Akhenaten

Co-opting Akhenaten into the aftermath of the Second World War continued in the 1950s. Howard Fast, now best remembered for writing the novel on which the film Spartaeus was based, also wrote an Amarna-themed novel, Moses, Prince of Egypt (1958). Fast's career as novelist and screen-writer was interrupted after he was blacklisted for Communist sympathies by the House Un-American Activities Committee. His Moses, Prince of Egypt is derived from Freud's Moses and Monothe­ism. A small clique of committed adherents of Aten-worship survives Akhenat­en's reign and influences Moses' version of monotheism, which he transmits to the Jews. Fast was very interested in Jewish history and wrote other novels about Jews in the ancient world, including the Zionist My Glorious Brothers

(1948). Fast's radical Jewish background tempts one to read all kinds of political meanings into Moses, Prince of Egypt in the same way that Thomas Mann's Joseph in Egypt was readjust before the Second World War.⁴² In his autobiography Fast warns against this, saying that he was tired of the relentlessness of Marxist ideology, which channelled all artistic production towards the class struggle, and wanted his novels to work as entertaining stories in their own right.⁴³

Although there was no major excavation at Amarna until 1977, novelists con­tinued to maintain their interest in its archaeology. Jacquetta Hawkes' King of the Two Lands

(1966), one of the few Akhenaten novels written by a professional archaeologist, is disappointing considering Hawkes' famous statement in another place, 'every age has the Stonchenge it deserves - or desires'.⁴⁴ If she had treated Akhenaten in the same way, she would have written a more interesting novel. Very different is Barbara Wood's well-researched The Watch Gods (1981), set on site at Amarna among an American (not British) archaeological team. The Watch Gods adds the standard ingredients of Egyptological fiction and films (the search for a lost tomb, ghosts and curses) to the now familiar epiphany with the Amarna royals. In a climactic scene, Nefertiti's ghost appears, speaking Egyptian, and her features merge with those of the glamorous Alexis Halstead, wife of one of the archaeologists, making past and present indistinguishable. As well as finding the lost tomb, the hero archaeologist Mark Davison eventually puts to rest Nefertiti's unquiet ghost and gets the girl - the beautiful Egyptian, Yasmina. The Watch Gods

is a good read, especially for those who can appreciate it as a roman-d-clef but it revolves around the colonialist ideas which still permeate much fictionalised archaeology. Wood assumes that the western archaeologists already know ancicnt Egypt, and their knowledge alone can rescue its past from oblivion. Only west­erners can unearth the deep and precious stratum of Egypt, literally and figura­tively; the recent, superficial and least-prized level is associated with modern Arabs.⁴⁵ This is played out very literally in Wood's book, where the Egyptian Yasmina's romance with the American archaeologist will eventually transplant her from east to west, like an artefact taken into a foreign museum collection.

Akhenaten's story attracted the writers of new genres of fiction, including fantasy novels with mystic elements such as Terry Greenhough's Friend of Pharaoh (1975). Grecnhough also wrote The Alien Contract, Thoughtworld, The Wandering Worlds

and The Thrice-Born, whose titles hint at his approach to Akhenaten. Tom Holland's The Sleeper in the Sands (1998) overlays some of the conventions of vam­pire and alien fiction onto the Amarna period in a deft and original way. Hol­land's Akhenaten is not from beyond the stars, but alien in that he is beyond normal humanity and so truly other - a sophisticated riff on the low-brow cliche that Egyptian culture was imported from other worlds.⁴¹' Modern fascination with murders and urban serial killers has also been projected onto the Amarna period, most successfully in Anton Gill's trilogy of murder mysteries, City of the Horizon, City of Dreams and City of the Dead. Gill neither clutters his narrative with period detail nor idealises the Egyptians. With their evocation of a corrupt, dirty, violent Thebes, they are among the most effective of the realistic Amarna novels.