Akhenaten полностью

The fascination of novelists and litterateurs with Amarna material culture is, I think, more broadly related to popular interest in Egypt. Like Egyptian archae­ology, this is artefact-led, and the ancient Egyptians appear primarily in terms of their own commodity culture rather than as embodied individuals. The emphasis lies on things rather than people. Even Naguib Mahfouz and Thomas Mann, the only really heavyweight authors to have produced an Amarna novel, could not avoid this. Two detailed German books have been published examining precisely

Figure 6.1 Tiye, Akhenaten, Nefertiti and their daughters dining. Lintel in the tomb of Huya, from Davies 1905b. The scene, apparently a snapshot of ancient royal life, has influenced many fiction writers. Reproduced by courtesy of the Egypt Exploration Society.

Plate 6.1 Clara Siemens, etchings of (a) Akhenaten, Nefertiti and their daughters, based on the famous stela from Amarna now in Berlin, (b) Akhenaten and Nefertiti in the studio of Djehutmose, c. 1922. Reproduced from Auer 1922.

which statues and reliefs Thomas Mann used to concoct his physical descriptions of Akhenaten and Nefertiti and get the period details 'correct'.³ Significantly, Amarna objects in novels behave quite differently from the fetishised Egyptian artefacts in other kinds of fiction. They do not transport modern individuals back to Akhenaten's court, and are ccrtainly never vengeful or punitive, unlike the disaster-bringing antiquities in the Egyptian Gothic tales of ninetecnth-ccntury writers such as Bram Stoker, Gonan Doyle and Louisa May Alcott.¹ Instead, Amarna objects are handsome things used by (mostly) agreeable people in lovely settings, evoking, as one author put it, 'domestic felicity in beautiful surround­ings'.⁵ Unlike the rest of Egyptian civilisation, which is radically other, Amarna is reassuringly cosy, just as in The Illustrated London Mews. The fictionalised Amarna royals arc not really royal but bourgeois, unsurprisingly perhaps, since the novel is the bourgeois narrative form par excellence.

The result of this obsession with artefacts is that Akhenaten emerges neither as a character nor even as strongly characterised. An extraordinarily static figure comes through, in spite of the fluidity of definite facts about him which one might think would give free range to the fiction writer's imagination. The novel­ists' Akhenaten utters platitudes about truth, beauty, mysticism and pacificism, or plays with his daughters in beautiful interiors. Sometimes he is like a tortured Romantic genius, wildly creative because living on borrowed time, with an inter­est in art. In the earlier fictions especially, he is a beautiful soul in a tortured, deformed body, looked after by a self-sacrificing nurse, Nefertiti - a version of the Beauty and the Beast narrative (sec Plate 6.1). Oddly, Tutankhamun receives a far more imaginative treatment than Akhenaten, in the face of known facts about him, such as his age at death. In Simeon Strunsky's King Akhnaton, A Chronicle of Ancient Egypt (1928), for instance, Tutankhamun is an efficient middle-aged bur­eaucrat who takes charge during a famine. Tutankhamun is not an individual with a personality in the same way as Akhenaten, just a vacuous figure who later ended up with a tomb full of 'wonderful things'.

Following conventional histories, the Amarna novels usually rework two basic plot-lines. The first is a straightforward chronological narration of events, usually told either from Akhenaten's or from Nefertiti's viewpoint. These are often a kind of Bildungsroman, concentrating on the young Akhenaten's interest in religious affairs (in which Tiye always plays an important part), his struggle with the religious establishment at Thebes, the founding of Akhet-aten, and ending with his death.'' These novels show varying degrees of interest either in the idealism or in the corruption and decadence of the royal family. The biblical Moses often appears as a character. The second mise-en-scene is the aftermath of Akhenaten's reign, often among the ruins of the city of Amarna, and the protagonists are royalty on the run.⁷ Akhenaten's daughters, especially Ankhescnpaatcn, arc favoured characters here, but non-royal actors also feature. An important figure in the genre of Amarna fiction is the ordinary man, who through some particular skill becomes intimate with the blighted royal family and falls in love with one of the princesses." In both of these plot-lines, Akhenaten, Nefertiti and their family life are usually presented positively, in direct contrast to the corrupt priests of Amun, who are the villains.