Akhenaten

In ethics he 'lived in truth' according to his ideals, and openly proclaims the domestic pleasures of a monogamist, riding side by side with his queen whom he kisses in the chariot, or sitting on his throne dancing the Queen and Princesses on his knee. In religion, in art, in life, we see the first great reasoner known in history.

At the same time as Petrie had been at Amarna, Urbain Bouriant (1849-1903) and Alexandre Barsanti (1858-1917) partly cleared the royal tomb in the wadi far to the east of the town site. Bouriant had previously spent two days at the site in April 1883, visiting the northern and southern tombs and recording some of their inscriptions, but was forced to give up work, overcome by illness and the terrible heat. Bouriant and Barsanti's recording of the royal tomb, published in 1903, proved crucial after its decorations and texts were vandalised in 1934; but in 1891 no information about the find was given out because Amarna was a battleground for tensions in the archaeological establishment. As well as showing how archaeologists were competing for the prestigious riches of Amarna, these tensions reflected larger, nationalist rivalries. After Egypt became a British pro­tectorate in 1882, British archaeologists like Petrie believed that they bore ultim­ate responsibility for the maintenance of its ancient monuments - a responsibility towards which the officials of the French-run Antiquities Sendee had an unhelp­ful, dog-in-the-manger attitude, at least according to the British. Petrie had had ongoing struggles with Eugene Grebaut (1846-1915), the director of the Antiqui­ties Scrvice, over permits to excavate.²¹ Even after the permit for a season's dig­ging at Amarna had been granted, feelings ran high. In January 1892, Petrie's assistant at Amarna, Percy Newberry (1868-1949), wrote a caustic letter to the editor of The Academy

revealing just how much relations had deteriorated between the French museum officials and the British archaeologists:

It is now made known that the royal tombs of Khuenaten and Tut­ankhamen, which had first been plundered by the Arabs, have been in the hands of the authorities of the Ghizeh Museum for the last two years. This retention of information is part of the policy of the French officials ... it seems that the Arabs' secret of Khuenaten's tomb has been reserved until further popular credit was acquired for the department. Egyptologists, apparently, have not simply to await the chances of for­tune but also the pleasure of the Museum officials before discoveries are imparted to them. For how much longer shall we have to bear this state of things?

²"'

Outbursts like this obviously did not help matters; and when the British made an application to copy the monuments at Amarna later in 1892, it was unsurprisingly rejected.

A dccade later, the Egypt Exploration Society dug at Amarna for six seasons between 1901 and 1906. Under the direction of Norman de Garis Davies (1865— 1941), there was a more conventional focus on recording tombs and texts. Work­ing almost single-handedly, Davies copied the texts on the boundary stelae and the surviving inscriptions and reliefs in the non-royal tombs. Although Bouriant had copicd some of these scenes in 1884, Davies' masterly drawings are still the best record of the tomb scenes: Amarna will always be seen through his eyes. Another of Davies' major contributions was to publish English translations of the 'hymn' to Aten from the various versions in the tombs of Akhenaten's courtiers. Press reviews of these publications are useful for gauging non-specialist responses to the site and its remains. The large-circulation Pall Mall Gazette reviewed the third volume of Davies' The Rock Tombs of Amarna on 21 March 1906. After a quotation from the 'hymn' to the Aten, the reader is told: 'it reveals once more, despite the enormous apparent differences, how unchanged in essentials is the world of today from that of the Pharaohs. The story of these long-departed shades is vividly retold from the carved records remaining.'