Henry Rider Haggard — a ring found at Amarna and inscribed with Akhenaten's name. Kipling's thank-you note to Haggard says:
Just a line on my return from town to thank you a hundred times for Akhenaton's Seal (I'm sure he kept it in his Library) which you needn't tell me has no duplicate. It won't be lost - ins'h Allah! And it's going into safe and honourable keeping. I don't care so much about Akhenaton's dealings with it (he probably countersigned a lot of tosh of the Social Progress nature before he was busted).4
Akhenaten is so deeply associated with progress and modernity that he could be encountered in London's newly built garden suburbs, but is also a slightly ridiculous figure, 'a Montessori prig' and believer in 'Social Progress'. He is a paradoxical thing, a thoroughly modern pharaoh.
To others, Akhenaten's halo remained untarnished. Akhenaten had a high profile in the inter-war years, marked by a search for new ideals and authority. He was a transcendental hero, one in an iconic lineage of the world's greatest thinkers. As in the 1890s, his prominence was a product of archaeology, when excavations and finds from Amarna were exhibited and written about. It was as an idealist that Akhenaten attracted Sigmund Freud. His last and most puzzling work, Moses and Monotheism, centres around the nature of Akhenaten's Geistigkeit, an untranslatable German word combining spirituality, intellectuality and pro- gressiveness. Via Freud, Akhenaten's story inspired Frida Kahlo (1907-54), whose amazingly complex painting Moses (1945) is structured around Amarna art elements. Figures and images symbolising all time and space are united com- positionally by the rays of a huge, blood-red Aten-disc, under whose protection Moses is born. Moses won an art prize in Mexico, and Kahlo gave a lecture about her painting and its complicated symbology. It was, she said, about the birth of the HERO:
On the same earth, but painting their heads larger, to distinguish them from the 'mass', the heroes are pictured (very few of them, but well chosen), the transformers of religions, the inventors or creators of these, the conquerors, the rebels. . . . To the right, and this figure I should have painted with much more importance than any other, Amenhotep IV can be seen, who was later called Akhenaten . . . later Moses, who according to Freud's analysis, gave his adopted people the same religion as that of Akhenaten, a little altered according to the interests and circumstances of his time. After Christ, follow Alexander the Great, Caesar, Mohammed, Luther, Napoleon and . . . 'the lost infant', Hitler. To the left, marvelous Nefertiti, wife of Akhenaten, I imagine that besides having been extraordinarily beautiful, she must have been 'a wild one' and a most intelligent collaborator to her husband. Buddha, Marx, Freud, Paracelsus, Epicure [«c], Genghis Kahn, Gandhi, Lenin and Stalin.5
The romantic and idealistic Frida Kahlo had a predictable vision of Akhenaten which was fine for the 1940s. (She also seems to have identified personally with Nefertiti.) The climate is rather different now, and universal heroes linking the whole of human existence are not so much in fashion. At the end of the 1990s, archaeologists and ancient historians are at the height of a new multicultural and academic turn. In today's jargon, some of us are engaged in the deconstruction, destabilisation, demythologisation and deideologisation of western-produced knowledge of the past. Part of this process is to create alternative points of reference and alternative discourses which reconfigure received wisdom. In other words, demoting cultural heroes and looking at them from unorthodox points of view is fashionable. So my postmodern version of Akhenaten is just as much of its time as Hall's, Kipling's and Kahlo's. My own prejudices, and something of my own history, will become clear from the parts of the Akhenaten myth I have chosen to survey here. Any examination of a myth- ologised historical character like Akhenaten inevitably ends up by adding something more to the myth, and this book is no exception. It is just as much an appropriation as the rest.
Although my focus here is not really on the historical Akhenaten but on cultural fantasies of him, it is still important to give a short account of his reign and examine the histories that fantasy takes as its point of departure. This is the first part of the next chaptcr. I attempt to synthesise briefly what can be really known about Akhenaten before turning to the business of how myths about him are created. I look at how Akhenaten's childhood and family dynamics have been re-created on the basis of no evidence at all, and how he is seen as revolutionary and innovatory, whereas much of what he did can also be seen as derivative and conservative. I also look at literal readings of Amarna art, based on an inapplicable notion of 'naturalism', and the consequent fixation on Akhenaten's body. Finally, I examine the fantasy of the lost Utopian city, and the ways in which Akhenaten had already been 'discovered' in a sense before anything factual was known about him. Philosophers, historians and mystics in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries created independently Utopian sun-cities in Egypt, presided over by an enlightened and benevolent pharaoh who offered the west a way forward. The historical Akhenaten thus confirmed a prefabricated text, which received further corroboration when the city of Amarna was excavated.
The archaeology of Amarna, and the people who dug and visited the site, are the subjects of Chapter 3. Amarna is the 'lost city' par excellence, waiting to be rediscovered by the western archaeologists who are the only ones who 'know' ancient Egypt. Presentation of its archaeology in various popular media is an important focus. From the 1850s Amarna figured in a variety of popular publications, especially religious books produced for Sunday reading. Between 1887 and 1936, a succession of important archaeological discoveries at Amarna stopped it from ever slipping out of the public eye. These discoveries coincided with the development of print technologies in the 1890s onwards, ensuring that images of Amarna and Akhenaten continued to be available in a range of English magazines, from the middlebrow, such as The Illustrated London Mews and The Sphere, to the up-market and artsy, such as The Burlington Magazine and The Connoisseur. Journalistic coverage of Amarna played a major part in sustaining its mythic status as a lost world and a Utopian space, a sort of Atlantis. At the same time it was also the ancient place which confirmed modern aspirations to bourgeois domesticity. In this context, I examine the personal agenda of the archaeologists who excavatcd Amarna and often doubled as journalists to publicise their discoveries. These rediscoveries of Amarna have coincided with some interesting moments in the development of archaeological thought, resulting in further appropriations of the site as it is deployed to prove the validity of different strategies. Digging also went hand in hand with political events. After Egypt became a British protectorate in 1882, Amarna became a metaphor for how ancient Egypt, hopelessly degraded after stagnant centuries of Islam and Ottoman rule, would be transformed by western progress. A close look at the archaeologies of Amarna also helps to put in context the phenomenon of'Tutmania', the fascination with Egypt that followed the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922. Tutmania was not a self-containcd phenomenon but was originally built on and sustained by popular interest in the archaeology of Amarna, something ignored by most work on the western appropriation of Egypt.'1 Indeed, some people in the 1920s complained that Tutankhamun was boring because he encapsulated the cliched image of Egypt as an ancient land obsessed with death, while Akhenaten and Amarna gave something much more exciting and up to date: an archaeology of life.
The place-name Amarna is, as Petrie wrote in 1894, 'a European concoction'.7 Because I am primarily interested in European appropriations of Amarna, I deliberately avoid in Chapter 3 the fascinating question of how it has been perceived by the people who live there. At various times Amarna monuments, including parts of Akhenaten's tomb, have been destroyed in local disputes, or resignified according to Islamic culture - the boundary stelae are supposed to mark the mouths of caves filled with treasure, for instance. Evidently a local process of mythologisation is in action, which invests the archaeological remains with a potent value. And feelings can still run high about Akhenaten in Egypt as a whole, as shown by the reaction to Naguib Mahfouz's novel about Akhenaten, al 'A'ish fi al-haqiqa (Dweller in Truth). It remains to be seen how such factors as the proposed Akhenaten visitor centre at nearby Minieh, Islamic fundamentalism in Middle Egypt, and the continued presence of foreign archaeologists, will develop and alter perceptions.