Akhenaten

Nefertiti must have known this house. It's not too fantastic to think that sometimes, long ago, people sitting as we were now, in this very room, might have heard the murmur of servants' voices out beyond the Central Room, speaking the lovely name as she drew near: 'Nefertiti. It is Nefer­titi. The Beautiful Lady comes!' And in a moment she may have passed through this doorway, trodden this floor, and perhaps sat talking to her host with a small sandalled foot resting on this column base by my chair.⁴²

This kind of relationship with the past affected Pendlebury's archaeological analysis of Amarna in a lasting way. It certainly coloured the terminology he adopted for the large official buildings in the central city which were his excava- tional focus. Lacking much indication of what they were originally called, Pend­lebury could bestow his own names. Attempting to describe the functions of various rooms in these structures, he borrowed words that had specific meanings in contemporary Muslim culture {harim, sirdariya)

alongside the vocabulary of classical architecture, such as impluvium (the open pool in the hall of elite Roman houses).⁴⁵

Once again Amarna became something without its own integrity, which can only be described as a pastiche of the eastern and the western. Pend­lebury's unwillingness to describe the site according to its own logic becomes even dearer when one looks at his terminology for the buildings associated with the royal family in the ccntral city: they are presented in terms of the ceremonial Edwardian London where Pendlebury had grown up. His central Amarna had its own 'flying squad', its 'War Officc', and the presence of stables in a structure 'might imply that this building housed the mounted or rather mechanized section of the Household Brigade'.⁴⁴ To complete the analogy, the palace was equipped with a 'Chapel Royal', and he even identified 'the quarters of the six princesses with their night-nurseries and their playroom'.⁴³

All that is lacking to complete the picture is Nanny in a frilly cap. When Mary Chubb remarked that Pendle­bury's ground plan of the site was 'like a district map of London', she may have been admitting more than she realised about how he really thought of Amarna.¹⁴' And Pendlebury's schema for site interpretation has been extremely influential. Given the lack of other settlement data, Amarna has to remain the template for reconstructing Egyptian urban life. But archaeologists still talk of the various 'suburbs' of Amarna (while decrying the word's utility), and assign functions to the domestic space of the Amarna houses in terms of western occupation patterns that are not always easy to reconcile with the archaeological evidence.

It might be argued that nuanced archaeologies were not a feature of the 1930s, but this is not necessarily the case. At exactly the same time as Pendlebury was excavating the houses of Amarna, the French archaeologist Bernard Bruycre was digging at Egypt's other great settlement site, Deir cl-Mcdina. Bruyere was in many ways a more subtle archaeologist than Pendlebury. He looked at the ancient data with fewer preconceptions about their meaning and function, and was more open to using parallels from non-western cultures to try to make sense of his finds. When he found fertility figurines at Deir el-Medina, he immediately located them in a context of cultural difference, citing comparanda from African cultures.⁴⁷

And Henri Frankfort, who had directed the cxcavation at Amarna before Pendlebury, was also interested in what he called the African substratum to Egyptian culture. While Bruyere and Frankfort stress difference, Pendlebury stresses familiarity in the city he described, apparently without irony, as the 'Monotheistic Utopia of Ancient Egypt'.⁴⁸

Consequently, Pcndlebury's Amarna (like Wilkinson's almost exactly a century earlier) is a paradoxical place: it is certainly fabricated as a romantic escape from the present, but it is an escape into a past whose troubling features have been discarded and replaced by the best aspects of the present. Amarna and London may be conflated, but Amarna is London without bad sanitation. In elaborate architectural reconstructions and perspective drawings on the pages of The Illus­trated London.News, Pendlebury was able to promote his vision of the clean, glittering city of Amarna to a wide reading public. (See Plate 3.1.) There was also a strong concentration on artistic productions. Apart from many photographs of objects, especially royal sculptural fragments, there were re-creations of Nefertiti posing for the sculptor Djehutmose ('The Actual Sculptor's Studio where the Wonder Head of Akhnaton's Queen was Modelled Shown in Picture Form for the First Time': 14 March 1925) and colour illustrations of wall-paintings (16 November 1929).