The result of all this was that by 1937, when the dig at Amarna ended, Amarna had been fabricated into a space in remote time where the evils of modernity could be cured. Amarna objects had also become symbols for Egypt as potent as Tutankhamun. We can see this in an advertisement in The Times' special Egypt Number, published on 26 January 1937 under the headline 'All Roads Lead to Egypt'. The entire issue is devoted to the economic and political history of Egypt, with a strong emphasis on encouraging foreign investment. Antiquities play a very small part. Apart from the Great Pyramid and Sphinx, almost the only pharaonic objects appear in the advertisement by the Cairo Museum's Department of Antiquities (see Plate 3.4). What are they? The head of one of Akhenaten's daughters, and the human-headed canopic jar in Amarna style from tomb 55 in the Valley of the Kings. By 1937, largely through the publicity efforts of the Egypt Exploration Society, the antiquities of the Amarna period had become symbols of Egypt as potent and imbued with meaning as the Sphinx and Pyramids to Anglophone readers.
Amarnamania: artefacts and architecture
Digging at Amarna stopped in 1937 and did not resume significantly until 1977. This forty-year hiatus in archaeological activity is a good moment for a brief digression to consider how Amarna's popular presence in the 1920s and 1930s
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DEPARTMENT OF ANTIQUITIES - CAIRO - EGYPT
Plate 3.4 Amarna royal women advertise 'All Roads Lead to Egypt': The Times, 26 January 1937.
media affected material culture. Interest in Amarna objects has remained strong ever since the 1920s, when the Egypt Exploration Society realised Amarna's merchandising potential by producing postcards and plaster casts of sculptures to sell at the regular public exhibitions of finds from the site. A visit to a museum gift shop, such as the Metropolitan Museum's in New York, will show the longevity of this interest: resin rcplicas of Tiye and her granddaughters are on sale for $ 120 or $185 apiece. And in London at the time of writing, quite a range of Amarna- themcd things is available: armchairs upholstered in red velvet (appropriately luxurious and imperial) with scenes of Akhenaten offering to the Aten, Akhenaten statue paperweights, and greetings cards with Amarna scenes on fake papyrus. All these pseudo-Egyptian household objects reflect a western response to ancient Egypt which is itself extremely old, going back at least to the Greek historian Herodotus in the fifth century bce. Herodotus coined some of the most familiar terms for the iconic objects of Egyptian culture - sphinx, pyramid, obelisk, and so on. It's instructive to think of the derivation of pyramid and obelisk from Greek words: pyramis literally means a conical loaf of bread, and obeliskos a meat-skewcr. The great tomb becomes a bun, the soaring pillar a kitchen utensiclass="underline" Herodotus scaled down the huge monuments of Egypt to make them fit the vocabulary of the ordinary Greek home. Exactly the same thing happens to
Amarna objects. Scaling them down and bringing them into the home is a means of colonising the past and reducing its strangeness by relating it to familiar cultural co-ordinates.
This tendency to scale down and colonise ancient Egyptian culture changes with a growing fascination with the cast from the eighteenth century onwards. The undifferentiated 'Orient', including Egypt, became associated with luxury, leisure, and products denoting extravagance or pleasurable physical sensations. Certain types of commodity were particularly identified with ancient Egypt and were put in Egyptian-themed packaging or advertised with Egyptian images. Scents, soap and grooming products generally are one type of commodity; tobacco is another. Numerous tobacco packages and brand titles featured Egyptian themes, with the effect of familiarising Egypt and making it recognisable.19 In north London there was even a cigarette factory built in the form of an Egyptian temple. By the mid-1920s Egypt's association with smoking had become so ingrained that it was almost automatic, even though the 'Egyptian' cigarettes themselves were usually made of tobacco grown in the Balkans. When one of the characters in the imagist poet H.D.'s novella Palimpsest (1926) sees Luxor temple, she remarks that it is 'rather like a magazine ad: or a cigarette box', and that she had seen it before 'on everything, cigarette boxes, posters in the underground, cigarette boxes, magazine ads'.'" This connection made it inevitable that the Amarna personalities would have a role in cigarette advertising and smoking paraphernalia. Like film stars or sports heroes, they appear on cigarette cards - true confirmation of their status as celebrities. A series of cigarette cards, issued by John Player and Co. in 1912, features Akhenaten and Tiye, Nefertiti still being relatively unknown at this time (see Plate 3.5). The caption identifies Tiye merely as 'Queen Amenophis', like an English wife who takes her husband's name on marriage, although her cartouche is reproduced correctly. The legend on the back picks up on the familiar idea (following Weigall and others) that Tiye was a foreigner, but embellishes it to make her sound even more European - 'she was blue-eyed, and of very fair complexion'. By the 1920s, when Nefertiti's face was well known, she usurped Tiye to appear on cigarette cards herself, as well as to adorn portable enamelled cigarette-cases.
Apart from in 1920s advertising, Akhenaten and Nefertiti also symbolised more generally the wealth, luxury and extravagant lifestyle that is associated with ancient Egyptian royalty. Objects decorated with Amarna motifs have overtones of aspirational lifestyle. The splendid beaded evening bag in Plate 3.6, decorated with the scene of Akhenaten and Nefertiti distributing gold from the tomb of Parennefer at Amarna, is a good example of this. I was unable to find out anything about its history, but it has the look of a home-made craftwork. I suspect it is a domestic version of die sumptuous evening bags made by Cartier in the early 1920s, which have gold clasps based on the Egyptian cosmetic spoons with handles shaped like swimming girls, and Egyptian-influenced beading and embroidery.01 Once again, the image of Akhenaten and Nefertiti works for the consumer by being miniaturised and having its ideological component removed.