their extraterrestrial origins, or Akhenaten's thick lips and high cheekbones as evidence that he was black (see Plate 5.1). The assumption that Akhenaten's statues and reliefs are to be read literally as realistic portraits is by no means confined to heterodox writing. Cyril Aldred and Donald Rcdford both maintain that Akhenaten's iconography reflects a real-life physical difference rather than expressing a theology in which the king is so beyond the human that he must be shown as inhabiting a different body. This has resulted in an extraordinary historical fascination with Akhenaten's physical body, especially his sexual biology. Cyril Aldred collaborated with a physician, and combined medical science with Amarna artistic images to diagnose that Akhenaten was afflicted with Frohlich's Syndrome, a glandular disorder. Sufferers from Frohlich's Syndrome share the physical irregularities apparently shown on certain statues of Akhenaten: obesity, feminine distributions of fat in thighs and buttocks, hydrocephalus resulting in ballooning of the skull, and so on.M Aldred was evidently rather pleased with his version of the Frohlich's Syndrome theory, though he acknowledged that it had problems (sufferers from Frohlich's Syndrome are usually infertile, for instance), and that Akhenaten's iconography could also be explicable theologically. More recently, it has been suggested that Akhenaten suffered from another medical condition, Marfan's Syndrome, an inherited disorder of the connective tissue which affects the organ system, skeleton and eyesight.''b Individuals with Marfan's Syndrome are often unusually tall, with long faces, chest deformities, and fingers extended by the stretching of the connective tissues - again, physical traits apparently discernible on Akhenaten's reliefs and statues. In this case, the scholarly search for precisely what was 'wrong' with Akhenaten has filtered down to literature distributed by help organisations for people with Marfan's Syndrome in Canada and the USA. This literature presents Akhenaten as a positive role model for sufferers from the disease: in spite of the physical limitations the condition imposes, he still managed to run a kingdom and produce great religious poetry. Akhenaten functions here, through his body, as a historical 'first' of significance to sufferers from the disease and how they might build an empowered self-image in an unsympathetic world.
There is now a broad consensus among Egyptologists that the exaggerated forms of Akhenaten's physical portrayal - what E. M. Forster called 'the exquisite deformities that appear in Egyptian art under Akhnaton' -arc not to be read literally.b7 Their common denominator is a symbolic gathering of all attributes of the creator-god into the physical body of the king himself. The Aten subsumes into itself all the different gods who create and maintain the universe, and the king is the living image of the Aten on earth. He can therefore display on earth the Aten's mutiple life-giving functions. These are represented through a set of signifiers that seem mutually contradictory to modern viewers, such as the appearance of female and male physical characteristics on the same statue, but made sense to the intended Egyptian audience. These attributes render the king literally suprahuman, a divine body which goes beyond human experience. Perhaps the easiest reminder that Amarna art is not natural or realistic in the way these terms are usually understood is by looking at it alongside images whose propaganda function is more transparent. Socialist realist art produced in the USSR under Communism is an obvious parallel. I use this example not because I think that Akhenaten was a proto-dictator, but because I think that Soviet realism and Amarna art are motivated by a similar inventory of considerations about the relationship of the ruler to politics. Both artistic traditions produced monumental works centred around iconic and divinised figures of the ruler not necessarily based on that ruler's actual physical appearance. Sometimes they share symbolic ways of representing that divinity and the suprahuman quality of the ruler's message. The real ruler has been replaced by a body-icon built around an idea. Both Akhenaten's sculptors and the Communist artists portrayed 'the idea of the man; as flesh and blood he might have ccased to exist; he had becomc a bundle of conccpts, the embodiment of all virtue, a divinity'.1'8
Pharaoh with no name
The Eighteenth Dynasty consisted of 14 kings at Thebes. . . .
Achencheres ruled for 16 years. In his time Moses became leader of the
Jews in their exodus from Egypt.
Manetho (third century bce)
