bedouin signs proclaimed, at parades honoring the King: "Hussein is the son of the Prophet, Nasser the son of a postman...