Akhenaten's grip on events continues to decline. His daughter Meketaten becomes pregnant by a Jew, but suffers retribution when she dies in childbirth. There is civil unrest among politicised Jewish workers in the brick factories at Busiris, where proto-Communism is preached: 'the poor ought to be equal to the rich . . . the boundaries between fields should be effaced, and the land be common property, and wealth taken from the rich and given to the poor'.3' Beset by all these problems, Akhenaten decides to abdicate, and is placed under house arrest. A successor to the throne is eventually found in Tutankhamun. He sends soldiers to murder Akhenaten, who escapes to the Maru-Aten and sets it on fire, disappearing in the flames. Rumours persist, however, that he is still alive, since no corpse was ever discovered. Merezhkovsky leaves it deliberately ambiguous as to whether Akhenaten died and was apocalyptically transfigured by the fire, or escaped to live on as a prophet who will convert the world. In the book's final tableau, the would-be assassin Issachar worships Akhenaten as his Messiah in the ruins of the Aten temple: 'Behold, He cometh!' is the last line.
All this seems very like a transposition to Egypt of key events in the Russian Revolution. The unrest among politicised industrial workers is here; so are the assassination attempts, the abdication of the tsar, his house arrest and the mystery of his death. Merezhkovsky is not aiming to write a history of the revolutions of 1917: rather he offers a parable for it, showing how the world may be transfigured and rejuvenated by his own religious and political theories, for which Akhenaten is a convenient mouthpiece. The novel is not without its (unconscious?) moments of levity, however, as in this description of a banquet at Amarna, clearly based on Figure 6.1:
Soft-boiled ibis eggs were served. They were not eaten as a rule, for the ibis was a bird sacred to the god Tot. But this time all the company ate some to please the king and show their contcmpt for the false god. Ty helped herself to three eggs. It was awkward to eat them with gloved hands and she smeared herself with the yolk, which, however, was not very noticeable beside the yellow streaks from the ointment.3fi
In a very different way, the fall of the Romanovs may have influenced two romantic novels both published in 1938, Allena Best's Honey of the Nile, and Lucile Morrison's The Lost Queen of Egypt. These are both 'lost princess' narratives based around Akhenaten's third daughter Ankhesenpaaten, who escapes from the political turmoil at Thebes after the death of Ay to live a simple life under an assumed name (see Figure 6.3). With their emphasis on flight, uncertain identities, a princess in disguise and the mystery of what happened to Akhenaten and his family, Best's and Morrison's novels might well have reminded readers in 1938 of Anna Anderson, the supposed Grand Duchess Anastasia, youngest daughter of Tsar Nicholas II. Anderson claimed to be the only survivor from the murder of the imperial family in 1918. In 1938, while living in Germany, Anderson's petition to be legally recognised as the tsar's heir was reported all over the English language press. One of the reasons why Anderson sought official recognition was so that she could claim a tsarist fortune (wrongly) believed to be hidden in the Bank of England. The spectre of lost royal wealth dominated the court case, and it is
Igure 6.3 Ankhesenpaatcn on the run. Illustration from Allena Best's Honey of the Nile, 1938.
probably not a coincidence that it pervades these two novels. Ankhesenpaaten pines for the vanished luxury and wealth of her past. Morrison has her confess that the only thing she misses about not being queen any more is 'the possession of beauty'.37 Best goes one step further. In exile Ankhesenpaaten is presented with a tiny scale-model of a royal apartment, including a miniature throne whose back is decorated with the Aten (see Figure 3.5).30 Here the visual mnemonics of Amarna and the Romanovs have merged. The Aten-backed throne which symbolised Amarna 'lifestyle' is miniaturised like the luxurious bibelots the court jeweller Faberge crafted for the Russian imperial family. Whether or not Morrison's and Best's novels were directly influenced by the supposed Anastasia, they are reminders of the fairy-talc quality that the Amarna story soon acquired.
A litde before these two slight but enjoyable novels were published, the mystery writer Agatha Christie had finished her three-act play Akhnaton, although it was not published until 1973. Christie was inside archaeological circles: she was married to an eminent archaeologist, Sir Max Mallowan, and knew British Egyptologists like Stephen Glanville. Christie used Weigall and Breasted's The Dawn of Conscience to create a pacifist Akhenaten pursued and eventually destroyed by the military and the priests of Amun. It has been interpreted as a critique of British appeasement of Nazi Germany in the 1930s, but Akhnaton seems more like the standard Christie family poisoning saga than anything deeply political.39 Akhenaten and Nefertiti are both poisoned by Nefertiti's ambitious sister Mutnodjmet (Christie calls her 'Nezzemut', a borrowing from Weigall), who wants to be queen. The cast consists of British stereotypes projected onto ancient Egypt. Mutnodjmet's husband Horemheb, last pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty, is a Colonel Blimp club bore, 'very much a soldier and definitely a pukka sahib', who re-enacts his battles with 'Old Fuzzy-Wuzzy' using improvised props. Mutnodjmet, glamorous 'in very diaphanous garments', illustrates how far Amarna lifestyle had become identified with modernity. In a conversation with Tutankhamun, she mocks the ageing Tiye for her out-of-date clothes and jewellery:
Oh, do look, Tut: all those old-fashioned gold ornaments. Aren't they screaming? . . . Do you even like her old-fashioned clothes? Don't you think the things wc wear nowadays are much prettier? They give so much more freedom.1"
The stage direction here is: undulates her body meaningly. With sub-Noel Coward dialogue like this, it seems difficult to read Akhnaton as a serious political parable. Christie sometimes tired of turning out formulaic detective novels set in the present and liked to vary her scenarios. Ancient Egypt was as attractive a location for crime stories as anywhere else, especially given its traditional associations with poison and death: hence her Death Comes as the End (1942), a family murder mystery set in the Middle Kingdom.
Post-war Akhenatens
Akhenaten fiction continued unabated after the Second World War. The story took on a new meaning in a world full of citics and lives ruined by ideological conflict. This topicality explains the otherwise surprising success of The Egyptian, an epic novel by the Finnish writer Mika Waltari. First published in Finnish in 1945, it was translated into English in 1949. Wordy and slow-moving, The Egyptian is not an easy read, though still popular in occult circles for its supposedly realistic portrayal of Egyptian magical practices. The hero is a wandering physician, Sinuhe, who treats Akhenaten in his last illness. His wife, an adherent of Aten- worship, is killed in the purges that follow Akhenaten's death, and eventually Sinuhe himself converts to Aten-worship. The Egyptian's popular appeal was confirmed when Twentieth-Century Fox decided to film it in 1953, directed by Michael Curtiz and given the full epic treatment. The film cost 4.2 million dollars, with $85,000 alone being spent on one sequence in Akhenaten's throne- room. This scene is a delirious melange of artefacts from all periods of Egyptian history. Akhenaten, Nefertiti and their six daughters are accurate enough (though the daughters are chastely clothed), but the backdrop is a relief from a Nineteenth Dynasty temple (1292-1190 bce), and other characters wear wigs and jewellery of the Twelfth Dynasty (1938-1759 bce). The casting illuminates the perception of Akhenaten post-Second World War, and how this was adapted to fit the conventions of epic films. Akhenaten was played by Michael Wilding (1912-79), a spare, ascetic-looking English actor who married Elizabeth Taylor. Figures of cultural authority were often played by English actors in Hollywood historical films. Musclcman Victor Mature played Horemheb, and Bella Darvi (1927-71), a Polish-born Holocaust survivor, was the exotic love interest Nefer. The film raids the iconography of Christian epic films of the day to portray Akhenaten in terms of Christ, complete with halo, and his persecuted followers as early Christians, who are martyred in set-piece conflicts with Horemheb's soldiers.41