Akhenaten

suburban fantasy of houses supplied with all desirable conveniences down to indoor lavatories and bathrooms. On the one hand, Amarna could be invoked as a forerunner of European progress, but on the other it could evoke a cyclical, eternal Egypt where things do not change, where the agricultural worker is 'ply­ing the same shaduf, ploughing with the same plough, preparing the same food in the same way and eating it with his fingers from the same bowl as did his fore­fathers of six thousand years ago'.'⁴

This is what underlies the posing of the modern Egyptians in the ancient ruins: they represent the fantasy of an eternal Egypt. The Illustrated London News

constructs an unreal Amarna which has no basis in any lived and embodied actuality. The people are actors, the original artefacts are used as props, and the ruins of the houses are box sets against the back- curtain of the Amarna landscape, which is itself a vast theatre. ®⁵

Magazine accounts were not the only means by which the Egypt Exploration Society publicised its activities at Amarna. To reach the widest possible audience, travelling exhibitions of Amarna objects toured the English provinces. In Bir­mingham, 2,000 people attended the Amarna exhibition hosted by a local social club, the Birmingham Conversazione, between 7 and 10 January 1936. There were also public lectures illustrated with magic-lantern slides. The text of one of these, given at the Royal Society, Burlington House, on 23 June 1925, has sur­vived in the archives of the Egypt Exploration Society. It was written and delivered (apparently very badly, according to marginal notes on the archive copy) by Thomas Whittcmore (1871-1950), who dug at Amarna from 1923. Since his field of expertise was Byzantine palaces, his lecture presented a rather idiosyncratic view of Amarna. Its architecture reminded Whittemore of the structures run up to house the World's Fair, which looked imposing but were actually insubstantial: 'a very gay pretty place, but a very temporary one'. According to Whittemore, the city itself was weak and had 'no sinews'. He went on to compare the Amarna palaces to those at St Petersburg, Versailles, and finally showed a lantern slide of Burlington House itself, where his audience was sitting!

Real, or even hyper-real, fabrications of the site reached their apogee when John D. S. Pendlebury (1904-41) became the director of the Egypt Exploration Society dig at Amarna for five seasons, from 1931. His very physical, almost proprietorial, relationship with Amarna is summed up in a photograph (usually reproduced cropped), where he fixes Nefertiti's gaze while holding her in a firm neck-grip (see Plate 3.3a). Pendlebury was a larger-than-life character around whom a certain mythology has grown up. His glamorous archaeological exploits both in Egypt and in Knossos, combined with his good looks, athleticism and heroic record in the Second World War have led to several highly romanticised accounts of him being published, characterising him as 'a golden boy', the hero of a novelette or a hagiography.³⁶ He certainly seems to have been a man who aroused strong emotions in the people who worked with him, not all of them positive. The official archives of the Egypt Exploration Society record the other side: there were disputes on site during the 1934—5 season, with personal ani­mosities flaring up among the staff, and concerns about the way Pendlebury conducted the excavation archaeologically and as a manager. There were also unsavoury rumours about financial misdealings by members of his team, which resulted in some being dismissed. He and his staff were described as amateurs, and Pendlebury's commitment to Egyptology questioned because of his Classical training and interest in Greek archaeology.