Akhenaten

Two travellers have known of the existence of the Tombs of Alabastron for perhaps three years - perhaps more, and yet this piece of knowledge [h]as been kept as secret, thus guarded with as much care as ever miser watched and fondled watched and fondled [sic] the largest treasure ever told! This too with fellow-labourers in the same Country and apparently living on the most friendly terms - often meeting & of course making the country a great part of the sub ject of conversation.¹²

Hay goes on to speculate about Wilkinson's duplicity, and concludes that only greed over the division of any spectacular finds at Amarna could have led him to act in such a disloyal way. (Hay returned to Amarna in the summer of 1830, spending two months there: his exquisite drawings of the boundary stelae and other monuments remain important archaeological records.)

To an extent, Wilkinson's Amarna was replete with the familiar Egyptian trap­pings of treasure, tombs and mystery. In Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyp­tians,

however, Wilkinson presented another Amarna alongside this - Amarna as the Egyptian urban environment in microcosm. 'In order to give a better notion of the general arrangement of houses and streets in an Egyptian town, I shall introduce the plan of an ancient city near Tel el Amarna.'¹¹ Wilkinson realised that there were problems with taking Amarna as representative of all ancient Egyptian towns, noting how the site is unusually long and narrow and distant from the Nile. Even so, Amarna provided the best evidence he had, and by comparing it to contemporary Egyptian towns, he created an inhabited space out of the ruins. Even shops get a mention. He compares them to the shops of the Cairo suq,

where 'an idle lounger frequently passes whole hours, less intent on benefiting the shop-keeper, than in amusing himself with the busy scene of the passing crowd', but also to those in London, even down to the 'by royal appoint­ment' signs fixed outside.¹⁴ Gardner Wilkinson's Amarna is a paradoxical one. It is both London and Cairo, both the progressive, teleological west and the leis­ured, passive Orient. It is simultaneously utterly knowable and utterly strange. It is the paradigm for Egyptian urban life, while also being an archaeological anomaly. It bears the burden of proof for his larger thesis about the Egyptians as proto-monotheists, but at the same time is the backdrop for a Gothic drama performed by Orientalist figures of excess.

The next person after Wilkinson to excavate Amarna in any detail was Karl Richard Lepsius (1810-84). At the head of the Prussian archaeological mission to Egypt financed by King Friedrich Wilhclm IY Lepsius and his team of draughtsmen stopped twice at Amarna: once on 19 September 1843 for three days, and then for a week in June 1845 on their return journey from recording the monuments of the Sudan. Lepsius was collccting information for his Denk- mdler Agyptens und Athiopiens

(1849—59), a twelve-volume magnum opus that is still an invaluable resource. While at Amarna he concentrated on recording the northern tombs and the boundary stelae, and making drawings, casts and paper squeezes of reliefs and inscriptions. In the course of his work he collected some fine art pieces that later entered the Berlin Museum. He also drew a ground plan of the ruins. Lepsius was less romantic than Wilkinson about Amarna. In a letter of 20 November 1843 he noted, 'While still in Europe I had recognised the builder of these monuments, and some other allied kings, to be antagonistic kings of the 18th Dynasty.'¹' In a paper delivered to the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin in 1851, Lepsius elaborated on this theory, using the data he had collected at Amarna to put together the first scholarly synthesis of what was known about Akhenaten.