Later, in the fifth, sixth and seventh centuries ce, there was plenty of Christian activity at Amarna, much of it conccntrated in the south of the site around Kom el-Nana, and there were monastic buildings at the northern tombs. Some ostraca recently discovered at Amarna suggest that this area may have been known in Coptic as Teglooge, literally ' The Ladder', a name often associated with monastic sites in Egypt, and very appropriate for one loeated in a high, inacccssiblc place like the northern tombs. At about this time the tomb of Panehesy (number 6) was converted into a church. The reliefs of Akhenaten and Nefertiti offering to the Aten were plastered over and replaced with Christian monograms, images of saints and prayers in Coptic (see Figure 2.9). The tomb of Huya (number 1) was inscribed with religious texts, now too damaged to translate consecutively, though the words 'god', 'our lord' and 'pray' recur.'" Other Coptic documents from Amarna, though few in number, clearly point to involvement with sccular matters. Two of these texts seem to have been sent to the monks from an army camp at Pedjla near el-Hagg Qandil, and the nature of the texts (receipts and
Figure 2.9 A Coptic saint painted over a relief of Akhenaten and Nefertiti offering to the Aten, from the tomb of Panehesy. Redrawn from Davies 1905a.
acknowledgements of tax payments) shows that the monastic inhabitants of the site in late antiquity were still part of the bureaucratic world outside.73
On the level of folklore, the kind of religious, political and human turmoil that characterised the latter part of Akhenaten's reign is often mythologised.71 Passages in some Greek and Roman writers suggest that this is exactly what happened, and that Akhenaten was still remembered nearly a millennium after his death. The Greek historian Herodotus, writing in the mid-fifth century bce, mentions a king who 'first closed all the temples so that nobody could make their sacrifices, then forced all the Egyptians to work for him' in stone-quarries. This may preserve some memory of Akhenaten transformed into the paradigmatic bad king of Egypt, but the parallel is tenuous.75 A more probable echo of Akhenaten's story is in the third-century bce author Manetho, whose work has only survived in resumes, quotations and translations by other ancient writers. Manetho had some knowledge of Akhenaten's reign, perhaps derived from Egyptian-language chronicles in temple libraries, and oral histories which called Akhenaten 'Osarseph'. He related a story about a certain King Amenophis (i.e. Amunhotep III), who wanted to see a vision of the gods and asked the seer Amenophis son of Paapis to help him do so. The seer predicted that there would be disaster in Egypt for thirteen years, and then committed suicide at the prospect.71' Manetho also refers to great physical upheaval being involved in the story. He says that there was a movement of 80,000 people to a remote area east of the Nile, which was later abandoned. Could this be some memory of the move to Akhet-aten, the thirteen or so years Akhenaten lived there, and its eventual destruction? Historically there is not much to go on here, especially given the confusion of Manetho's text. The anecdote may just show that the end of Amunhotep Ill's reign was somehow connected with a vague memory of troubled times ahead. The surviving resumes of Manetho ascribe various successors to Amunhotep III, some of them with names superficially similar to Akhenaten, such as Akcncheres and Akencherscs. Other versions of the events of Akhenaten's reign were circulating as late as the second century ce, though it is not clear to what extent these depend on Manetho's history.77 These versions share a strong tradition of connecting Moses with a period of religious icono- clasm and political brutality in Egypt lasting thirteen years. One of them, Against Apion (an apologia for Judaism by the Jewish author Flavius Josephus), is the first to link a folklore version of Akhenaten with the biblical Moses, another idea which will rccur throughout this book.
In spite of all this confusion among the ancient historians, they do seem to hint that some events of the Amarna period lived on in Egypt's collective memory. And once recorded in important classical authors like Josephus, the story was set to live on for the educated elites in the west who read Greek and Latin - which was exactly what happened. In the ancient authorities like Manetho one could read about battles, conspiracies and struggles in ancient Egypt that gave insight into human character and were a guide to moral behaviour. In this oblique way, Akhenaten went on to be rediscovered by seventeenth- and eighteenth- century writers, who created allegories set in Egypt that prefigure the Akhenaten myth.
One example is Civitas So lis (The City of the Sun) by Tommaso Campanella (1568-1639), published in 1623. A mystic convinced of his own messianic mission, Campanella was arrested and tortured by the Inquisition, and wrote Cwitas Solis while he was in prison. Its central text is a verse of the Bible, Isaiah 19:18: 'In that day there shall be five cities in the land of Egypt . . . one shall be called the city of the sun.' Around this verse Campanella created an elaborate Utopia, an answer to the ecclesiastical and political corruption of his day. The city of the sun was ruled by a pacifist and benign theocracy, who worshipped a sun-god oddly like the Aten. 'They serve under the sign of the sun which is the symbol and visage of god from whom comes light and warmth and every other thing.'78 Another example is the allegorical novel Sethos (1731) by the French scholar and classicist Abbe Jean Terrasson (1670-1750), which is based closely on Manetho. Sethos is mostly remembered for its influence upon Masonic myth, but Terrasson also created a parallel of the Akhenaten myth without ever having heard of Akhenaten himself. Sethos is a highly moral tale. It tells the story of Prince Sethos, son of King Osoroth of Egypt and Queen Nephtc. Osoroth cares only for pleasure and nothing for the business of government. He delegates the tedious work of ruling to his capable wife. Sethos is the paradigmatic good prince, and very much his mother's son. He is keen to take instruction on spiritual and temporal matters from the priests of Memphis in order to rule well; but he finds that they are too corrupt, and goes in search of a purer, older wisdom at the Pyramids. Here he is enlightened, and to mark his new spiritual status, Sethos changes his name to Cheres. Terrasson borrowed this name from Manctho's account of the successors of Amunhotep III in the Eighteenth Dynasty. Cheres-Sethos suffers many tribulations because of his political rivals, and though he is reviled at the time, his message lives on after his death as an instruction for the future.