But it was the second part of the book that really amazed me, as it effortlessly jumped a thousand years forward without anything changing much—easily achieved in Ancient Egyptian history—to another Pharaoh who was even more remarkable—Akhenaton. Akhenaton, or Ikhnaton, or Akhatenton, originally Amenhotep IV, was the heretic who decided there was only one god, the Sun, Aton as he called it, and as such is the first monotheist we know of. The glorious one-eyed statue of the Ava Gardner look-alike Nefertiti was his wife. After twenty-odd years, the outraged priests struck back and overthrew Akhenaton’s city and his sun-god and restored the old gods, attempting to remove all trace of the heretic period. They failed, or else we would not know about it.
    But the point is this—just one hundred years later, Moses was a young prince in Egypt, and you can bet your socks that the monotheism of Akhenaton still existed as an underground movement, to which he undoubtedly gained access. This then was the origin of the Judeo-Christian-Moslem religions. Akhenaton was the man who created God as we know him. I thought I was a genius for discovering this, since no one else, certainly not Cotterill, seemed to realise it. But, of course, all fourteen year olds tend to overestimate their own brilliance...