Akhenaten

Ancient history has always been about trying to organise the welter of evi­dence from the past into interrelated, conceptually manageable and presently meaningful narratives, so that the past could be held up to the present, like a mirror. In Akhenaten's case, the narrative had been predetermined in terms of what Egypt was supposed to supply to the west; so when Akhenaten was rediscovered by archaeologists and historians, he stepped neatly into the niche which had already been carved for him. How the developing discipline of archaeology made Akhenaten confirm fables of a monotheistic, pacifist, sun- worshipping Utopia in Egypt that offered the modern world something it had lost is the subject of the next chapter.

THE ARCHAEOLOGIES OF AMARNA

Some time in the second century ce, a Roman citizen called Catullinus visited the tomb of Ahmose, tomb 3 of the northern group at Amarna. He walked past the faqade, showing Ahmose adoring the royal cartouches, past the small hall with the 'hymn' to the Aten, and entered the main hall of the tomb. Here Catullinus would have seen images of Akhenaten and Nefertiti riding in a chariot from the palace to the Aten temple, with a military escort. On the undecorated wall behind him, he could see something very different from the scenes carved by Akhenaten's artisans: a confused, overlapping mass of Greek graffiti, cut into the tomb walls by visitors over a period of several centuries before Catullinus stood there. Unlike the hieroglyphic inscriptions in the tomb, he could certainly read the graffiti. He would have read how one man, Spartacus the runner, visited the tomb during Alexander of Macedon's occupation of Egypt in the 320s bce, and how another man, Philinus, made the journey to Amarna in regnal year 19 of Ptolemy Alexander, that is in 96 or 95 bce. An anonymous Roman traveller recorded his visit in year 37 of Augustus, around 7 ce. Other visitors to the northern tombs felt awed by the power of a place they believed to be somehow holy, and showed their respect to the gods they perceived there by leaving religious drawings and graffiti. It is slighdy misleading to call these inscriptions 'graffiti', which really offer the writers' thanks to the gods for allowing safe passage through their territory. The funerary god Anubis appears in them, so maybe the northern tombs at Amarna retained their original associations with death and rebirth (see Figure 3.1).

Perhaps the wall of tangled graffiti written by earlier travellers augmented Catullinus' sense of the tomb's antiquity and, like them, he was moved to leave a permanent memorial of his visit. Catullinus was well enough educated to compose a neat metrical inscription in Greek to record his presence:

After climbing up here, I, Catullinus, engraved this in the doorway,

amazed at the skill of the holy stone-cutters.¹

The graffiti in Ahmose's tomb show that people kept coming to this remote place for centuries. They journeyed there at all times of year, even when

Figure 3.1 Drawing of Anubis, from ihc tomb of Huya at Amarna, Roman period: the left-hand figure holds the keys to the underworld. Redrawn from Davies 1905b.

travelling was difficult during the hot summer months and the flood in humid August. No wonder that they sometimes recorded their gratitude to the god Pan Euhodos, equated with the Egyptian god Min, patron deity of the desert and dangerous journeys! Whatever led them to the place also led them to inscribe a permanent record of their presence, leaving behind a rocky carte de visite. Perhaps Amarna, or the northern tombs in particular, had acquired a special reputation or resonance - what some anthropologists call a numen, a palpable but indefinible power of placc which evokes in onlookers a feeling of awe mingled with a sense of their own powerlessness. At any rate, the graffito of Catullinus and some others in the Amarna tombs suggest that they were perceived as awe-inspiring, powerful and holy.²