William Durand-Poole

bent over, doubled over in obsequiousness before him, you know, and crouching on the ground very often as though they're afraid to stand up, you know.

I think he was a real tyrant.

The process of hacking out the name of a deity is important.

Those people who could read in Egypt, and these are the priests, of course, whenever they read, they had to read aloud.

There was no such thing as silent reading.

And so immediately they would say, they saw the hieroglyphs, Amun, it would come out.

By cancelling their names, of course, they cannot say the name of the god.

And if the name of the god isn't there, does the god exist in that case?

Does a tree in a forest fall and make a sound?

You know, it's that kind of thing.

If we don't say the name of the god, does he exist at all?

Yes.

It's not that he's denying the presence of the old gods, but they are rivals to his new god.

I think that's an important thing, you know.

And he wants to foreground his new god, which, of course, is so completely linked to him.

So really, I mean, it's self-aggrandizement, I think, more than anything else here.

Absolutely, absolutely.

And what I can't get my head around, okay, so it's rather like if you think about Britain...

You know, in the 1540s, say, with, you know, the way in which the old church images were being whitewashed over or hacked to pieces.

But what do we do with the belief?