Egypt and Akhenaten were easily available in other ways. In the early 1920s, the spectacular sculptural pieces Ludwig Borchardt had cxcavated ten years before from Djehutmose's studio at Amarna finally went oil display in Berlin. They received the same sort of local media attention that The Illustrated London News paid to Amarna in Britain.h As in England, fictional treatments of Akhenaten and the Amarna period followed, including several novels, poetry and a play (see appendix). Akhenaten inspired pieces of visual art, too (see Plate 6.2). Popular history books on Egypt proliferated in the 1920s, rcficcting the growing interest of the German-speaking world in Akhenaten. James Henry Breasted's A History of Egypt, with its eulogistic sections on Akhenaten, and Arthur Weigall's The Lfe and Times of Akhnaton, Pharaoh of Egypt were both translated into German by distinguished Egyptologists, Hermann Kees and Hermann Ranke. There were also the many editions of Adolf Erman's Die agyptische Religion and Hcinrich Schafer's Amarna in Religion und Kunst (1931). Freud had copies of these books in his personal library, annotated and bearing the marks of careful study. They were the sources he and the psychoanalytic community used for their researches into Akhenaten's history. Freud's desire to bring Akhenaten into his life extended to his collection of antiquities. He even owned a large fake piece of Amarna sculpture, similar to the reliefs in the Berlin collection illustrated in Schafer's book: a carving of a courtier making obeisance to the Aten, like those on the door jambs of non-royal tombs at Amarna.'
To see Freud's interest in Akhenaten as part of a more general interest in ancient Egypt, however, is not to downplay its importance or contemporary relevance to him and others. In their day, the books by Breasted, Erman, Schafer and Weigall that Freud read in his study were thought to show how the past holds up a mirror to the present. Reviewers remarked on how contemporary, meaningful and challenging Akhenaten's story seemed. These ideas were developed by German novelists like Victor Curt Habicht, in his novella Echnaton (1919), using Breasted and Weigall as sources. Habicht uses Akhenaten's supposed pacifism to critiquc the First World War, and Echnaton ends: 'For thousands and thousands of years your voice was silent, Echnaton, and you were sunk in nothingness and night. . . . Echnaton our Redeemer, a new tide is beginning!'8 Breasted and Weigall in particular write about Akhenaten in terms of religious and political struggles that could be seen as parallels for ones then going on in Europe - especially because they represent Akhenaten as a thoroughly European individual. Their Akhenaten was not only a proto-Christian - in fact, a proto- Protestant, who destroyed the images of the idolatrous cult of Amun - but also a patron of the arts and a gifted, expressive poet. No wonder, then, that their books at various times compare him to Cromwell, Luther, Leonardo da Vinci, St Francis of Assisi, the poet Wordsworth, the French painter Jean-Francois Millet and even the Italian actress Eleanora Duse! As a piece of historians' shorthand these comparisons may seem harmless enough, but read alongside other ideas about race and the Egyptians then current, they begin to take on a different complexion. The Protestant Akhenaten created by Breasted and Weigall manifested himself in the writings both of the psychoanalysts and of their Fascist opponents in ways that the well-intentioned Egyptologists might never have imagined. Before looking at both these incarnations, I want to backtrack for a moment and look in a little more depth at Breasted and Weigall, and what their interpretations of Akhenaten offered Freud and the Fascists.
James Henry Breasted and Arthur Weigall
The most lasting monument to the diligence and energy ofjames Henry Breasted (1865-1935) is the Oriental Institute in Chicago. Founded at Brcastcd's urging in 1919 with Rockefeller money, it is still one of the world's premier institutions for studying Egypt and the ancient Near East. Its library, museum and teaching rooms occupy a fine early 1930s building in the bosky university quarter of Chicago, a contrast to the urban decay of much of the city's South Side. Above the front entrance of the Oriental Institute there is an impressive carved tympanum, like the allegorical sculptures over the doors of medieval cathedrals. It is composed around two male figures symbolising how civilisation is changed by a meeting of ancient and modern, and the modern world progresses through the encounter. On the left is Antiquity, embodied in an Egyptian scribe derived from an Old Kingdom woodcarving. To his right are the Sphinx, the Pyramids, and a cluster of pharaohs and Assyrian law-givers. The man on the other side of the tympanum represents Modernity. Muscular and heroically naked, he stands on a stairway to indicate the ascent of man through progress, an idea of which Breasted was fond. Mr Modernity holds a fragmentary Egyptian relief with hieroglyphs. These are a slightly modified version of a text common in the tombs of Akhenaten's courtiers at Amarna, where the tomb owner addresses the Aten and says, 'grant the sight of your beauty'.H Behind him is a backdrop of great buildings, like the Acropolis, as mnemonics for human cultural achievement. We also see the bringers of enlightenment, including a Crusader knight and an archaeologist scrutinising a pot. What better symbol to crown this whole composition than a large Aten-disc, whose rays reach out to bless the ascent of modernity through the benign and civilising influence of Egyptian culture? This sculpture is a realisation in stone of Breasted's beliefs about the relationship of ancient Egypt to the modern world, and the centrality of Akhenaten in that relationship. In his books, Egypt is 'the keystone of the arch' of civilisation, with prehistoric man on one side and civilised Europe on the other.1" As in the tympanum, Akhenaten stands at the apex of that keystone, the most exalted figure in the most exalted lineage. Breasted liked this image so much that he had a version of it engraved to use as his bookplate (see Figure 4.1). Every time he opened one of his books he could be reminded of Akhenaten's supreme value as an agent of culture and civilisation.
Breasted came from a lower-middle-class family in the small town of Rockford, Illinois, where his father ran a hardware store. His path to the first chair of Egyptology in the USA, at the University of Chicago, had not been smooth. In 1887 he was working as a pharmacist when a revelation made him realise his vocation to preach the gospel. The same year he started studying for the ministry at the Chicago Theological Seminary, paid for by a grim Seventh Day Adventist friend in Rockford. 'I tell you, Satan is holding high carnival here', she wrote to Breasted of goings-on in their small home town." After two years of theology and Hebrew, Breasted was beset by doubts about faulty translations of the scriptures. He left the seminary and went a secular route, studying Oriental languages at Yale and later Berlin.
Breasted was ccrtainly fascinated by Akhenaten (he always referred to him as Ikhnaton), resulting in some ground-breaking research. I wonder whether in some way Breasted saw studying Akhenaten as a way of combining his interest in ancient Egypt with his Christian beliefs. His doctoral dissertation, presented at Berlin in 1894, was the first text edition of the Aten 'hymns' in the Amarna tombs. He treated them editorially as though they were classical or Biblical texts, supplying a Latin commentary and critical apparatus. When he married 21-year- old Frances Hart later that year, the couple went to Egypt for a honeymoon which included a trip to Amarna. Breasted spent a week copying the hieroglyphs of the various versions of the 'hymns', while his wife stayed on their houseboat