Akhenaten

Biographies conventionally begin by looking at the subject's family background, childhood and formative years to find explanations for the adult's character and actions. The lack of any reliable evidcncc for Akhenaten prior to his acccssion makes this impossible to do. Nothing secure is known about Akhenaten's birth or education, and everything has to be inferred from the little that is known of other pharaohs. Also, given the separation in time, and the sorts of primary evidence that survive, not much can be said about the personal relationships in Akhen­aten's family that is not speculation or pseudo-history. If it is difficult to empathise with royal families of our own time and place, it is going to be even more difficult to acccss one so far removed in every way. The main sources of evidence for Akhenaten's family are not ideologically neutral and should never be read as though they are: they are not the materials for a psychobiography. Yet biographers still insist on reconstructing Akhenaten's family dynamics and their effect on his psychological development from these sources. Donald Redford, for instance, sees Akhenaten as 'a man deemed ugly by the acccpted standards of the day, secluded in the palace in his minority, certainly close to his mother, possibly ignored by his father, outshone by his brother and sisters, unsure of himself'.³⁰

Here we have a whole psychobiography cookcd up out of classic Freudian ingredients - possessive mother, distant authoritarian father, ctc. - and based, as we shall see, on absolutely no evidence. To imagine that this kind of history can be written about Akhenaten at all is another instance of how historians delude themselves into thinking that he is an acccssiblc figure who can be identified with and understood in modern terms.

Akhenaten and his family also seem knowable because they are the stars of Egyptian history par excellence

, accorded the star treatment by biographers and Egyptologists. Amunhotep III, Tiye, Akhenaten and Nefertiti have star personae in the filmic sense, their stardom created out of a fascination with the interaction between biographical facts, personal glamour and a fabulous lifestyle. Film histor­ians have defined stardom as primarily an image of the way stars live, and that, more than anything, lifestyle

is the backdrop for the specific personalities of stars and the details and events of their lives. Also, stardom is ultimately accessible and unthreatening because it combines the special with the ordinary. '¹

Popular media, especially journalism, have played such a part in creating and sustaining interest in Amunhotep III, Tiye, Akhenaten and Nefertiti that these ideas about film stars may help explain how they have been biographiscd. They arc over­whelmingly royal but at the same time oddly bourgeois, happily married couples with a well-developed domestic aesthetic - something apparently confirmed by the archaeology of their palaces at Malqata, Medinet el-Gurob and Amarna. As well as being stars, Akhenaten's parents are refracted through fictional arche­types, Orientalist cliches, iconic rulers from western history, or a mixture of all three. Amunhotep is often compared to Louis XIV of France as Egypt's 'Sun King'. This is partly because one of his favourite self-applied epithets was aten tjehen, 'the dazzling sun-disc', but also because of his long reign, the material luxury of his court and his supposed personal decadence. Biographers make Amunhotep III into a sort of indolent sultan with a 'harem' of mistresses, numerous 'bastards', and a body wrecked by a lifetime of ovcr-indulgencc: the full details of his decayed teeth, bad breath, corpulence and so on arc not spared. ⁵" Since Amunhotep's mummy cannot even be identified securely, all this is based on not much more than presupposition about what excessive rulers are like, with an added dash of Orientalism suitable for writing about a king of Egypt. Certainly Amunhotep III had numerous co-wives who bore him many children, but so did other pharaohs of the New Kingdom, and there is no evidence to suggest that Amunhotep was more uxorious than any of them.