Nothing illustrates this process of familiarisation better than a letter written on 3 May 1922, when interest in the excavations at Amarna was at its height. The writer was H. R. Hall (1873-1930), Keeper of Egyptian Antiquities at the British Museum, and author of The Ancient History of the .Near East from the Earliest Times to the Battle of Salamis (1913), which went into ten successive editions. Hall believed that Akhenaten was totally solipsistic and probably half-mad, and countered Breasted's 'first individual' epithet with one of his own: 'Certainly Akhenaten was the first doctrinaire in history, and, what is much the same thing, the first prig.'" From his office at the Museum, Hall wrote to Arthur Weigall (1880-1934) who from 1905 to 1914 had been Inspector-General of Antiquities for the Egyptian Government but had sincc left the archaeological world. In 1922 he was working as the film critic of the Daily Mail and a freelance journalist. Hall was writing to congratulate Weigall on the second, revised edition of his bestseller The Life and Times of Akhnaton, Pharaoh of Egypt - an emotive biography whose mixture of archaeology, religion and romancc ensured its huge success among a readership ranging from English popular novelists to Sigmund Freud. Inadvertently Weigall was one of the main creators of the Akhenaten myth, and his name will come up often in this book. Hall saluted 'my dear Weigall' with an appropriate greeting in hieroglyphs, and went on:
You will do us proud if you will boost the E[gypt] E[xploration] S[oci- ety] and the Amarna digs in your book, on the re-edition of which I congratulate you. Your way of dealing with our cracked friend Crack- enaten appeals more to the Great British Public than mine: I don't think that people like him to be made out a common Garden-city crank, as I represent him. Ah me! I fear I am unrcgenerate: no uplift about me. No enthewziasm [sic], no mysteries, no ghosteses [.sic], no One God, no primeval Egyptian wisdom, no unlucky mummies, no signs of the zodiac, no reincarnation, no abracadabra, no soulfulncss about me. Nor do I go about in smelly garments with an old rucksack and wave a potsherd. So I don't please either kind of crank, mystified or Petrified, and the movie public is more interested in your and Breasted's Ikhnaton than in mine. Yours is a thriller: mine a Montessori prig, and that is what I believe he was. But each to his taste, and as brother-augurs, wc can carefully place our tongues in our cheeks and wink our dexter eye at one another. And Woolley is also an augur. He is prepared to provide you with the latest movie stuff on old Crackpot and the city of Cracketaten as revealed in the latest epoch-making excavations of the greatest archaeological society in the World bar none, and will phone or write you on the hop, sure thing. You will see specimens of our Mr. Woolley's stuff in the Illustrated London News shortly; the house of Akhenaten's prime minister, showing the Machinery of Government (including I suppose the Treasury Axe) at work (put a penny in the slot) will am/use/aze you. He will soon have another article out in the Illustrated] L[ondon] N[ews] about Carccmish, with an illustration of the house in which Jeremiah met Herodotus. At least, he says so. The interview must have been interesting.
. . . Forgive my frivolity. But Akhenaten always makes me feel frivolous. He was the sort of person I always want to poke in the ribs and hear him crow and gasp. I am afraid he would really have felt obliged to sacrifice me to Amun with his own hand if I had lived in his times, for I have no bump of reverence, and have always mocked at prophets.
Yours ever, H. R. Hall3
H. R. Hall's witty and allusive letter is full of in-jokes about his and Weigall's academic contemporaries - it pokes fun at some of Petrie's personal habits, for instance. But it really focuses on ways of packaging the pharaoh to make him attractive to a mass audience. In May 1922, with Tutankhamun's tomb still to be discovered, Akhenaten was the first ancient Egyptian celebrity, born from a union between archaeology and its presentation in modern mass media. Through the mixture of text and image in journals like The Illustrated London News, people could see the past brought to life. Hall's pseudo-American 'movie' slang and references to automation all point out how Akhenaten was produced at the current boundaries of technology. Hall reminds us (very topically) that technology has the power to re-create a past which has nothing to do with history, but everything to do with modern desires about what history ought to be. It can create amazing and impossible encounters, such as one between the biblical prophet Jeremiah and the fifth-century bce historian Herodotus. But the most significant encounter is that between the ancient and modern world, in which Akhenaten can be a perfect mediator.
Hall understood the progressiveness of Akhenaten's ideas in terms of the 1920s. His Akhenaten lives in a garden suburb - the epitome of a certain kind of bourgeois domestic ideal - and approves of the radical educational methods of Maria Montessori. Not everybody was so impressed with Akhenaten's modernity. Conservatives like Rudyard Kipling thought rather differently about him. In 1925 Kipling received a rather handsome birthday present from the novelist