It is in the pages of the London newspapers of the 1920s and 1930s, especially The Illustrated London News, that the idea of Amarna as a garden suburb is most fully realised and explored. The garden suburb movement grew in London in the first decade of the twentieth century. It aimed to build planned communities of aesthetically pleasing houses with good facilities, especially ventilation and sanitation, to combat the bad physical and moral effects of inner-city overcrowding. Garden suburbs were a political experiment too. They would be populated by a cross-section of society, who would learn to get along by being neighbours, helping to break down class antagonism and religious sectarianism. It was obviously an idealistic project, and garden suburb dwellers were associated with 'cranky' movements such as Spiritualism and vegetarianism (especially by their detractors). That Akhenaten would himself come to be associated with the garden suburb movement was a predictable conclusion of the way he had been presented in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as the most up-to- date pharaoh, the ancient precursor of modern progress. The progressive, idealistic, experimental pharaoh needs an up-to-date city. Amarna, like the London garden suburbs, was believed to be a planned community with good sanitation, the product of an idealistic and visionary imagination, and its ideal homes were a staple of The Illustrated London News reports from the earliest coverage of the dig in 1921. Readers/viewers were invited to create connections between their own homes and those of the New Kingdom. The equation of Amarna with modern planned urban communities had filtered down so effectively that, by 1923, a satire in the fortnightly magazine Punch could poke fun at Akhenaten by comparing him to the inhabitants of modern garden suburbs: 'It may be a plausible theory that Aken-Aten, who worshipped the sun with flowers and with hymns, was the kind of man whom one meets walking around a Garden City in sandals.'"
The houses at Amarna seemed to demonstrate a filtering-down of the desirable lifestyle to an accessible social level, again like the garden suburbs. In The Illustrated London News of 6 August 1921, Peet's byline was 'Home Life in Egypt 3000 years ago', and a double-page spread featured a photograph captioned: 'A convenience as much demanded in Ancient Egypt as modern London: a bathroom of 1350 b.c., the bath being a limestone slab with a raised edge and runnel.' This immediacy was emphasised in the long, extensively illustrated article by Leonard Woolley in the issue for 6 May 1922. He stresses parallels with modern town planning (the headline is 'Workmen's model dwellings of 3000 years ago'), and the accompanying photographs repopulate the houses by posing the Egyptian dig workers among the ruins, using excavated objects, in a sort of tableau vivant. 'Beside a fire of old fuel on the original hearth, with flat stone tables and clay saucer on the stone "divan": a modern Egyptian in an ancicnt parlour' runs the caption to Plate 3.2; another, to a photograph of women carrying water while a piper plays, is 'As 3000 years ago: "North Passage" in the workmen's village - girls carrying 14th century b.c. wicker trays and water jars.'
What kind of Amarnutopia was being presented in these images? There is the
Plate 3.2 'Beside a fire of old fuel on the original hearth, with flat stone tables and clay saucer on the stone divan: a modern Egyptian in an ancient parlour': The Illustrated London News, 6 May 1922. Reproduced by courtesy of the Egypt Exploration Society.
suburban fantasy of houses supplied with all desirable conveniences down to indoor lavatories and bathrooms. On the one hand, Amarna could be invoked as a forerunner of European progress, but on the other it could evoke a cyclical, eternal Egypt where things do not change, where the agricultural worker is 'plying the same shaduf, ploughing with the same plough, preparing the same food in the same way and eating it with his fingers from the same bowl as did his forefathers of six thousand years ago'.'4 This is what underlies the posing of the modern Egyptians in the ancient ruins: they represent the fantasy of an eternal Egypt. The Illustrated London News constructs an unreal Amarna which has no basis in any lived and embodied actuality. The people are actors, the original artefacts are used as props, and the ruins of the houses are box sets against the back- curtain of the Amarna landscape, which is itself a vast theatre. ®5
Magazine accounts were not the only means by which the Egypt Exploration Society publicised its activities at Amarna. To reach the widest possible audience, travelling exhibitions of Amarna objects toured the English provinces. In Birmingham, 2,000 people attended the Amarna exhibition hosted by a local social club, the Birmingham Conversazione, between 7 and 10 January 1936. There were also public lectures illustrated with magic-lantern slides. The text of one of these, given at the Royal Society, Burlington House, on 23 June 1925, has survived in the archives of the Egypt Exploration Society. It was written and delivered (apparently very badly, according to marginal notes on the archive copy) by Thomas Whittcmore (1871-1950), who dug at Amarna from 1923. Since his field of expertise was Byzantine palaces, his lecture presented a rather idiosyncratic view of Amarna. Its architecture reminded Whittemore of the structures run up to house the World's Fair, which looked imposing but were actually insubstantiaclass="underline" 'a very gay pretty place, but a very temporary one'. According to Whittemore, the city itself was weak and had 'no sinews'. He went on to compare the Amarna palaces to those at St Petersburg, Versailles, and finally showed a lantern slide of Burlington House itself, where his audience was sitting!
Real, or even hyper-real, fabrications of the site reached their apogee when John D. S. Pendlebury (1904-41) became the director of the Egypt Exploration Society dig at Amarna for five seasons, from 1931. His very physical, almost proprietorial, relationship with Amarna is summed up in a photograph (usually reproduced cropped), where he fixes Nefertiti's gaze while holding her in a firm neck-grip (see Plate 3.3a). Pendlebury was a larger-than-life character around whom a certain mythology has grown up. His glamorous archaeological exploits both in Egypt and in Knossos, combined with his good looks, athleticism and heroic record in the Second World War have led to several highly romanticised accounts of him being published, characterising him as 'a golden boy', the hero of a novelette or a hagiography.36 He certainly seems to have been a man who aroused strong emotions in the people who worked with him, not all of them positive. The official archives of the Egypt Exploration Society record the other side: there were disputes on site during the 1934—5 season, with personal animosities flaring up among the staff, and concerns about the way Pendlebury conducted the excavation archaeologically and as a manager. There were also unsavoury rumours about financial misdealings by members of his team, which resulted in some being dismissed. He and his staff were described as amateurs, and Pendlebury's commitment to Egyptology questioned because of his Classical training and interest in Greek archaeology.
Recently his digging strategies have been criticised further. Although claiming a commitment to careful 'scientific' digging, Pendlebury was also excited by the notion of archaeology as the handmaiden of history, writing 'one cannot tell in what part of the city some important historical document may come to light. A mere slum house may contain an inscription that will revolutionise history.'17 Indeed, he applied names such as 'slums' to structures on the basis of their size or the quality of the buildings, rather than on the basis of what was found in those structures. Under his direction extensive areas of the site were cleared too quickly, and waste from this clearance was dumped in places which had either been unexcavated or inaccurately planned in earlier seasons of work. This caused a serious row about digging strategy between Pendlebury and his deputy, H. W. Fairman. Pendlebury seems, in addition, not to have supervised the workmen carefully enough. The workforce was large and not always easy to control, even though they had mostly been recruited from elsewhere in Egypt in the hope that they would not become involved with local factions (see Plate 3.3d). An appreciable number of small finds was pilfered and entered the antiquities market, with a resultant distortion of the profile of the site, and feuds between the workmen eventually led to the destruction of much of the decoration of the royal tomb.38 With hindsight, it is all too easy to criticise Pendlebury's archaeological strategies and see him as a gung-ho explorer rather than a scientific cxcavator. To be fair, he was interested in a broad range of data from Amarna, and did his best to interpret them from a wide background of previous scholarship and his own digging experience. His seasons of excavation yielded thousands of contexted artefacts from the central city, important for subsequent reconstructions of the