When the chicken crieth in the egg-shell, He giveth it life, delighting that it should chirp with all its might. The same Aton, Who liveth for ever, Who slumbers not, neither does He sleep, knows the wishes of your heart. The Lord of Peace will not tolerate the victory of those who delight in strife.23
Akhenaten's encouraging message helps Margaret to go on with her life after Freddy's death, and Akhenaten is also responsible for her meeting with Michael again, in a railway buffet. Love overtakes them and they make plans to marry before Michael is sent back to fight. For a final time Mrs Mervill is encountered, blasted with smallpox and swathed in draperies like a mummy. On their wedding day, Michael and Margaret remark on the similarity of the Psalms to the 'hymn' to the Aten, and as they say their vows the sun breaks through the clouds and touches them with its rays, just as the Aten touches Akhenaten and Nefertiti. A final quote from Akhenaten's 'hymn' concludes the novel perfectly.
A Wife out of Egypt and There Was a King in Egypt are in some ways the most complex fictional treatments of Akhenaten. Although ultimately based on the familiar nineteenth-century idea that Egypt was the beginning of everything, Lorimer's version of Akhenaten is allowed to comment on (and offer solutions to) a wider range of difficult political and social problems than usual. In this respect, her novels hark back to an older tradition of Utopian fiction about ancient Egypt, such as Jane Loudon Webb's The Mummy: A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century (1827) and Edgar Allan Poe's Some Words with a Mummy (1847). In both of these, revived mummies give invaluable advice, sanctioned by time, to a world which has gone wrong and lost all proper sense of values. Crusading English novelists would probably have co-opted Akhenaten into other political debates, but archaeology intervened. The discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun at the same time as the excavation of Amarna was to be a turning point in the development of fictions about Akhenaten.
Fictions post-Tutankhamun
The palace hall, the pillars hung with flowers. And frieze of royal cobras, while the Sun Through opened ceilings sends the morning hours As gods of Egypt and of Ikhnaton.
Leonard 1924: 13
There is a significant difference in the presentation of the Amarna dramatis personae after 1922. Before this date, Akhenaten was a ghost, a spectral figure conjured up in a museum or in a mystic communion between past and present. But after 1922, archaeological discoveries at Amarna and the Valley of the Kings enabled writers to re-create a physical context in which he could move and act, and Akhenaten becomes far more material and tangible. W. E. Leonard's poem above, with its sensuous evocation of a lived space, is an example. In the 1920s realistic novels set at the time of his religious changes began to be written, with Akhenaten appearing as a fully realised character in his own right. It is almost as if uncovering the material remains of the royal court of Akhenaten's city gave writers the confidence to allow him to emerge. While deeply interested in the material culture of the past, the realist Akhenaten fictions of the 1920s and 1930s continually project the modern onto the ancient - not, as in Lorimer's novels, the other way round.
The most bizarre example of this confusion of ancient and modern is probably King Akhnaton: A Chronicle of Ancient Egypt (1928). Written by an American, Simeon Strunsky, it is based around a humble character who makes friends with the royal family. While ostensibly a 'chronicle', it is full of amazing anachronisms and terrible dialogue of the 'if you're ever in the land of Canaan, look us up' variety. The hero is Bek, a historical individual (one of Akhenaten's craftsmen, who also appeared in Rawnsley's poem quoted earlier). He is the son of Seker, who works for 'the Horus Water Reserve Development Board'. The young Bek wins a scholarship to the Anion College of Fine Arts at Thebes. Thebes for a student is an exciting town: a character tells Bek that it' "is full of nice little eating places, and some day when you have an evening off from college I must take you out. Are you fond of foreign food?"' Bek proceeds through the bureaucratic ranks, eventually becoming Head of the Pharaonic Department of Public Works and Town Planning at Thebes. Here he meets Akhenaten's daughter 'Neffy' (Neferneferuaten), who complains to him, ' "You know Bek, it's awful dull here in Thebes since Dad moved out to Aten City."' Bek eventually moves out to Aten City, marries 'Neffy', and the novel ends with them both attending the circumcision-feast of the baby Moses.
Equally unburdened by historical accuracy is another 1920s American novel, Archie Bell's King Tut-Ankh-Amun: his romantic history. Relating how, as Prince of Her- monthis, he won the love of Senpa, priestess of the temple of Karnak, and through her interest achieved THE THRONE OF THE PHARAOHS (1923). I wonder, although I have no evidence for this, whether this novel is connected with films. The long title, with its idiosyncratic capitalisation, recalls the hyperbole of film posters, and the novel shares some set-pieces with silent films, such as a virgin being sacrificcd to the Nile. Bell presents an unconventional version of the Amarna royal family, as grotesques in a pageant of Orientalist excess. The villainess is the gorgeously bejewelled and scented Khu-Pen-Aton - actually Meritaten after assuming her father's name and title. (The odd form of the name must be derived somehow from one of Petrie's old publications which call Akhenaten Khu-en-Atcn.) Khu- Pen-Aton is an evil temptress reminiscent of movie star Theda Bara's characterisation of Cleopatra in the 1917 film of the same name. Like Khu-Pen-Aton, Theda Bara's Cleopatra is an exotic and destructive vamp who consumes men - a link also suggested by the book's covcr art, which shows a woman in vaguely Egyptian dress lying on a chaise-longue with a panther at her feet. Bell's novel centres on Khu-Pen-Aton's vicious rivalry with her virtuous younger sister Senpa (Ankhesenpaaten). Senpa has fallen in love with Tutankhamun, who had previously incurred Khu-Pen-Aton's hatred by rejecting her sexual advances. In a climactic scene, Khu-Pen-Aton is about to have Senpa sacrificed to the Nile, but is eventually overpowered and dragged off to prison by Tutankhamun's cohorts. In prison Khu-Pen-Aton uses her irresistible vamp skills to seduce and murder the guard:
The stalwart officer, unable to curb himself, lay his head against the
cushions of the couch, and with her cheeks pressed against his own, she breathed the warm breath of passion against his face.
'I love you!' he whispered, as he breathed the flower odors from her bosom drapery . . .
She drew a dagger from beneath the pillow and buried it deep in his side, and grasping his throat with her hand, she fell upon him with a leap and thrust it deeper again."'4
When Tutankhamun's soldiers arrive to kill her, Khu-Pcn-Aton commits suicide in an obvious parallel of Cleopatra's: 'they saw the white breast laid bare, the dagger raised and then thrust deep'.2' Tutankhamun and Senpa marry and rule Egypt, though shortly afterwards Tutankhamun dies in agony, stricken by the plague.
By realising the potential of the story of Akhenaten's family as an Orientalist spectacle, Bell implies a powerful moral lesson for the present. Like the orgy scenes in Cecil B. de Mille films about antiquity, sexual and material excess is a reminder of the inevitable downfall of civilisations.21' In Bell's novel, Akhenaten's corrupt regime and bloodthirsty family, concerned only with struggles for power, are punished and ultimately brought down. But this message was not found universally uplifting or even interesting, as illustrated by the first film treatment of any part of Akhenaten's story: Tutankhamen, directed by the independent William Earle and released in December 1923. This seems to have been a melodramatic love story replete with Orientalist tropes, including the ever-popular virgin sacri- fice.27 Surviving stills show that, in spite of efforts to get the period detail right, we are still very much in contemporary America. One caption reads, 'in this boudoir scene of the Princcss and her attendants as reproduced by the Earle studios, the life and surroundings of the early Egyptians bccomc a vivid reality': real indeed, because the princcss is white and her maids are black. The film also claimed to be highly educative, however: