Breasted was more than a philologist and epigraphcr: he was also a gifted synthesist and populariser. He wrote several wide-ranging cultural and intellectual histories of the ancient world that, as we have seen, were primary texts for Freud, Jung and many others. These combined up-to-the-minute primary data, both documentary and archaeological, with observations on how these data fitted into the wider development of human culturc. Apart from the hugely influential A History of Egypt, he wrote Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt (1912, revised from a series of lectures delivered at the Union Theological Seminary in New York), The Conquest of Civilization (1926, a reworking of his earlier textbook Ancient Times, A History of the Early World), and The Dawn of Conscience (1933, reusing much material from Development oj Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt). He even wrote a commentary to accompany stereoscopic slides of Egyptian sites which showed the monuments in 3D. All his historical works contain substantial discussions of Akhenaten and translations of the 'hymn' to the Aten divided up into stanzas, making them look like western poems. Sometimes the translations arc printed alongside a parallel text of Psalm 104, which Breasted believed derived from the Aten 'hymns'. The enthusiastic tone of these discussions of Akhenaten remained consistent throughout the thirty years of Breasted's writing career (partly because of his tendency to recycle his work), and they need to be seen in relation to his ideas about the value of ancient history to the modern world. His philosophy of history had something in common with the post-processual theories about archaeology's socio-political role that I outlined at the end of the previous chapter. Breasted believed that scholars of the ancicnt world should have a commitment to social change. They had a duty to present accessibly information from the past to the widest possible audiencc, in order to suggest solutions for a range of problems in the present.11 As the clumsy symbolism of the Oriental Institute sculpture conveys, Egypt is the supremely privileged ancient culture which can offer the most to the progressive 'civilising' of humanity, and Akhenaten is the most privileged Egyptian. For Breasted he is the best and first, the keystone in the arch - the first individual, the first prophet of an exalted religion and the first idealist in recorded history. Breasted's account of Akhenaten's primal value attracted Freud. He approvingly underlined these 'first' epithets in his copy of A History of Egypt."
Breasted's idea of Akhenaten at the effective service of both present and future is all very well; but his version of him is still decidedly sectarian. For one thing, Breasted often lets his anti-Catholic prejudices slip through. If Akhenaten's Aten religion was the precursor of monotheism, it was a robustly Protestant monotheism, purged of the anthropomorphic images and corrupt priesthood that irresistibly reminded him of Catholicism. To Breasted, the priests of Amun were evil popes like the Borgias who stopped individual communion with god; the gods of polytheistic religion were like saints, idols for the worship of the ignorant. The vocabulary of Protestant anti-papism filters into Breasted's discussion of the priesthood of Amun, which he called 'the earliest national priesthood yet known' and 'the first po7itifex maximus. This Amonite papacy constituted a powerful political obstacle in the way of realizing the supremacy of the ancient Sun god.'1'
