Akhenaten

A litde before these two slight but enjoyable novels were published, the mystery writer Agatha Christie had finished her three-act play Akhnaton, although it was not published until 1973. Christie was inside archaeological circles: she was mar­ried to an eminent archaeologist, Sir Max Mallowan, and knew British Egyptolo­gists like Stephen Glanville. Christie used Weigall and Breasted's The Dawn of Conscience to create a pacifist Akhenaten pursued and eventually destroyed by the military and the priests of Amun. It has been interpreted as a critique of British appeasement of Nazi Germany in the 1930s, but Akhnaton

seems more like the standard Christie family poisoning saga than anything deeply political.³⁹ Akhen­aten and Nefertiti are both poisoned by Nefertiti's ambitious sister Mutnodjmet (Christie calls her 'Nezzemut', a borrowing from Weigall), who wants to be queen. The cast consists of British stereotypes projected onto ancient Egypt. Mutnodjmet's husband Horemheb, last pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty, is a Colonel Blimp club bore, 'very much a soldier and definitely a pukka sahib', who re-enacts his battles with 'Old Fuzzy-Wuzzy' using improvised props. Mutnod­jmet, glamorous 'in very diaphanous garments', illustrates how far Amarna life­style had become identified with modernity. In a conversation with Tutankhamun, she mocks the ageing Tiye for her out-of-date clothes and jewellery:

Oh, do look, Tut: all those old-fashioned gold ornaments. Aren't they screaming? . . . Do you even like her old-fashioned clothes? Don't you think the things wc wear nowadays are much prettier? They give so much more freedom.¹"

The stage direction here is: undulates her body meaningly.

With sub-Noel Coward dialogue like this, it seems difficult to read Akhnaton as a serious political parable. Christie sometimes tired of turning out formulaic detective novels set in the present and liked to vary her scenarios. Ancient Egypt was as attractive a location for crime stories as anywhere else, especially given its traditional associations with poison and death: hence her Death Comes as the End (1942), a family murder mystery set in the Middle Kingdom.

Post-war Akhenatens

Akhenaten fiction continued unabated after the Second World War. The story took on a new meaning in a world full of citics and lives ruined by ideological conflict. This topicality explains the otherwise surprising success of The Egyptian, an epic novel by the Finnish writer Mika Waltari. First published in Finnish in 1945, it was translated into English in 1949. Wordy and slow-moving, The Egyptian

is not an easy read, though still popular in occult circles for its supposedly realistic portrayal of Egyptian magical practices. The hero is a wandering physician, Sinuhe, who treats Akhenaten in his last illness. His wife, an adherent of Aten- worship, is killed in the purges that follow Akhenaten's death, and eventually Sinuhe himself converts to Aten-worship. The Egyptian's popular appeal was con­firmed when Twentieth-Century Fox decided to film it in 1953, directed by Michael Curtiz and given the full epic treatment. The film cost 4.2 million dollars, with $85,000 alone being spent on one sequence in Akhenaten's throne- room. This scene is a delirious melange of artefacts from all periods of Egyptian history. Akhenaten, Nefertiti and their six daughters are accurate enough (though the daughters are chastely clothed), but the backdrop is a relief from a Nine­teenth Dynasty temple (1292-1190 bce), and other characters wear wigs and jewellery of the Twelfth Dynasty (1938-1759 bce). The casting illuminates the perception of Akhenaten post-Second World War, and how this was adapted to fit the conventions of epic films. Akhenaten was played by Michael Wilding (1912-79), a spare, ascetic-looking English actor who married Elizabeth Taylor. Figures of cultural authority were often played by English actors in Hollywood historical films. Musclcman Victor Mature played Horemheb, and Bella Darvi (1927-71), a Polish-born Holocaust survivor, was the exotic love interest Nefer. The film raids the iconography of Christian epic films of the day to portray Akhenaten in terms of Christ, complete with halo, and his persecuted followers as early Christians, who are martyred in set-piece conflicts with Horemheb's soldiers.⁴¹