Akhenaten

Another reason for Akhenaten's continued presence is because he has found a succession of perfect cultural moments to be reborn. When Europeans began to rediscover him in earnest in the late 1840s and early 1850s, Egypt had a high but still ambivalent position in western ideas about its past and the formation of its culture. These were set out by historians and philosophers like G. W. Hegel (1770-1831), who praised ancient Egypt's contribution to civilisation. They attributed to ancient Egypt the development of literacy and civic government, and made it a stage on the ascent of humanity from barbarism to enlightenment. Yet at the same time Egyptian culture went off along paths that pointed in the opposite direction to western enlightenment - towards the occult, polytheism, and the ultimate decline of great empires. In this sense, ancient Egypt was a disturbing memento mori, as in Shelley's Egyptian sonnet 'Ozymandias', where it is 'the decay of that colossal wreck'. Akhenaten, however, seemed to eradicate the most troubling aspects of ancient Egypt by advocating monotheism, and so seemed to be a

progressive pharaoh who offered civilisation a way forward in the present. When archaeology revealed more about him in the 1890s and 1900s, this was apparently confirmed. An individual emerged from the ruins of Amarna, Akhenaten's city. He was an individual who seemed to accord perfectly with 'the new spirit in history', which regarded progress as 'the sacredness and worth of man as an ethical being endowed with volition, choice and responsibility'. So wrote the historian and journalist W. S. Lilly in 1895, adding that human history was 'the record of the gradual triumph of the forces of conscience and reason over the blind forces of inanimate nature and the animal forces of instinct and temperament in man'.¹

But Akhenaten also vindicated bourgeois values: he 'openly proclaims the domestic pleasures of a monogamist', wrote the British archaeologist Flinders Petrie (1853-1942) in The Times in 1892. In a fin-de-siecle world haunted by images of degeneration and decay, Akhenaten's freshness and wholesome family life seemed to offer a vision of revitalisation, in the same way as the Utopian movements that flourished at this time. Akhenaten's archaeo­logical rediscovery coincided with an unparalleled appetite for popular history in many forms: not just through written texts but also through local societies, read­ing groups, public lectures illustrated with slides, and evening classes. Knowing the past had become a favourite way of looking at the present. Such a prolifer­ation of sources made Akhenaten available to a wide audience, and amateur, heterodox versions of Egypt soon began to split themselves off from professional, orthodox ones. Cheap books, the development of mass-circulation illustrated newspapers, and later visual media like stereoscopic slides and film, made Akhenaten known to even more people.

Nothing illustrates this process of familiarisation better than a letter written on 3 May 1922, when interest in the excavations at Amarna was at its height. The writer was H. R. Hall (1873-1930), Keeper of Egyptian Antiquities at the British Museum, and author of The Ancient History of the .Near East from the Earliest Times to the Battle of Salamis (1913), which went into ten successive editions. Hall believed that Akhenaten was totally solipsistic and probably half-mad, and countered Breasted's 'first individual' epithet with one of his own: 'Certainly Akhenaten was the first doctrinaire in history, and, what is much the same thing, the first prig.'" From his office at the Museum, Hall wrote to Arthur Weigall (1880-1934) who from 1905 to 1914 had been Inspector-General of Antiquities for the Egyptian Government but had sincc left the archaeological world. In 1922 he was working as the film critic of the Daily Mail

and a freelance journalist. Hall was writing to congratulate Weigall on the second, revised edition of his bestseller The Life and Times of Akhnaton, Pharaoh of Egypt - an emotive biography whose mixture of archaeology, religion and romancc ensured its huge success among a readership ranging from English popular novelists to Sigmund Freud. Inadvertently Weigall was one of the main creators of the Akhenaten myth, and his name will come up often in this book. Hall saluted 'my dear Weigall' with an appropriate greeting in hieroglyphs, and went on: