Figure 4.1 Bookplate of James Henry Breasted, an engraving of the tympanum of the Oriental Institute Chicago c 1930. Actual size.
and wrote letters home. Their time at Amarna does not sound like much fun. It was so cold they needed hot water bottles; Frances was menstruating, and worried about her husband's non-observance of the sabbath. On 13 January 1895 she wrote that she could not join Breasted copying in the tomb because she had what she called 'the "occassion" [.rzc]' and added: 'It is Sunday but husband feels he is doing right to use the time in copying and so he is. We have Sunday in our hearts.'12 It is a telling comment. Studying Akhenaten, she implies, was an appropriate Sunday observance. It was doing the Lord's work.
Breasted was more than a philologist and epigraphcr: he was also a gifted synthesist and populariser. He wrote several wide-ranging cultural and intellectual histories of the ancient world that, as we have seen, were primary texts for Freud, Jung and many others. These combined up-to-the-minute primary data, both documentary and archaeological, with observations on how these data fitted into the wider development of human culturc. Apart from the hugely influential A History of Egypt, he wrote Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt (1912, revised from a series of lectures delivered at the Union Theological Seminary in New York), The Conquest of Civilization (1926, a reworking of his earlier textbook Ancient Times, A History of the Early World), and The Dawn of Conscience (1933, reusing much material from Development oj Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt). He even wrote a commentary to accompany stereoscopic slides of Egyptian sites which showed the monuments in 3D. All his historical works contain substantial discussions of Akhenaten and translations of the 'hymn' to the Aten divided up into stanzas, making them look like western poems. Sometimes the translations arc printed alongside a parallel text of Psalm 104, which Breasted believed derived from the Aten 'hymns'. The enthusiastic tone of these discussions of Akhenaten remained consistent throughout the thirty years of Breasted's writing career (partly because of his tendency to recycle his work), and they need to be seen in relation to his ideas about the value of ancient history to the modern world. His philosophy of history had something in common with the post-processual theories about archaeology's socio-political role that I outlined at the end of the previous chapter. Breasted believed that scholars of the ancicnt world should have a commitment to social change. They had a duty to present accessibly information from the past to the widest possible audiencc, in order to suggest solutions for a range of problems in the present.11 As the clumsy symbolism of the Oriental Institute sculpture conveys, Egypt is the supremely privileged ancient culture which can offer the most to the progressive 'civilising' of humanity, and Akhenaten is the most privileged Egyptian. For Breasted he is the best and first, the keystone in the arch - the first individual, the first prophet of an exalted religion and the first idealist in recorded history. Breasted's account of Akhenaten's primal value attracted Freud. He approvingly underlined these 'first' epithets in his copy of A History of Egypt."
Breasted's idea of Akhenaten at the effective service of both present and future is all very well; but his version of him is still decidedly sectarian. For one thing, Breasted often lets his anti-Catholic prejudices slip through. If Akhenaten's Aten religion was the precursor of monotheism, it was a robustly Protestant monotheism, purged of the anthropomorphic images and corrupt priesthood that irresistibly reminded him of Catholicism. To Breasted, the priests of Amun were evil popes like the Borgias who stopped individual communion with god; the gods of polytheistic religion were like saints, idols for the worship of the ignorant. The vocabulary of Protestant anti-papism filters into Breasted's discussion of the priesthood of Amun, which he called 'the earliest national priesthood yet known' and 'the first po7itifex maximus. This Amonite papacy constituted a powerful political obstacle in the way of realizing the supremacy of the ancient Sun god.'1'
Breasted's obsession with the role of Egypt and Akhenaten in the development of human culture also shifted the focus away from the Jewish contribution, leaving his work open to adoption by Fascists and racists. His emphasis comes partly from scholarly respect for the critical mass of Egyptian evidence, to which he wanted to do full justice. But he also believed that Christian monotheism provided the paradigm for understanding all world religions, and that Akhenaten was the originator of a monotheism which was merely redacted by the Jews 'standing on the Egyptian's shoulders', as he put it. According to Breasted, Akhenaten's idealism was not to be revived until six centuries after his death, when the 'hordes who were now drifting into Ikhnaton's Palestinian provinces had coalesced into a nation of social, moral and religious aspirations, and had thus brought forth the Hebrew prophets'.Hand in hand with this is Breasted's view that the agents of human civilisation were what he callcd the Egypto-Asiatic race, whose heir is modern America (whether or not Jews are part of this is ambiguous). 'The evolution of civilization has been the achievement of this Great White Race', he wrote.1' I am not sure whether it is fair to call Breasted anti-Semitic. Certainly for him some people were more equal than others. He saw Jewish immigrants to America from eastern Europe as hopelessly degraded, calling them 'great unassimilable masses', and hoping that the 'retarding effects' of their presence could be reversed by 'the solidity of the better farming and lower middle class elements from northern Europe'.18 In his last book, The Dawn of Conscience, published the same year as the Nazis came to power in Germany, Breasted seems to have realised that some of his work could be read as anti- Semitic and that he might have to defend himself against criticism.19 Pointing to his lifelong interest in ancient Jewish culture, he denied any anti-Semitic bias, falling back on the old 'some of my best friends are Jews' strategy - as though friendly relations with individual Jews are incompatible with personally held anti-Semitism in the abstract.
Breasted was certainly a first-rate scholar and had worthwhile educational goals that are not so far from those of some modern archaeologists. He had a much more secular approach to ancient history than many of his peers, being influenced by the educational ideas of American liberal philosophers like John Dewey (1859-1952), whom Breasted knew at the University of Chicago. Dewey argued that, in education, a politically concerned sociology should replace religion, and that the future was to be controlled by an effective dialogue between the past and the present. However, Breasted's social sympathies were narrower than Dewey's, and he now reads as smugly convinced of his own Tightness — exactly like his own vision of Akhenaten, in fact. In Breasted's work it is still possible to hear the voice of the young Sabbatarian from Rockford who heard the call to go out and preach the word of a severe God.