RECENT EXCAVATIONS
By the Egypt Exploration Society at TELL EL-AMARNA AND ARMANT
At the WELLCOME HISTORICAL MEDICAL MUSEUM
54, WIGMORE ST., W.I Sept 8th to Oct 3rd
ADMISSION FREE
Figure 3.5 Invitation to view an exhibition of Amarna objects in the Wellcome Museum, 1930, before the image from the back of Tutankhamun's throne had become cliched. Actual size.
This work promises far more interesting results than any so far yielded up at Luxor. Whatever may be thought of the artistic value of the discoveries in the tomb of Tutankhamen, there can be no doubt that the accumulation of such a vast hoard of property in a temple of the dead made a rather unpleasant appeal to the materialistic side of our nature. Investigators at Tell el-Amarna will not be digging among the houses of the dead, but will seek for knowledge among dwellings that were once inhabited by the living.
It is in the pages of the London newspapers of the 1920s and 1930s, especially The Illustrated London News, that the idea of Amarna as a garden suburb is most fully realised and explored. The garden suburb movement grew in London in the first decade of the twentieth century. It aimed to build planned communities of aesthetically pleasing houses with good facilities, especially ventilation and sanitation, to combat the bad physical and moral effects of inner-city overcrowding. Garden suburbs were a political experiment too. They would be populated by a cross-section of society, who would learn to get along by being neighbours, helping to break down class antagonism and religious sectarianism. It was obviously an idealistic project, and garden suburb dwellers were associated with 'cranky' movements such as Spiritualism and vegetarianism (especially by their detractors). That Akhenaten would himself come to be associated with the garden suburb movement was a predictable conclusion of the way he had been presented in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as the most up-to- date pharaoh, the ancient precursor of modern progress. The progressive, idealistic, experimental pharaoh needs an up-to-date city. Amarna, like the London garden suburbs, was believed to be a planned community with good sanitation, the product of an idealistic and visionary imagination, and its ideal homes were a staple of The Illustrated London News reports from the earliest coverage of the dig in 1921. Readers/viewers were invited to create connections between their own homes and those of the New Kingdom. The equation of Amarna with modern planned urban communities had filtered down so effectively that, by 1923, a satire in the fortnightly magazine Punch could poke fun at Akhenaten by comparing him to the inhabitants of modern garden suburbs: 'It may be a plausible theory that Aken-Aten, who worshipped the sun with flowers and with hymns, was the kind of man whom one meets walking around a Garden City in sandals.'"
The houses at Amarna seemed to demonstrate a filtering-down of the desirable lifestyle to an accessible social level, again like the garden suburbs. In The Illustrated London News of 6 August 1921, Peet's byline was 'Home Life in Egypt 3000 years ago', and a double-page spread featured a photograph captioned: 'A convenience as much demanded in Ancient Egypt as modern London: a bathroom of 1350 b.c., the bath being a limestone slab with a raised edge and runnel.' This immediacy was emphasised in the long, extensively illustrated article by Leonard Woolley in the issue for 6 May 1922. He stresses parallels with modern town planning (the headline is 'Workmen's model dwellings of 3000 years ago'), and the accompanying photographs repopulate the houses by posing the Egyptian dig workers among the ruins, using excavated objects, in a sort of tableau vivant. 'Beside a fire of old fuel on the original hearth, with flat stone tables and clay saucer on the stone "divan": a modern Egyptian in an ancicnt parlour' runs the caption to Plate 3.2; another, to a photograph of women carrying water while a piper plays, is 'As 3000 years ago: "North Passage" in the workmen's village - girls carrying 14th century b.c. wicker trays and water jars.'
What kind of Amarnutopia was being presented in these images? There is the
Plate 3.2 'Beside a fire of old fuel on the original hearth, with flat stone tables and clay saucer on the stone divan: a modern Egyptian in an ancient parlour': The Illustrated London News, 6 May 1922. Reproduced by courtesy of the Egypt Exploration Society.
