Pendlebury's personal investment in the past also affected how he represented Amarna, in life on the site as well as in numerous publications.39 He found the present day uninspiring, and wanted to return to a Utopian past. There are stories about his dislike of the mundane aspects of modernity, such as cars, and an obituary in the Journal of Egyptian Archaeology says that 'chivalry and romanticism were of his essence'.40 He was keen to stress links between the past and the present in a way that would now be called essentialist, in which people are bound by their shared humanity across vast spatial and temporal boundaries. Pendlebury made this clear in the introduction to his general book about Amarna:
One of the most fascinating points about the work is that we are concerned with the private lives of the whole population, slave and noble, workman and official and the royal family itself. So strong is this homely atmosphere that we feel we really know as individuals the people whose houses we are excavating
These feelings seem to have filtered into everyday life on site. Photographs in the archives of the Egypt Exploration Society show how keen Pendlebury was to experience an Orientalist past through assuming other identities: he appears in a variety of fancy-dress costumes - as a Cretan peasant, or in turban and galabiyah as one of his own workmen, and even, significantly, as Akhenaten himself (see Plate 3.3b). The walls of the Amarna dig house, constructed over the foundations of a New Kingdom building whose column bases are still visible in the courtyard, were decorated with appropriate paintings: heads of Nefertiti and hieroglyphs juxtaposed with a portrait of one of the workmen (see Plate 3.3e). The past and the present are conflated here in a glorious melange where temporality has no meaning.
The delirious effect of layering past and present comes through strongly in Nefertiti Lived Here, a popular book written by a member of Pendlebury's staff, Mary Chubb. Originally published in 1954, it has recently (1998) been reissued.
(d)
Plate 3.3 (a) Pendlebury and a reproduction head of Nefertiti at an exhibition of Amarna objects in London, 1935. (b) Pendlebury at Amarna in fancy dress as Akhenaten, wearing a faience necklace from Amarna, c. 1930s, (c) Painting on the walls of the Egypt Exploration Society dig house at Amarna, 1930s, (d) Pay-day for the Egyptian staff at Amarna, 1936. Seated at the table: right, John Pendlebury; left, the draughtsman Ralph Lavers. All reproduced by courtesy of the Egypt Exploration Society.
As Chubb's title implies, the Amarna royals are ever-present for her, and in one passage she experiences a sort of epiphany with Nefertiti in the dig house:
Nefertiti must have known this house. It's not too fantastic to think that sometimes, long ago, people sitting as we were now, in this very room, might have heard the murmur of servants' voices out beyond the Central Room, speaking the lovely name as she drew near: 'Nefertiti. It is Nefertiti. The Beautiful Lady comes!' And in a moment she may have passed through this doorway, trodden this floor, and perhaps sat talking to her host with a small sandalled foot resting on this column base by my chair.42
This kind of relationship with the past affected Pendlebury's archaeological analysis of Amarna in a lasting way. It certainly coloured the terminology he adopted for the large official buildings in the central city which were his excava- tional focus. Lacking much indication of what they were originally called, Pendlebury could bestow his own names. Attempting to describe the functions of various rooms in these structures, he borrowed words that had specific meanings in contemporary Muslim culture {harim, sirdariya) alongside the vocabulary of classical architecture, such as impluvium (the open pool in the hall of elite Roman houses).45 Once again Amarna became something without its own integrity, which can only be described as a pastiche of the eastern and the western. Pendlebury's unwillingness to describe the site according to its own logic becomes even dearer when one looks at his terminology for the buildings associated with the royal family in the ccntral city: they are presented in terms of the ceremonial Edwardian London where Pendlebury had grown up. His central Amarna had its own 'flying squad', its 'War Officc', and the presence of stables in a structure 'might imply that this building housed the mounted or rather mechanized section of the Household Brigade'.44 To complete the analogy, the palace was equipped with a 'Chapel Royal', and he even identified 'the quarters of the six princesses with their night-nurseries and their playroom'.43 All that is lacking to complete the picture is Nanny in a frilly cap. When Mary Chubb remarked that Pendlebury's ground plan of the site was 'like a district map of London', she may have been admitting more than she realised about how he really thought of Amarna.14' And Pendlebury's schema for site interpretation has been extremely influential. Given the lack of other settlement data, Amarna has to remain the template for reconstructing Egyptian urban life. But archaeologists still talk of the various 'suburbs' of Amarna (while decrying the word's utility), and assign functions to the domestic space of the Amarna houses in terms of western occupation patterns that are not always easy to reconcile with the archaeological evidence.
It might be argued that nuanced archaeologies were not a feature of the 1930s, but this is not necessarily the case. At exactly the same time as Pendlebury was excavating the houses of Amarna, the French archaeologist Bernard Bruycre was digging at Egypt's other great settlement site, Deir cl-Mcdina. Bruyere was in many ways a more subtle archaeologist than Pendlebury. He looked at the ancient data with fewer preconceptions about their meaning and function, and was more open to using parallels from non-western cultures to try to make sense of his finds. When he found fertility figurines at Deir el-Medina, he immediately located them in a context of cultural difference, citing comparanda from African cultures.47 And Henri Frankfort, who had directed the cxcavation at Amarna before Pendlebury, was also interested in what he called the African substratum to Egyptian culture. While Bruyere and Frankfort stress difference, Pendlebury stresses familiarity in the city he described, apparently without irony, as the 'Monotheistic Utopia of Ancient Egypt'.48
Consequently, Pcndlebury's Amarna (like Wilkinson's almost exactly a century earlier) is a paradoxical place: it is certainly fabricated as a romantic escape from the present, but it is an escape into a past whose troubling features have been discarded and replaced by the best aspects of the present. Amarna and London may be conflated, but Amarna is London without bad sanitation. In elaborate architectural reconstructions and perspective drawings on the pages of The Illustrated London.News, Pendlebury was able to promote his vision of the clean, glittering city of Amarna to a wide reading public. (See Plate 3.1.) There was also a strong concentration on artistic productions. Apart from many photographs of objects, especially royal sculptural fragments, there were re-creations of Nefertiti posing for the sculptor Djehutmose ('The Actual Sculptor's Studio where the Wonder Head of Akhnaton's Queen was Modelled Shown in Picture Form for the First Time': 14 March 1925) and colour illustrations of wall-paintings (16 November 1929).