Akhenaten

Akhenaten is indivisibly associated with Amarna, and the archaeological rediscoveries of his city go hand in hand with rediscoveries of him. This chapter examines how excavations at Amarna have been interpreted since the first Euro­pean travellers reached there at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and how these interpretations have affected the Akhenaten legend.⁵ The most famous names in Egyptology excavated at Amarna or visited there: Gardner Wilkinson, Lepsius, Flinders Petrie, Howard Carter. Even Jean-Franqois Champollion (1790-1832), the decipherer of hieroglyphs, visited the tomb of Ahmose in 1828 or 1829: he found the carvings of Akhenaten unpleasingly feminine and concluded that he must have been suffering from some hideous disease.⁴ My focus here is on personalities as much as on digging strategies, because it seems to me that the people involved in digging and publicising Amarna have all had particu­lar agendas about the presentation of Egypt: it is important to consider this background. I also concentrate on those antiquarians and archaeologists who made efforts to popularise their discoveries at Amarna. Early antiquarians at Amarna such as Claude Sicard, Edme Jomard and Gardner Wilkinson were much impressed by the strangeness of the things they saw there, and how differ­ent they were from the way they expected Egyptian monuments to look. They allowed themselves to respond emotionally to the inherent power of a place which had no particular historical associations for them. But these responses to the site change as Akhenaten and his beliefs become more familiarised, especially through fascination with him as the proto-monothcist. Then Amarna is gradually transformed from a strange and awesome environment to a place where ancient Egypt can be known and comprehended in contemporary terms. In the years preceding the Second World War, strange or uncanny aspects of Amarna's archaeology were downplayed, and it metamorphosed from a numinous mystery into a version of suburban London, the prototype garden suburb. With hindsight, it is easy to smile knowingly at the garish reconstructions of Amarna produced for the mass-circulation illustrated papers of the 1920s and 1930s, which provide the city with every institution of the modern urban built environment. (See Plate 3.1.) Images like this, however, still live on. In popular books and magazines such as The National Geographic, the pristine city of Akhet-aten, 'fresh, glittering, dedi­cated . . . where the paint and plaster were scarcely dry, where hammer and chisel still rang and rasped with feverish activity',

¹ is a persistent fantasy of ancient Egypt. As with all the most seductive images of antiquity, however, it is appealing but only a small part of the story.

From grotto to garden suburb

Subsequent reuse of the tombs of Akhenaten's officials show that parts of Amarna had a long history of reusage, with some of the tombs becoming places of pre-Christian pilgrimage which were later converted into churches. There is no evidence so far for whether this kind of activity continued after the seventh century ce, when Egypt was controlled by Muslim rulers. Amarna may have retained its traditional aura, but equally possibly it could have fallen out of people's consciousness as a holy space. There are other instances of this from archaeological history: Stonehenge is perhaps the best example. On the other hand, some Amarna monuments were certainly resignified by the local inhabit­ants. In the nineteenth century, one of the boundary stelae (stela P) was blown up bv locals in the search for a cave filled with treasure that supposedly lay behind it>

The earliest written responses to Amarna are preserved by the few European travellers who made their way south of Cairo in the early eighteenth century.

THE "MUSHROOM" CITT WHICH TEMPORARILY DISPLACED THE5ES AS THE CAPITAL

OP ANCIENT EGYPT IN THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY SC. A PICTORIAL RECONSTRUCTION Or AKHETATE! BUILT BY AKHENATEN AS THE CENTRE Of HIS NEW RELIGION OF SUN-WORSHIP SHOWING THE TEMPLE. PALACE. RECORDS OFFICE, AND UNIVERSITY (HOUSE OP LIFE).

Plate 3.1 Reconstruction of Akhet-aten from The Illustrated London Xews, 15 September 1934, by D. Macpher- son. Reproduced by courtesy of the Egypt Exploration Society.