ZAS
Zeitschriftfir Agyptische Sprache
ABBREVIATIONS AND CONVENTIONS Conventions
For the sake of convenience, I refer to Akhenaten as such throughout, even for the period before he assumed the name, when it is technically incorrect to do so. The terms 'king' and 'pharaoh' have been used interchangeably, even though both are anachronistic. Although not consistent with my practice elsewhere, I have hyphenated Akhet-aten to distinguish it from the pharaoh's name in sections where both names occur frequently. I usually use Akhet-aten when discussing the city in Akhenaten's day, Amarna for most other periods in its history. Most Egyptian personal names have been translated when they first occur, to give a sense of them as dogmatic phrases, often with theological meanings. All translations are my own unless otherwise acknowledged. Dates are to the Common Era (ce = ad) or Before the Common Era (bce = bc). ce dates are usually left undesignated unless there is any ambiguity.
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AKHENATEN IN THE MIRROR
Faced with the remains of an extinct civilization, I conceive analogically the kind of man who lived in it. But the first need is to know how I experience my own cultural world, my own civilization. The reply will once more be . . . that I interpret their behaviour by analogy with my own.
Merleau-Ponty 1962: 348
Histories and biographies of Akhenaten usually end with the destruction of his city and the obliteration of his name by those who wanted to erase his memory for ever. But this only marks one sort of ending, which is really another beginning. Amazing edifices continue to be built out of the ruins that Akhenaten's opponents left behind, and over the last century and a half Akhenaten has had an extraordinary cultural after-life. Akhenaten-themed theologies, paintings, novels, operas, poems, films, advertisements, fashion accessories and pieces of domestic kitsch have all been created. This book is the first attempt to look at them and try to understand why their makers chose Akhenaten. I want to know what interests are served, at particular historical moments, by summoning up the ghost of a dead Egyptian king. These representations of him are not structured by Akhenaten's own history but by struggles for legitimation and authority in the present. Such multiple and contradictory redrawings of characters from ancient history like Sappho, Alexander the Great, Cleopatra and Julius Caesar are always more concerned with the importance of the issues discussed through them than their historicity. In that respect Akhenaten is no exception - he is a sign rather than a person. But in another way he is a unique sign. Unlike those other iconic figures, Akhenaten has become a sign almost entirely through the medium of archaeology. The classical historians do not mention him explicitly, and so he was never a part of western cultural history in the same way as other famous pharaohs like Cheops and Cleopatra. Revealed by archaeology in the early nineteenth century, Akhenaten emerged largely unencumbered by cultural baggage and ready to be reborn. Since that time, the Akhenaten myth has developed, a myth which is a unique barometer for exploring the fascination of the west with ancient Egypt over the last two centuries or so.
This book is about the historical Akhenaten in only a peripheral way. It is not a biography of him but a metabiography - a look at the process of biographical representation. It's really about the uses of the archaeological past and the dialogue between past and present: how Akhenaten is simultaneously a legacy of the past and a fact of the present. I am not really interested in Akhenaten himself, but in why other people are interested in him and find his story relevant and inspirational when he has been dead for three and a half thousand years. For inspirational it is. Akhenaten has moved a roster of great twentieth-century creative talents to reproduce him in many media: Sigmund Freud, Thomas Mann, H.D. and Naguib Mahfouz in literature, Frida Kahlo in paint, Philip Glass and Derek Jarman in the performing arts. But Akhenaten does not belong exlusively to elite culture, and so he is a marvellously rich resource for allowing a range of other voices to be heard, in spite of forces which would consign them to insignificance. Most books on aspects of Egyptology give little space to these 'fringe' voices, but here I engage with them often. They deserve a respectful hearing, and give a sense of the vitality and variety of the meanings of Akhenaten. Also, I believe that it is very important for the professional community to listen to non- specialists. The two groups are not in conflict, or at least they need not be, and the dialogue can be mutually enriching. Writing this book reminded me repeatedly of how this dialogue had made me ask questions I would otherwise never have considered. Hence my search for Akhenaten's modern reincarnations led me off into territories that academic historians rarely visit. I met mystics who believe that Akhenaten guards the lost wisdom of Atlantis, disability rights activists who present him as a positive role model to children suffering from a disease affecting the connective tissues, Afrocentrists who invoke him as an ancestor from the glorious black past denied them by European racists, gay men who say that he is the first gay man. In this book there are other versions of the pharaoh that many will find either mad or offensive or both: Akhenaten the proto-Nazi, for instance, or Akhenaten the patron saint of paedophiles. Ancient Egypt is invested with so much cultural capital that people who feel marginalised by majority cultures want a share of it too.
What all these mutually exclusive versions of Akhenaten have in common is that the stories told of him are the stories of their creators. Their retellings are more complex than just inventing fictions or recounting facts. Description, observation and self-revelation mix with selective reporting of evidence and the reworking or omission of unsuitable details. All presenters of Akhenaten, scholarly or otherwise, have distinctive personal, cultural and generic biases that shape their perceptions. In this book I spend a lot of time examining what might be called the paratextual conditions of the mythic Akhenaten - the other circumstances which help to produce specific views of him and assist in his mythologisation.
It is hard to find common denominators to these myths because they are so Protean, their different guises shifting to suit the needs of particular audiences, genres and interpreters. However, one thing which underpins many of them is the desire, to find an antecedent for oneself or one's beliefs in ancient Egypt. Along with Greece and Rome, Egypt has a privileged position in western ideas about its own origins. Since Plato, historians, politicians and theologians have looked to ancient Egypt to find justification, legitimation or authentication. Akhenaten is a uniquely attractive figure to draw on here. He is supposedly an individual, a real person whose psychology and character we can see developing, someone with whom we can identify. In 1905 one of the first scholars to write for the public about Akhenaten, the American Egyptologist James Henry Breasted (1865-1935), famously called him 'the first individual in human history'. In fact, Akhenaten presents a carefully constructed image of himself through an ideolo- gised set of words and pictures that make the individual behind them elusive. But the idea of him as an individual has become deep-rooted. Akhenaten would never have had the kind of after-life that he has enjoyed unless he was felt to be accessible in a unique way. And so Akhenaten has repeatedly been made to speak, in the first-person singular, in the languages that we understand - a kind of ventriloquist's dummy who mouths the words of the people who manipulate him.
Another reason for Akhenaten's continued presence is because he has found a succession of perfect cultural moments to be reborn. When Europeans began to rediscover him in earnest in the late 1840s and early 1850s, Egypt had a high but still ambivalent position in western ideas about its past and the formation of its culture. These were set out by historians and philosophers like G. W. Hegel (1770-1831), who praised ancient Egypt's contribution to civilisation. They attributed to ancient Egypt the development of literacy and civic government, and made it a stage on the ascent of humanity from barbarism to enlightenment. Yet at the same time Egyptian culture went off along paths that pointed in the opposite direction to western enlightenment - towards the occult, polytheism, and the ultimate decline of great empires. In this sense, ancient Egypt was a disturbing memento mori, as in Shelley's Egyptian sonnet 'Ozymandias', where it is 'the decay of that colossal wreck'. Akhenaten, however, seemed to eradicate the most troubling aspects of ancient Egypt by advocating monotheism, and so seemed to be a progressive pharaoh who offered civilisation a way forward in the present. When archaeology revealed more about him in the 1890s and 1900s, this was apparently confirmed. An individual emerged from the ruins of Amarna, Akhenaten's city. He was an individual who seemed to accord perfectly with 'the new spirit in history', which regarded progress as 'the sacredness and worth of man as an ethical being endowed with volition, choice and responsibility'. So wrote the historian and journalist W. S. Lilly in 1895, adding that human history was 'the record of the gradual triumph of the forces of conscience and reason over the blind forces of inanimate nature and the animal forces of instinct and temperament in man'.1 But Akhenaten also vindicated bourgeois values: he 'openly proclaims the domestic pleasures of a monogamist', wrote the British archaeologist Flinders Petrie (1853-1942) in The Times in 1892. In a fin-de-siecle world haunted by images of degeneration and decay, Akhenaten's freshness and wholesome family life seemed to offer a vision of revitalisation, in the same way as the Utopian movements that flourished at this time. Akhenaten's archaeological rediscovery coincided with an unparalleled appetite for popular history in many forms: not just through written texts but also through local societies, reading groups, public lectures illustrated with slides, and evening classes. Knowing the past had become a favourite way of looking at the present. Such a proliferation of sources made Akhenaten available to a wide audience, and amateur, heterodox versions of Egypt soon began to split themselves off from professional, orthodox ones. Cheap books, the development of mass-circulation illustrated newspapers, and later visual media like stereoscopic slides and film, made Akhenaten known to even more people.