He is not static and conservative, but political and dynamic. Different interest groups compete for the right to present him, and the huge appetite for works about Egypt in all media maintains this. Yet the most successful books on Egypt in terms of sales are often those that academic insiders regard as the most eccentric, and usually refuse to engage with in any way. Their authors go on to exploit this lack of professional engagement: it's much easier to claim that there is a cover-up when the official response is 'No comment'. How the situation has changed from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, when archaeologists and Egyptologists were media figures famous enough to appear as characters in popular fiction. Part of the reason why Petrie, Wallis Budge and Margaret Murray were so well known in their day was because they wrote popular books which presented Egyptian archaeology in an inclusive and exciting way. But the growth in academic specialisation since then means that few modern scholars attempt such projects. Now technology is dissolving the boundaries between the academically credible and the fringe. People increasingly go for all kinds of information to the World Wide Web, where all information is of equal value. Here eccentric and conventional Egyptology rub shoulders, and it can be hard to know which is which. Archaeology is global. The professional community is going to have to engage more with non-specialists, whether it likes it or not. The many strange faces of Akhenaten are reminders of this: they are mnemonics for a world where orthodox and heterodox, past and present, reality and hyper-reality, are becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish.
HISTORIES OF AKHENATEN
The Tel cl Amarna period has had more nonsense written about it than any other period in Egyptian history, and Akhenaten is a strong rival to Cleopatra for the historical novelist. The appeal of Cleopatra is the romantic combination oflove and death; Akhenaten appeals by a combination of religion and sentiment. In the ease of Akhenaten the facts do not bear the construction often put on them.
Margaret Murray 1949: 54
Here are some of the religious and political leaders that Akhenaten has been compared to: Martin Luther, Cromwell, Julian the Apostate, Moses, Christ. His reign has been compared to the Reformation, the English Civil War (again with Akhenaten as Cromwell rather than Charles I), the French Revolution, the Russian revolutions of 1917 - in fact, to almost any ideological conflict with religion, doomed royal personalities and perhaps a love story at its centre. Historians who write about a world far removed in time and place find such comparisons with other periods in history very tempting. But at the same time these analogies smooth over the difference between the ancient and the modern world, making readers think that it is possible to understand Akhenaten and his reign with a minimum of cultural adjustment. They also subtly superimpose western ways of thinking about monarchy, art and religion onto a world where their meanings and ideological underpinnings were very different. Ultimately, they trivialise by emphasising similarity rather than difference. They are almost an abuse of Akhenaten's memory, an unwarranted universalisation of his experience. Once his story has become universal, it can easily become one of those stories which are so compelling that they resist closure and so full of rich potentialities that they cannot be historically contained - in other words, a myth.
This chapter is a hard look at that myth and the aspects of Akhenaten's history that have been most influential in its formation, rather than a comprehensive history of his reign. Inevitably I have had to be selective and ignore some important historical questions because they have little to do with myth-making. Therefore I spend little time considering foreign policy and diplomacy, or whether, there was a period when Akhenaten and his father Amunhotcp III ruled jointly. All this involves a certain amount of debunking myths. The most attractive and resilient parts of Akhenaten's history/pseudobiography are also the parts that arc most difficult to substantiate with hard evidence. Also, I do not want to write another over-personalised psyehobiography of Akhenaten, reconstructing his motivations, . feelings and emotions. It would be marvellous if one could say with authority that Akhenaten had Oedipal fantasies about his parents, or that 'there can be no doubt that both Akhenaten and Nefertiti were extremely proud of their six daughters', or that Akhenaten's sister was the 'little companion' of their mother's lonely widowhood, or that 'the perfect life of the royal family was shattered' by child deaths - but one can't, bccausc the evidence is not there.1
These quotations all come from the standard, most easily available works on Akhenaten by professional Egyptologists. As well as being sentimental and wholly speculative, they illustrate the central problem that his biography is rarely written with any neutrality. More than any other period of Egyptian history, Akhenaten's reign evokes emotive narratives and personalised responses, even from conservative academics who have had long scholarly connections with it. This is true of the authors of the two most authoritative English-language biographies, Akhenaten, King of Egypt (1988, still in print) by Cyril Aldred (1914-91), and Donald Redford's Akhenaten, the Heretic King (1984). Both biographies are scholarly works based on an exhaustive knowledge of the period, and in many ways they are still indispensable. Yet they paint radically different pictures of the king and his reign, which ultimately derive from Redford disliking Akhenaten and Aldred thinking he was admirable. To their crcdit, neither author makes any attempt to disguise his opinion.
Donald Redford, a Canadian archaeologist, has worked since the mid-1960s on reconstructing the dismantled monuments from the early part of Akhenaten's reign at east Karnak. It seems to me that his work on these monuments influenced his conception of Akhenaten in Akhenaten, the Heretic King, as an inflexible ideologue who deserved his downfall, like a modern dictator whose statues are torn down. Redford sometimes uses the vocabulary of the Cold War and 1984 - people are 'purged' or become 'non-persons', the Egyptian army takes POWs, and so on. Its conclusion hints at other types of prejudice. Redford admits that he personally dislikes Akhenaten, not only bccausc he was a repressive monomaniac and intellectual lightweight, but also because he was an effeminate artistic type: 'Is this effete monarch, who could never hunt or do battle, a true descendant of the authors of Egypt's empire?' His court 'is nothing but an aggregation of voluptuaries ... I cannot conceive a more tiresome regime under which to live.'" On the other hand, Cyril Aldred (formerly Keeper of Art and Archaeology in the Royal Scottish Museum, Edinburgh) is very keen on Amarna art. Believing that images of Akhenaten which seem to show him physically aberrant may be read literally, in the 1960s he developed the influential theory (first proposed in 1907) that Akhenaten suffered from a rare endocrinal disorder, Frohlich's Syndrome. Perhaps from his early training at the Courtauld Institute of Art, Aldred talks about Egypt using art-historical vocabulary indicative of western European cultural movements: 'naturalism', 'mannerism', 'realism', and so on. Akhenaten, King of Egypt is Eurocentric in other ways. Aldred seems to think about Akhenaten and Nefertiti in terms of the British royal family of his youth, who celebrate 'jubilees' and 'durbars' just like George V Aldred admires Akhenaten for being more 'advanced' and 'rational' (read: western) than other pharaohs, based on the Judaeo-Christian assumption that monotheism must inherendy be a superior belief system to any other. He thinks that this can be deduced from artistic productions: 'Amarna art in the integration of its compositions betrays ... a more joyous acceptance of the natural world, and a more rational belief in a universal sole god.'3