Akhenaten

Figure 3.4 English aristocrats alongside Amarna royals: cartoon by George Morrow from Punch,

28 February 1923. The caption is: SNAPPED IN THE VALLEY OF THE KINGS. Reading from left to right: Funeral companion of KING TUTANKH-AMEN, Lady Sophia Bulge, Queen NEPHERTITI and Lord Algernon Gark. [Inset Portrait of Pasht.] © Punch Ltd.

certainly had a high profile and a special cachet.¹⁹ This affected the way Petrie dug the site. Apart from stopping work to show elite visitors around, he had to make some concession to the desire of his rich backers for fine art objects. Because the area around the great Aten temple looked as though it might have interesting sculptural pieces appropriate for Amherst's collection, he set Garter investigating it on his own. It did indeed yield a quantity of statuary, later sold by Amherst's heirs in 1921, including some of the most famous pieces of Amarna art. Petrie and Garter also surveyed the royal wadi to find Akhenaten's tomb, because of the rumours that it had been found and plundered by the locals, and that the Cairo Museum authorities knew its location but were suppressing the information for their own ends.

Initially the scope of Petrie's dig was ambitious. 'It is an overwhelming site to deal with. Imagine setting about exploring the ruins of Brighton, for that is about the size of the town: and then you can realise how one man must feel with such a huge lump of work', wrote the daunted Petrie.²⁰

He soon decided that it was impossible to plan the whole vast area and so he would skim the site by digging a selection of houses, finding the palace, if possible, and the temples and their foundation deposits. His excavation nevertheless produced some results of lasting archaeological importance. Petrie established a numbering system for the bound­ary stelae which is still in use, produced a map that was not superseded for thirty years, and made many important individual finds. Petrie realised Amarna's unique importance for Egyptian settlement archaeology and as a centrc of eco­nomic production, anticipating more recent archaeological approaches to the site. The Amarna artefacts which were given to Amherst reveal Petrie's exc.ava- tional focus in 1891-2. When the Amarna pieces from Amherst's antiquities collection were sold at Sotheby's on 17 June 1921, important sculptures rubbed shoulders with tools, sandstone drills, pigment samples, and ceramic moulds for faience objects, non-art pieces without intrinsic acsthctic value (lots 827, 828, 859, 860, etc.). Petrie's excavations at Amarna set up the picture of Akhenaten's city as a centre of artistic production, something that was to strike a chord in popular interpretations of the site (see p. 147).

The star discovery of Petrie's expedition was the painted pavement from the building he called the Great Palace, now believed to have been called the 'House of Rejoicing of the Aten'. This find caused quite a stir at the time, partly because of Petrie's own enthusiastic journalism, which was partly intended to publicise the dig in the hope of raising money for future excavations. He wrote in The Academy (9 April 1892):

The subjects of these floors are tanks with fish, birds and lotus; groups of calves, plants, birds and insects; and a border of bouquets and dishes. But the main value of them lies in the new style of art displayed; the action of the animals, and the naturalistic grace of the plants, arc unlike any other Egyptian work, and are unparalleled even in classical frescoes. Not until modern times can such studies from nature be found.

'The new style of art', 'the naturalistic grace of the plants', 'modern times' - is Petrie describing ancient Egyptian art or art nouveau, or both at oncc? His description is surely influenced by seeing art nouveau objects; and I wonder whether the wider ideology of the movement, which rejected designs based on classical or renaissance archetypes along with the boundaries between high aca­demic art and decorative craft, might also have fed into his words, however unconsciously. Amarna art, he implies, is somehow more democratic. Petrie does not mention that the expressive 'studies from nature' on the pavement are juxta­posed with one of the most standard and rigid iconographic motifs of the Egyp­tian repertoire: the pathway of bound enemies of Egypt, alternately African and Asiatic, whom the pharaoh symbolically crushes as he walks over their images (sec Figure 2.8). Petrie transformed the pavement from a political statement about royal hegemony into an attractive piece of interior design comprehensible to a late ninetccnth-century aesthetic.

These artistic judgements were in line with Petrie's highly positive view of Akhenaten himself. In a lecture the text of which was published in The Times (7 September 1892), Petrie said that Akhenaten was 'a humanistic, rationalizing despot', adding: