Akhenaten

Donald Redford, a Canadian archaeologist, has worked since the mid-1960s on reconstructing the dismantled monuments from the early part of Akhenaten's reign at east Karnak. It seems to me that his work on these monuments influ­enced his conception of Akhenaten in Akhenaten, the Heretic King, as an inflexible ideologue who deserved his downfall, like a modern dictator whose statues are torn down. Redford sometimes uses the vocabulary of the Cold War and 1984 - people are 'purged' or become 'non-persons', the Egyptian army takes POWs, and so on. Its conclusion hints at other types of prejudice. Redford admits that he personally dislikes Akhenaten, not only bccausc he was a repressive monomaniac and intellectual lightweight, but also because he was an effeminate artistic type: 'Is this effete monarch, who could never hunt or do battle, a true descendant of the authors of Egypt's empire?' His court 'is nothing but an aggregation of voluptuaries ... I cannot conceive a more tiresome regime under which to live.'" On the other hand, Cyril Aldred (formerly Keeper of Art and Archaeology in the Royal Scottish Museum, Edinburgh) is very keen on Amarna art. Believing that images of Akhenaten which seem to show him physically aberrant may be read literally, in the 1960s he developed the influential theory (first proposed in 1907) that Akhenaten suffered from a rare endocrinal disorder, Frohlich's Syndrome. Perhaps from his early training at the Courtauld Institute of Art, Aldred talks about Egypt using art-historical vocabulary indicative of western European cul­tural movements: 'naturalism', 'mannerism', 'realism', and so on. Akhenaten, King

of Egypt is Eurocentric in other ways. Aldred seems to think about Akhenaten and Nefertiti in terms of the British royal family of his youth, who celebrate 'jubilees' and 'durbars' just like George V Aldred admires Akhenaten for being more 'advanced' and 'rational' (read: western) than other pharaohs, based on the Judaeo-Christian assumption that monotheism must inherendy be a superior belief system to any other. He thinks that this can be deduced from artistic productions: 'Amarna art in the integration of its compositions betrays ... a more joyous acceptance of the natural world, and a more rational belief in a universal sole god.'³

Contradictory biographies like these are part of the process by which a histor­ical figure becomes mythologised. It is still possible to write about even the most sacrosanct heroes and heroines more impartially, and William J. Murnane has shown that this can be done for Akhenaten. Murnane's invaluable source history Texts from the Amarna Period in Egypt (1995) has the great advantage of being entirely based on the full range of written documentation, but does not offer a narrative history. Readers have to put that together from the documents. A short synthesis pointing out a few facts alongside many problems might therefore be a useful preliminary to my investigation of how the legend surrounding Akhenaten has been formed.

The reign of Akhenaten

The least disputed events of Akhenaten's life and reign can be summed up as follows.⁴ A younger son of Amunhotep III (reg. c. 1391-1353 bce) and his consort Tiye, he was originally named Amunhotep and may have been born between

c. 1385 and 1375 bce.⁵ There are no textual mentions or pictorial depictions of him which definitely predate Amunhotep Ill's heb-sed or jecZ-festival, a series of cele­brations and religious rituals symbolically reinvigorating the pharaoh which started in year 30 of the reign, c.

1361 bce. The first documentary record of the future Akhenaten comes in a brief inscription on a jar which supplied some food product to his father's W-festival. He succeeded Amunhotep III as Amunhotep iy probably on his father's death in c. 1353 bce. The evidence for any extended period of joint rule between Amunhotep III and Akhenaten is circumstantial, or based on art-historical criteria which are so far not generally accepted.⁶

Temple-building programmes in honour of the Aten, or divinised sun-disc, began early in the new reign, perhaps in the first year. East of the ritual site at Karnak, an extensive temple complex apparently called the Gem-pa-Aten (mean­ing perhaps 'The-Aten-is-found' or 'He-has-found-the-Aten') was hurriedly built in honour of the sun-god Re'-Harakhty-Aten, here depicted as human-bodied but falcon-headed and wearing an Aten-disc. Akhenaten is shown making differ­ent offerings to Re'-Harakhty-Aten in a series of roofless kiosks, instead of the usual scenes where he offers to the numerous gods of the Dual Kingdom of Egypt.⁷ The name and divine nature of this sun-god are defined in new honorific formulae, replete with theological meanings and puns on the names of gods that