Who is this hero, sprung from gods. Whom, from afar, my eyes survey? Sec him approach! His features I can trace: My heart knew Cheres, ere my eyes his face. Is he that hero? Was his valour giv'n To be the instrument of gracious heav'n?79
Terrasson's novel corresponds to the basic motifs of the Akhenaten myth closely, even down to 'Nephte' being one of the principal characters! Present are the distant lazy father like Amunhotep, the energetic domineering mother like Tiye, the close bond between mother and son, the change of name, the spiritual ascent towards a lost ancient wisdom which is misunderstood at the time but survives because of its transcendent worth.
'My heart knew Cheres, ere my eyes his face': the line makes as much sense when Akhenaten is substituted for Cheres. The similarities of Campanella's and
Terrasson's elaborate fables to Akhenaten's history are coincidental, but they still show the extent to which Akhenaten's story had already been written long before his historical rediscovery. This becomes all the more striking in the light of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century interest in the variously named successors of Amunhotep III (Manetho's Akencheres/Akencherses/Achencheres), because of their supposed connection with Moses and the Exodus. Following popular histories, such as the Histoire universelle of Bossuet, some historians at this time believed that the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt was a time of supreme importance in human history. One British writer went so far as to say that 'there is every probability that the founders of that dynasty were also the founders and originators of the entire frame-work of social organisation which exists at the present day'.80 British social and political institutions, such as a division between church and state, universities to maintain high culture, even land taxes, were all supposed to have originated in Egypt during the Eighteenth Dynasty. And who brought these benefits from Egypt to England? The last of Amenophis' line, Akencheres, the pseudo-Akhenaten, 'whose expulsion . . . led to the civilisation of Greece, of Europe, and it may be emphatically said, of this country'.8'
Ancient history has always been about trying to organise the welter of evidence from the past into interrelated, conceptually manageable and presently meaningful narratives, so that the past could be held up to the present, like a mirror. In Akhenaten's case, the narrative had been predetermined in terms of what Egypt was supposed to supply to the west; so when Akhenaten was rediscovered by archaeologists and historians, he stepped neatly into the niche which had already been carved for him. How the developing discipline of archaeology made Akhenaten confirm fables of a monotheistic, pacifist, sun- worshipping Utopia in Egypt that offered the modern world something it had lost is the subject of the next chapter.
THE ARCHAEOLOGIES OF AMARNA
Some time in the second century ce, a Roman citizen called Catullinus visited the tomb of Ahmose, tomb 3 of the northern group at Amarna. He walked past the faqade, showing Ahmose adoring the royal cartouches, past the small hall with the 'hymn' to the Aten, and entered the main hall of the tomb. Here Catullinus would have seen images of Akhenaten and Nefertiti riding in a chariot from the palace to the Aten temple, with a military escort. On the undecorated wall behind him, he could see something very different from the scenes carved by Akhenaten's artisans: a confused, overlapping mass of Greek graffiti, cut into the tomb walls by visitors over a period of several centuries before Catullinus stood there. Unlike the hieroglyphic inscriptions in the tomb, he could certainly read the graffiti. He would have read how one man, Spartacus the runner, visited the tomb during Alexander of Macedon's occupation of Egypt in the 320s bce, and how another man, Philinus, made the journey to Amarna in regnal year 19 of Ptolemy Alexander, that is in 96 or 95 bce. An anonymous Roman traveller recorded his visit in year 37 of Augustus, around 7 ce. Other visitors to the northern tombs felt awed by the power of a place they believed to be somehow holy, and showed their respect to the gods they perceived there by leaving religious drawings and graffiti. It is slighdy misleading to call these inscriptions 'graffiti', which really offer the writers' thanks to the gods for allowing safe passage through their territory. The funerary god Anubis appears in them, so maybe the northern tombs at Amarna retained their original associations with death and rebirth (see Figure 3.1).
Perhaps the wall of tangled graffiti written by earlier travellers augmented Catullinus' sense of the tomb's antiquity and, like them, he was moved to leave a permanent memorial of his visit. Catullinus was well enough educated to compose a neat metrical inscription in Greek to record his presence:
After climbing up here, I, Catullinus, engraved this in the doorway,
amazed at the skill of the holy stone-cutters.1
The graffiti in Ahmose's tomb show that people kept coming to this remote place for centuries. They journeyed there at all times of year, even when
Figure 3.1 Drawing of Anubis, from ihc tomb of Huya at Amarna, Roman period: the left-hand figure holds the keys to the underworld. Redrawn from Davies 1905b.
travelling was difficult during the hot summer months and the flood in humid August. No wonder that they sometimes recorded their gratitude to the god Pan Euhodos, equated with the Egyptian god Min, patron deity of the desert and dangerous journeys! Whatever led them to the place also led them to inscribe a permanent record of their presence, leaving behind a rocky carte de visite. Perhaps Amarna, or the northern tombs in particular, had acquired a special reputation or resonance - what some anthropologists call a numen, a palpable but indefinible power of placc which evokes in onlookers a feeling of awe mingled with a sense of their own powerlessness. At any rate, the graffito of Catullinus and some others in the Amarna tombs suggest that they were perceived as awe-inspiring, powerful and holy.2
Akhenaten is indivisibly associated with Amarna, and the archaeological rediscoveries of his city go hand in hand with rediscoveries of him. This chapter examines how excavations at Amarna have been interpreted since the first European travellers reached there at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and how these interpretations have affected the Akhenaten legend.5 The most famous names in Egyptology excavated at Amarna or visited there: Gardner Wilkinson, Lepsius, Flinders Petrie, Howard Carter. Even Jean-Franqois Champollion (1790-1832), the decipherer of hieroglyphs, visited the tomb of Ahmose in 1828 or 1829: he found the carvings of Akhenaten unpleasingly feminine and concluded that he must have been suffering from some hideous disease.4 My focus here is on personalities as much as on digging strategies, because it seems to me that the people involved in digging and publicising Amarna have all had particular agendas about the presentation of Egypt: it is important to consider this background. I also concentrate on those antiquarians and archaeologists who made efforts to popularise their discoveries at Amarna. Early antiquarians at Amarna such as Claude Sicard, Edme Jomard and Gardner Wilkinson were much impressed by the strangeness of the things they saw there, and how different they were from the way they expected Egyptian monuments to look. They allowed themselves to respond emotionally to the inherent power of a place which had no particular historical associations for them. But these responses to the site change as Akhenaten and his beliefs become more familiarised, especially through fascination with him as the proto-monothcist. Then Amarna is gradually transformed from a strange and awesome environment to a place where ancient Egypt can be known and comprehended in contemporary terms. In the years preceding the Second World War, strange or uncanny aspects of Amarna's archaeology were downplayed, and it metamorphosed from a numinous mystery into a version of suburban London, the prototype garden suburb. With hindsight, it is easy to smile knowingly at the garish reconstructions of Amarna produced for the mass-circulation illustrated papers of the 1920s and 1930s, which provide the city with every institution of the modern urban built environment. (See Plate 3.1.) Images like this, however, still live on. In popular books and magazines such as The National Geographic, the pristine city of Akhet-aten, 'fresh, glittering, dedicated . . . where the paint and plaster were scarcely dry, where hammer and chisel still rang and rasped with feverish activity',1 is a persistent fantasy of ancient Egypt. As with all the most seductive images of antiquity, however, it is appealing but only a small part of the story.