Akhenaten

By realising the potential of the story of Akhenaten's family as an Orientalist spectacle, Bell implies a powerful moral lesson for the present. Like the orgy scenes in Cecil B. de Mille films about antiquity, sexual and material excess is a reminder of the inevitable downfall of civilisations.²¹' In Bell's novel, Akhenaten's corrupt regime and bloodthirsty family, concerned only with struggles for power, are punished and ultimately brought down. But this message was not found uni­versally uplifting or even interesting, as illustrated by the first film treatment of any part of Akhenaten's story: Tutankhamen,

directed by the independent William Earle and released in December 1923. This seems to have been a melodramatic love story replete with Orientalist tropes, including the ever-popular virgin sacri- fice.²⁷ Surviving stills show that, in spite of efforts to get the period detail right, we are still very much in contemporary America. One caption reads, 'in this boudoir scene of the Princcss and her attendants as reproduced by the Earle studios, the life and surroundings of the early Egyptians bccomc a vivid reality': real indeed, because the princcss is white and her maids are black. The film also claimed to be highly educative, however:

Surely such pictures must stir the imagination of those who live in small towns in the West and show them that, after all, the old East has much to teach the West in municipal construction and the value of permanent monuments which, founded on faith, stand forever as a memorial to the past glory of man reflecting the divine guidance of the Omnipotent.²⁸

Yet the director did not have much success in getting such preachy parts of the film past the distributors, who wanted the love story and spectacle played up and the message reduced. Everything that dealt with 'the moral struggle of Tut­ankhamen between the proffered strength of the ancient Gods of Egypt, backed by the wealth of Thebes, and his faith to the Aton sun-symbol of Akhnaton, had to be cut out'.²⁹ The truth was that by December 1923 many people were tired of Tutmania, especially when laced with solemn moralising from Akhenaten.

This theme of a once wealthy and powerful dynasty humiliated and eventually destroyed underlies almost all the Amarna fictions of the 1920s and 1930s. Their authors seem, consciously or not, to be thinking about the rccent end of many monarchies, especially the Romanov dynasty in Russia. The downfall of the tsar­ist regime in the 1917 revolutions, the internal exile and subsequent disappear­ance of Tsar Nicholas II, Tsarina Alexandra and their five children, remained matters for speculation. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the story was kept alive in dozens of published memoirs of life at the Romanov court by Russian emigres to Europe and America, and also by the highly publicised claims of the woman who believed herself to be the Grand Duchess Anastasia, youngest daughter of the tsar. Indeed, on the face of it, the story of Akhenaten and the story of the last tsar are oddly close. There is the great royal romance; the family of beautiful daughters; the supremely wealthy and cultured court; the religious fanaticism which leads to the neglect of state affairs; and ultimately political disaster and human tragedy. The final mystery is there too: what happened to Akhenaten, Nefertiti and the princesses? Fiction writers of the 1920s and 1930s developed these parallels to explore important ideas, as well as to tell a romantic and tragic story.

The most sophisticated of these treatments is by Dmitri Sergeyevitch Merezhkovsky, a widely read novelist in the 1920s, whose influence on Freud was outlined in Chapter 4. First published in Russian in 1924, his long novel was soon translated into German as Der Messias. Roman and into English as Akhnaton King of Egypt

, the latter reprinted several times. Although little known outside Russia, Merezhkovsky is an important figure in twentieth-century Russian literature, of comparable status to (say) Ezra Pound, and was nominated for a Nobel prize in 1933. In the 1890s, Merezhkovsky had been one of the founders of the influen­tial avant-garde Symbolist movement, and his historical novels on various Rus­sian tsars, Emperor Julian the Apostate (reg. 363-6 ce) and Leonardo da Vinci were very successful Tsar Nicholas II even read some of them in exile.¹" The marvellous cover art to the 1927 English edition of Akhnaton King of Egypt, in which Akhenaten has apparently encountered the luxurious Orientalism of the Ballet Russe, hints at the very Russian origins of Merezhkovsky's Akhenaten (see Plate 6.2).