But he who enters yonder mountain cave May sec the form of that courageous king, Who felt that light was life for everything, And should outlast the grave.
And that dream-city Khuenaten made -
The boy-reformer by the banks of Nile
Who broke with Thebes, her priestly power and guile -
Shall never surely fade.
Still in our desert it renews its youth, Still lifts its beauty out of barren sands. City, thought-built, eternal, not with hands, For Light that lives in Truth.12
Here Rawnsley assembles all the ingredients that characterise the forthcoming wave of 1920s Amarna fiction: the cosmopolitan city and its flourishing artistic life, its spiritual and idealistic ruler, its ultimate tragedy.
All these were to be considerably expanded in a book which probably had more impact on building the Akhenaten myth than any other: Arthur Weigall's The Life and Times of Akhnaton, Pharaoh of Egypt (1910), whose impact I surveyed in Chapter 4. Weigall realised the potential for myth-making around Akhenaten. He also realised that a combination of religion and sentimentality sold books, and made the Amarna royal couple into glamorous celebrities. Through him, Akhenaten and Nefertiti soon became well enough known to appear as characters in short fiction written for popular large-circulation magazines - the authors assume that their readers will know the essential historical facts. A romantic writer, Lilian Bagnall, moved smartly to cash in on Weigall's popular success with her romance, 'In the Tombs of the Kings' (1910).
Bagnall published this in The London Magazine, an illustrated monthly largely aimed at middle-class women. Her story of aristocratic romance and excavation in Egypt is given a surprising twist by introducing Akhenaten and Nefertiti - the first time, to my knowledge, that they appear as characters in fiction. The aristocratic Egyptologist, Paul Vyning, son of the suitably named Lord Quest, goes out to Egypt to dig and encounters the beautiful and elegant Claudia Forrest. He sees her standing 'like a tall blue gentian, in a simple dress of native cotton, vivid against the burning yellow of the cliffs'. Before they have been long in conversation, Paul asks Claudia whether she believes in reincarnation. Perhaps they had both been in Egypt before, he suggests, ' "in the days when England was infested with unpleasant people with blue skins, before blue blood was thought anything of'', but she is sceptical. Shortly after, inexplicable supernatural things happen when Paul and Claudia play the parts of Akhenaten and Nefertiti in an amateur theatrical held in the Valley of the Kings - an incident shamelessly stolen by Bagnall from one of Weigall's favourite stories.13 Claudia begins to think that there may be something in reincarnation after all. The denouement comes when she and Paul visit the tombs in the western Valley of the Kings, excavated a few years earlier. Here they are trapped in a tomb, nearly killed by a rockfall, and encounter a terrifying spectre of Akhenaten's successor Ay. Paul and Claudia manage to escape, and confcss their love for each other after realising that they had indeed lived in Egypt before, as Akhenaten and Nefertiti. The greatest love story of the ages, Bagnall implies, will never die.
Desert romances like Bagnall's were pretty hackneyed even in 1910, though they remained popular (see Figure 6.2). Comedy rather than romance is more apparent in the next significant fictional treatment of Akhenaten: Henry Rider Haggard's long story Smith and the Pharaohs, serialised over three issues of The Strand Magazine in 1912-13. Haggard was very interested in Akhenaten. He owned rings inscribed with Akhenaten's cartouche - one of which he gave to Rudyard Kipling - and visited Amarna, though he was disappointed with what he saw. (His reactions are quoted on p. 71.) Given Haggard's interest in
Figure 6.2 Cartoon by George Morrow from Punch, 9 May 1923, at the height of'Tutmania'. © Punch Ltd.
collecting, the museum is a suitable setting for the epiphany with Akhenaten in Smith and the Pharaohs. Smith, an amateur Egyptologist, stays behind in the museum after closing time to look at the mummified bodies of the pharaohs. It turns out that this night is the one night of the year when they come to life and converse. All the most famous rulers are there, including the 'long-necked' Akhenaten (Haggard uses Petrie's form Khu-en-Aten) lecturing Ramesses II 'in a high, weak voice'. Haggard presents him as a valetudinarian bore who drones on about his religious theories, parodying the stereotype of the mystic bore, a stock character in late Victorian and Edwardian satire.14 He is also, I think, poking fun at Weigall's earnest Akhenaten. In Haggard's tale, Akhenaten bores Ramesses so much that he urges him go away and tell another pharaoh about monotheism:
'I will talk with him', answered Khu-en-Aten. 'It is more than possible we may agree on certain points. Meanwhile, let me explain to to your Majesty -'
'Oh, I pray you, not now. There is my wife.'
'Your wife?' said Khu-en-Aten, drawing himself up. 'Which wife? I am told that your Majesty had many and left a large family; indeed, I see some hundreds of them here to-night. Now, I - but let me introduce Nefertiti to your Majesty. I may explain that she was my only wife.'
'So I have understood. Your Majesty was rather an invalid, were you not? Of course, in those circumstances, one prefers the nurse whom one can trust.'15
As in Bagnall's story, what is notable here is how much knowledge about Akhenaten is presupposed for the satire to work. Haggard assumes that the readers of The Strand Magazine know about Akhenaten's religious reforms, his supposed physical deformity and his devotion to Nefertiti. Weigall certainly succeeded in giving Akhenaten and Nefertiti distinct characters for the non-specialist.
Although a potential figure of fun, the Edwardian Akhenaten was also relevant to topical issues that were debated in novels, particularly religious questions. Alternative religions were a major cultural phenomenon at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. One of their characteristic features was an interest in eastern mysticism ancient and modern, especially Egyptian and Tibetan. The success, at various times, of Swedenborgianism, Mesmerism, Spiritualism and various types of Theosophy showed how much public appetite there was for new and exotic forms of religious belief to supplement or replace orthodox forms of Christianity. People involved in religious and social reform were often attracted to them. Akhenaten has an obvious part to play here. He was seen as a charismatic figure, and a common thread of early twentieth-century alternative religions was the presence of a central revelatory figure, a sort of guru. His teachings also seemed progressive and relevant, yet not too far from Christianity: reassuringly western, in fact, like those who had reinterpreted eastern philosophies to produce Theosophy and Anthroposophy. b
Akhenaten's religion could easily be seen as pointing the way ahead in an imperialist world which was obsessed with materialism and had lost a proper sense of human values. This is the tenor of two very interesting novelistic treatments of the Akhenaten legend, A Wife out of Egypt (1913) and There Was a King in Egypt (1918) by Norma Lorimer (1864-1948).
Lorimer, though now long out of print and forgotten, was a very successful writer in the first two decades of the twentieth century. The British Library catalogue lists thirty-four books by her, and her Akhenaten novels went into several cheap two-shilling editions after enthusiastic reviews. A beautiful and thrilling romance', said The Daily Sketch of There Was a King in Egypt. Lorimer was a fine writer, with a gift for dialogue and the sensuous description of landscape. She deserves to be better known. Her forte was romance and travelogue spiced with a dash of mysticism, and her Egypt novels are part of a sub-genre of romances with Egyptian settings that were very popular in late Victorian and Edwardian times.17 Their Egyptian settings reflect the growth of tourism to Egypt and its popularity as a honeymoon destination. But Lorimer also cared passionately about the political situation in modern Egypt. She was enraged by Muslim discrimination against the Christian Copts, but even more by the patronising attitude of the British colonialists to the Egyptians. 'He hadn't the slightest idea of what he really meant by the word natives, whether Mohammedans, Copts, Greeks or Persians', she writes of one of her characters. Unusually, Lorimer's fiction presents the physical remains of the pharaonic past as a token of the future possibilities of an Egypt governed by its own people, rather than as a symbol of the lost glories it would never regain. She is also sharply critical of unimaginative reactions to ancient monuments nourished by books of the Sunday School type, which can only see the biblical parallels. In this context, Akhenaten is useful for Lorimer's political agenda, as a great figure of the glorious past, but with progressive ideas that are applicable to the modern world. He is an exemplar both for political and for religious advancement.