Akhenaten полностью

Louis Farrakhan's alternative etymology for the Egyptian word Aton, rcsignifying it in order to bring it right up to date, is part of a distinctively African American mode of discourse known as 'sciencing'. Sciencing can be defined as reinterpret­ing a word by breaking down its constituent syllables to reveal a hidden political and cultural meaning. It is a popular rhetorical tool for Afrocentrist orators elevating ancient Egypt as a religious forebear: solar is broken down into soul-Ra, Africa into AfRa-ka, chemistry into Khem (= Egypt) is thee, and so on." I should like to finish by scicncing the word Aton myself, and pointing out its resemblance to the Greek word aition, root of the word aetiology: the assignment of a cause or origin to a thing or placc, often in mythological terms. The foundation story of Rome is a good example of a mythological aition. Why is Rome called Rome? Because it was founded by i?omulus. Aetiology seeks to explain the origins of the mysterious and inexplicable, to give comprehensible reasons for the incompre­hensible. Readings of Akhenaten both by Afrocentrists and by alternative reli­gionists make him into a sort of aition, an emblematic and revelatory figure who is imbued with multiple meanings that continue to be redrawn. For both, though in very different ways, he has come to be a symbol of the struggle between dark and light, between freedom and oppression, between enlightenment and corruption. He is invoked as an aition for many contradictory things: the Egyptian origins of a distinctively black monotheism, the white origins of superior knowledge. The contradictory quality of these redrawings illustrates how they can only be viewed through what anthropologists call the 'emic perspective', which interprets cultural phenomena in terms of the categories of the specific cultural system under scru­tiny. They also illustrate the vitality and independence of the intellectual, emo­tional and behavioural processes at work in reclaiming Akhenaten for your own side. Proponents of alternative Akhenatens rejig their sources to make him into something original and relevant, a new aition - Nefcrtiti-Aphrodite, Aton-atone. Carlo Ginzburg's classic book The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth- Century Miller reveals some of the same processes of rcsignification as those of the alternative Akhcnatenists. The Cheese and the Worms tells the story of Domcnico Scandella, also known as Menocchio, a miller in rural northern Italy who devised his own cosmos out of a combination of his conventional pious books, the world around him and his own desire to make sense of that world. Menocchio read by isolating words and phrases, sometimes distorting them, juxtaposing differ­ent passages, and firing off rapid verbal analogies that filled every word with new meanings of his own. 'It was not the book as such, but the encounter between the printed page and oral culture that formed such an explosive mixture in Mcnocchio's head."⁸

LITERARY AKHENATENS

Here is the past and all its inhabitants miraculously sealed as in a magic tank; all we have to do is to look and to listen and to listen and to look and soon the little figures - for they are rather under life size - will begin to move and to speak, and as they move we shall arrange them in all sorts of patterns of which they were ignorant.

Virginia Woolf [1930] 1967:54