Akhenaten

This book is about the historical Akhenaten in only a peripheral way. It is not a biography of him but a metabiography - a look at the process of biographical representation. It's really about the uses of the archaeological past and the dia­logue between past and present: how Akhenaten is simultaneously a legacy of the past and a fact of the present. I am not really interested in Akhenaten himself, but in why other people are interested in him and find his story relevant and inspirational when he has been dead for three and a half thousand years. For inspirational it is. Akhenaten has moved a roster of great twentieth-century cre­ative talents to reproduce him in many media: Sigmund Freud, Thomas Mann, H.D. and Naguib Mahfouz in literature, Frida Kahlo in paint, Philip Glass and Derek Jarman in the performing arts. But Akhenaten does not belong exlusively to elite culture, and so he is a marvellously rich resource for allowing a range of other voices to be heard, in spite of forces which would consign them to insignifi­cance. Most books on aspects of Egyptology give little space to these 'fringe' voices, but here I engage with them often. They deserve a respectful hearing, and give a sense of the vitality and variety of the meanings of Akhenaten. Also, I believe that it is very important for the professional community to listen to non- specialists. The two groups are not in conflict, or at least they need not be, and the dialogue can be mutually enriching. Writing this book reminded me repeat­edly of how this dialogue had made me ask questions I would otherwise never have considered. Hence my search for Akhenaten's modern reincarnations led me off into territories that academic historians rarely visit. I met mystics who believe that Akhenaten guards the lost wisdom of Atlantis, disability rights activ­ists who present him as a positive role model to children suffering from a disease affecting the connective tissues, Afrocentrists who invoke him as an ancestor from the glorious black past denied them by European racists, gay men who say that he is the first gay man. In this book there are other versions of the pharaoh that many will find either mad or offensive or both: Akhenaten the proto-Nazi, for instance, or Akhenaten the patron saint of paedophiles. Ancient Egypt is invested with so much cultural capital that people who feel marginalised by majority cultures want a share of it too.

What all these mutually exclusive versions of Akhenaten have in common is that the stories told of him are the stories of their creators. Their retellings are more complex than just inventing fictions or recounting facts. Description, obser­vation and self-revelation mix with selective reporting of evidence and the reworking or omission of unsuitable details. All presenters of Akhenaten, schol­arly or otherwise, have distinctive personal, cultural and generic biases that shape their perceptions. In this book I spend a lot of time examining what might be called the paratextual conditions of the mythic Akhenaten - the other circum­stances which help to produce specific views of him and assist in his mythologisation.

It is hard to find common denominators to these myths because they are so Protean, their different guises shifting to suit the needs of particular audiences, genres and interpreters. However, one thing which underpins many of them is the desire, to find an antecedent for oneself or one's beliefs in ancient Egypt. Along with Greece and Rome, Egypt has a privileged position in western ideas about its own origins. Since Plato, historians, politicians and theologians have looked to ancient Egypt to find justification, legitimation or authentication. Akhenaten is a uniquely attractive figure to draw on here. He is supposedly an individual, a real person whose psychology and character we can see developing, someone with whom we can identify. In 1905 one of the first scholars to write for the public about Akhenaten, the American Egyptologist James Henry Breasted (1865-1935), famously called him 'the first individual in human history'. In fact, Akhenaten presents a carefully constructed image of himself through an ideolo- gised set of words and pictures that make the individual behind them elusive. But the idea of him as an individual has become deep-rooted. Akhenaten would never have had the kind of after-life that he has enjoyed unless he was felt to be accessible in a unique way. And so Akhenaten has repeatedly been made to speak, in the first-person singular, in the languages that we understand - a kind of ventriloquist's dummy who mouths the words of the people who manipulate him.