Akhenaten

There is another obvious (perhaps too obvious) parallel between Akhenaten and Stalinism. Both their regimes eventually became officially unacceptable, and attempts were made to expunge their memories. The last essential component of the Akhenaten myth centres around the destruction of his monuments at Thebes and Akhet-aten, and the erasure of his name in official contexts. This was partly intended to create an ideologically correct view of history from which the Amarna experiment could be deleted. Akhenaten and his successors do not appear on temple king lists because Nineteenth Dynasty pharaohs did not want to make offerings to their names. But this was also supposed to ensure personal oblivion for Akhenaten himself. Egyptian ideas about rebirth placcd great emphasis on speaking the name of the deceased: without being commemorated in this way, no rebirth was possible. The demolition of Akhenaten's monuments was part of this process. So was the invention of euphemisms for him, such as "the criminal of Akhet-aten', so that no one would have to speak his unlucky name. It was hoped that Akhenaten would have no after-life — not only in the sense of religious rebirth, but also in the sense of Nachleben

or historical after-life. This was not something unique to Akhenaten and other politically unacceptable rulers like Hatshepsut: pharaohs at many periods of Egyptian history were sub­jected to this.⁶⁹

The fact that Akhenaten's successors needed to make such efforts at all suggests that his memory was still alive a century after his death; and it may have continued to live on for many ccnturics after that. After all, visible erasure is itself an oblique form of commemoration. It is easy to restore Stalin from his feet left behind in photographs ineptly doctored in the 1950s de-Stalinisation pro­gramme. Even erasure from monumental contexts would not make Akhenaten into a forgotten pharaoh. Writing Akhenaten out of official commemorations does not mean that he would not survive in a broader historical sense. His influ­ence might live on in other ways too, and there is good reason to suppose that it did.

Part of the attempt to obliterate Akhenaten personally was the destruction of Akhet-aten. His city is usually depictcd as a deserted ghost town, waiting to be rediscovered by the western archaeologists who are the only ones who 'know' Egypt and can rescue its past from oblivion. In 1982 Aldred quoted approvingly Norman de Garis Davies' comment that Amarna was 'a chance bivouac in the march of history, filled for a moment with all the movement and colour of intense life, and then abandoned to deeper silence'.⁷⁰

A television documentary about Akhet-aten, screened on British TV's BBC2 in April 1999, was called Egypt's Lost City,

as though it were a sort of Pompeii. Akhet-aten/Amarna has become the romantic lost city par excellence, a sort of Atlantis or even a deserted Eden. One nineteenth-century writer called Amarna 'The Dream-City' in a moony poem which talked about traversing the 'solemn wilderness' of destroyed Amarna, where one might 'feel still fresh the wonder and the calm / Of greatness passed away' (see p. 147).