The grottoes have sculptures of a very peculiar style. The figures are similar to those at Gebel Toona; and the king and queen, frequently attended by their children, are in like manner represented praying to the Sun, whose rays, terminating in human hands, give them the sign of life. It was by accident that I first discovered these grottoes in 1824, being distant from the river, and then unknown to the boatmen of the Nile. The royal names, as at Gebel Toona, have been invariably defaced, evidently by the Egyptians themselves. Some have supposed that the kings, whose names are found here, belong to the dynasty of shepherds, whose memory was odious, as their rule was oppressive to the Egyptians; but their era does not agree with the date of these sculptures. They may, however, have been later invaders; and there is reason to believe that that they made a change in the religion . . . which would account for the erasure of their names. From their features it is evident they were not Egyptians; their omission in the list of kings, the erasure of their names, the destruction of their monuments, and the abject submission they required, prove them to have been looked on with hatred in the country; and the peculiar mode of worshipping and representing the Sun argues that their religion differed from the Egyptian.11
To Wilkinson, Amarna sculpture was so anomalous that it can only be explained by having a foreign origin. But his account is also laced with the staple ingredients of Gothic fiction. The people at Amarna arc despotic figures of political excess, despised and ultimately destroyed by their subjects. These threatening figures are depicted on the walls of remote, abandoned 'grottoes', evoking the dark subterranean vaults that were such popular settings for Gothic novels. And, of course, many Gothic tales took place in the 'Orient', an exotic space where the imagination could roam unboundedly. Wilkinson might even have been thinking of books from his own library, such as William Beckford's Vathek (1786), the story of a tyrannical voluptuary caliph who builds magnificent palaces to indulge himself but is eventually damned for his lack of restraint. Wilkinson's Amarna is imbued with an atmosphere of gloom and mystery, populated by spectral figures, to promote a sense of awe, wonder and terrified expectation in the reader or potential traveller.
While enjoying the dramatic potential of Amarna, Wilkinson was also well aware of its archaeological importance and the possibility that the tombs might yield treasure. When he visited Amarna two years later with the artist and traveller James Burton (1788-1862), he swore him to secrecy about the tombs, even though they were used to sharing information about their discoveries with other English antiquarians, such as Robert Hay (1799-1863) and Joseph Bonomi (1796-1878), all of whom travelled together in Egypt. Burton, however, found the Amarna material so interesting and important that he had to tell Hay, who fulminated incoherently to his diary about the violation of their gentlemen's agreement on Amarna (called here 'Alabastron'):
Two travellers have known of the existence of the Tombs of Alabastron for perhaps three years - perhaps more, and yet this piece of knowledge [h]as been kept as secret, thus guarded with as much care as ever miser watched and fondled watched and fondled [sic] the largest treasure ever told! This too with fellow-labourers in the same Country and apparently living on the most friendly terms - often meeting & of course making the country a great part of the sub ject of conversation.12
Hay goes on to speculate about Wilkinson's duplicity, and concludes that only greed over the division of any spectacular finds at Amarna could have led him to act in such a disloyal way. (Hay returned to Amarna in the summer of 1830, spending two months there: his exquisite drawings of the boundary stelae and other monuments remain important archaeological records.)
To an extent, Wilkinson's Amarna was replete with the familiar Egyptian trappings of treasure, tombs and mystery. In Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians, however, Wilkinson presented another Amarna alongside this - Amarna as the Egyptian urban environment in microcosm. 'In order to give a better notion of the general arrangement of houses and streets in an Egyptian town, I shall introduce the plan of an ancient city near Tel el Amarna.'11 Wilkinson realised that there were problems with taking Amarna as representative of all ancient Egyptian towns, noting how the site is unusually long and narrow and distant from the Nile. Even so, Amarna provided the best evidence he had, and by comparing it to contemporary Egyptian towns, he created an inhabited space out of the ruins. Even shops get a mention. He compares them to the shops of the Cairo suq, where 'an idle lounger frequently passes whole hours, less intent on benefiting the shop-keeper, than in amusing himself with the busy scene of the passing crowd', but also to those in London, even down to the 'by royal appointment' signs fixed outside.14 Gardner Wilkinson's Amarna is a paradoxical one. It is both London and Cairo, both the progressive, teleological west and the leisured, passive Orient. It is simultaneously utterly knowable and utterly strange. It is the paradigm for Egyptian urban life, while also being an archaeological anomaly. It bears the burden of proof for his larger thesis about the Egyptians as proto-monotheists, but at the same time is the backdrop for a Gothic drama performed by Orientalist figures of excess.
The next person after Wilkinson to excavate Amarna in any detail was Karl Richard Lepsius (1810-84). At the head of the Prussian archaeological mission to Egypt financed by King Friedrich Wilhclm IY Lepsius and his team of draughtsmen stopped twice at Amarna: once on 19 September 1843 for three days, and then for a week in June 1845 on their return journey from recording the monuments of the Sudan. Lepsius was collccting information for his Denk- mdler Agyptens und Athiopiens (1849—59), a twelve-volume magnum opus that is still an invaluable resource. While at Amarna he concentrated on recording the northern tombs and the boundary stelae, and making drawings, casts and paper squeezes of reliefs and inscriptions. In the course of his work he collected some fine art pieces that later entered the Berlin Museum. He also drew a ground plan of the ruins. Lepsius was less romantic than Wilkinson about Amarna. In a letter of 20 November 1843 he noted, 'While still in Europe I had recognised the builder of these monuments, and some other allied kings, to be antagonistic kings of the 18th Dynasty.'1' In a paper delivered to the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin in 1851, Lepsius elaborated on this theory, using the data he had collected at Amarna to put together the first scholarly synthesis of what was known about Akhenaten.
It was the cosier aspects of Wilkinson's Amarna, however, that were most widely picked up and disseminated in the Anglophone world, particularly in writings of the 1850s about Egypt and the Bible. Typical are the works of William Osburn (1793—c. 1869), an amateur Egyptologist and zealous anti-Catholic (his other books included Hidden Works of Darkness: or, the Doings of the Jesuits). Between 1841 and 1854 he wrote several books on how Egyptian archaeology proved the Bible's historicity, using Wilkinson as one of his main sources of archaeological data, among them The Antiquities of Egypt. Ancient Egypt, her Testimony to the Truth of the Bible (1846); Israel in Egypt, or the Books of Genesis and Exodus illustrated by Existing Monuments (1853) and The Monumental History of Egypt as recorded on the Ruins of her Temples, Palaces and Tombs (1854). Osburn writes of Amarna that 'the utter absence of the social affections, which so painfully characterizes the pictures of the life of man at all other epochs of the history of Ancient Egypt, is greatly mitigated in this single place'. His follows this with a description of a relief of the royal family, emphasising the harmonious union of Akhenaten and Nefertiti and their affectionate attitude towards their daughters. Given Osburn's broader agenda, the reason for this unusual representation 'of the social affections' at Amarna is not hard to predict: 'It is neither illogical nor improbable to refer this great moral improvement to the influence of the comparatively purer and more truthful doctrine regarding the Divine existence, for which these sectarians contended.'"' Osburn's books were very well received: the London Literary Gazette said, 'among the most distinguished cultivators of ancient Egyptian research ... he has directed his inquiries to that particular field which is most interesting to the Christian'. In the 1870s and later they were sources for pious books of the type often given as Sunday School prizes, and magazines for young people such as The Quiver or Sunday Readings for the Young. These were acceptable reading for Sabbatarian households who observed Sunday as a day of complete rest. Through these texts, the image of Akhenaten eventually became familiar, and Amarna acquired a special status for the English. It had reassuring associations with the progress towards monotheism and the elevation of family life in a pious domestic setting. The chance discovery of the so-called Amarna letters by a local woman in 1887 made it seem an even more intriguing place. This discovery enabled Amarna to be associated not only with the development of monotheism and the Bible as a historical source but also with some of the Bible's central characters (see Figure 3.3).