Aton/aition
Louis Farrakhan's alternative etymology for the Egyptian word Aton, rcsignifying it in order to bring it right up to date, is part of a distinctively African American mode of discourse known as 'sciencing'. Sciencing can be defined as reinterpreting a word by breaking down its constituent syllables to reveal a hidden political and cultural meaning. It is a popular rhetorical tool for Afrocentrist orators elevating ancient Egypt as a religious forebear: solar is broken down into soul-Ra, Africa into AfRa-ka, chemistry into Khem (= Egypt) is thee, and so on." I should like to finish by scicncing the word Aton myself, and pointing out its resemblance to the Greek word aition, root of the word aetiology: the assignment of a cause or origin to a thing or placc, often in mythological terms. The foundation story of Rome is a good example of a mythological aition. Why is Rome called Rome? Because it was founded by i?omulus. Aetiology seeks to explain the origins of the mysterious and inexplicable, to give comprehensible reasons for the incomprehensible. Readings of Akhenaten both by Afrocentrists and by alternative religionists make him into a sort of aition, an emblematic and revelatory figure who is imbued with multiple meanings that continue to be redrawn. For both, though in very different ways, he has come to be a symbol of the struggle between dark and light, between freedom and oppression, between enlightenment and corruption. He is invoked as an aition for many contradictory things: the Egyptian origins of a distinctively black monotheism, the white origins of superior knowledge. The contradictory quality of these redrawings illustrates how they can only be viewed through what anthropologists call the 'emic perspective', which interprets cultural phenomena in terms of the categories of the specific cultural system under scrutiny. They also illustrate the vitality and independence of the intellectual, emotional and behavioural processes at work in reclaiming Akhenaten for your own side. Proponents of alternative Akhenatens rejig their sources to make him into something original and relevant, a new aition - Nefcrtiti-Aphrodite, Aton-atone. Carlo Ginzburg's classic book The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth- Century Miller reveals some of the same processes of rcsignification as those of the alternative Akhcnatenists. The Cheese and the Worms tells the story of Domcnico Scandella, also known as Menocchio, a miller in rural northern Italy who devised his own cosmos out of a combination of his conventional pious books, the world around him and his own desire to make sense of that world. Menocchio read by isolating words and phrases, sometimes distorting them, juxtaposing different passages, and firing off rapid verbal analogies that filled every word with new meanings of his own. 'It was not the book as such, but the encounter between the printed page and oral culture that formed such an explosive mixture in Mcnocchio's head."8
LITERARY AKHENATENS
Here is the past and all its inhabitants miraculously sealed as in a magic tank; all we have to do is to look and to listen and to listen and to look and soon the little figures - for they are rather under life size - will begin to move and to speak, and as they move we shall arrange them in all sorts of patterns of which they were ignorant.
Virginia Woolf [1930] 1967:54
Why didn't Virginia Woolf write a novel about Akhenaten? She should have done - the high priestess of Modernism might have found the story of the most modern pharaoh quite inspirational. She must have known something about Akhenaten. The Woolfs' publishing house, the Hogarth Press, brought out Freud's Moses and Monotheism, translated by their friend James Strachey, who even attempted to psychoanalyse Akhenaten. Less celebrated authors than Woolf, however, have produced quite a quantity of literary treatments of Akhenaten and the Amarna period over the last hundred years. There are at least sixty (listed in the Appendix); doubtless there are others I have missed, as well as unpublished or self-published ones. Most are written in English, French or German, but also in Arabic, Slavic and Scandanavian languages. Their quantity is testimony in itself to the enduring interest in Akhenaten: there is no comparable body of fiction about any other ancient historical character, with the exceptions of Cleopatra and Alexander the Great. Even Ramesses II, Tutankhamun or the Old Kingdom pyramid builders do not compare in the fiction stakes. There is, of course, a long western history of novels and dramas about pharaohs, which enact a compelling drama of love, power and tragedy against exotic backdrops. Francois Pascale's Sesostris (1661), along with tragedies like John Sturmy's Sesostris, or Royalty in Disguise (1728), Edward Young's Busiris, King of Egypt (1730), Charles Marsh's Amasis, King of Egypt (1737), and novels like Jean Terrasson's Sethos (1731) are among the earliest. Akhenaten is the heir to this fictional and dramatic tradition.
Almost every genre has been used to tell Akhenaten's story, the novel being the most favoured format by far. The predominance of Akhenaten novels fits in, I think, with the ideas developed by literary critics like Georg Lukacs that the rise of the novel is closely linked to the ideology of individualism. The realistic novel is the mode through which a sustained fictional world is re-created through the individual's point of view, and this sustains the imagination of bourgeois society which creates and consumes these novels. Since Akhenaten has notoriously been called the first individual, we might expcct his 'individualism' to be explored through the novel format. Lukacs' ideas about relationships between the novel and the bourgeoisie also help explain the domestic ideal that lies at the heart of many Akhenaten novels. Most of them are extremely conservative and lack the radical imagination of the alternative Akhenatens.
Apart from novels, there arc short stories, several plays (none of them, as far as I know, ever performed), collections of poetry, and what one might call faction - narratives which mingle fictional elements with some of the apparatus of scholarship. Many combine the romantic and crotic with the didactic, and were written for the popular market by authors who were often successful in their day but have made little impression on conventional literary histories. Several authors believe they can commune with Amarna mystically or lived there in previous incarnations, as I mentioned in Chapter 5. It may or may not be significant that three-quarters of them were written by women. The Amarna period, with its glamorous and powerful female protagonists, offers plenty of scope for those who want to identify with beautiful princesses. Or perhaps this is just part of the long tradition of women writing historical novels out of an interest in personality, romance, and the historical failures historians dismiss.
It may seem unfair to pull apart books written to entertain rather than to inform seriously or be great literature; but fictions are useful for understanding the Akhenaten myth. They serve and renew a widespread popular interest in the past which is not satisfied by scholarly books. Most of the novels are formulaic and caught up in contemporaneity, but this contemporaneity illustrates how different aspects of Akhenaten have more appeal at particular historical moments, and so how the legend can be perpetually reconfigured. In the novels written during and immediately after the First World War, for instance, Akhenaten the pacifist is the dominant figure, sometimes combining with a Spiritualist Akhenaten who offers alternatives to a Christianity unable to cope with the flood of bereavement caused by the war. During the Cold War and in the post-Watergate 1970s, the events at Amarna became the stuff of political thrillers about corruption and espionage. In the 1980s and 1990s, Akhenaten becomes more explicitly eroticised, a figure of sexual deviance or fevered excess. Most of these works seem to be individual responses born out of an interest in the period and its events. The most original ones were written either before many facts were known about Akhenaten, or where the authors have not tried to be historically authentic. Realist novels about ancient Egypt do not work, perhaps because the novel was a genre of literature which the Egyptians did not have. The best historical novels are those which adopt in some way narrative structures of the time they describe - think of Robert Graves' brilliant use of the format of Latin annalistic history writing in /, Claudius — or which abandon narrative realism altogether, as Marguerite Youreenar did in her superb Memoirs of Hadrian.