Akhenaten

In Jomard's description and the accompanying plans, Amarna was a place of Cyclopean architecture, not a pile of weathered mud-brick mounds. After dis­cussing the huge sizes of the brick and the vastncss of the enclosure of ruins, Jomard went on to say that the building astonished him as much as anything else he had seen in Egypt, and found himself unable to guess at its function - temple, palace, fortress, or granary?

Twenty-five years after Jomard, in 1824, the English traveller and antiquar­ian John Gardner Wilkinson (1797-1875) reached Amarna, and travelled there again two years later. He recorded the northern tomb of Meryre' I, and visit­ed the alabaster quarry at Hatnub and possibly the southern group of tombs; he also surveyed and mapped the town site, and made casts and drawings. Wilkinson's visits had important consequences for the rediscovery of Amarna. He wrote about its remains at some length in his enormously popular Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians

(1836) - perhaps the biggest single influence on early Victorian views of ancient Egypt - and in Murray's Handbook for Travel­lers in Egypt (1847), for years the guidebook most used by English tourists. Victorian travelogues as late as the 1890s mention visiting Egyptian sites, Murray 's

in hand. It would be interesting to know whether Wilkinson had read Jomard's awed and tantalising descriptions of its ruins. Some years after his first visit to Amarna, he recorded his impressions of the tombs in Murray's Handbook:

The grottoes

have sculptures of a very peculiar style. The figures are similar to those at Gebel Toona; and the king and queen, frequently attended by their children, are in like manner represented praying to the Sun, whose rays, terminating in human hands, give them the sign of life. It was by accident that I first discovered these grottoes in 1824, being distant from the river, and then unknown to the boatmen of the Nile. The royal names, as at Gebel Toona, have been invariably defaced, evidently by the Egyptians themselves. Some have supposed that the kings, whose names are found here, belong to the dynasty of shepherds, whose memory was odious, as their rule was oppressive to the Egyptians; but their era does not agree with the date of these sculptures. They may, however, have been later invaders; and there is reason to believe that that they made a change in the religion . . . which would account for the erasure of their names. From their features it is evident they were not Egyptians; their omission in the list of kings, the erasure of their names, the destruction of their monuments, and the abject submission they required, prove them to have been looked on with hatred in the country; and the peculiar mode of worshipping and representing the Sun argues that their religion differed from the Egyptian.¹¹

To Wilkinson, Amarna sculpture was so anomalous that it can only be explained by having a foreign origin. But his account is also laced with the staple ingredients of Gothic fiction. The people at Amarna arc despotic figures of political excess, despised and ultimately destroyed by their subjects. These threat­ening figures are depicted on the walls of remote, abandoned 'grottoes', evoking the dark subterranean vaults that were such popular settings for Gothic novels. And, of course, many Gothic tales took place in the 'Orient', an exotic space where the imagination could roam unboundedly. Wilkinson might even have been thinking of books from his own library, such as William Beckford's Vathek (1786), the story of a tyrannical voluptuary caliph who builds magnificent palaces to indulge himself but is eventually damned for his lack of restraint. Wilkinson's Amarna is imbued with an atmosphere of gloom and mystery, populated by spectral figures, to promote a sense of awe, wonder and terrified expectation in the reader or potential traveller.

While enjoying the dramatic potential of Amarna, Wilkinson was also well aware of its archaeological importance and the possibility that the tombs might yield treasure. When he visited Amarna two years later with the artist and traveller James Burton (1788-1862), he swore him to secrecy about the tombs, even though they were used to sharing information about their discoveries with other English antiquarians, such as Robert Hay (1799-1863) and Joseph Bonomi (1796-1878), all of whom travelled together in Egypt. Burton, however, found the Amarna material so interesting and important that he had to tell Hay, who fulminated incoherently to his diary about the violation of their gentlemen's agreement on Amarna (called here 'Alabastron'):