Akhenaten

Spread by news media, interest in the excavations at Amarna in the 1920s and 1930s went all over Europe. When they finished, Freud wrote to his friend Arnold Zweig that he would pay to continue them if he were a millionaire: I start with Freud in Chapter 4. He and the early psychoanalytic community were fascinated by Akhenaten, who seemed to prove the existence of the Oedipus complex in distant antiquity, and thus the status of psychoanalysis as an objective science. Freud and his followers derived many of their ideas from the works of Weigall and Breasted. Their reinterpretation of (then) reliable Egyptologists is an interesting test-case in how myths are produced by heterodox groups using orthodox sources. From the same angle, I look at the Fascist versions of Akhen­aten that co-existed with Freud's and called upon Akhenaten in the same way. Fascists made the Utopian Amarna into a Utopia of their own - a reminder that Utopias are, ultimately, very dangerous places. Disturbingly, some of these Nazi interpretations are still in circulation today, distributed by far-right publishers and on the World Wide Web. Although Fascists and early psychoanalysts shared little common ground, the fact that they both invoked Akhenaten as a legitimating figure from the past illustrates how quickly he acquired the cultural capital to function in contemporary struggles.

Chapter 5 develops this idea by looking at versions of Akhenaten which are constructed to challenge the status quo. Paradoxically, these are the most extreme and imaginative readings of Akhenaten, while being at the same time the most conservative. I concentrate on two Akhenatens which sometimes overlap: the mystic Akhenaten of alternative religionists, and the black Akhenaten of Afro- centrists. Afrocentrism is a political and cultural movement which seeks to reclaim the origins of world civilisations in black Africa, and Egypt plays a cen­tral part in its discourse. It's a controversial philosophy which has been criticised by white and black historians, especially in its appropriation of Egypt. In this respect, they say, Afrocentrism is based on old-fashioned ideas about race, and actually dances to a western tunc while claiming to be a radical revision of history. It 'may be useful in developing communal discipline and self-worth and even in galvanising black communities to resist the encroachments of crack cocaine, but ... its European, Cartesian outiines remain visible beneath a new lick of Kemetic [i.e. Egyptian] paint'.⁸

Yet the black people I met who passion­ately believed in a black Akhenaten were not concerned with the niceties of Afrocentrism's status as a basis for writing cultural history: they were involved with much more immediate struggles. This was brought home when I moved on to the writings of alternative religionists. I was struck by the racist assumptions that seemed to underlie some of these readings of Akhenaten. Many of these arc indebted to various forms of Theosophy, whose potential for appropriation by the extreme right has often been noted. As with the Fascist interpretations of Akhen­aten in the previous chapter, the most disturbing thing about these was the way that dangerous ideas lay beneath what seemed to be a harmless route to spiritual development and self-knowledge.

Chapter 6 considers the numerous fictional and literary treatments of Akhenaten, which cover almost every genre: plays, poetry, but above all novels. Akhenaten's story had sometimes been used to comment on modern political events, in rather the same way that Shakespeare critiqued Jacobean politics in plays set in the ancient world. But such treatments of Akhenaten are in the minority. Many of these novels or literary treatments are conservative and predictable. They con­trast strikingly with the imaginative rereadings of Akhenaten's story surveyed in Chapter 5, perhaps illustrating how fiction comes from a different centre of cultural production. Their authors reflect bourgeois sensibilities, a predictable consequencc of Amarna's representation as the most bourgeois place of antiquity. They are hampered by a fascination with Egyptian material culture and a desire to get the period details right, which means that many of them are more or less descriptions of famous pieces of art from Amarna, strung together with dialogue. Most are also very Eurocentric, betraying the extent to which ancient Egypt has been internalised and familiarised by the west. Many people believe that ancient Egypt can be understood in modern terms with a mini­mum of cultural adjustment. Literary versions of Akhenaten demonstrate this, sometimes hilariously.