Akhenaten

In Egypt itself, creative writers are interested in Akhenaten. As the champion of an aniconic god, Akhenaten has attractions for writers from Muslim culture, which does not permit the representation of the human figure in religious con­texts. In the context of political instability in Egypt and the threats posed by inflexible Islamic fundamentalism, Akhenaten's reign may seem specially relevant to Egyptian writers. The most notable is Naguib Mahfouz (b. 1911), Egypt's best- known writer and winner of a Nobel prize for literature. Mahfouz has had a long connection with creating fictional ancient Egypts. At the start of his career in the 1930s he wrote three novels set in pharaonic times, which used themes from antiquity to address contemporary problems. His early novels set in ancient Egypt were never as well received as his work set in the present, and have not been translated into European languages. More recently, Mahfouz has returned to pharaonic Egypt and is particularly interested in Akhenaten.⁴⁷ Mahfouz's Akhenaten retains some of his earlier status as religious and moral idealist that has considerably diminished in Anglophone writing. His explicitly political novel of 1983, Before the Throne: A Dialogue with Egypt's Leaders from Menes to Anwar al-Sadat,

was written in the wake of al-Sadat's assassination by a Muslim extremist in 1981. It presents Akhenaten's religious message in terms of Islamic monotheism, employing Qur'anic vocabulary now all too familiar to the west - jihad, fatwa, and so on. While Akhenaten's idealism is praiseworthy, his inability to preserve Egypt's military strength is not. Mahfouz's second novel about Akhenaten, Dweller in Truth,

which was translated into English in 1998, develops this criticism of Akhenaten as a well-intentioned but rigid ideologue who neglects the practical­ities of government. Dweller in Truth is rather reminiscent of the realist English Amarna novels of the 1920s. It has some of the same set-pieces, such as Akhen­aten commissioning the sculptor Bak to portray him with all his physical deform­ities, a 'hymn' to the Aten scene, and domestic life at Akhet-aten. Mahfouz makes it clear that Akhenaten's way is not the way ahead, however, and Horemheb is the real hero of the novel, the restorer of order from chaos. Mahfouz certainly seems to be drawing political parallels, with Akhenaten as Sadat and Horemheb as President Hosni Mubarak, a link that suggested itself to Mubarak's govern­ment in the early 1990s.⁴⁸

But Mahfouz also comments on the larger question of which parts of Egypt's pharaonic heritage are worth retaining in a society which increasingly defines itself in terms of Islamic values.

For writers outside Muslim countries, the focus is no longer on Akhenaten as a religious and political innovator but as a sexual being. Akhenaten was being made into a homoerotic object as early as the 1920s: Thomas Mann portrays him wearing make-up and henna on his nails and looking like a decadent English aristocrat, with all that that implies. Novels of more permissive times emphasise the sexuality, corruption and decadence of Amarna. Akhenaten's knowledge is no longer of higher thought, but of the wrong kind of sexual secrets: 'he knew things no prince should know, and almost nothing that a prince should'.⁴⁹ The novel from which this came, David Stacton's On a Balcony

(1958) is an early example of fascination with Akhenaten's sexuality, which sometimes takes on quite bizarre forms. Here Akhenaten has a fetishistic obsession with the body of Horemheb, whose 'navel was like a concave nipple. It was dark; it was warm; it was deep, and no doubt it had a very special smell. The prince very much wanted to stick his finger in it.' We also get to hear about Akhenaten's penis (it looked and smelled like a persimmon fruit), and his fondness for wearing gloves made of human skin to avoid being touched by ordinary mortals.⁵⁰ This may all have seemed topical in 1958, with the much-publicised serial killings of Ed Gein, which influenced the 1960 Hitchcock film Psycho. Norman Bates and Akhenaten are, after all, two of culture's greatest mummy's boys.