Akhenaten

Here are some of the religious and political leaders that Akhenaten has been compared to: Martin Luther, Cromwell, Julian the Apostate, Moses, Christ. His reign has been compared to the Reformation, the English Civil War (again with Akhenaten as Cromwell rather than Charles I), the French Revolution, the Rus­sian revolutions of 1917 - in fact, to almost any ideological conflict with religion, doomed royal personalities and perhaps a love story at its centre. Historians who write about a world far removed in time and place find such comparisons with other periods in history very tempting. But at the same time these analogies smooth over the difference between the ancient and the modern world, making readers think that it is possible to understand Akhenaten and his reign with a minimum of cultural adjustment. They also subtly superimpose western ways of thinking about monarchy, art and religion onto a world where their meanings and ideological underpinnings were very different. Ultimately, they trivialise by emphasising similarity rather than difference. They are almost an abuse of Akhenaten's memory, an unwarranted universalisation of his experience. Once his story has become universal, it can easily become one of those stories which are so compelling that they resist closure and so full of rich potentialities that they cannot be historically contained - in other words, a myth.

This chapter is a hard look at that myth and the aspects of Akhenaten's history that have been most influential in its formation, rather than a comprehensive history of his reign. Inevitably I have had to be selective and ignore some import­ant historical questions because they have little to do with myth-making. There­fore I spend little time considering foreign policy and diplomacy, or whether, there was a period when Akhenaten and his father Amunhotcp III ruled jointly. All this involves a certain amount of debunking myths. The most attractive and resilient parts of Akhenaten's history/pseudobiography are also the parts that arc most difficult to substantiate with hard evidence. Also, I do not want to write another over-personalised psyehobiography of Akhenaten, reconstructing his motiv­ations, . feelings and emotions. It would be marvellous if one could say with authority that Akhenaten had Oedipal fantasies about his parents, or that 'there can be no doubt that both Akhenaten and Nefertiti were extremely proud of their six daughters', or that Akhenaten's sister was the 'little companion' of their mother's lonely widowhood, or that 'the perfect life of the royal family was shattered' by child deaths - but one can't, bccausc the evidence is not there.¹

These quotations all come from the standard, most easily available works on Akhenaten by professional Egyptologists. As well as being sentimental and wholly speculative, they illustrate the central problem that his biography is rarely written with any neutrality. More than any other period of Egyptian history, Akhenaten's reign evokes emotive narratives and personalised responses, even from conserva­tive academics who have had long scholarly connections with it. This is true of the authors of the two most authoritative English-language biographies, Akhen­aten, King of Egypt (1988, still in print) by Cyril Aldred (1914-91), and Donald Redford's Akhenaten, the Heretic King (1984). Both biographies are scholarly works based on an exhaustive knowledge of the period, and in many ways they are still indispensable. Yet they paint radically different pictures of the king and his reign, which ultimately derive from Redford disliking Akhenaten and Aldred thinking he was admirable. To their crcdit, neither author makes any attempt to disguise his opinion.