Akhenaten

To others, Akhenaten's halo remained untarnished. Akhenaten had a high profile in the inter-war years, marked by a search for new ideals and authority. He was a transcendental hero, one in an iconic lineage of the world's greatest thinkers. As in the 1890s, his prominence was a product of archaeology, when excavations and finds from Amarna were exhibited and written about. It was as an idealist that Akhenaten attracted Sigmund Freud. His last and most puzzling work, Moses and Monotheism, centres around the nature of Akhenaten's

Geistigkeit, an untranslatable German word combining spirituality, intellectuality and pro- gressiveness. Via Freud, Akhenaten's story inspired Frida Kahlo (1907-54), whose amazingly complex painting Moses

(1945) is structured around Amarna art elements. Figures and images symbolising all time and space are united com- positionally by the rays of a huge, blood-red Aten-disc, under whose protection Moses is born. Moses won an art prize in Mexico, and Kahlo gave a lecture about her painting and its complicated symbology. It was, she said, about the birth of the HERO:

On the same earth, but painting their heads larger, to distinguish them from the 'mass', the heroes are pictured (very few of them, but well chosen), the transformers of religions, the inventors or creators of these, the conquerors, the rebels. . . . To the right, and this figure I should have painted with much more importance than any other, Amenhotep IV can be seen, who was later called Akhenaten . . . later Moses, who according to Freud's analysis, gave his adopted people the same religion as that of Akhenaten, a little altered according to the interests and circumstances of his time. After Christ, follow Alexander the Great, Caesar, Moham­med, Luther, Napoleon and . . . 'the lost infant', Hitler. To the left, marvelous Nefertiti, wife of Akhenaten, I imagine that besides having been extraordinarily beautiful, she must have been 'a wild one' and a most intelligent collaborator to her husband. Buddha, Marx, Freud, Paracelsus, Epicure [«c], Genghis Kahn, Gandhi, Lenin and Stalin.⁵

The romantic and idealistic Frida Kahlo had a predictable vision of Akhen­aten which was fine for the 1940s. (She also seems to have identified personally with Nefertiti.) The climate is rather different now, and universal heroes linking the whole of human existence are not so much in fashion. At the end of the 1990s, archaeologists and ancient historians are at the height of a new multi­cultural and academic turn. In today's jargon, some of us are engaged in the deconstruction, destabilisation, demythologisation and deideologisation of western-produced knowledge of the past. Part of this process is to create alterna­tive points of reference and alternative discourses which reconfigure received wisdom. In other words, demoting cultural heroes and looking at them from unorthodox points of view is fashionable. So my postmodern version of Akhenaten is just as much of its time as Hall's, Kipling's and Kahlo's. My own prejudices, and something of my own history, will become clear from the parts of the Akhenaten myth I have chosen to survey here. Any examination of a myth- ologised historical character like Akhenaten inevitably ends up by adding some­thing more to the myth, and this book is no exception. It is just as much an appropriation as the rest.

Although my focus here is not really on the historical Akhenaten but on cul­tural fantasies of him, it is still important to give a short account of his reign and examine the histories that fantasy takes as its point of departure. This is the first part of the next chaptcr. I attempt to synthesise briefly what can be really known about Akhenaten before turning to the business of how myths about him are created. I look at how Akhenaten's childhood and family dynamics have been re-created on the basis of no evidence at all, and how he is seen as revolutionary and innovatory, whereas much of what he did can also be seen as derivative and conservative. I also look at literal readings of Amarna art, based on an inapplic­able notion of 'naturalism', and the consequent fixation on Akhenaten's body. Finally, I examine the fantasy of the lost Utopian city, and the ways in which Akhenaten had already been 'discovered' in a sense before anything factual was known about him. Philosophers, historians and mystics in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries created independently Utopian sun-cities in Egypt, presided over by an enlightened and benevolent pharaoh who offered the west a way forward. The historical Akhenaten thus confirmed a prefabricated text, which received further corroboration when the city of Amarna was excavated.