Akhenaten

Some of the more recent novels are driven by an obsessive interest in Akhenat­en's sex life, and in the final chapter I look at how Akhenaten has been brought right up to date by exploring his sexuality. One manifestation is the gay Akhen­aten, part of the quest for a gay identity in the past that has been so important in some quarters over the last twenty years or so. Another is the polymorphously perverse Akhenaten: heterosexual monogamist no more, this Akhenaten has sex with his male lovers, mother, son-in-law and various daughters as well as his wives and concubines. Again, to me these portrayals seem conservative while trying to be radical. The gay versions are misogynistic. in that they write the prominent women of Akhenaten's family out of the plot; the others recall Orientalist porn of the nineteenth century, in which pansexual eastern potentates had sex with everybody imaginable. These sexual incarnations of Akhenaten are an appropri­ate place to conclude. They sum up 150 years of appropriations, but are open- ended and so point the way to the ones that will inevitably follow but are now impossible to predict.

I hope that the result of all this is more than a breeze through the manifest­ations of ancient Egypt in western eulturc since mid-Victorian times. I also hope that the Akhenatens I have discussed here add up to more than empty post­modern pastiches, a void at the centre of an endless parade of signifiers without reference. By examining the multiple Akhenatens of this book, I intended to do three things. I wanted first to point out the extent to which the west has internal­ised ancient Egypt and made it its own. The sccond was to enable everybody who is interested to look at Akhenaten with a little more neutrality. Academics need to remember that the histories of Akhenaten they write are just as self-revealing as those by people who have had little to do with conventional history. Researcher, researched and the act of researching are interactive texts which form each other. Admitting this makes the highly personal nature of what is produced through research more explicit; we acknowledge our own input rather than hiding behind the mask of objectivity. This is true not just of Akhenaten, but of the whole archaeological past - though admittedly Akhenaten, like Stonehenge, is an extreme case.

Third, it seemed to me that this multiplicity of Akhenatens is telling the profes­sional community that its role is changing. Conventional histories of Egypt present a view of an apolitical past which is over and done with, but Akhenaten's amazing life in the western imagination shows how this is anything but the case.

He is not static and conservative, but political and dynamic. Different interest groups compete for the right to present him, and the huge appetite for works about Egypt in all media maintains this. Yet the most successful books on Egypt in terms of sales are often those that academic insiders regard as the most eccentric, and usually refuse to engage with in any way. Their authors go on to exploit this lack of professional engagement: it's much easier to claim that there is a cover-up when the official response is 'No comment'. How the situation has changed from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, when archaeologists and Egyptologists were media figures famous enough to appear as characters in popular fiction. Part of the reason why Petrie, Wallis Budge and Margaret Murray were so well known in their day was because they wrote popular books which presented Egyptian archaeology in an inclusive and exciting way. But the growth in academic specialisation since then means that few modern scholars attempt such projects. Now technology is dissolving the boundaries between the academically credible and the fringe. People increasingly go for all kinds of information to the World Wide Web, where all information is of equal value. Here eccentric and conventional Egyptology rub shoulders, and it can be hard to know which is which. Archaeology is global. The professional community is going to have to engage more with non-specialists, whether it likes it or not. The many strange faces of Akhenaten are reminders of this: they are mnemonics for a world where orthodox and heterodox, past and present, reality and hyper-reality, are becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish.

HISTORIES OF AKHENATEN

The Tel cl Amarna period has had more nonsense written about it than any other period in Egyptian history, and Akhenaten is a strong rival to Cleopatra for the historical novelist. The appeal of Cleopatra is the romantic combination oflove and death; Akhen­aten appeals by a combination of religion and sentiment. In the ease of Akhenaten the facts do not bear the construction often put on them.

Margaret Murray 1949: 54