Akhenaten

The result of all this was that by 1937, when the dig at Amarna ended, Amarna had been fabricated into a space in remote time where the evils of modernity could be cured. Amarna objects had also become symbols for Egypt as potent as Tutankhamun. We can see this in an advertisement in The Times' special Egypt Number, published on 26 January 1937 under the headline 'All Roads Lead to Egypt'. The entire issue is devoted to the economic and political history of Egypt, with a strong emphasis on encouraging foreign investment. Antiquities play a very small part. Apart from the Great Pyramid and Sphinx, almost the only pharaonic objects appear in the advertisement by the Cairo Museum's Department of Antiquities (see Plate 3.4). What are they? The head of one of Akhenaten's daughters, and the human-headed canopic jar in Amarna style from tomb 55 in the Valley of the Kings. By 1937, largely through the publicity efforts of the Egypt Exploration Society, the antiquities of the Amarna period had become symbols of Egypt as potent and imbued with meaning as the Sphinx and Pyramids to Anglophone readers.

Amarnamania: artefacts and architecture

Digging at Amarna stopped in 1937 and did not resume significantly until 1977. This forty-year hiatus in archaeological activity is a good moment for a brief digression to consider how Amarna's popular presence in the 1920s and 1930s

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YOU WILL FIND IN

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YOU ARE INTERESTED IN ..

Prehistoric Remains, Monument},

Museum Exltibiu, Geological, Ancient Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Coptic,

that may keep you spellbound for a pawing hour or two, of hold you for a lifetime of study.

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-ing, as fresh to-day as when laid on three thousand yean ago, architecture, the wonder of peoples and ages, jewelry tliat a queen oncc wore, of which a queen of to-day would be proud, textiles that Lancashire might well envy, ten AND SEE THEM FOR YOURSELF thousand other beauties to catch your

DEPARTMENT OF ANTIQUITIES - CAIRO - EGYPT

Plate 3.4 Amarna royal women advertise 'All Roads Lead to Egypt': The Times, 26 January 1937.

media affected material culture. Interest in Amarna objects has remained strong ever since the 1920s, when the Egypt Exploration Society realised Amarna's merchandising potential by producing postcards and plaster casts of sculptures to sell at the regular public exhibitions of finds from the site. A visit to a museum gift shop, such as the Metropolitan Museum's in New York, will show the longevity of this interest: resin rcplicas of Tiye and her granddaughters are on sale for $ 120 or $185 apiece. And in London at the time of writing, quite a range of Amarna- themcd things is available: armchairs upholstered in red velvet (appropriately luxurious and imperial) with scenes of Akhenaten offering to the Aten, Akhen­aten statue paperweights, and greetings cards with Amarna scenes on fake papyrus. All these pseudo-Egyptian household objects reflect a western response to ancient Egypt which is itself extremely old, going back at least to the Greek historian Herodotus in the fifth century bce. Herodotus coined some of the most familiar terms for the iconic objects of Egyptian culture - sphinx, pyramid, obel­isk, and so on. It's instructive to think of the derivation of pyramid and obelisk from Greek words: pyramis literally means a conical loaf of bread, and obeliskos a meat-skewcr. The great tomb becomes a bun, the soaring pillar a kitchen utensil: Herodotus scaled down the huge monuments of Egypt to make them fit the vocabulary of the ordinary Greek home. Exactly the same thing happens to

Amarna objects. Scaling them down and bringing them into the home is a means of colonising the past and reducing its strangeness by relating it to familiar cultural co-ordinates.