Akhenaten

Akhenaten's grip on events continues to decline. His daughter Meketaten becomes pregnant by a Jew, but suffers retribution when she dies in child­birth. There is civil unrest among politicised Jewish workers in the brick factories at Busiris, where proto-Communism is preached: 'the poor ought to be equal to the rich . . . the boundaries between fields should be effaced, and the land be common property, and wealth taken from the rich and given to the poor'.³' Beset by all these problems, Akhenaten decides to abdicate, and is placed under house arrest. A successor to the throne is eventually found in Tutankhamun. He sends soldiers to murder Akhenaten, who escapes to the Maru-

Aten and sets it on fire, disappearing in the flames. Rumours persist, however, that he is still alive, since no corpse was ever discovered. Merezhkovsky leaves it deliberately ambiguous as to whether Akhenaten died and was apocalyptically transfigured by the fire, or escaped to live on as a prophet who will convert the world. In the book's final tableau, the would-be assassin Issachar worships Akhenaten as his Messiah in the ruins of the Aten temple: 'Behold, He cometh!' is the last line.

All this seems very like a transposition to Egypt of key events in the Russian Revolution. The unrest among politicised industrial workers is here; so are the assassination attempts, the abdication of the tsar, his house arrest and the mystery of his death. Merezhkovsky is not aiming to write a history of the revolutions of 1917: rather he offers a parable for it, showing how the world may be trans­figured and rejuvenated by his own religious and political theories, for which Akhenaten is a convenient mouthpiece. The novel is not without its (unconscious?) moments of levity, however, as in this description of a banquet at Amarna, clearly based on Figure 6.1:

Soft-boiled ibis eggs were served. They were not eaten as a rule, for the ibis was a bird sacred to the god Tot. But this time all the company ate some to please the king and show their contcmpt for the false god. Ty helped herself to three eggs. It was awkward to eat them with gloved hands and she smeared herself with the yolk, which, however, was not very noticeable beside the yellow streaks from the ointment.^3fi

In a very different way, the fall of the Romanovs may have influenced two romantic novels both published in 1938, Allena Best's Honey of the Nile, and Lucile Morrison's The Lost Queen of Egypt.

These are both 'lost princess' narratives based around Akhenaten's third daughter Ankhesenpaaten, who escapes from the polit­ical turmoil at Thebes after the death of Ay to live a simple life under an assumed name (see Figure 6.3). With their emphasis on flight, uncertain identities, a prin­cess in disguise and the mystery of what happened to Akhenaten and his family, Best's and Morrison's novels might well have reminded readers in 1938 of Anna Anderson, the supposed Grand Duchess Anastasia, youngest daughter of Tsar Nicholas II. Anderson claimed to be the only survivor from the murder of the imperial family in 1918. In 1938, while living in Germany, Anderson's petition to be legally recognised as the tsar's heir was reported all over the English language press. One of the reasons why Anderson sought official recognition was so that she could claim a tsarist fortune (wrongly) believed to be hidden in the Bank of England. The spectre of lost royal wealth dominated the court case, and it is

Igure 6.3 Ankhesenpaatcn on the run. Illustration from Allena Best's Honey of the Nile,

1938.

probably not a coincidence that it pervades these two novels. Ankhesenpaaten pines for the vanished luxury and wealth of her past. Morrison has her confess that the only thing she misses about not being queen any more is 'the possession of beauty'.³⁷ Best goes one step further. In exile Ankhesenpaaten is presented with a tiny scale-model of a royal apartment, including a miniature throne whose back is decorated with the Aten (see Figure 3.5).³⁰ Here the visual mnemonics of Amarna and the Romanovs have merged. The Aten-backed throne which sym­bolised Amarna 'lifestyle' is miniaturised like the luxurious bibelots the court jeweller Faberge crafted for the Russian imperial family. Whether or not Mor­rison's and Best's novels were directly influenced by the supposed Anastasia, they are reminders of the fairy-talc quality that the Amarna story soon acquired.