Akhenaten

You will do us proud if you will boost the E[gypt] E[xploration] S[oci- ety] and the Amarna digs in your book, on the re-edition of which I congratulate you. Your way of dealing with our cracked friend Crack- enaten appeals more to the Great British Public than mine: I don't think that people like him to be made out a common Garden-city crank, as I represent him. Ah me! I fear I am unrcgenerate: no uplift about me. No enthewziasm [sic],

no mysteries, no ghosteses [.sic], no One God, no primeval Egyptian wisdom, no unlucky mummies, no signs of the zodiac, no reincarnation, no abracadabra, no soulfulncss about me. Nor do I go about in smelly garments with an old rucksack and wave a potsherd. So I don't please either kind of crank, mystified or Petrified,

and the movie public is more interested in your and Breasted's Ikhnaton than in mine. Yours is a thriller: mine a Montessori prig, and that is what I believe he was. But each to his taste, and as brother-augurs, wc can carefully place our tongues in our cheeks and wink our dexter eye at one another. And Woolley is also an augur. He is prepared to provide you with the latest movie stuff on old Crackpot and the city of Cracketaten as revealed in the latest epoch-making excavations of the greatest arch­aeological society in the World bar none, and will phone or write you on the hop, sure thing. You will see specimens of our Mr. Woolley's stuff in the Illustrated London News shortly; the house of Akhenaten's prime minister, showing the Machinery of Government (including I suppose the Treasury Axe) at work (put a penny in the slot) will am/use/aze you. He will soon have another article out in the Illustrated] L[ondon] N[ews] about Carccmish, with an illustration of the house in which Jeremiah met Herodotus. At least, he says so. The interview must have been interesting.

. . . Forgive my frivolity. But Akhenaten always makes me feel frivo­lous. He was the sort of person I always want to poke in the ribs and hear him crow and gasp. I am afraid he would really have felt obliged to sacrifice me to Amun with his own hand if I had lived in his times, for I have no bump of reverence, and have always mocked at prophets.

Yours ever, H. R. Hall³

H. R. Hall's witty and allusive letter is full of in-jokes about his and Weigall's academic contemporaries - it pokes fun at some of Petrie's personal habits, for instance. But it really focuses on ways of packaging the pharaoh to make him attractive to a mass audience. In May 1922, with Tutankhamun's tomb still to be discovered, Akhenaten was the first ancient Egyptian celebrity, born from a union between archaeology and its presentation in modern mass media. Through the mixture of text and image in journals like The Illustrated London News, people could see the past brought to life. Hall's pseudo-American 'movie' slang and references to automation all point out how Akhenaten was produced at the current bound­aries of technology. Hall reminds us (very topically) that technology has the power to re-create a past which has nothing to do with history, but everything to do with modern desires about what history ought to be. It can create amazing and impossible encounters, such as one between the biblical prophet Jeremiah and the fifth-century bce historian Herodotus. But the most significant encounter is that between the ancient and modern world, in which Akhenaten can be a perfect mediator.

Hall understood the progressiveness of Akhenaten's ideas in terms of the 1920s. His Akhenaten lives in a garden suburb - the epitome of a certain kind of bourgeois domestic ideal - and approves of the radical educational methods of Maria Montessori. Not everybody was so impressed with Akhenaten's modernity. Conservatives like Rudyard Kipling thought rather differently about him. In 1925 Kipling received a rather handsome birthday present from the novelist

Henry Rider Haggard — a ring found at Amarna and inscribed with Akhenaten's name. Kipling's thank-you note to Haggard says:

Just a line on my return from town to thank you a hundred times for Akhenaton's Seal (I'm sure he kept it in his Library) which you needn't tell me has no duplicate. It won't be lost - ins'h Allah! And it's going into safe and honourable keeping. I don't care so much about Akhenaton's dealings with it (he probably countersigned a lot of tosh of the Social Progress nature before he was busted).⁴

Akhenaten is so deeply associated with progress and modernity that he could be encountered in London's newly built garden suburbs, but is also a slightly ridiculous figure, 'a Montessori prig' and believer in 'Social Progress'. He is a paradoxical thing, a thoroughly modern pharaoh.