Akhenaten

Recently his digging strategies have been criticised further. Although claiming a commitment to careful 'scientific' digging, Pendlebury was also excited by the notion of archaeology as the handmaiden of history, writing 'one cannot tell in what part of the city some important historical document may come to light. A mere slum house may contain an inscription that will revolutionise history.'¹⁷ Indeed, he applied names such as 'slums' to structures on the basis of their size or the quality of the buildings, rather than on the basis of what was found in those structures. Under his direction extensive areas of the site were cleared too quickly, and waste from this clearance was dumped in places which had either been unexcavated or inaccurately planned in earlier seasons of work. This caused a serious row about digging strategy between Pendlebury and his deputy, H. W. Fairman. Pendlebury seems, in addition, not to have supervised the workmen carefully enough. The workforce was large and not always easy to control, even though they had mostly been recruited from elsewhere in Egypt in the hope that they would not become involved with local factions (see Plate 3.3d). An appre­ciable number of small finds was pilfered and entered the antiquities market, with a resultant distortion of the profile of the site, and feuds between the work­men eventually led to the destruction of much of the decoration of the royal tomb.³⁸ With hindsight, it is all too easy to criticise Pendlebury's archaeological strategies and see him as a gung-ho explorer rather than a scientific cxcavator. To be fair, he was interested in a broad range of data from Amarna, and did his best to interpret them from a wide background of previous scholarship and his own digging experience. His seasons of excavation yielded thousands of contexted artefacts from the central city, important for subsequent reconstructions of the

Pendlebury's personal investment in the past also affected how he represented Amarna, in life on the site as well as in numerous publications.³⁹ He found the present day uninspiring, and wanted to return to a Utopian past. There are stories about his dislike of the mundane aspects of modernity, such as cars, and an obituary in the

Journal of Egyptian Archaeology says that 'chivalry and romanti­cism were of his essence'.⁴⁰ He was keen to stress links between the past and the present in a way that would now be called essentialist, in which people are bound by their shared humanity across vast spatial and temporal boundaries. Pendlebury made this clear in the introduction to his general book about Amarna:

One of the most fascinating points about the work is that we are con­cerned with the private lives of the whole population, slave and noble, workman and official and the royal family itself. So strong is this homely atmosphere that we feel we really know as individuals the people whose houses we are excavating

These feelings seem to have filtered into everyday life on site. Photographs in the archives of the Egypt Exploration Society show how keen Pendlebury was to experience an Orientalist past through assuming other identities: he appears in a variety of fancy-dress costumes - as a Cretan peasant, or in turban and galabiyah as one of his own workmen, and even, significantly, as Akhenaten himself (see Plate 3.3b). The walls of the Amarna dig house, constructed over the foundations of a New Kingdom building whose column bases are still visible in the courtyard, were decorated with appropriate paintings: heads of Nefertiti and hieroglyphs juxtaposed with a portrait of one of the workmen (see Plate 3.3e). The past and the present are conflated here in a glorious melange

where temporality has no meaning.

The delirious effect of layering past and present comes through strongly in Nefertiti Lived Here, a popular book written by a member of Pendlebury's staff, Mary Chubb. Originally published in 1954, it has recently (1998) been reissued.

(d)

Plate 3.3 (a) Pendlebury and a reproduction head of Nefertiti at an exhibition of Amarna objects in London, 1935. (b) Pendlebury at Amarna in fancy dress as Akhenaten, wearing a faience necklace from Amarna, c. 1930s, (c) Painting on the walls of the Egypt Exploration Society dig house at Amarna, 1930s, (d) Pay-day for the Egyp­tian staff at Amarna, 1936. Seated at the table: right,

John Pendlebury; left, the draughtsman Ralph Lavers. All reproduced by courtesy of the Egypt Exploration Society.

As Chubb's title implies, the Amarna royals are ever-present for her, and in one passage she experiences a sort of epiphany with Nefertiti in the dig house: