Akhenaten

Paul Lucas (1664-1737), who visited Egypt in 1704 and 1714, includes Amarna on a map published in his travelogue, Voyage du Sieur Paul Lucas au levant. Contenant la description de la haute Egypte, suivant le cours du Ml, depuis le Caire jusqua'aux cataractes. He claims to have visited all the places on his map, but does not describe the ruins of Amarna.' AJesuit hoping to make converts to Catholicism seems to have been the first European to record a visit to the site in modern times. Pere Claude Sicard was 37 when he visited Amarna in November 1714, having already been a missionary in Syria and Cairo for more than a decade.⁸

In addition to his religious activities, Sicard was under instructions from the due d'Orleans, regent for the young Louis XV to document the ancient monuments he encountered. While visiting local Christians at Mellawi, Sicard was shown boundary stela A at Tuna el-Gebel (see Plate 2.2). The stela impressed him so much that he recorded it both in words and in a rather confused picture - it was one of the few illustra­tions in the printed version of his work (see Figure 3.2). The accompanying description, the first European one of an Amarna monument, is worth quoting at length. Sicard interpreted the images on the stela in terms of biblical descriptions of sacrifices. But, like the Greek and Roman visitors, he was still fascinated by the strangeness of what he saw and struggled to make sense of what was obviously something extraordinary:

First of all one notices a sun surrounded by numerous rays, fifteen or twenty pieds [e. 4.8-6.4 m] across. Two life-size priests, wearing tall pointed hats, extend their hands towards this, the object of their vener­ation. The tips of their fingers touch the tips of the rays of the sun. At their side are two little boys, wearing the same head-gear as the priests, each one presenting them with two large vessels full of liquid. Below the sun there are two slaughtered lambs stretched out on three piles of faggots, each one composed of three pieces of wood. ... In front of the sun, directly opposite the two people making the sacrifice, there are figures of two women and two girls in full relief, fixed to the rock only by their feet and partly by a pillar at their backs. The marks of the hammer- blows that beheaded them can still be seen. I looked everywhere for an inscription or something else that could inform me about the different figures and how they had been used, or could at least tell me the year when this piecc of work was fashioned and the name of its crcator. But I could uncover nothing; and so I leave it to the learned antiquarians to reveal what has remained unknown to me.⁹

The same sort of feelings are evident in the next substantial account of Amar- na's ruins, by Edme Jomard (1777-1862). He was one of the antiquarians who accompanied Napoleon's expedition, and stopped off at Amarna on his way north in 1798 or 1799. He surveyed the site, and published the first plan of the ruins of Amarna in the monumental Description de I'Egypte in 1817 (Planches

IV plate 63.6-9). Jomard's plans and description reveal the large amount that was

Figure 3.2

Claude Sicard (1677-1726), sketch of boundary stela A, from Texte de transition entre la relation d'un voyage dans Fisle du Delta et la relation d'un voyage en haute Egypte, 1716. Compare Plate 2.2. The free-standing figures of Akhenaten, Nefertiti and their two oldest daughters have been absorbed onto the decoration of the stela itself.

visible on the ground, and how impressive he found it. He writes of the ruins of the small Atcn temple:

On this large road heading southwards from Et-Tell one finds, at 400 metres from the last houses of the village, an enclosure which traverses it: in the middle there is a gateway. Towards the main area of ruins and to the left is a large brick edifice preceded by a colossal gateway, the thick­ness of which is scarcely credible for this kind of construction: its open­ing is 11.15m, and its thickness 7.5 m. The walls are inclined like the faces of pylons. Although destroyed for much of their height, this is still 7.33 m. The bricks are themselves of gigantic size . . . their appearance is very fine. In fact this gateway is almost as large as the great pylon of the palace of Luxor.¹⁰