Akhenaten

The novels I surveyed in the previous chapter showed the considerable curiosity about Akhenaten's sexual and emotional life from the very beginning of western interest in him. Victorian and Edwardian views of him were firmly heterosexual. Openly proclaiming 'the domestic pleasures of a monogamist', as Petrie put it in 1892, Akhenaten stood out like a beacon in a sea of uxorious pharaohs, and was the first family man. This optimistic picture soon began to be thrown into ques­tion, however. In 1910 the first psychoanalysts jumped on Breasted's eulogistic writings about Akhenaten, reading them as Ocdipal narratives. The discovery in the 1920s and 1930s of apparently androgynous images of Akhenaten such as the east Karnak colossi (Plate 2.1) made people wonder whether Akhenaten was a eunuch, or perhaps a hermaphrodite. As speculation about Akhenaten's sex­ual biology flourished, people also wondered about the nature of his personal relationships. In the 1920s the notion of an Akhenaten with homosexual interests creeps in, partly derived from contemporary ideas about homosexuality as a physical disease. He is described in words and phrases redolent of effeminacy, like languid, delicate, epicene, 'a feeble eccentric and dccadent aesthete'.' This feel­ing that things were not quite as they ought to be was apparently confirmed by a limestone stela found at Amarna (now in Berlin) which shows Akhenaten in close and intimate physical proximity with a male figure believed in the 1920s to be his successor Smenkhkare', though different identities are now ascribed to the fig­ures (see Figure 7.1).² This carving and other images of Akhenaten influenced Thomas Mann's portrayal of him in Joseph and his Brothers.

Akhenaten, according to Mann, resembled 'an aristocratic young Englishman of somewhat decadent stock', weak-chinned, and with 'deeply, dreamily overshadowed eyes with lids he could never open quite wide'.'⁵ Decadent, dreamy, with heavy-lidded eyes: Mann's Akhenaten is a classic description of a 'sad young man', perhaps the most persistent visual cliche for representing homosexual men in western

Figure 7.1 Limestone stela from Amarna showing Akhenaten enthroned with another ruler, probably Amunhotep III or Nefertiti. The cartouches identifying the rulers were perhaps inscribed in paint or ink which has not survived. Height 21.7cm, width 16.5 cm. Agyptischcs Museum, Berlin, inv. 17813.

culture.⁴ Portrait miniatures of Akhenaten and Smenkhkare', painted on ivory by Winifred Brunton (1880-1959) in the late 1920s, reflect this characterisation. Brunton was no stranger to Egyptological circles - her husband was a keeper at the Cairo Museum. In her portraits, Brunton surrounds Akhenaten and Smenkhkare' with signifiers of femininity. Akhenaten, effete and hairless, wears a necklace of pink flowers; Smenkhkare', slight and in a diaphanous skirt, toys limp-wristedly with an ostrich-feather fan (see Plate 7.1). Others spelled out what Mann and Brunton only hinted at. In 1928 the Egyptologist Percy Newberry (1868-1949), who had dug with Petrie at Amarna, wrote of the Berlin stela: 'The intimate relations between the Pharaoh and the boy as shown by the scene on this stela recall the relationship between the Emperor Hadrian and the youth Anti- nous.'⁵

The comparison of Akhenaten with Hadrian and Smenkhkare' with Hadrian's lover Antinous is telling, because the latter were notoriously regarded as 'the most famous fairies in history'.⁶ But Newberry implies that Akhenaten and Smenkhkare' were challenging Hadrian and Antinous for that particular title. Perhaps the Egyptian link reflects the growing importance of the ancient and modern east, as opposed to the Greek world, as the central metaphor for male- male desire in the 1920s, as found in the novels of Ronald Firbank and others.⁷ At any rate, by 1928 Akhenaten was starting to shrug off his wholesome identity as the first family man to become a symbol of deviant sexual desire - the first homosexual in recorded history.