Akhenaten

By the late 1890s and early 1900s, archaeologists and the media made Amarna offer a combination of exciting, biblical-tinged archaeology and beaux-arts in line with the current taste. No wonder it was an attractive halt for the increasing numbers of tourists on Nile cruises, or the more affluent travelling by private houseboat (dahabiyeh)\ Guidebooks such as

Baedecker's Egypt (1897) and Cook's Handbook for Egypt (1903) give details of how to get to Amarna and incorporate it in longer itineraries, usually while en route

to Asyut from visiting the Middle King­dom tombs at Beni Hassan, or by rail to Medinet el-Fayum. These assume that the painted pavement will be the main focus of the trip. Baedecker provides complicated instructions about how to get to the inaccessible tombs or spend more time at the site. These involve taking a train to Deir Mawas, travelling by donkey to el-Hagg Qandil or el-Till, obtaining the keys from the various guard­ians, and making arrangements for staying overnight with the Omdeh (a local dignitary). The inclusion of this kind of practical information in guidebooks for tourists might suggest that many of them travelled to Amarna in the hope of seeing the place which not only confirmed the Bible but also appealed to a contemporary aesthetic. However, it is striking that hardly any of the dozens of travel books describing holidays in Egypt produced between 1890 and 1910 say anything at all about visiting Amarna. On the rare occasions they do, the trip is presented as a triumph of the visitor's determination and initiative over the lassi­tude and unreliability of the locals. The travelogue Pyramids and Progress: Sketches from Egypt (1900) by the artist John Ward RA (1832-1912) is typical. His title, a pun on Bunyan's spiritual classic

Pilgrim's Progress, gives a clue to how he con­ceptualised his visit to Egypt. Under the healthy regime of the British protector­ate, old Egypt makes 'progress', like the sick patient Ward often compares it to. He describes visits to ostrich farms and sugar factories as well as to tombs and temples, and the book is dedicated to the British governor, Lord Cromer. But the journey is also an intensely spiritual one for Ward. The pinnacle of this is going to Amarna, where progress and spirituality come together: 'I longed to see the place with my own eyes', he says, especially the north tombs with their scenes of the royal family 'in attitudes of deep devotion, and the inscriptions full of the praise of truth and many noble principles advocated by Christianity'."³ As with all pilgrimages, the suffering of the pilgrim is a crucial element. Ward spends several pages describing the difficulties of getting to Amarna - embarking at el- Hagg Qandil, the long donkey ride, haggling with the locals for small antiquities. Only after all this 'the pleasure was to come'. He was overwhelmed by the beauty of the desert landscape, and found his adventure to 'the plain of the lost city, the scene of the unsuccessful effort of an old-world reformer' deeply moving.

When other tourists eventually made it to Amarna, it was sometimes an anti­climax. What was there on the ground failed to meet their romantic expectations. The novelist and Egyptophilc Henry Rider Haggard (1856-1925) visited on a wet February afternoon, and was not impressed. 'The place seemed, beneath a dull sky that spattered rain, of a dreariness indescribable - a very epitome of the vanity of human hopes and of greatness passed away.'²⁴

Another successful novel­ist and Egyptophilc, Norma Lorimcr (1864—1948), of whom much more in Chapter 6, was one of the few women who recorded her feelings. After her visit in 1908 she admitted, rather disingenuously:

I was disappointed. ... I expected more. I had built up in my mind's eye something more expressive of the king's extraordinary life, something more significant of his courageous revolt against the all-powerful priests of Amon. Except the distant tombs, all that is left of his new capital, all that to-day tells the tale of his religious war, are a few fragments of mosaic floors.²¹

No wonder she was disappointed, because she had earlier talked about Akhen­aten's 'delightful' taste in art, and the palace at Amarna as the 'Versailles of Egypt, a city of love and pleasure, where . . . tables were filled with fruit and garlands of flowers, wines, beer, and cakes and ale'. Illyria on the Nile indeed.