Akhenaten

The archaeology of Amarna, and the people who dug and visited the site, are the subjects of Chapter 3. Amarna is the 'lost city' par excellence, waiting to be rediscovered by the western archaeologists who are the only ones who 'know' ancient Egypt. Presentation of its archaeology in various popular media is an important focus. From the 1850s Amarna figured in a variety of popular publica­tions, especially religious books produced for Sunday reading. Between 1887 and 1936, a succession of important archaeological discoveries at Amarna stopped it from ever slipping out of the public eye. These discoveries coincided with the development of print technologies in the 1890s onwards, ensuring that images of Amarna and Akhenaten continued to be available in a range of English magazines, from the middlebrow, such as

The Illustrated London Mews and The Sphere,

to the up-market and artsy, such as The Burlington Magazine and

The Connoisseur. Journalistic coverage of Amarna played a major part in sustaining its mythic status as a lost world and a Utopian space, a sort of Atlantis. At the same time it was also the ancient place which confirmed modern aspirations to bourgeois domesticity. In this context, I examine the personal agenda of the archaeologists who excavatcd Amarna and often doubled as journalists to publicise their dis­coveries. These rediscoveries of Amarna have coincided with some interesting moments in the development of archaeological thought, resulting in further appropriations of the site as it is deployed to prove the validity of different strat­egies. Digging also went hand in hand with political events. After Egypt became a British protectorate in 1882, Amarna became a metaphor for how ancient Egypt, hopelessly degraded after stagnant centuries of Islam and Ottoman rule, would be transformed by western progress. A close look at the archaeologies of Amarna also helps to put in context the phenomenon of'Tutmania', the fascination with Egypt that followed the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922. Tutmania was not a self-containcd phenomenon but was originally built on and sustained by popular interest in the archaeology of Amarna, something ignored by most work on the western appropriation of Egypt.'¹

Indeed, some people in the 1920s com­plained that Tutankhamun was boring because he encapsulated the cliched image of Egypt as an ancient land obsessed with death, while Akhenaten and Amarna gave something much more exciting and up to date: an archaeology of life.

The place-name Amarna is, as Petrie wrote in 1894, 'a European concoction'.⁷ Because I am primarily interested in European appropriations of Amarna, I deliberately avoid in Chapter 3 the fascinating question of how it has been per­ceived by the people who live there. At various times Amarna monuments, including parts of Akhenaten's tomb, have been destroyed in local disputes, or resignified according to Islamic culture - the boundary stelae are supposed to mark the mouths of caves filled with treasure, for instance. Evidently a local process of mythologisation is in action, which invests the archaeological remains with a potent value. And feelings can still run high about Akhenaten in Egypt as a whole, as shown by the reaction to Naguib Mahfouz's novel about Akhenaten, al 'A'ish fi al-haqiqa (Dweller in Truth). It remains to be seen how such factors as the proposed Akhenaten visitor centre at nearby Minieh, Islamic fundamentalism in Middle Egypt, and the continued presence of foreign archaeologists, will develop and alter perceptions.