Breasted's obsession with the role of Egypt and Akhenaten in the development of human culture also shifted the focus away from the Jewish contribution, leaving his work open to adoption by Fascists and racists. His emphasis comes partly from scholarly respect for the critical mass of Egyptian evidence, to which he wanted to do full justice. But he also believed that Christian monotheism provided the paradigm for understanding all world religions, and that Akhenaten was the originator of a monotheism which was merely redacted by the Jews 'standing on the Egyptian's shoulders', as he put it. According to Breasted, Akhenaten's idealism was not to be revived until six centuries after his death, when the 'hordes who were now drifting into Ikhnaton's Palestinian provinces had coalesced into a nation of social, moral and religious aspirations, and had thus brought forth the Hebrew prophets'.Hand in hand with this is Breasted's view that the agents of human civilisation were what he callcd the Egypto-Asiatic race, whose heir is modern America (whether or not Jews are part of this is ambiguous). 'The evolution of civilization has been the achievement of this Great White Race', he wrote.1' I am not sure whether it is fair to call Breasted anti-Semitic. Certainly for him some people were more equal than others. He saw Jewish immigrants to America from eastern Europe as hopelessly degraded, calling them 'great unassimilable masses', and hoping that the 'retarding effects' of their presence could be reversed by 'the solidity of the better farming and lower middle class elements from northern Europe'.18 In his last book, The Dawn of Conscience, published the same year as the Nazis came to power in Germany, Breasted seems to have realised that some of his work could be read as anti- Semitic and that he might have to defend himself against criticism.19 Pointing to his lifelong interest in ancient Jewish culture, he denied any anti-Semitic bias, falling back on the old 'some of my best friends are Jews' strategy - as though friendly relations with individual Jews are incompatible with personally held anti-Semitism in the abstract.
Breasted was certainly a first-rate scholar and had worthwhile educational goals that are not so far from those of some modern archaeologists. He had a much more secular approach to ancient history than many of his peers, being influenced by the educational ideas of American liberal philosophers like John Dewey (1859-1952), whom Breasted knew at the University of Chicago. Dewey argued that, in education, a politically concerned sociology should replace religion, and that the future was to be controlled by an effective dialogue between the past and the present. However, Breasted's social sympathies were narrower than Dewey's, and he now reads as smugly convinced of his own Tightness — exactly like his own vision of Akhenaten, in fact. In Breasted's work it is still possible to hear the voice of the young Sabbatarian from Rockford who heard the call to go out and preach the word of a severe God.
The witty and humorous British Egyptologist Arthur Weigall (1880-1934) was a quite different man from Breasted. He came from a solidly bourgeois church- and-army background and was educated at one of England's best public schools. Chief Inspector of Antiquities for Upper Egypt by the age of 25, his Egyptological career ran more smoothly than Breasted's; but he was less obsessively focused on scholarly work, and eventually left professional Egyptology to freelance in London as a set-designer, film critic and novelist.2" Like Breasted, however, he had close personal links with the religious establishment. His stepfather was a Church of England clergyman and his pious mother had worked with the Manchester City Mission in the slums of northern industrial towns during WeigalFs childhood. This certainly affected his biography The Life and Times of Akhnaton, Pharaoh of Egypt. Weigall was solicitous of family opinion and did not want his writing to cause them any embarrassment. He therefore emphasised Akhenaten as a precursor of Christian monotheism more prominently than he might otherwise have done. While he was in Egypt writing the biography, his letters home show that his own religious beliefs were inclusive, almost deistie, but that he was well aware of the power of religion to sell books to the Edwardian public. He wrote to his wife Hortense:
I take it that as Aton is in every way described like our God, and as there is no attribute of our God which is not applied to Aton, therefore Aton is God as we understand him; and I speak of the Aton-worship as a sort of pre-Christian revelation. But of course, in my heart I feel this very attitude is simply playing to my audience, for I laugh at the very idea of Christianity being in sole possession.21
