Akhenaten полностью

The most lasting monument to the diligence and energy ofjames Henry Breasted (1865-1935) is the Oriental Institute in Chicago. Founded at Brcastcd's urging in 1919 with Rockefeller money, it is still one of the world's premier institutions for studying Egypt and the ancient Near East. Its library, museum and teaching rooms occupy a fine early 1930s building in the bosky university quarter of Chicago, a contrast to the urban decay of much of the city's South Side. Above the front entrance of the Oriental Institute there is an impressive carved tym­panum, like the allegorical sculptures over the doors of medieval cathedrals. It is composed around two male figures symbolising how civilisation is changed by a meeting of ancient and modern, and the modern world progresses through the encounter. On the left is Antiquity, embodied in an Egyptian scribe derived from an Old Kingdom woodcarving. To his right are the Sphinx, the Pyramids, and a cluster of pharaohs and Assyrian law-givers. The man on the other side of the tympanum represents Modernity. Muscular and heroically naked, he stands on a stairway to indicate the ascent of man through progress, an idea of which Breast­ed was fond. Mr Modernity holds a fragmentary Egyptian relief with hiero­glyphs. These are a slightly modified version of a text common in the tombs of Akhenaten's courtiers at Amarna, where the tomb owner addresses the Aten and says, 'grant the sight of your beauty'.^H Behind him is a backdrop of great build­ings, like the Acropolis, as mnemonics for human cultural achievement. We also see the bringers of enlightenment, including a Crusader knight and an archae­ologist scrutinising a pot. What better symbol to crown this whole composition than a large Aten-disc, whose rays reach out to bless the ascent of modernity through the benign and civilising influence of Egyptian culture? This sculpture is a realisation in stone of Breasted's beliefs about the relationship of ancient Egypt to the modern world, and the centrality of Akhenaten in that relationship. In his books, Egypt is 'the keystone of the arch' of civilisation, with prehistoric man on one side and civilised Europe on the other.¹" As in the tympanum, Akhenaten stands at the apex of that keystone, the most exalted figure in the most exalted lineage. Breasted liked this image so much that he had a version of it engraved to use as his bookplate (see Figure 4.1). Every time he opened one of his books he could be reminded of Akhenaten's supreme value as an agent of culture and civilisation.

Breasted came from a lower-middle-class family in the small town of Rockford, Illinois, where his father ran a hardware store. His path to the first chair of Egyptology in the USA, at the University of Chicago, had not been smooth. In 1887 he was working as a pharmacist when a revelation made him realise his vocation to preach the gospel. The same year he started studying for the ministry at the Chicago Theological Seminary, paid for by a grim Seventh Day Adventist friend in Rockford. 'I tell you, Satan is holding high carnival here', she wrote to Breasted of goings-on in their small home town." After two years of theology and Hebrew, Breasted was beset by doubts about faulty translations of the scrip­tures. He left the seminary and went a secular route, studying Oriental languages at Yale and later Berlin.

Breasted was ccrtainly fascinated by Akhenaten (he always referred to him as Ikhnaton), resulting in some ground-breaking research. I wonder whether in some way Breasted saw studying Akhenaten as a way of combining his interest in ancient Egypt with his Christian beliefs. His doctoral dissertation, presented at Berlin in 1894, was the first text edition of the Aten 'hymns' in the Amarna tombs. He treated them editorially as though they were classical or Biblical texts, supplying a Latin commentary and critical apparatus. When he married 21-year- old Frances Hart later that year, the couple went to Egypt for a honeymoon which included a trip to Amarna. Breasted spent a week copying the hieroglyphs of the various versions of the 'hymns', while his wife stayed on their houseboat

Figure 4.1 Bookplate of James Henry Breasted, an engraving of the tympanum of the Oriental Institute Chicago c 1930. Actual size.

and wrote letters home. Their time at Amarna does not sound like much fun. It was so cold they needed hot water bottles; Frances was menstruating, and wor­ried about her husband's non-observance of the sabbath. On 13 January 1895 she wrote that she could not join Breasted copying in the tomb because she had what she called 'the "occassion" [.rzc]' and added: 'It is Sunday but husband feels he is doing right to use the time in copying and so he is. We have Sunday in our hearts.'¹² It is a telling comment. Studying Akhenaten, she implies, was an appropriate Sunday observance. It was doing the Lord's work.