Figure 3.4 English aristocrats alongside Amarna royals: cartoon by George Morrow from Punch, 28 February 1923. The caption is: SNAPPED IN THE VALLEY OF THE KINGS. Reading from left to right: Funeral companion of KING TUTANKH-AMEN, Lady Sophia Bulge, Queen NEPHERTITI and Lord Algernon Gark. [Inset Portrait of Pasht.] © Punch Ltd.
certainly had a high profile and a special cachet.19 This affected the way Petrie dug the site. Apart from stopping work to show elite visitors around, he had to make some concession to the desire of his rich backers for fine art objects. Because the area around the great Aten temple looked as though it might have interesting sculptural pieces appropriate for Amherst's collection, he set Garter investigating it on his own. It did indeed yield a quantity of statuary, later sold by Amherst's heirs in 1921, including some of the most famous pieces of Amarna art. Petrie and Garter also surveyed the royal wadi to find Akhenaten's tomb, because of the rumours that it had been found and plundered by the locals, and that the Cairo Museum authorities knew its location but were suppressing the information for their own ends.
Initially the scope of Petrie's dig was ambitious. 'It is an overwhelming site to deal with. Imagine setting about exploring the ruins of Brighton, for that is about the size of the town: and then you can realise how one man must feel with such a huge lump of work', wrote the daunted Petrie.20 He soon decided that it was impossible to plan the whole vast area and so he would skim the site by digging a selection of houses, finding the palace, if possible, and the temples and their foundation deposits. His excavation nevertheless produced some results of lasting archaeological importance. Petrie established a numbering system for the boundary stelae which is still in use, produced a map that was not superseded for thirty years, and made many important individual finds. Petrie realised Amarna's unique importance for Egyptian settlement archaeology and as a centrc of economic production, anticipating more recent archaeological approaches to the site. The Amarna artefacts which were given to Amherst reveal Petrie's exc.ava- tional focus in 1891-2. When the Amarna pieces from Amherst's antiquities collection were sold at Sotheby's on 17 June 1921, important sculptures rubbed shoulders with tools, sandstone drills, pigment samples, and ceramic moulds for faience objects, non-art pieces without intrinsic acsthctic value (lots 827, 828, 859, 860, etc.). Petrie's excavations at Amarna set up the picture of Akhenaten's city as a centre of artistic production, something that was to strike a chord in popular interpretations of the site (see p. 147).
The star discovery of Petrie's expedition was the painted pavement from the building he called the Great Palace, now believed to have been called the 'House of Rejoicing of the Aten'. This find caused quite a stir at the time, partly because of Petrie's own enthusiastic journalism, which was partly intended to publicise the dig in the hope of raising money for future excavations. He wrote in The Academy (9 April 1892):
The subjects of these floors are tanks with fish, birds and lotus; groups of calves, plants, birds and insects; and a border of bouquets and dishes. But the main value of them lies in the new style of art displayed; the action of the animals, and the naturalistic grace of the plants, arc unlike any other Egyptian work, and are unparalleled even in classical frescoes. Not until modern times can such studies from nature be found.
'The new style of art', 'the naturalistic grace of the plants', 'modern times' - is Petrie describing ancient Egyptian art or art nouveau, or both at oncc? His description is surely influenced by seeing art nouveau objects; and I wonder whether the wider ideology of the movement, which rejected designs based on classical or renaissance archetypes along with the boundaries between high academic art and decorative craft, might also have fed into his words, however unconsciously. Amarna art, he implies, is somehow more democratic. Petrie does not mention that the expressive 'studies from nature' on the pavement are juxtaposed with one of the most standard and rigid iconographic motifs of the Egyptian repertoire: the pathway of bound enemies of Egypt, alternately African and Asiatic, whom the pharaoh symbolically crushes as he walks over their images (sec Figure 2.8). Petrie transformed the pavement from a political statement about royal hegemony into an attractive piece of interior design comprehensible to a late ninetccnth-century aesthetic.
These artistic judgements were in line with Petrie's highly positive view of Akhenaten himself. In a lecture the text of which was published in The Times (7 September 1892), Petrie said that Akhenaten was 'a humanistic, rationalizing despot', adding:
In ethics he 'lived in truth' according to his ideals, and openly proclaims the domestic pleasures of a monogamist, riding side by side with his queen whom he kisses in the chariot, or sitting on his throne dancing the Queen and Princesses on his knee. In religion, in art, in life, we see the first great reasoner known in history.
At the same time as Petrie had been at Amarna, Urbain Bouriant (1849-1903) and Alexandre Barsanti (1858-1917) partly cleared the royal tomb in the wadi far to the east of the town site. Bouriant had previously spent two days at the site in April 1883, visiting the northern and southern tombs and recording some of their inscriptions, but was forced to give up work, overcome by illness and the terrible heat. Bouriant and Barsanti's recording of the royal tomb, published in 1903, proved crucial after its decorations and texts were vandalised in 1934; but in 1891 no information about the find was given out because Amarna was a battleground for tensions in the archaeological establishment. As well as showing how archaeologists were competing for the prestigious riches of Amarna, these tensions reflected larger, nationalist rivalries. After Egypt became a British protectorate in 1882, British archaeologists like Petrie believed that they bore ultimate responsibility for the maintenance of its ancient monuments - a responsibility towards which the officials of the French-run Antiquities Sendee had an unhelpful, dog-in-the-manger attitude, at least according to the British. Petrie had had ongoing struggles with Eugene Grebaut (1846-1915), the director of the Antiquities Scrvice, over permits to excavate.21 Even after the permit for a season's digging at Amarna had been granted, feelings ran high. In January 1892, Petrie's assistant at Amarna, Percy Newberry (1868-1949), wrote a caustic letter to the editor of The Academy revealing just how much relations had deteriorated between the French museum officials and the British archaeologists:
It is now made known that the royal tombs of Khuenaten and Tutankhamen, which had first been plundered by the Arabs, have been in the hands of the authorities of the Ghizeh Museum for the last two years. This retention of information is part of the policy of the French officials ... it seems that the Arabs' secret of Khuenaten's tomb has been reserved until further popular credit was acquired for the department. Egyptologists, apparently, have not simply to await the chances of fortune but also the pleasure of the Museum officials before discoveries are imparted to them. For how much longer shall we have to bear this state of things?2"'
Outbursts like this obviously did not help matters; and when the British made an application to copy the monuments at Amarna later in 1892, it was unsurprisingly rejected.
A dccade later, the Egypt Exploration Society dug at Amarna for six seasons between 1901 and 1906. Under the direction of Norman de Garis Davies (1865— 1941), there was a more conventional focus on recording tombs and texts. Working almost single-handedly, Davies copied the texts on the boundary stelae and the surviving inscriptions and reliefs in the non-royal tombs. Although Bouriant had copicd some of these scenes in 1884, Davies' masterly drawings are still the best record of the tomb scenes: Amarna will always be seen through his eyes. Another of Davies' major contributions was to publish English translations of the 'hymn' to Aten from the various versions in the tombs of Akhenaten's courtiers. Press reviews of these publications are useful for gauging non-specialist responses to the site and its remains. The large-circulation Pall Mall Gazette reviewed the third volume of Davies' The Rock Tombs of Amarna on 21 March 1906. After a quotation from the 'hymn' to the Aten, the reader is told: 'it reveals once more, despite the enormous apparent differences, how unchanged in essentials is the world of today from that of the Pharaohs. The story of these long-departed shades is vividly retold from the carved records remaining.'