Akhenaten

Egypt's False Prophet

Nicholas Reeves

• Publisher: Thames and Hudson Ltd
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780500774588
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Geschichte der ägyptischen Antike

One of the most compelling and controversial figures in history, Akhenaten has captured the imagination like no other Egyptian pharaoh. Known today as a heretic, Akhenaten sought to impose upon Egypt and its people the worship of a single god the sun and in so doing changed the country in every way. In this immensely readable re-evaluation, Nicholas Reeves takes issue with the existing view of Akhenaten, presenting an entirely new perspective on the turbulent events of his seventeen-year reign. Reeves argues that, far from being the idealistic founder of a new faith, Akhenaten cynically used religion for purely political ends in a calculated attempt to reassert the authority of the king. Backed up by abundant archaeological and documentary evidence, Reevess closely written narrative also provides many new insights into questions that have baffled scholars for generations the puzzle of the body in Tomb 55 in the Valley of the Kings; the fate of Nefertiti, Akhenatens beautiful wife, and the identity of the mysterious successor, Smenkhkare; and the theory that Tutankhamun, Akhenatens son and true heir, was murdered.

CHAPTER ONE

DISCOVERY

‘… a trickle of fine yellow sand slipped through my fingers out of the cracks and crevices of the rough surface beneath. Egyptian sand. I was holding something that had scarcely been touched since it had been found in Egypt years before, something which might still bear the fingerprints not only of the finder, but even of the maker.… Suddenly I was invaded by a great longing; I wanted to know all I could about the place where the tile had come from … Tell el Amarna; up till this moment a name meaning for me no more than that of a heap of ruins somewhere on the eastern bank of the Nile, where once Tutankhamun had lived, and, yes, Nefertiti – I was clear about her – and her strange husband the Pharaoh Amenhotep [Amenophis] IV, whose other curious name was Akhenaten …’ MARY CHUBB

From Sicard to Lepsius

The name el-Amarna dates back less than three hundred years, to the 18th century and a tribe of dusty bedouin known as the Beni Amran. Here, on a desolate Middle Egyptian plain, bordered by the great river Nile and hemmed in by craggy cliffs to north, south and east, the bedouin settled and established a string of four villages – el-Till, el-Hagg Qandil, el-Amiriya and el-Hawata. The name of the first of these would combine with that of the tribe to produce ‘el-Till el-Amarna’, later corrupted to ‘Tell el-Amarna’ and now abbreviated to its more familiar form – el-Amarna.

Today el-Amarna is one of the most celebrated ancient sites in the world – archaeologically, since it is one of very few large-scale Egyptian settlements to have been preserved from dynastic times; and historically, because it served as stage for the unfolding drama of the ‘heretic’ pharaoh Akhenaten and his beautiful wife, Nefertiti. It was perhaps, too, the birthplace of a famous prince of Egypt, Tutankhaten – better known today by the later form of his name, Tutankhamun. Here the boy-king laughed and played during the endless summers of an innocent childhood; here, by the shaded banks of the Nile, he ‘cut with his own hand’ the simple reed which was later mounted in gold and inscribed to accompany him in his tomb.

For years, el-Amarna’s ruins lay utterly forgotten – thanks in large part to the ‘evil reputation’ of the locals, whose habit of shooting first and greeting later long deterred the curious from taking an interest in the area. One of the earliest hints to the existence of this lost city we owe to a Jesuit traveller by the name of Claude Sicard. He was the first to note, in 1714, across the river at a site known as Tuna el-Gebel, one of the massive boundary stelae (that now designated A) which had been cut to demarcate el-Amarna’s greater limits. The first westerners to encounter the city proper, however, were the members of Napoleon Bonaparte’s expedition of 1798–99.

The French had landed in Egypt with the ultimate aim of securing a new passage to India via the Isthmus of Suez. As with all French ventures, the cultural component of the enterprise was an important one, and as part of the expedition staff Bonaparte carried with him 139 scholars whose aim was to study and record the country in both its ancient and its modern aspects. Protected from the unsolicited attentions of rowdy locals thanks to a sizeable military escort, few sites escaped the notice of the French savants – el-Amarna included. And the abandoned city, as something quite new and different, made a memorable impression, as Edmé Jomard, in charge of the survey, recalled:

‘I was surprised to see so great a mass of ruins, … no less than two thousand two hundred metres long and a thousand wide, yet which, though situated near the Nile … does not feature on any map. I was eager to make a plan and to compile drawings of the better preserved parts. Most of the constructions are unfortunately demolished, and one can see little more than the foundations. However, one still finds a very great number of houses in brick with their principal walls; a large gateway and its enclosure; two vast edifices where the plan is distinct; [and] the great longitudinal road forty-eight metres wide….’

Two hundred years ago, the dark, pebble-strewn ruins of el-Amarna were clearly substantial, with acre upon acre of half-decayed mud-brick sparking still with fragments of coloured glaze, blue-painted potsherds or flecks of gold leaf. One building – today recognizable as the Small Aten Temple – stood in places to a height of more than 7 m (23 ft), though it had been robbed in antiquity, as almost everywhere at the site, of its limestone facings. The French, knowing nothing of the ruins’ significance, nevertheless delayed their journey to map and draw what was visible, with the results eventually published in the great Description de l’Égypte, the official record of their scientific mission. Not surprisingly, however, among the mass of superficially more impressive monuments laid before an eager European public, el-Amarna’s remains would make little immediate impression.

With the possible exception of some desultory digging in the early decades of the 19th century by the French and British representatives in Egypt, Bernardino Drovetti and Henry Salt – between them responsible for the superb Egyptological collections now in the museums of Paris, Turin and London – it was a full quarter-century after the visit of Napoleon’s expedition before any serious exploration of el-Amarna was undertaken. John Gardner Wilkinson, an English Egyptologist – one of the first – who visited the ruins twice, in 1824 and again (with his compatriot James Burton) in 1826, undertook his own survey of the city. This was subsequently reproduced in his famous, multi-volume Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians – the book which would earn him a knighthood and, more importantly, draw to Egyptology for the first time a wide and enthusiastic popular audience.

The ruins of el-Amarna, as surveyed by the engineers and savants attached to Napoleon Bonaparte’s Egyptian expedition. Clearly visible in the left-centre of the plan is the Small Aten Temple and, to its west (across the Royal Road), the ‘Coronation Hall’.

Influenced by the proximity of the quarries at Hatnub, ancient source of the creamy, translucent stone popularly known as alabaster, Wilkinson identified the site of el-Amarna with the ‘Alabastron’ of the Roman authors. But clearly it was no Classical foundation, as the same explorer realized. In the cliffs to the north of the site he located the settlement’s pharaonic cemetery, and here sketched and made wet paper ‘squeezes’ of the relief-decorated walls in more than half a dozen tombs. Though the scenes were badly damaged (in part as a result of later habitation by Coptic-Christian monks), the results of Wilkinson’s work gave scholars serious pause. The depictions were of a style and manner not previously encountered, being neither Classical nor properly pharaonic: improbably distorted images of an almost feminine king and his slender queen, accompanied, in scenes of unusual intimacy, by their equally peculiar, banana-headed brood and showered by the beams of an unusual, rayed sun. Who were these creatures?

Thanks to Jean François Champollion’s decipherment of the long-impenetrable hieroglyphic script, the identity of el-Amarna’s mysterious king would soon be established (in today’s spelling) as ‘Akhenaten’, the name of his wife as ‘Nefertiti’, both of whom lived in the middle years of the 18th dynasty, during the second half of the 2nd millennium bc; while the solar disc proffering the ankh, or hieroglyphic sign for ‘life’, to the noses of the royal family was seen to be a god. The god was ‘Aten’, and an expanded version of the deity’s name, presented in a kingly pair of oval frames or ‘cartouches’, accompanied the image at all times throughout the tombs. What was particularly odd for Egypt, however, was that Aten was the only divinity represented: the otherwise ubiquitous lord of the underworld, Osiris, together with his gloomy retinue, was at el-Amarna nowhere to be seen.

With Wilkinson’s visit, the scholarly flood-gates were opened, and news of ‘Alabastron’ and the ‘disc worshippers’ spread among the cognoscenti. But it was not until the expedition sent out during the 19th century’s fifth decade by the Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm IV – ‘the best-equipped [team] … that had ever gone to Egypt with skilled draughtsmen among the members’ – that any further, substantial documentation of el-Amarna and its monuments became available. The medium would be the plates of the massive Denkmäler aus Aegypten und Aethiopien, the official record of the Prussian expedition compiled under the direction of the project leader, Karl Richard Lepsius. The amount of data gathered at el-Amarna over a mere 12 days in 1843 and 1845 was impressive. More impressive still, however, was the brilliance with which Lepsius, one of the period’s greatest Egyptologists, disentangled from his findings the basic history of the site:

‘Through the monuments we became acquainted with several kings of this period [the 18th Dynasty], who were not afterwards admitted in the legitimate lists, but were regarded as unauthorised co-temporary or intermediate kings. Among these Amenophis IV. is to be particularly noted, who, during a very active reign of twelve [sic] years, endeavoured to accomplish a complete reformation of all secular and spiritual institutions. He built a royal capital for himself in Central Egypt, near the present Tel-el-Amarna, introduced new offices and usages, and aimed at no less a thing than to abolish the whole religious system of the Egyptians, which had hitherto subsisted, and to place in its stead the single worship of the Sun…. Indeed, the former gods and their worship were persecuted to such an extent by this king, that he erased all the gods’ names, with the single exception of the Sun-god Ra [Re], from every monument that was accessible throughout the country, and because his own name, Amenophis, contained the name of Ammon [Amun], he changed it into Bech-en-aten [Akhenaten], “Worshipper of the Sun’s disk” ….’

What scholars found intriguing was Lepsius’s subsequent observation that the names and images of the Amarna royal couple had themselves frequently been hacked out by those who came after; Akhenaten’s changes, evidently, had not met with universal approbation. Nor was it the memory of Akhenaten alone which had been shunned, as Lepsius recognized: his successors – Smenkhkare, Tutankhamun and Ay – were similarly ignored in the later king-lists. These rulers had one particular feature in common: each, to a greater or a lesser extent, had been associated with el-Amarna, and all that that city stood for. And they had paid dearly for it.

The discovery of the royal tomb

Although Akhenaten’s abandoned city clearly had an interesting story to tell – of which Lepsius had recovered a great deal more than the bare bones – no further exploration was attempted for several decades. The work of a French mission in the 1880s is memorable primarily for the title of the report on their first season: Deux jours de fouilles à Tell el Amarna [Two Days of Excavations at Tell el Amarna] – at a time when the typical expedition was one of several months. Only with the discovery by locals in the late 1880s of an immense sepulchre, hidden deep in the eastern desert cliffs of Gebel Abu Hasa to the east of the city, would the academic pulse again quicken.

The locals’ find was kept secret for some time, to be covertly exploited by its discoverers. It proved to be the burial place of Akhenaten himself, with the robbers’ loot apparently including gold jewelry (one item a ring with the name of queen Nefertiti) now divided between museums in Edinburgh and Liverpool, as well as a mysterious ‘mummy’, which some since have idly speculated might have been the king’s own. In 1891–92, the sepulchre was ‘cleared’ under the notional supervision of Alessandro Barsanti, the cast-maker and ‘odd-jobs man’ of the Egyptian Antiquities Service; sad to say, the work was badly skimped, and much important archaeological information was lost, particularly in the burial chamber where Barsanti’s men seem to have concentrated their efforts.

Bezel of a stirrup-shaped ring cast in massive gold and chased with the hieroglyphs of Nefertiti’s second name-form: ‘Nefernefruaten-Nefertiti’. Found in the vicinity of the royal tomb at el-Amarna in about 1882.

The first excavations: Flinders Petrie and Howard Carter

A year after Barsanti’s clearance, the freshly swept Amarna royal tomb was visited by a young man in Egypt for the first time – Howard Carter, a shy and somewhat prim British artist who was to carve out for himself an enviable niche in the history of Egyptian exploration. While at el-Amarna, Carter prepared quick copies of the principal scenes which decorated the walls of Akhenaten’s sepulchre, and these drawings – his first venture into print – were soon after reproduced in The Daily Graphic for 23 March 1892. Although little more than sketches, they accurately captured, almost for the first time, the unique flavour of the Amarna art-style (Lepsius’s copies are famously bland). Little did Carter suspect, but it was a style which would come to dominate his life when, 30 years later, he uncovered the tomb of Tutankhamun, Akhenaten’s son. The burial was crammed with an unparalleled treasure of statues, sculptures and gold, made during and immediately after the ‘heretic’s’ reign. And el-Amarna, fittingly, would be the theme to which Carter chose to return for his last scholarly contribution – an essay in Sir E. Denison Ross’s The Art of Egypt through the Ages – in 1931, eight years before his death.

Howard Carter was of relatively modest birth with no personal wealth and few immediate prospects. He owed his presence at el-Amarna to the chance patronage of a philanthropic collector, William Amhurst Tyssen-Amherst, 1st Baron Amherst of Hackney, for whom Carter’s artist father had previously undertaken a number of commissions. Detecting the boy’s serious antiquarian interest, Amherst had decided to take the young Howard under his protective wing.

Keen to add to his burgeoning collection of Egyptian antiquities, Amherst sent Carter along as his personal representative on the excavations then being undertaken by the legendary but dour Flinders Petrie – soon to be appointed to Britain’s first chair in Egyptology at University College London. El-Amarna was to give Carter his first taste of digging and, despite Petrie’s notoriously meagre fare (the excavator’s unfortunate staff famously claimed that ‘You lived on sardines, and when you had eaten the sardines you ate the tin’), he found the work much to his liking.

Petrie himself had been drawn to el-Amarna not by the tombs and inscriptions which had lured his predecessors, nor even by the hope that he might discover more of the cuneiform diplomatic archive which had recently been brought to light by the local digger of sebakh. A pioneer in the study of Egypt’s material culture, Petrie was primarily attracted by the prospect of working on a single-period site which had been but little contaminated by earlier or later occupation. A season’s work at el-Amarna, he hoped, would provide a ‘snapshot’ of Egyptian civilization at a single, restricted moment in time, and yield dividends for the general study and classification of the pots, pans and trinkets of ancient everyday life.

Petrie set to work with his usual energy, and, by means of triangulation survey and small test excavations (sondages) carried out at selected parts of the site, he was able rapidly to characterize the principal areas of the city: palace and temple structures were identified, together with domestic dwellings and the waste-heaps of a variety of workshops in which had been carried out the manufacture of faience, glass, pottery and sculpture. The original opulence of the ancient city – evidenced by the remains of elaborately painted floors and exquisitely decorated walls, and by a veritable mass of fragments of local and imported, utilitarian and decorative i...