Akhenaten

'I do not know where I am from,' answered Taia, 'do you?'"

It soon becomes clear that Taia is a reincarnation of her namesake, reborn to atone for the original Taia's sins in life - she ends up offering herself to be poisoned instead of Amasis, and dies in his stead after confessing her love for him.

Herbertson's novella is full of the standard Orientalist tropes of ancicnt Egypt as a land of luxury, sensuality and death, and so has more in common with earlier Gothic fiction about Egypt. However, Petrie's presentation of his discoveries at Amarna offered creative writers new possibilities. Akhenaten's Egypt could be divorced from Orientalism, because it was seen as quite different - fresh, up to date, and idealistic rather than ancient, static and corrupt. This can be seen earliest in the work of the elcrgyman and litterateur H. D. Rawnsley. In 1892 Rawnsley had published the extremely successful

.Notes for the Nile, a literary hand­book for travellers to Egypt, and followed it up two years later with Idylls and Lyrics of the Nile. This is a sort of poetic travelogue moving from north to south in

Egypt, which juxtaposes scenes of the ancient past with the daily life he observes, as though they arc the same. In this sense, Rawnsley repeats the familiar Orien­talist cliche of the eternal, cyclical Egypt, in which the people appear as props in an exotic environment which never changes. Rawnsley's rendering of the site of Amarna is rather different, however, and owes a debt to Petrie's journalism (sec pp. 64-9). I quote his poem, 'The Dream-City of Khucnaten', in full.

Who through this solemn wilderness may stray Beyond the river and its belt of palm, May feel still fresh the wonder and the calm Of greatness passed away.

All the new world of Art with Nature one, All the young city's restless upward strife, Its higher truth, its happier, homelier life, - All like a phantom gone.

No more the draughtsman from the furthest Ind Casts on the palace-floor his vermeil dyes, No more the scribe from clay syllabaries Will spell Assyria's mind.

Not here the potter from the Grecian Isles Throws the new shape or plies the painter's reed, No kiln-man melts the glaze or bakes the tiles, Or spins the glassy bead.

The Master-Sculptor Bek, from Aptu brought, No longer bids his pupil, line on line, With copying chisel grave the marble fine To beauty and to thought.

But he who enters yonder mountain cave May sec the form of that courageous king, Who felt that light was life for everything, And should outlast the grave.

And that dream-city Khuenaten made -

The boy-reformer by the banks of Nile

Who broke with Thebes, her priestly power and guile -

Shall never surely fade.

Still in our desert it renews its youth, Still lifts its beauty out of barren sands. City, thought-built, eternal, not with hands, For Light that lives in Truth.¹²

Here Rawnsley assembles all the ingredients that characterise the forthcoming wave of 1920s Amarna fiction: the cosmopolitan city and its flourishing artistic life, its spiritual and idealistic ruler, its ultimate tragedy.

All these were to be considerably expanded in a book which probably had more impact on building the Akhenaten myth than any other: Arthur Weigall's The Life and Times of Akhnaton, Pharaoh of Egypt (1910), whose impact I surveyed in Chapter 4. Weigall realised the potential for myth-making around Akhenaten. He also realised that a combination of religion and sentimentality sold books, and made the Amarna royal couple into glamorous celebrities. Through him, Akhenaten and Nefertiti soon became well enough known to appear as char­acters in short fiction written for popular large-circulation magazines - the authors assume that their readers will know the essential historical facts. A romantic writer, Lilian Bagnall, moved smartly to cash in on Weigall's popular success with her romance, 'In the Tombs of the Kings' (1910).