By the late 1890s and early 1900s, archaeologists and the media made Amarna offer a combination of exciting, biblical-tinged archaeology and beaux-arts in line with the current taste. No wonder it was an attractive halt for the increasing numbers of tourists on Nile cruises, or the more affluent travelling by private houseboat (dahabiyeh)\ Guidebooks such as Baedecker's Egypt (1897) and Cook's Handbook for Egypt (1903) give details of how to get to Amarna and incorporate it in longer itineraries, usually while en route to Asyut from visiting the Middle Kingdom tombs at Beni Hassan, or by rail to Medinet el-Fayum. These assume that the painted pavement will be the main focus of the trip. Baedecker provides complicated instructions about how to get to the inaccessible tombs or spend more time at the site. These involve taking a train to Deir Mawas, travelling by donkey to el-Hagg Qandil or el-Till, obtaining the keys from the various guardians, and making arrangements for staying overnight with the Omdeh (a local dignitary). The inclusion of this kind of practical information in guidebooks for tourists might suggest that many of them travelled to Amarna in the hope of seeing the place which not only confirmed the Bible but also appealed to a contemporary aesthetic. However, it is striking that hardly any of the dozens of travel books describing holidays in Egypt produced between 1890 and 1910 say anything at all about visiting Amarna. On the rare occasions they do, the trip is presented as a triumph of the visitor's determination and initiative over the lassitude and unreliability of the locals. The travelogue Pyramids and Progress: Sketches from Egypt (1900) by the artist John Ward RA (1832-1912) is typical. His title, a pun on Bunyan's spiritual classic Pilgrim's Progress, gives a clue to how he conceptualised his visit to Egypt. Under the healthy regime of the British protectorate, old Egypt makes 'progress', like the sick patient Ward often compares it to. He describes visits to ostrich farms and sugar factories as well as to tombs and temples, and the book is dedicated to the British governor, Lord Cromer. But the journey is also an intensely spiritual one for Ward. The pinnacle of this is going to Amarna, where progress and spirituality come together: 'I longed to see the place with my own eyes', he says, especially the north tombs with their scenes of the royal family 'in attitudes of deep devotion, and the inscriptions full of the praise of truth and many noble principles advocated by Christianity'."3 As with all pilgrimages, the suffering of the pilgrim is a crucial element. Ward spends several pages describing the difficulties of getting to Amarna - embarking at el- Hagg Qandil, the long donkey ride, haggling with the locals for small antiquities. Only after all this 'the pleasure was to come'. He was overwhelmed by the beauty of the desert landscape, and found his adventure to 'the plain of the lost city, the scene of the unsuccessful effort of an old-world reformer' deeply moving.
When other tourists eventually made it to Amarna, it was sometimes an anticlimax. What was there on the ground failed to meet their romantic expectations. The novelist and Egyptophilc Henry Rider Haggard (1856-1925) visited on a wet February afternoon, and was not impressed. 'The place seemed, beneath a dull sky that spattered rain, of a dreariness indescribable - a very epitome of the vanity of human hopes and of greatness passed away.'24 Another successful novelist and Egyptophilc, Norma Lorimcr (1864—1948), of whom much more in Chapter 6, was one of the few women who recorded her feelings. After her visit in 1908 she admitted, rather disingenuously:
I was disappointed. ... I expected more. I had built up in my mind's eye something more expressive of the king's extraordinary life, something more significant of his courageous revolt against the all-powerful priests of Amon. Except the distant tombs, all that is left of his new capital, all that to-day tells the tale of his religious war, are a few fragments of mosaic floors.21
No wonder she was disappointed, because she had earlier talked about Akhenaten's 'delightful' taste in art, and the palace at Amarna as the 'Versailles of Egypt, a city of love and pleasure, where . . . tables were filled with fruit and garlands of flowers, wines, beer, and cakes and ale'. Illyria on the Nile indeed.
The year before Lorimer visited Amarna in 1908, the Deutsche Oricnt- Gesellschaft had been granted the concession to dig under the directorship of Ludwig Borchardt (1863 1938). This was the first attempt to conduct a large- scale excavation and topographic survey of the site, focusing on the perimeters of the southern part of the city, which were the least disturbed by previous excavation or expanding cultivation. Their work was interrupted by the First World War, as was the publication and exhibition of many of their findings. Borchardt's important work on the domestic buildings was not published until 1980. Among the other discoveries were some of the most famous pieces of Amarna art, now so famous that they have taken on a kitsch persona of their own: the small relief of an Amarna princess presenting a flower to a man, often identified as Meri- taten and Smenkhkare', and most famously the polychrome bust of Nefertiti. The discovery of this object, in December 1912, has spawned a mythology of its own: there are stories of how Borchardt misled the Egyptian Antiquities Service when the finds from the expedition were being divided up so as to claim the piccc for Berlin, and how it was then smuggled out of Egypt in a fruit cratc. Borchardt himself was not above hyping the discovery. He wrote:
Were I to describe this discovery here as it really took place, with its confusion, its surprises, its hopes and also its minor disappointments, the reader would ccrtainly be as confused thereby as we were at the time, when we made notes in the studio, and had hardly got the particulars of one find to paper before two further objects to be measured and noted were uncovered.2b
This image of Nefertiti, representing a pale-skinned woman whose distinguished features accord to western canons of beauty, is central to the Akhenaten myth. A whole book could easily be written about its manifestations in popular culture. It enables a 'pretty facc' to be put on one of the principal players in the Amarna family romance, countering Victorian judgements that Nefertiti looked ugly and haggard in Amarna reliefs, and was obviously in a terminal stage of tuberculosis.27 This pretty face enabled women to identify with Nefertiti's beauty. As early as 1925 Nefertiti was being invoked in literature as the paradigm of loveliness, and she became a popular identity for women to assume at fancy- dress parties in the 1920s and 1930s.28
All these archaeological discoveries before the First World War enabled the pieturc of Akhenaten, his family and city, to be elaborated. Life there was one of 'domestic felicity in beautiful surroundings'.29 And the idea of an Amarnutopia was to become very important in the next decade's discovery of the site.