Akhenaten

There are so many other ways in which Akhenaten's story could be told - from the perspective of an oppressed priest of Amun, perhaps, or a family drama about the upheaval of moving from Thebes to Akhet-aten, or a magic realist novel a la Angela Carter. The very limited range of approaches used by the authors of the Amarna novels illustrates the limited range of western fantasies about ancient Egypt, based around ritualised religion, material culture, and roy­alty. Yet while the focus is always royalty, it is a domestic and bourgeois royalty whose lives move in twentieth-century western rhythms: home, collective wor­ship, family meals, present-giving. Even unpronounceable Egyptian personal names are altered to make them sound western: Akhenaten's daughters Meri- taten and Ankhesenpaaten are reborn as Rita and Patty!⁹ If the kings of Egypt are so recognisable, no wonder that people who claim past lives as ancient Egyp­tians so often say they were Egyptian

royalty. It is no coincidence that one of the most popular tourist souvenirs from Egypt is an appropriation of royal trappings - one's own name transcribed into golden hieroglyphs and placed inside a car­touche, the prerogative of ancient Egyptian kings and queens. Freud's notion of the Familienroman or 'family romance' may help to explain the unconscious motiv­ations behind these novels, especially the assumption that the contemporary reader will identify with the Amarna royal protagonists. Freud coined the term Familienroman

to explain the Oedipal phantasies in which people imagined that their relationship to their parents had been modified: that they were really found­lings whose parents were noble, for example. Identifying with the Amarna royals in this way enables one to take part in a great romantic drama, and to share in the great wealth and luxury that Egypt signifies.

Amarna fictions, then, may be seen as mirroring popular interest in Egypt, stimulated by what information is generally available at a given time. They also illustrate how archaeological information is used by the non-specialist to present the ancient world to an even wider audience, the fiction-reading public. Fictions peak in the 1920s - at the time of the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb and wide press coverage of excavations at Amarna - and in the 1970s, during the international exhibition of Tutankhamun's funerary equipment (see Figure 6.2 and Appendix). The close relationship between popular archaeological reporting and fiction-writing is shown by the extent to which contemporary archaeologists appear in fiction, thinly disguised. Norma Lorimer's romances are a case in point (see below), but so are works by high-art writers like H.D. Secret Name: Excavator's Egypt, the third part of H.D.'s Palimpsest (1926), features the scholars 'Miss Surry' and 'Prof. Bodge-Gafton', in whom it is not hard to recognise the Egyptologists Margaret Murray (1863-1963) and E. A. Wallis Budge.

Fictions 1890—1923: spectral Akhenatens

If fiction-writing and the popular presentation of archaeological discoveries go hand in hand, one would expect to see significant changes in fiction as more facts about the king and his reign became available. This is exactly the case. In fiction before the 1920s Akhenaten himself is a spectral figure, an apparition or a ghost rather than a flesh-and-blood individual, and his mother Tiye dominates, because little was known about Nefertiti. Akhenaten's religious interests are usu­ally attributed to Tiye, especially because Akhenaten himself was supposed to be 'weak, vain, possibly half-witted', and Tiye the real power in the land, a ruthless woman 'who could rest content with nothing short of absolute power'.¹⁰

Tiye is overtaken only when Nefertiti's image became famous after the publication of the Berlin sculptures in the 1920s. With Nefertiti's attractive facc splashed across the covers of magazines like The Illustrated London News, it became possible to fabricate one of the great royal love stories of the ages between her and Akhen­aten. It becomes a love story on a par with Antony and Cleopatra, Arthur and Guinevere, Napoleon and Josephine, and Nicholas and Alexandra - with added value because all these stories end in tragedy and mystery.

Predictably, then, Tiye is the central character in the very first novel with any kind of Amarna theme. Mallard Herbertson's Tata: A Shadow of the Nile (1890) gives the historical facts about Tiye a mystical spin that is very much of its time. Here a beautiful, spectral maiden appears from nowhere in front of the hero, Amasis. He asks her what she is called:

'No-one ever spoke to me but you,' answered the girl, 'but will you call me Taia?'

'I have read that the Queen Taia of old came from Naharina', said Amasis. 'You seem a stranger, are you of her country?'