Akhenaten [History, fantasy and ancient Egypt]

Figure 2.8 African and Asiatic enemies of Egypt, from the painted pavement in the 'House of Rejoicing of the Aten'. Egyptian Museum, Cairo.

their extraterrestrial origins, or Akhenaten's thick lips and high cheekbones as evidence that he was black (see Plate 5.1). The assumption that Akhenaten's statues and reliefs are to be read literally as realistic portraits is by no means confined to heterodox writing. Cyril Aldred and Donald Rcdford both maintain that Akhenaten's iconography reflects a real-life physical difference rather than expressing a theology in which the king is so beyond the human that he must be shown as inhabiting a different body. This has resulted in an extraordinary historical fascination with Akhenaten's physical body, especially his sexual biology. Cyril Aldred collaborated with a physician, and combined medical science with Amarna artistic images to diagnose that Akhenaten was afflicted with Frohlich's Syndrome, a glandular disorder. Sufferers from Frohlich's Syndrome share the physical irregularities apparently shown on certain statues of Akhenaten: obesity, feminine distributions of fat in thighs and buttocks, hydrocephalus resulting in ballooning of the skull, and so on.^M Aldred was evidently rather pleased with his version of the Frohlich's Syndrome theory, though he acknowledged that it had problems (sufferers from Frohlich's Syndrome are usually infertile, for instance), and that Akhenaten's iconography could also be explicable theologically. More recently, it has been suggested that Akhenaten suffered from another medical condition, Marfan's Syndrome, an inherited disorder of the connective tissue which affects the organ system, skeleton and eyesight.''^b Individuals with Marfan's Syndrome are often unusually tall, with long faces, chest deformities, and fingers extended by the stretching of the connective tissues - again, physical traits apparently discernible on Akhenaten's reliefs and statues. In this case, the scholarly search for precisely what was 'wrong' with Akhenaten has filtered down to literature distributed by help organisations for people with Marfan's Syndrome in Canada and the USA. This literature presents Akhenaten as a positive role model for sufferers from the disease: in spite of the physical limitations the condition imposes, he still managed to run a kingdom and produce great religious poetry. Akhenaten functions here, through his body, as a historical 'first' of significance to sufferers from the disease and how they might build an empowered self-image in an unsympathetic world.

There is now a broad consensus among Egyptologists that the exaggerated forms of Akhenaten's physical portrayal - what E. M. Forster called 'the exquisite deformities that appear in Egyptian art under Akhnaton' -arc not to be read literally.^b7 Their common denominator is a symbolic gathering of all attributes of the creator-god into the physical body of the king himself. The Aten subsumes into itself all the different gods who create and maintain the universe, and the king is the living image of the Aten on earth. He can therefore display on earth the Aten's mutiple life-giving functions. These are represented through a set of signifiers that seem mutually contradictory to modern viewers, such as the appearance of female and male physical characteristics on the same statue, but made sense to the intended Egyptian audience. These attributes render the king literally suprahuman, a divine body which goes beyond human experience. Perhaps the easiest reminder that Amarna art is not natural or realistic in the way these terms are usually understood is by looking at it alongside images whose propaganda function is more transparent. Socialist realist art produced in the USSR under Communism is an obvious parallel. I use this example not because I think that Akhenaten was a proto-dictator, but because I think that Soviet realism and Amarna art are motivated by a similar inventory of considerations about the relationship of the ruler to politics. Both artistic traditions produced monumental works centred around iconic and divinised figures of the ruler not necessarily based on that ruler's actual physical appearance. Sometimes they share symbolic ways of representing that divinity and the suprahuman quality of the ruler's message. The real ruler has been replaced by a body-icon built around an idea. Both Akhenaten's sculptors and the Communist artists portrayed 'the idea of the man; as flesh and blood he might have ccased to exist; he had becomc a bundle of conccpts, the embodiment of all virtue, a divinity'.¹'⁸

Pharaoh with no name

The Eighteenth Dynasty consisted of 14 kings at Thebes. . . .

Achencheres ruled for 16 years. In his time Moses became leader of the

Jews in their exodus from Egypt.

Manetho (third century bce)

There is another obvious (perhaps too obvious) parallel between Akhenaten and Stalinism. Both their regimes eventually became officially unacceptable, and attempts were made to expunge their memories. The last essential component of the Akhenaten myth centres around the destruction of his monuments at Thebes and Akhet-aten, and the erasure of his name in official contexts. This was partly intended to create an ideologically correct view of history from which the Amarna experiment could be deleted. Akhenaten and his successors do not appear on temple king lists because Nineteenth Dynasty pharaohs did not want to make offerings to their names. But this was also supposed to ensure personal oblivion for Akhenaten himself. Egyptian ideas about rebirth placcd great emphasis on speaking the name of the deceased: without being commemorated in this way, no rebirth was possible. The demolition of Akhenaten's monuments was part of this process. So was the invention of euphemisms for him, such as "the criminal of Akhet-aten', so that no one would have to speak his unlucky name. It was hoped that Akhenaten would have no after-life — not only in the sense of religious rebirth, but also in the sense of Nachleben or historical after-life. This was not something unique to Akhenaten and other politically unacceptable rulers like Hatshepsut: pharaohs at many periods of Egyptian history were subjected to this.⁶⁹ The fact that Akhenaten's successors needed to make such efforts at all suggests that his memory was still alive a century after his death; and it may have continued to live on for many ccnturics after that. After all, visible erasure is itself an oblique form of commemoration. It is easy to restore Stalin from his feet left behind in photographs ineptly doctored in the 1950s de-Stalinisation programme. Even erasure from monumental contexts would not make Akhenaten into a forgotten pharaoh. Writing Akhenaten out of official commemorations does not mean that he would not survive in a broader historical sense. His influence might live on in other ways too, and there is good reason to suppose that it did.

Part of the attempt to obliterate Akhenaten personally was the destruction of Akhet-aten. His city is usually depictcd as a deserted ghost town, waiting to be rediscovered by the western archaeologists who are the only ones who 'know' Egypt and can rescue its past from oblivion. In 1982 Aldred quoted approvingly Norman de Garis Davies' comment that Amarna was 'a chance bivouac in the march of history, filled for a moment with all the movement and colour of intense life, and then abandoned to deeper silence'.⁷⁰ A television documentary about Akhet-aten, screened on British TV's BBC2 in April 1999, was called Egypt's Lost City, as though it were a sort of Pompeii. Akhet-aten/Amarna has become the romantic lost city par excellence, a sort of Atlantis or even a deserted Eden. One nineteenth-century writer called Amarna 'The Dream-City' in a moony poem which talked about traversing the 'solemn wilderness' of destroyed Amarna, where one might 'feel still fresh the wonder and the calm / Of greatness passed away' (see p. 147).

However well such a portrayal of the site might suit the romantic idea of an idyll blown away, it is misleading. On the east bank waterfront of Amarna, there has been some sort of occupation more or less continuously from the end of the Eighteenth Dynasty. Akhet-aten continued to be used throughout the reign of Tutankhamun and probably into the reign of Horemhcb, last pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty, who left inscriptions at the great Aten temple. People living in the workmen's village may have guarded the tombs, and there was perhaps an expectation that the city would need protection until it was reinhabited. There seems to have been a partial rcoccupation of parts of the site in the reign of Ramesses III, c. 1194 1163 bce.'¹ The stone parts of city buildings were taken away for reuse in monuments at Hermopolis and elsewhere, but their mud-brick components, and those buildings constructed entirely of mud-brick, remained standing to an appreciable extent. (When Napoleon's surveyors visited Amarna in 1798 or 1799, they marvelled at the exposed mud-brick pylon of the small Aten temple, still over 7 metres high.) Akhenaten's 'Royal Road' through the ancient city centre continued to be the main route connccting the villages of el- Till and el-Hagg Qandil. The site continued to attract visitors throughout the Ptolemaic and Roman periods, especially the northern group of tombs. Amarna may even have been a stop on the itineraries of tourists, who were evidently impressed with the physical remains, as I discuss in the next chapter. It is possible that memories of Akhenaten in some form lingered among the ruins of his city, perhaps as a vague but still powerful aura attached to the site. Something more than the prospcct of high mud-brick walls and a good view must have attracted visitors to this inacccssible spot.