ebook - The Ancient World (3 of 7)

VIP免费

2024-12-15 0 0 294.42KB 8 页 5.9玖币

Chapter Three - The Egyptian Empire

A. The Conquering Pharaohs

The Hyksos reigned in Egypt about two hundred years (1800-1600 B.C.). Then the Egyptians rose and expelled them, and native Pharaohs

sat on the throne again. But this was not enough. They seem to have been furiously determined to make sure against future invasion from

any direction, and they acted on the principle that attack is the best defence. The boundaries of Egypt were pushed westwards to guard

against invasion from Libya, southwards up the Nile as a protection against Nubia and Punt. The greatest danger, however, was from the

princes and cities of Syria, who had probably helped the Hyksos. The Syrians were encouraged by the Hittites to resist. But the great

conqueror, Thutmose III (1501-1447 B.C.), year after year led his armies into Syria and dealt crushing blows, till not only the left arm of the

Fertile Crescent (p.61), but its top, too (the upper reaches of the Euphrates and Tigris), were entirely in his power. A strong navy on the coast

of Syria supported his army, threatened the Hittites on the south coast of Asia Minor and compelled Crete and Cyprus to obey him. Thus

arose in the Eighteenth Dynasty, the Egyptian Empire. Empire is the name we give to a large area of land inhabited by different races, and

ruled over by a conquering race which keeps its power by a strong army and navy and by careful organisation. Thutmose was proud of his

conquests, and had accounts of them written and engraved. He had four obelisks made (tall square pillars with pointed tops), and they have

spread his renown further than he ever imagined, for one is now in Constantinople (Istanbul), one in Rome, one in London and one in New

York.

The Egyptian Empire reached its highest glory under Amenhotep III (1411-1375 B.C.). Thebes, the capital of the Empire, was enriched with

the spoils of many nations and adorned by architects and artists who could command the labour of huge slave-gangs, Syrians and Negroes,

the conqueror's prisoners of war. Temples, palaces and monuments, lavishly adorned with gold and silver and painted with brilliant pictures,

gleamed against a background of rich foliage. Numerous flags and bright-coloured awnings added to the gaiety of the scene, and the river

was crowded with shipping of every kind.

Egyptian Mould For Brick-Making

To this period and that of the following dynasty, the Nineteenth, belong the mighty temples which, even in their ruined state, greatly impress

visitors to Karnak, the modern name for Thebes. The ancient temples erected by earlier kings had been neglected by the Hyksos, and the

Empire Pharaohs rebuilt and extended them on a magnificent scale. At right angles to the river lay a whole series of buildings comprising the

temple of Amen. The main features of this were a spacious open court surrounded by a colonnade and next to it a huge covered hall, the

largest hall with pillars ever erected by men. The main pillars down the centre of the hall are sixty-nine feet high, and a hundred men can

stand on the top of each.

The walls and pillars of the temple were carved and painted with the exploits of Thutmose III and other conquerors. A stately avenue of

carved rams ran from the temple gates to the river. On the south side of the temple was a large artificial lake which reflected its glories. From

this stretched a park a mile and a half long, with an avenue and statues down the centre connecting the temple of Karnak with another temple

of Amen on the river bank at Luxor, the southern suburb of Thebes. This too had a large hall with towering pillars. These buildings could

have been erected only by a nation whose architects, artists and craftsmen had reached a very high level of skill, which challenges

comparison with those of any other period of history, including our own.

The next Amenhotep (1375-1360 B.C.), the fourth of the line, was a very different man from his father. The glory of the Empire, the worship

of Amen, did not interest this young king at all. He devoted his life to suppressing the worship of Amen and all other gods, and encouraging

the whole Empire to recognise Aton, the Sun-God, as the only God. Perhaps he thought this would be a better way to bind the Empire

together than a chain of garrisons. Everywhere the temples of Amen were closed and his name erased from all monuments, even though this

involved cutting out his father's name too and changing his own to Akenaton ("He in whom Aton is satisfied"). However he differed from his

ancestors in other ways, Akenaton inherited their strong will, for he abandoned Thebes and all its glories and built himself a new capital two

hundred miles lower down the river, Aketaton, now called Tel-el-Amarna. Though he failed to establish his new worship, which declined

after his death, it marks him out as the greatest teacher of religion before Moses. For though his God is a sun-god, Akenaton has an

file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/sodindo/De...he_Ancient_World_by_Tenen_(html-text-pic)/03.htm (1 of 8) [6/19/2002 3:36:03 PM]

Chapter Three - The Egyptian Empire

enlightened idea of him as Creator and Sustainer of all living things and Father of all men, whether Syrian, Negro or Egyptian. Here is one of

his hymns to Aton:

The Great Hall Of Pillars In The Temple Of Amen At Thebes - Restoration of the hypostyle of the temple of Karnak.

(*) "All cattle rest upon their pasturage,

The trees and the plants flourish,

The birds flutter in their marshes,

Their wings uplifted in adoration to thee.

All the sheep dance upon their feet,

All winged things fly,

They live when thou hast shone upon them."

----

Note: [*] Based on "Cambridge Ancient History."

----

King Akenaton

file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/sodindo/De...he_Ancient_World_by_Tenen_(html-text-pic)/03.htm (2 of 8) [6/19/2002 3:36:03 PM]

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

ChapterThree-TheEgyptianEmpireChapterThree-TheEgyptianEmpireA.TheConqueringPharaohsTheHyksosreignedinEgyptabouttwohundredyears(1800-1600B.C.).ThentheEgyptiansroseandexpelledthem,andnativePharaohssatonthethroneagain.Butthiswasnotenough.Theyseemtohavebeenfuriouslydeterminedtomakesureagainstfutureinv...

展开>> 收起<<

ebook - The Ancient World (3 of 7).pdf

共8页,预览2页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

ebook - The Ancient World (3 of 7)

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: