The witty and humorous British Egyptologist Arthur Weigall (1880-1934) was a quite different man from Breasted. He came from a solidly bourgeois church- and-army background and was educated at one of England's best public schools. Chief Inspector of Antiquities for Upper Egypt by the age of 25, his Egyptological career ran more smoothly than Breasted's; but he was less obsessively focused on scholarly work, and eventually left professional Egyptology to freelance in London as a set-designer, film critic and novelist.2" Like Breasted, however, he had close personal links with the religious establishment. His stepfather was a Church of England clergyman and his pious mother had worked with the Manchester City Mission in the slums of northern industrial towns during WeigalFs childhood. This certainly affected his biography The Life and Times of Akhnaton, Pharaoh of Egypt. Weigall was solicitous of family opinion and did not want his writing to cause them any embarrassment. He therefore emphasised Akhenaten as a precursor of Christian monotheism more prominently than he might otherwise have done. While he was in Egypt writing the biography, his letters home show that his own religious beliefs were inclusive, almost deistie, but that he was well aware of the power of religion to sell books to the Edwardian public. He wrote to his wife Hortense:
I take it that as Aton is in every way described like our God, and as there is no attribute of our God which is not applied to Aton, therefore Aton is God as we understand him; and I speak of the Aton-worship as a sort of pre-Christian revelation. But of course, in my heart I feel this very attitude is simply playing to my audience, for I laugh at the very idea of Christianity being in sole possession.21
Weigall genuinely admired Akhenaten, but he did not hold the same dogmatic belief in his universal rightness as Breasted.
The Life and Times of Akhnaton was first published in book form in 1910. It developed from a series of articles written for non-speeialist journals and magazines to feed public interest in the discovery of the mysterious Amarna royal tomb, KV 55, in 1907. The Life and Times of Akhnaton was an instant huge success, a bestseller. Going through various impressions and revisions and in print throughout the 1920s and 1930s (the second edition fortunately coincided with the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb), it was translated into French, German and Dutch, received scores of reviews in every sort of newspaper and periodical, and was read by the public, scholars and writers of fiction. Kees' translation was one of Thomas Mann's main Egyptological resources when researching his quartet of Joseph novels, partly set at Akhenaten's court.22 Reviewers noted that The
Life and Times of Akhnaton is a novel as much as a history, but it is worth remembering that it was a ground-breaking book for its day, a bold attempt at a new kind of biography. Weigall wrote in a florid, breathless, almost journalistic style that even in 1910 was regarded with some amusement and made reviewers question his book's scholarly weight. 'The Heretic King of the Egyptologists is a fascinating figure, and Mr Weigall has written a fascinating book about him. Whether or not all the details are historically accurate is of little consequence', observed one.*'3 Whatever its genre, The Life and Times of Akhnaton succeeded in making the reign of Akhenaten seem not only interesting but also extremely relevant to the times. The headlines over the review in Reynold's Newsletter (25 September 1910) say a lot: PRIMAL IDEALISM. TOLSTOY IN THE PURPLE. 'The reign of Akhenaton has special interest for the modern world', said the reviewer in The Daily News (2 April 1910). The Pall Mall Gazette (26 April 1910) agreed:
the career of a man with such lofty conceptions was well worth telling. When it is added that this pharaoh was also the apostle of naturalness, of the simple life and of domestic joys, that he was a patron of art and a poet, it will be seen that, properly handled, the story of his life is of absorbing interest.
To add further public appeal and avoid the book becoming too preachy, Weigall injected plenty of exciting archaeology. As Inspector of Antiquities he had been personally involved in several relevant excavations - the opening of the tomb of Tiye's parents, of the mysterious burial in KV 55 (see Plate 2.4), and the tomb of Akhenaten's successor Horemheb. Weigall had a gift for vivid description and these parts of the book still read very well. The light, non-academic style of The Life and Times of Akhnaton belies how much effort Weigall put into the research for it, although he never intended his book to be the definitive history but rather 'a sketch to introduce the gent, to people', as he wrote to Hortense. Undeservedly, the influence of his book gets less attention than Breasted's more sober and 'scholarly' work, and Weigall himself has been dismissed as a phantast and 'hieroglyphically almost illiterate'.24 As we shall see, the influence of The Life and Times of Akhnaton is still very much with us.
Weigall's interpretation of Akhenaten was simple and sentimental. He was the prophet of monotheism — though, as we have seen, Weigall's private opinions about this may have been rather different from those in the book. He was also a pacifist, a reformer, and one of the great teachers of humanity, like Buddha, Christ and St Francis of Assisi. As such, Weigall's Akhenaten is less narrowly Protestant than Breasted's. First and foremost, though, his Akhenaten was a monogamous family man who was devoted to his wife and daughters. Weigall talks of the charm and sanctity of his family life: 'Akhnaton seems to have never been happy unless all his children were with him and his wife by his side.'*'' He ventures into psychobiography with his detailed reconstruction of Akhenaten's formative years, something to which the less speculative Breasted pays little attention. Weigall gives Akhenaten a domineering mother in Tiye, and a distant, passive father in Amunhotep III - the central actors in an Oedipal drama. A glance through Karl Abraham's 'analysis' of Akhenaten shows how much he used Weigall to reconstruct the family narrative, which was one of the reasons why the early psychoanalysts were interested in him. If they wanted Akhenaten to bear the burden of proof for the transhistorical reality of the Oedipus complex, Weigall was a much richer source than Breasted. Taken together, Weigall and Breasted were a powerful combination for the 'inner circle' of psychoanalytic pioneers in their search for historical authentication. In his evaluation of Karl Abraham's work in 1927, Freud's biographer Ernest Jones commented that Akhenaten was of supreme historical importance because he could be used to prove 'how a knowledge of psychoanalysis could contribute to the elucidation of purely historical problems'. Moreover, Akhenaten was the 'forerunner of the Christian teachers of the doctrine of love and an ethical revolutionary who reserved his fate for his father only ... all Echnaton's innovations, iconoclasms and reforms could be directly traced to the cffects of the Oedipus complex'.21' In a telling Freudian slip, Jones got Akhenaten's dates wrong, saying that he had died twenty-three centuries ago, so making him a whole millennium more up to date! Akhenaten, Jones implies, was more than a test-case for the validity of psychoanalysis as an objective science: he was also central to the writing and rewriting of a completely new kind of history. Both of these aspects of Akhenaten, as extracted from Breasted and Weigall, went into shaping Moses and Monotheism.
Moses and monotheism in context
'Remember, Moses was a prince of Egypt, not a schmegege with sidelocks. According to Freud, he was as Egyptian as they come.'