Egypt and Akhenaten were easily available in other ways. In the early 1920s, the spectacular sculptural pieces Ludwig Borchardt had cxcavated ten years before from Djehutmose's studio at Amarna finally went oil display in Berlin. They received the same sort of local media attention that The Illustrated London News paid to Amarna in Britain.h As in England, fictional treatments of Akhenaten and the Amarna period followed, including several novels, poetry and a play (see appendix). Akhenaten inspired pieces of visual art, too (see Plate 6.2). Popular history books on Egypt proliferated in the 1920s, rcficcting the growing interest of the German-speaking world in Akhenaten. James Henry Breasted's A History of Egypt, with its eulogistic sections on Akhenaten, and Arthur Weigall's The Lfe and Times of Akhnaton, Pharaoh of Egypt were both translated into German by distinguished Egyptologists, Hermann Kees and Hermann Ranke. There were also the many editions of Adolf Erman's Die agyptische Religion and Hcinrich Schafer's Amarna in Religion und Kunst (1931). Freud had copies of these books in his personal library, annotated and bearing the marks of careful study. They were the sources he and the psychoanalytic community used for their researches into Akhenaten's history. Freud's desire to bring Akhenaten into his life extended to his collection of antiquities. He even owned a large fake piece of Amarna sculpture, similar to the reliefs in the Berlin collection illustrated in Schafer's book: a carving of a courtier making obeisance to the Aten, like those on the door jambs of non-royal tombs at Amarna.'
To see Freud's interest in Akhenaten as part of a more general interest in ancient Egypt, however, is not to downplay its importance or contemporary relevance to him and others. In their day, the books by Breasted, Erman, Schafer and Weigall that Freud read in his study were thought to show how the past holds up a mirror to the present. Reviewers remarked on how contemporary, meaningful and challenging Akhenaten's story seemed. These ideas were developed by German novelists like Victor Curt Habicht, in his novella Echnaton (1919), using Breasted and Weigall as sources. Habicht uses Akhenaten's supposed pacifism to critiquc the First World War, and Echnaton ends: 'For thousands and thousands of years your voice was silent, Echnaton, and you were sunk in nothingness and night. . . . Echnaton our Redeemer, a new tide is beginning!'8 Breasted and Weigall in particular write about Akhenaten in terms of religious and political struggles that could be seen as parallels for ones then going on in Europe - especially because they represent Akhenaten as a thoroughly European individual. Their Akhenaten was not only a proto-Christian - in fact, a proto- Protestant, who destroyed the images of the idolatrous cult of Amun - but also a patron of the arts and a gifted, expressive poet. No wonder, then, that their books at various times compare him to Cromwell, Luther, Leonardo da Vinci, St Francis of Assisi, the poet Wordsworth, the French painter Jean-Francois Millet and even the Italian actress Eleanora Duse! As a piece of historians' shorthand these comparisons may seem harmless enough, but read alongside other ideas about race and the Egyptians then current, they begin to take on a different complexion. The Protestant Akhenaten created by Breasted and Weigall manifested himself in the writings both of the psychoanalysts and of their Fascist opponents in ways that the well-intentioned Egyptologists might never have imagined. Before looking at both these incarnations, I want to backtrack for a moment and look in a little more depth at Breasted and Weigall, and what their interpretations of Akhenaten offered Freud and the Fascists.
James Henry Breasted and Arthur Weigall
