Amarna letters

“ Unfortunately the international tensions of the day were such that Egypt needed a warrior rather than a philosopher king. The idealism of Amenhotep IV was largely lost on his own generation, and entirely lost on the generation that followed him.
Nofretete was devoted both to her husband and to the religious reforms to which he dedicated his life. She bore him six daughters and appears to have been her husband’s constant companion and confidant. Nofretete was, understandably, a favored subject in Amarna art. ”

“ Ṭâb-shâr-Ashur870 writes to the king that he has received a letter from Ashur-riṣûa: “Thus it is written in it, saying, a messenger of the Ukkai went to Armenia, he has sent a letter to the palace, and these are the contents of the letter, on the morning of the sixth, this letter came to me; he sent, saying, the Ukkai have heard concerning Ariê that he went against him (the king of Armenia) and his city.” Then the letter becomes very defective, but we hear again of Kumai and Eliṣ (clearly the Eliṣada above) . ”

“ Behold has he, the greatest man in Egypt and Arabia, before whom all are but shadows, and unto whom is offered the love and respect of all those who live within the bounty of his great heart, yea! behold has he deigned to look upon Amanreh, the thirteen year old daughter of Sheikh el Hoatassin, second only in wealth and prowess to our own master. Fair is she and young, in very truth meet to wed with him who rules us with a hand of iron, bound in thongs of softest velvet. ”

“ Ah, heart of gold, why art thou broke? O King!
Whence falleth he?'
"And Yudhishthira said,
Not pausing: 'Once he lied, a lordly lie!
He bragged—our brother—that a single day
Should see him utterly consume, alone,
All those his enemies,—which could not be.
Yet from a great heart sprang the unmeasured speech.
Howbeit, a finished hero should not shame
Himself in such wise, nor his enemy,
If he will faultless fight and blameless die:
This was Arjuna's sin. Follow thou me!'
"So the king still went on. ”

“ I have published this pamphlet in order to refute beforehand inventions and slanders against the faith of Islam and against Moslems generally, and I affirm that what the Armenians have suffered is to be attributed to the Committee of Union and Progress, who deal with the empire as they please; it has been due to their nationalist fanaticism and their jealousy of the Armenians, and to these alone; the Faith of Islam is guiltless of their deeds. ”

“ And because his intellect and wisdom were in no way clouded by this association with a human soul, he says he can recollect all his previous incarnations, while Arjuna, not yet having fully received the light of the Logos, is not in a position to understand all that took place in connection with his former births. He says that it is his object to look after the welfare of humanity, and that whenever a special incarnation is necessary, he unites himself with the soul of a particular individual ”

“ Why have the Armenians been so cruelly persecuted, oppressed, tortured and butchered? Why were their beautiful daughters abducted, their wives ravished, they themselves massacred by the Kurds, Circassians, and Turks? Not because they belong to a different nationality—though they do—but because they belong to a different religion—they are Christians. So I beg the reader to bear in mind that the real trouble or the Armenian question, at the bottom, is the old conflict, first between Christianity and Paganism, then between Christianity and Mohammedanism, and now with Pagan-Mohammedanism. ”

“ I have seen young men who had fought the enemy day and night, without sleeping. Their eyesight had been so affected that they were practically blind, and they were transferred to the Red Cross Station to be treated. Even then they were very cheerful. While the shrapnel was raining upon Van, the Armenian children were playing soldiers in the streets.
Armenag Yegarian, with his cool and able leadership; Aram, with his constant presence and advice; P. Terlemezian, with his great heart; Krikor of Bulgaria, with his indefatigable industry and inventive genius—they were very able leaders. ”

“ It is not the isolated fact that Armenia is now undergoing a most terrible persecution, that fifty thousand or sixty thousand helpless men, women and children have already suffered death in every form which the most depraved nature, the most cruel instincts, the most bitter and fanatical hatred could devise, that so deeply arouses us ”

“ An unknown writer874 tells the king that
“five commanders of Armenia entered the city of Uesi, Sêteni [of whom we heard above] commander of ... teni, Ḳaḳḳadânu of the writer's district, or of Ukkai, Sakuatâ of Ḳaniun, Siblia of Alzi, Ṭutu of Armiraliu, these are their names. With three underlings, they entered Uesi. Now their forces are weak and weakening (?) , the forces are (?) , the king has set out from Ṭurushpîa, he has come into Kaniun. What the king, my lord, sent me, saying, ‘Send scouts,’ I have sent a second time. The spies (?) ”

“ He heard voices—those of Adventus and the Indian.
Arjuna was generally so silent that Philostratus had vainly endeavored to discover from him any particulars as to the doctrine of the Brahmans, among whom Apollonius of Tyana declared that he had found the highest wisdom, or concerning the manners of his people. And yet the Indian was a man of learning, and could even read the manuscripts of his country. The Parthian ambassador had expressly dwelt on this when he delivered Arjuna to Caesar as a gift from his king. But Arjuna had never favored any of these strangers with his confidence. ”

“ Perhaps no translation of the Scriptures has ever made so deep an impression on a people as this one has made on the Armenians. By them it was taken as a symbolical history of their own country. Did not the events recorded in the very first chapters happen in Armenia? and also the second Creation after the Flood? Did not their beloved mountain, Ararat, figure in the latter story? In the Bible they found even the names of their national heroes, Haik and Vahagn, though, as we have seen, for the latter names only the translators are responsible. ”

“ Few among us have acquired their language, one of the most ancient forms of human speech that possess a literature. Still fewer have studied their art or read their poetry even in translations. There is, therefore, an ample field for a book which shall present to those Englishmen and Frenchmen, whose interest in Armenia has been awakened by the sufferings to which its love of freedom and its loyalty to its Christian faith have exposed it, some account of Armenian art and Armenian poetical literature. ”

“ It is for the youngest Christian nation on earth to say whether the oldest shall perish and be no more, and whether the followers of Mohammed shall be the sole inhabitants of that land which, in the beginning of all things, was the Garden of Eden. If we turn a deaf ear now to the supplications of the starving thousands of fellow-Christians in Eastern Turkey, the coming of spring will see the troublous Armenian question forever at rest. There will be no more Armenian question, for there may be no more Armenians. ”

“ He must be equal in soul, abandon the desire of the fruits of work, rise above his intellectual notions of sin and virtue, live and act in Yoga with a mind in Samadhi, firmly fixed, that is to say, in the Divine alone. Arjuna is not satisfied: he wishes to know how the change to this state will affect the outward action of the man, what result it will have on his speech, his movements, his state, what difference it will make in this acting, living human being. ”

“ For although Arjuna is himself concerned only with his own situation, his inner struggle and the law of action he must follow, yet, as we have seen, the particular question he raises, in the manner in which he raises it does really bring up the whole question of human life and action, what the world is and why it is and how possibly, it being what it is, life here in the world can be reconciled with life in the Spirit. ”

“ Such is the evil end of the Armenian race: let it be a warning to those peoples who are striving for freedom, and let them understand that freedom is not to be achieved but by the shedding of blood, and that words are the stock-in-trade of the weak alone. ”

“ Arjuna, the disciple who receives his initiation on the battle-field, is a counterpart of this conception; he is the type of the struggling human soul who has not yet received the knowledge, but has grown fit to receive it by action in the world in a close companionship and an increasing nearness to the higher and divine Self in humanity. ”

“ It is their religion which has held the Armenians together in spite of centuries of persecution by Persian satraps; in spite of the tyranny of Seljuk sultans; in spite of the pogroms of Russian autocrats. To no other people in the world, save only those of the real “Niobe of nations”—the long-suffering but invincible sons and daughters of Erin—has their religion served as a stronger bond of union than it has to the cruelly harassed [311] and down-trodden Armenians. ”

“ There is no nation in the world which has suffered as much persecution, oppression, injustice and martyrdom as the Armenians, yet there is not a nation, even with less advantages, that can compare with them in education. They are like the Jews also in this respect that wherever there is a sufficient number, they have a church and close by is a school. There is less illiteracy among the Armenians than among some Roman Catholic countries. ”

“ Armenia has stood the only Christian race and nation in Asia, for more than a thousand years, despite the oft repeated threat, Islam or Death. At any hour, in any age its glorious roll of martyrs would have been filled up and its blood would have ceased to flow, if it had been willing to deny the Christ and swear allegiance to the false Prophet. ”

“ Our self-imposed task to voice as clearly and strongly as we could the History and Horrors of Armenia under the Curse of Islam is nearly finished. For many weeks the fires have burned hot within us, and the daily news from the land of sorrows has only made our heart beat more rapidly and our pen fly the faster that our appeal might reach your ears while yet there was time to save from utter destruction a remnant of this most ancient Christian people of whom two hundred thousand now look to England and America for daily bread. ”

“ For he is, as the Teacher points out to his disciple, the best who has to get the standard for others ; and in fact Arjuna is called upon to live according to-the highest ideals of his age and the prevailing culture, but with knowledge, with understanding of that which lay behind, and not as ordinary men, with a following of the merely outward law and rule.
But the point here is that the modern mind has exiled from its practical motive-power the two essential things, God or the Eternal and spirituality or the God-state, which are the master conceptions of the Gita. ”

“ No one of intelligence could deny that the new religion and new philosophy which was preached at El Amârna was more worthy of consideration on general lines than was the narrow doctrine of the Amon priesthood; and all thinkers must have rejoiced at the freedom from bonds which had become intolerable. But the world was not ready, and indeed is still not ready, for the schemes which Akhnaton propounded; and the unpractical model-kingdom which was uncertainly developing under the hills of El Amârna must have already been seen to contain the elements of grave danger to the State. ”

“ Whatever progress has been realized by the Armenians has been despite the systematic opposition of the Turkish government. They have smuggled, so to say, European elements of civilization into Armenia. But Armenian experience proved that it is vain, it is even dangerous, for Christians under Moslem rule to try to progress, to multiply schools and churches and colleges, to educate the children, to send the young men to the Universities of Europe and America, to be economical and industrious, to grow rich and to be influential or merely to be born beautiful under the Turkish flag. ”

“ James Bryce, in his supplementary chapter to the 4th edition of his book “Transcaucasia and Ararat” makes the following grave comment:—
“Twenty years is a short space in the life of a nation. But these twenty years have been filled with sufferings for the Armenian Christians greater than their ancestors had to endure during the eight centuries that have passed since the first Turkish Conquest of Armenia. They have been years of misery, slaughter, martyrdom, agony, despair.” ”

“ He calls himself the cavalier of the streets, but when he is up to any of his tricks he disguises himself as an Armenian—the disguise consisting merely of his saying he is an Armenian. It's so simple, he says, for the mugs believe him at once, on the ground that no one would say he was an Armenian if he wasn't. ”

“ The rest of Arjuna’s questions and utterances proceed from the same temperament and character. When he is told that once the soul-state is assured there need be no apparent change in the action, he must act always by the law of his nature, even if the act itself seem faulty and deficient compared with that of another law than his own, he is troubled. The nature! but what of this sense of sin in the action with which he is preoccupied? is it not this very nature which drives men as if by force and even against their better will into sin and guilt ? ”