at the interval people could be overheard wondering which bits were false, Akhenaten's breasts or penis.27 Akhenaten's sexual ambivalence was accentuated by having his part sung by a counter-tenor. The fluting voice, neither male nor female, is perfect for Glass's transgendered Akhenaten. As well as Akhenaten, Christopher Robson has sung other roles whose confused sexuality is threatening and destructive, such as an incestuous lesbian murderess in a version of Jean Genet's play The Maids. Like Jarman, those who stage Glass's opera exploit the setting in an Orientalist space to augment the sexuality. In A/chnaten the winnowers and brickmakers summoned up one aspect of eternal, unchanging Egypt; the other, (homo)erotie side of Orientalism was represented by six shaven-headed non-singing wrestlers, naked cxccpt for white sumo-style loincloths, who writhed about in slow-motion clinches for the entire production. At the end of the opera they were a convenient dramatic deviec, surrounding Akhenaten and bringing him down after his self-blinding. The wrestlers were included to focus the self- absorbed royal characters in a real human drama, but to the many gay opera- goers their shaven heads and built-up bodies suggested something rather different
they looked like 1980s stereotypes of gay men. This received a curious real-life confirmation after the performance, when you walked out of the English National Opera, down Saint Martin's Lane, and past one of London's most popular gay bars, the Brief Encounter. Life imitated art: the stage wrestlers' twins were standing around on the pavement with their drinks, and for a moment two different gay worlds seemed to merge.28
Even if Glass intended to foreground Akhenaten's religious idealism, it was the sexual aspects of the opera that struck most people. The reviewer in the conservative Daily Telegraph (19 June 1985) complained that far too much was made of Akhenaten's deviant sexuality, pointing out rightly that the historical evidence for it was pretty thin. 'What did get lost in this production was the spiritual stature of this reformer, depicted unjustly as a moronic nonentity.' The confuscd incestuous relationships of Akhenaten's family were also a focus of interest. 'Who fathered or mothered whom is beyond anyone's wit to sort out. Mr Glass suggests the worst, by making everyone as incestuous as possible.'29 Nearly everybody commented on Akhenaten's body, praising the marvellous make-up job that made Christopher Robson into such a convincing hermaphrodite. Some thought that this was overdone. The reviewer in the Mew Musical Express thought that the most unusual thing in the opera was Akhenaten's body, with its 'somewhat enlarged cranium, female breasts, and male genitalia. As the latter were exposed, I swear I saw a huge collective thought-bubble containing a question-mark rise above the audience.'30 The accompanying still of a bare-chested Robson as Akhenaten is captioned, 'They're Nefertittis!' Other reviewers wrote of the eerie, unearthly quality the combination of counter-tenor voice and hermaphrodite body evoked.31 Evidcndy the display of a deviant and sexualised body still had the power to unsettle and confront. In spite of Glass's fascination with him as 'the man of Religion', cultural change had made Akhenaten's ideas less important, interesting or relevant than his sexual self.
EPILOGUE
Ramses docs not signify anything for us, only the mummy is of an inestimable worth because it is what guarantees that accumulation has meaning. Our entire linear and accumulative culture collapses if we cannot stockpile the past in plain view. To this end the pharaohs must be brought out of their tomb and the mummies out of their silence.
Baudrillard 1994: 9-10
The sexualised Akhenaten is a suitable image of him to conclude with. It is an image which encapsulates so many of the ways he, and ancient Egypt, have been used over the past 150 years or so. The gay versions are another example of how Akhenaten has been endlessly co-opted by particular interest groups as the first member of a symbolic ancestry that stretches back to Egypt. They also show that even the visions of him that seem most radical and confronting have something quite conservative at their heart. What we see in Akhenaten's many different faces is actually, then, the stability of ancicnt Egypt's cultural meanings. His guises are reflections of the different people who have adopted him at different times and places and made him their own, but usually for the same reasons. Ancient Egypt promises access to the hidden and the originary. 'We require a visible past, a visible continuum, a visible myth of origin, which reassures us about our end.'1 Akhenaten is that visible myth of origin, immediately recognisable, endlessly exploitable, and all things to all people. And he will remain a myth, because myths are what people want to believe.
The image of sexualised Akhenaten is also terminable, yet interminable. While summing up what has happened to him in the past, it also hints at what may happen to him in the future. The seeds of Akhenatens yet to come are buried in die representations I have surveyed, and are waiting for the right conditions to make them sprout. Some of the plants that grow from those seeds may be benign and beautiful; others may be monstrous. While writing this I wondered many times how Akhenaten would be regarded had he been discovered for the first time at the end of the twentieth century instead of at the beginning of the nineteenth. Those images of the happy family life, and the naked children being petted, would be interpreted rather differently, I suspect, as Vladimir Nabokov suggested in Lolita (1960). Here Akhenaten's 'pre-nubile Nile daughters . . . wearing nothing but many necklaccs of bright beads' stood at the beginning of Humbert Humbert's lineage of nymphets, reassuring him 'that it was all a question of attitude, that there was really nothing wrong in my being moved to distraction by girl-children'.2 If Akhenaten appeared for the first time now, he might seem to sum up everything that was wrong with the world, instead of being a role model whom we would want to enlist on our side.
It is unsatisfying for a book to conclude that there is no conclusion, and without any reflections on the 'real' Akhenaten who lies behind the endless representations. Yet it would be wrong to try to impose a neat and homogeneous ending onto a book that is really about diversity and multiplicity. And the historical Akhenaten was himself aware of the power of multiple representations. During his lifetime he had himself shown in many different guises, playing around with his own images and identities: dutiful son, all-encompassing ruler, warrior-king, parent, husband and various gods. In that sense the diversity of this book does represent something of the true nature of Akhenaten. This very diversity is what will ensure Akhenaten's presence as a cultural hallucination. If Akhenaten is not of an age but for all time, it is not because he transcends historical and cultural boundaries as the world's first individual. He has become a simulacrum, an endlessly repeated copy with no original. His immortality lies precisely in what is not there. He has survived becausc behind those recognisable features there is a space where conflicting desires erotic, aesthetic, political - can be enacted and lived
APPENDIX
Literary treatments of Akhenaten, the Amarna period, or the archaeology of Amarna