Akhenaten

History, Fantasy and Ancient Egypt

Dominic Montserrat

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781134690411
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Social Sciences
• Categoría: Archaeology

The pharaoh Akhenaten, who ruled Egypt in the mid-fourteenth century BCE, has been the subject of more speculation than any other character in Egyptian history. This provocative new biography examines both the real Akhenaten and the myths that have been created around him. It scrutinises the history of the pharaoh and his reign, which has been continually written in Eurocentric terms inapplicable to ancient Egypt, and the archaeology of Akhenaten's capital city, Amarna. It goes on to explore the pharaoh's extraordinary cultural afterlife, and the way he has been invoked to validate everything from psychoanalysis to racial equality to Fascism.

1

Akhenaten in the Mirror

Faced with the remains of an extinct civilization, I conceive analogically the kind of man who lived in it. But the first need is to know how I experience my own cultural world, my own civilization. The reply will once more be … that I interpret their behaviour by analogy with my own.

Merleau-Ponty 1962: 348

Histories and biographies of Akhenaten usually end with the destruction of his city and the obliteration of his name by those who wanted to erase his memory for ever. But this only marks one sort of ending, which is really another beginning. Amazing edifices continue to be built out of the ruins that Akhenaten’s opponents left behind, and over the last century and a half Akhenaten has had an extraordinary cultural after-life. Akhenaten-themed theologies, paintings, novels, operas, poems, films, advertisements, fashion accessories and pieces of domestic kitsch have all been created. This book is the first attempt to look at them and try to understand why their makers chose Akhenaten. I want to know what interests are served, at particular historical moments, by summoning up the ghost of a dead Egyptian king. These representations of him are not structured by Akhenaten’s own history but by struggles for legitimation and authority in the present. Such multiple and contradictory redrawings of characters from ancient history like Sappho, Alexander the Great, Cleopatra and Julius Caesar are always more concerned with the importance of the issues discussed through them than their historicity. In that respect Akhenaten is no exception – he is a sign rather than a person. But in another way he is a unique sign. Unlike those other iconic figures, Akhenaten has become a sign almost entirely through the medium of archaeology. The classical historians do not mention him explicitly, and so he was never a part of western cultural history in the same way as other famous pharaohs like Cheops and Cleopatra. Revealed by archaeology in the early nineteenth century, Akhenaten emerged largely unencumbered by cultural baggage and ready to be reborn. Since that time, the Akhenaten myth has developed, a myth which is a unique barometer for exploring the fascination of the west with ancient Egypt over the last two centuries or so.

This book is about the historical Akhenaten in only a peripheral way. It is not a biography of him but a metabiography – a look at the process of biographical representation. It’s really about the uses of the archaeological past and the dialogue between past and present: how Akhenaten is simultaneously a legacy of the past and a fact of the present. I am not really interested in Akhenaten himself, but in why other people are interested in him and find his story relevant and inspirational when he has been dead for three and a half thousand years. For inspirational it is. Akhenaten has moved a roster of great twentieth-century creative talents to reproduce him in many media: Sigmund Freud, Thomas Mann, H.D. and Naguib Mahfouz in literature, Frida Kahlo in paint, Philip Glass and Derek Jarman in the performing arts. But Akhenaten does not belong exlusively to elite culture, and so he is a marvellously rich resource for allowing a range of other voices to be heard, in spite of forces which would consign them to insignificance. Most books on aspects of Egyptology give little space to these ‘fringe’ voices, but here I engage with them often. They deserve a respectful hearing, and give a sense of the vitality and variety of the meanings of Akhenaten. Also, I believe that it is very important for the professional community to listen to nonspecialists. The two groups are not in conflict, or at least they need not be, and the dialogue can be mutually enriching. Writing this book reminded me repeatedly of how this dialogue had made me ask questions I would otherwise never have considered. Hence my search for Akhenaten’s modern reincarnations led me off into territories that academic historians rarely visit. I met mystics who believe that Akhenaten guards the lost wisdom of Atlantis, disability rights activists who present him as a positive role model to children suffering from a disease affecting the connective tissues, Afrocentrists who invoke him as an ancestor from the glorious black past denied them by European racists, gay men who say that he is the first gay man. In this book there are other versions of the pharaoh that many will find either mad or offensive or both: Akhenaten the proto-Nazi, for instance, or Akhenaten the patron saint of paedophiles. Ancient Egypt is invested with so much cultural capital that people who feel marginalised by majority cultures want a share of it too.

What all these mutually exclusive versions of Akhenaten have in common is that the stories told of him are the stories of their creators. Their retellings are more complex than just inventing fictions or recounting facts. Description, observation and self-revelation mix with selective reporting of evidence and the reworking or omission of unsuitable details. All presenters of Akhenaten, scholarly or otherwise, have distinctive personal, cultural and generic biases that shape their perceptions. In this book I spend a lot of time examining what might be called the paratextual conditions of the mythic Akhenaten – the other circumstances which help to produce specific views of him and assist in his mythologisation.

It is hard to find common denominators to these myths because they are so Protean, their different guises shifting to suit the needs of particular audiences, genres and interpreters. However, one thing which underpins many of them is the desire, to find an antecedent for oneself or one’s beliefs in ancient Egypt. Along with Greece and Rome, Egypt has a privileged position in western ideas about its own origins. Since Plato, historians, politicians and theologians have looked to ancient Egypt to find justification, legitimation or authentication. Akhenaten is a uniquely attractive figure to draw on here. He is supposedly an individual, a real person whose psychology and character we can see developing, someone with whom we can identify. In 1905 one of the first scholars to write for the public about Akhenaten, the American Egyptologist James Henry Breasted (1865–1935), famously called him ‘the first individual in human history’. In fact, Akhenaten presents a carefully constructed image of himself through an ideologised set of words and pictures that make the individual behind them elusive. But the idea of him as an individual has become deep-rooted. Akhenaten would never have had the kind of after-life that he has enjoyed unless he was felt to be accessible in a unique way And so Akhenaten has repeatedly been made to speak, in the first-person singular, in the languages that we understand – a kind of ventriloquist’s dummy who mouths the words of the people who manipulate him.

Another reason for Akhenaten’s continued presence is because he has found a succession of perfect cultural moments to be reborn. When Europeans began to rediscover him in earnest in the late 1840s and early 1850s, Egypt had a high but still ambivalent position in western ideas about its past and the formation of its culture. These were set out by historians and philosophers like G. W. Hegel (1770–1831), who praised ancient Egypt’s contribution to civilisation. They attributed to ancient Egypt the development of literacy and civic government, and made it a stage on the ascent of humanity from barbarism to enlightenment. Yet at the same time Egyptian culture went off along paths that pointed in the opposite direction to western enlightenment – towards the occult, polytheism, and the ultimate decline of great empires. In this sense, ancient Egypt was a disturbing memento mori, as in Shelley’s Egyptian sonnet ‘Ozymandias’, where it is ‘the decay of that colossal wreck’. Akhenaten, however, seemed to eradicate the most troubling aspects of ancient Egypt by advocating monotheism, and so seemed to be a progressive pharaoh who offered civilisation a way forward in the present. When archaeology revealed more about him in the 1890s and 1900s, this was apparently confirmed. An individual emerged from the ruins of Amarna, Akhenaten’s city. He was an individual who seemed to accord perfectly with ‘the new spirit in history’, which regarded progress as ‘the sacredness and worth of man as an ethical being endowed with volition, choice and responsibility’. So wrote the historian and journalist W. S. Lilly in 1895, adding that human history was ‘the record of the gradual triumph of the forces of conscience and reason over the blind forces of inanimate nature and the animal forces of instinct and temperament in man’.¹ But Akhenaten also vindicated bourgeois values: he ‘openly proclaims the domestic pleasures of a monogamist’, wrote the British archaeologist Flinders Petrie (1853–1942) in The Times in 1892. In a fin-de-siècle world haunted by images of degeneration and decay, Akhenaten’s freshness and wholesome family life seemed to offer a vision of revitalisation, in the same way as the Utopian movements that flourished at this time. Akhenaten’s archaeological rediscovery coincided with an unparalleled appetite for popular history in many forms: not just through written texts but also through local societies, reading groups, public lectures illustrated with slides, and evening classes. Knowing the past had become a favourite way of looking at the present. Such a proliferation of sources made Akhenaten available to a wide audience, and amateur, heterodox versions of Egypt soon began to split themselves off from professional, orthodox ones. Cheap books, the development of mass-circulation illustrated newspapers, and later visual media like stereoscopic slides and film, made Akhenaten known to even more people.

Nothing illustrates this process of familiarisation better than a letter written on 3 May 1922, when interest in the excavations at Amarna was at its height. The writer was H. R. Hall (1873–1930), Keeper of Egyptian Antiquities at the British Museum, and author of The Ancient History of the Near East from the Earliest Times to the Battle of Salamis (1913), which went into ten successive editions. Hall believed that Akhenaten was totally solipsistic and probably half-mad, and countered Breasted’s ‘first individual’ epithet with one of his own: ‘Certainly Akhenaten was the first doctrinaire in history, and, what is much the same thing, the first prig.’² From his office at the Museum, Hall wrote to Arthur Weigall (1880–1934) who from 1905 to 1914 had been Inspector-General of Antiquities for the Egyptian Government but had since left the archaeological world. In 1922 he was working as the film critic of the Daily Mail and a freelance journalist. Hall was writing to congratulate Weigall on the second, revised edition of his bestseller The Life and Times of Akhnaton, Pharaoh of Egypt – an emotive biography whose mixture of archaeology, religion and romance ensured its huge success among a readership ranging from English popular novelists to Sigmund Freud. Inadvertently Weigall was one of the main creators of the Akhenaten myth, and his name will come up often in this book. Hall saluted ‘my dear Weigall’ with an appropriate greeting in hieroglyphs, and went on:

You will do us proud if you will boost the E[gypt] E[xploration] Society] and the Amarna digs in your book, on the re-edition of which I congratulate you. Your way of dealing with our cracked friend Crackenaten appeals more to the Great British Public than mine: I don’t think that people like him to be made out a common Garden-city crank, as I represent him. Ah me! I fear I am unregenerate: no uplift about me. No enthewziasm [sic], no mysteries, no ghosteses [sic], no One God, no primeval Egyptian wisdom, no unlucky mummies, no signs of the zodiac, no reincarnation, no abracadabra, no soulfulness about me. Nor do I go about in smelly garments with an old rucksack and wave a potsherd. So I don’t please either kind of crank, mystified or Petrified, and the movie public is more interested in your and Breasted’s Ikhnaton than in mine. Yours is a thriller: mine a Montessori prig, and that is what I believe he was. But each to his taste, and as brother-augurs, we can carefully place our tongues in our cheeks and wink our dexter eye at one another. And Woolley is also an augur. He is prepared to provide you with the latest movie stuff on old Crackpot and the city of Cracketaten as revealed in the latest epoch-making excavations of the greatest archaeological society in the World bar none, and will phone or write you on the hop, sure thing. You will see specimens of our Mr. Woolley’s stuff in the Illustrated London News shortly; the house of Akhenaten’s prime minister, showing the Machinery of Government (including I suppose the Treasury Axe) at work (put a penny in the slot) will am/use/aze you. He will soon have another article out in the I[llustrated] L[ondon] N[ews] about Carcemish, with an illustration of the house in which Jeremiah met Herodotus. At least, he says so. The interview must have been interesting.

… Forgive my frivolity But Akhenaten always makes me feel frivolous. He was the sort of person I always want to poke in the ribs and hear him crow and gasp. I am afraid he would really have felt obliged to sacrifice me to Amun with his own hand if I had lived in his times, for I have no bump of reverence, and have always mocked at prophets.

Yours ever,
H. R. Hall³

H. R. Hall’s witty and allusive letter is full of in-jokes about his and Weigall’s academic contemporaries – it pokes fun at some of Petrie’s personal habits, for instance. But it really focuses on ways of packaging the pharaoh to make him attractive to a mass audience. In May 1922, with Tutankhamun’s tomb still to be discovered, Akhenaten was the first ancient Egyptian celebrity, born from a union between archaeology and its presentation in modern mass media. Through the mixture of text and image in journals like The Illustrated London News, people could see the past brought to life. Hall’s pseudo-American ‘movie’ slang and references to automation all point out how Akhenaten was produced at the current boundaries of technology. Hall reminds us (very topically) that technology has the power to re-create a past which has nothing to do with history, but everything to do with modern desires about what history ought to be. It can create amazing and impossible encounters, such as one between the biblical prophet Jeremiah and the fifth-century BCE historian Herodotus. But the most significant encounter is that between the ancient and modern world, in which Akhenaten can be a perfect mediator.

Hall understood the progressiveness of Akhenaten’s ideas in terms of the 1920s. His Akhenaten lives in a garden suburb – the epitome of a certain kind of bourgeois domestic ideal – and approves of the radical educational methods of Maria Montessori. Not everybody was so impressed with Akhenaten’s modernity. Conservatives like Rudyard Kipling thought rather differently about him. In 1925 Kipling received a rather handsome birthday present from the novelist Henry Rider Haggard – a ring found at Amarna and inscribed with Akhenaten’s name. Kipling’s thank-you note to Haggard says:

Just a line on my return from town to thank you a hundred times for Akhenaton’s Seal (I’m sure he kept it in his Library) which you needn’t tell me has no duplicate. It won’t be lost – ins’h Allah! And it’s going into safe and honourable keeping. I don’t care so much about Akhenaton’s dealings with it (he probably countersigned a lot of tosh of the Social Progress nature before he was busted).⁴

Akhenaten is so deeply associated with progress and modernity that he could be encountered in London’s newly built garden suburbs, but is also a slightly ridiculous figure, ‘a Montessori prig’ and believer in ‘Social Progress’. He is a paradoxical thing, a thoroughly modern pharaoh.

To others, Akhenaten’s halo remained untarnished. Akhenaten had a high profile in the inter-war years, marked by a search for new ideals and authority He was a transcendental hero, one in an iconic lineage of the world’s greatest thinkers. As in the 1890s, his prominence was a product of archaeology, when excavations and finds from Amarna were exhibited and written about. It was as an idealist that Akhenaten attracted Sigmund Freud. His last and most puzzling work, Moses and Monotheism, centres around the nature of Akhenaten’s Geistigkeit, an untranslatable German word combining spirituality, intellectuality and progressiveness. Via Freud, Akhenaten’s story inspired Frida Kahlo (1907–54), whose amazingly complex painting Moses (1945) is structured around Amarna art elements. Figures and images symbolising all time and space are united compositionally by the rays of a huge, blood-red Aten-disc, under whose protection Moses is born. Moses won an art prize in Mexico, and Kahlo gave a lecture about her painting and its complicated symbology. It was, she said, about the birth of the HERO:

On the same earth, but painting their heads larger, to distinguish them from the ‘mass’, the heroes are pictured (very few of them, but well chosen), the transformers of religions, the inventors or creators of these, the conquerors, the rebels. … To the right, and this figure I should have painted with much more importance than any other, Amenhotep IV can be seen, who was later called Akhenaten … later Moses, who according to Freud’s analysis, gave his adopted people the same religion as that of Akhenaten, a little altered according to the interests and circumstances of his time. After Christ, follow Alexander the Great, Caesar, Mohammed, Luther, Napoleon and … ‘the lost infant’, Hitler. To the left, marvelous Nefertiti, wife of Akhenaten, I imagine that besides having been extraordinarily beautiful, she must have been ‘a wild one’ and a most intelligent collaborator to her husband. Buddha, Marx, Freud, Paracelsus, Epicure [sic], Genghis Kahn, Gandhi, Lenin and Stalin.⁵

The romantic and idealistic Frida Kahlo had a predictable vision of Akhenaten which was fine for the 1940s. (She also seems to have identified personally with Nefertiti.) The climate is rather different now, and universal heroes linking the whole of human existence are not so much in fashion. At the end of the 1990s, archaeologists and ancient historians are at the height of a new multicultural and academic turn. In today’s jargon, some of us are engaged in the deconstruction, destabilisation, demythologisation and deideologisation of western-produced knowledge of the past. Part of this process is to create alternative points of reference and alternative discourses which reconfigure received wisdom. In other words, demoting cultural heroes and looking at them from unorthodox points of view is fashionable. So my postmodern version of Akhenaten is just as much of its time as Hall’s, Kipling’s and Kahlo’s. My own prejudices, and something of my own history, will become clear from the parts of the Akhenaten myth I have chosen to survey here. Any examination of a mythologised historical character like Akhenaten inevitably ends up by adding something more to the myth, and this book is no exception. It is just as much an appropriation as the rest.

Although my focus here is not really on the historical Akhenaten but on cultural fantasies of him, it is still important to give a short account of his reign and examine the histories that fantasy takes as its point of departure. This is the first part of the next chapter. I attempt to synthesise briefly what can be really known about Akhenaten before turning to the business of how myths about him are created. I look at how Akhenaten’s childhood and family dynamics have been re-created on the basis of no evidence at all, and how he is seen as revolutionary and inno...