Akhenaten: The Last Alien Pharaoh Of Ancient Egypt

Akhenaten: The Last Alien Pharaoh Of Ancient Egypt

Ancient texts describe a time in the history of ancient Egypt known as the Predynastic era, where 'Gods' ruled for hundreds of years over Ancient Egypt, Akhenaten could easily have been an ancient Egyptian Pharaoh that belonged to that period, only out of place and time.

Icons and sirens: Egyptian femmes fatales

As if all the above were not enough, the Amarna period has yielded one particular artistic icon that somehow manages to combine the sexual attraction of Marilyn Monroe with the deadly controversy of the Elgin Marbles, and perhaps a little added spice of racism and fascism. This is of course the bust of Nefertiti.

The German excavator Ludwig Borchardt discovered the famous painted limestone bust of Nefertiti in 1912, in the workshop of the sculptor Thutmose, whose house was one of the large sprawling villas in the southern part of the city at Amarna. The sculpture – probably intended as a sculptor’s model rather than a finished piece in itself – is about 50 cm high and fantastically well preserved, its only flaw being the absence of the right eye (although remarkably this does not particularly impair its overall beauty). The circumstances by which the bust ended up in the Berlin museum, however, have been a source of heated debate ever since. According to Nicholas Reeves,

At the formal division of spoils a mere month after the discovery, the Nefertiti bust passed to Dr James Simon, the sponsor of the German excavations. In 1920 Simon made a formal gift of his collection to the state of Prussia; three years after that, the queen was unveiled to an astonished public – an event closely followed by outraged complaints from the Egyptian Government that the queen’s portrait had left Egypt under irregular circumstances. Accusations flew and solutions were proposed in an attempt to resolve this unhappy situation – but to no avail . . .

If the bust arrived in Europe amid controversy, the situation if anything became worse by the 1930s, when Adolf Hitler himself declared that it was his favourite work of art from Egypt, and would therefore remain in Germany.

The link with Hitler is perhaps no accident, since one of the other controversial aspects of the sculpture is the fact that it has such characteristically European, rather than African facial characteristics. This has meant that, for many Afrocentrists, it symbolizes traditional Egyptologists’ supposed determination to present Egyptian culture as non-African and non-black. In the catalogue of the polemical exhibition ‘Egypt in Africa’ in 1996, Asa G. Hilliard III, Professor of Education at Georgia State University, argued,

This exhibit is one of the first to select items that show more typical African phenotypes rather than the atypical and sometimes foreign images that most Europeans like to see, e.g. Nefertiti, the Sheik el Bilad, or Kai the scribe, those ambiguous enough to be regarded as ‘white’.

The bust seems to belong to the later part of the Amarna period, when the new artistic style had settled down, and become much less extreme. In the eyes of some observers it is the most aesthetically pleasing image of a woman’s face ever produced. In an attempt to analyse why this should be the case, Jaromir Malek suggests that

Much of the attraction of the piece stems from its perfect, almost geometrical, regularity which is so appealing to our modern eyes: long straight lines predominate, most conspicuously those connecting the front of the crown and the queen’s forehead on profile, and the side of the crown and her cheeks on front view.

Even by the standards of 18th-Dynasty royal women, such as Ahhotep I and Hatshepsut, the real historical Nefertiti, principal wife of Akhenaten, seems to have achieved unusual power and influence, perhaps building on the achievements of her influential mother-in-law (and perhaps also aunt) Queen Tiye. Camille Paglia paints a lurid Lady-Macbeth-like portrait of Nefertiti:

The proper response to the Nefertiti bust is fear. The queen is an android, a manufactured being. She is a new gorgoneion, a ‘bodiless head of fright’ . . . Art shows Akhenaten half-feminine, his limbs shrunken and belly bulging, possibly from birth defect or disease. This portrait shows his queen half-masculine, a vampire of political will.

Whether we agree with Paglia’s characteristically over-the-top description or not, it shows the continuing power of this bust – and by extension, Nefertiti herself – to evoke passionate responses. There can be few sculptures that are so closely identified with the individual depicted that commentators discuss the bust as if it were in some sense the actual woman, which is after all a very characteristically ancient Egyptian position to take.

The way in which the statue itself is regarded almost as a sacred relic was demonstrated in 2003, when two artists (‘Little Warsaw’) effectively ‘restored’ the whole sculpture, creating a body to support the bust, as part of the Hungarian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. In the end, the head was not allowed to travel to Venice to be displayed along with the body, but a curiously evocative photograph was taken, showing the old head and new body joined together and standing upright beside the empty display case in Berlin (as if Nefertiti had come through time to visit her own bust but found it missing). This was a powerful artistic image, but on a museological and Egyptological level it was considered inappropriate to treat the object in this cavalier way, and relations between the Berlin Egyptian Museum and the Supreme Council for Antiquities in Cairo were again somewhat soured – the original plan to display both head and body together in Venice was abandoned. In the booklet accompanying the display of The Body of Nefertiti, the artists point out that,

It became evident that Nefertiti had been studied to death by Egyptologists: the only way to revive her seemed to be by replanting her into the context of contemporary art.

They also have something to say on the racial debate:

This statue is one of the important sources of European cultural history and sculpture, even though it was created outside the continent. Its outsider position adds further meanings to the project of completing: this 3000 year old model of beauty has been contributing, ever since it was found and put on public display, to the European ideal of beauty, even though it is both culturally and historically non-European.

Amarna issues

It is probably some kind of record (and perverse in the extreme) to have come this close to the end of a general book on Egyptology without having provided any detailed discussion of Akhenaten, Nefertiti, or Cleopatra – clearly among the most popular icons of ancient Egypt (the fourth member of this select group being of course Tutankhamun). These ancient individuals, apart from being the most fascinating aspects of the subject for many modern enthusiasts, have been foremost in the transformation of Egyptology into a vibrant part of 21st-century popular culture. The ways in which these icons have been exploited can therefore give a general sense of the absorption of Egypt into the mass media.

In obedience to chronological order, we should deal with Akhenaten and Nefertiti first. Undoubtedly, Akhenaten’s reign, in the mid-14th century bc, was the most unusual religious and artistic phase of the Egyptian New Kingdom (1550–1069), if not the entire pharaonic period. During the first few years of his reign he appears to have developed an obsession with the cult of the Aten (literally the ‘sun-disc’), a considerably more abstract deity than the traditional Egyptian pantheon. He built religious monuments to the Aten at a number of sites, but primarily at eastern Karnak and at Akhetaten (‘horizon of the Aten’), the latter being a new capital city established by him on supposedly virgin ground at the site now known as Amarna in Middle Egypt. It is Amarna that has given its name to the period encompassing the reigns of Akhenaten and his brief successors. Because Akhenaten and his activities were reviled soon after his death, virtually all of his monuments were dismantled and his name was erased from those that remained. Consequently, it was not until the work of 19th-century archaeologists that the history of the Amarna period began to be reconstructed from the many surviving fragments. As Erik Hornung puts it,

Akhenaten himself, forgotten for so long, now appears before us as one of the great founders of religion, and the first one whom we can grasp. ‘Hero’ or ‘Heretic’ – he definitely belongs not just to Ancient Egypt, but to human history.

It is interesting to trace views of Akhenaten from the early 20th century onwards. Initially his stock is high, and Arthur Weigall’s ‘biography’ of the king paints him as the founder of a ‘religion so pure that one must compare it with Christianity to discover its faults’, while Thomas Mann makes him the hero of his romantic novel Joseph, but by the 1950s Eberhard Otto was describing him as egocentric, ugly, and despotic, and in the 1980s Donald Redford argued that ‘Akhenaten destroyed much, he created little . . . Akhenaten, whatever else he may have been, was no intellectual heavyweight’.

The high profile of Akhenaten in modern times is not so much because of any particularly detailed awareness of the architecture of his temples or his iconoclastic religious ideas (although these have had a significant impact on some more recent faiths and philosophies, such as Rosicrucianism), but because of the very striking and unusual appearance of much of the art of his reign. The king himself is shown as a long-faced, bulbous-chinned, thick-lipped, and fat-bellied figure, apparently with female breasts and swollen thighs, rather than being idealized as a youthful paragon of manhood as was usually the case with Egyptian kings (and according to the chief royal sculptor Bak, it was the king himself who had authorized this style of art). As in other periods, both the royal family and the elite officials surrounding the king were depicted in a similar way, thus ensuring that all those Amarna-period works of art that include human figures are fairly easy to recognize. This has also led to the production of a large number of fakes and forgeries of Amarna sculptures, since the exaggerated style is relatively easy to copy (and also very popular with the buyers of antiquities). In the case of the Mansoor private collection of antiquities, a very large group of Amarna pieces have been subject to intense dispute concerning their authenticity. There is also said to have been a stronger sense of freedom and creativity in Amarna art, although this perception is no doubt partly the result of the changes in religious subject matter and the survival of an unusual number of paintings from within houses and palaces as opposed to temples and tombs.

It is not clear whether the artistic distortions of Amarna ‘portraits’ constitute a realistic record of Akhenaten’s appearance (which would imply that he suffered from some form of disease) or whether there is a more symbolic reason for his androgynous appearance, perhaps relating to an attempt to personify both male and female aspects of fecundity. Some Egyptologists have suggested, for instance, that the bisexual appearance of the Amarna-style human figures might echo the form of Hapy, the god of the Nile inundation whose body was deliberately intended to convey the idea of both male and female fertility.

The first full-blown attempt to explain Akhenaten’s appearance medically was the proposal by the ubiquitous Sir Grafton Elliot Smith that the king may have suffered from Froehlich’s Syndrome, an endocrine disorder which can have similar effects on the body. The disadvantage of this solution is that sufferers from this syndrome are also usually not only mentally retarded but incapable of producing children, neither of which could be applied to Akhenaten, with at least six girls by Nefertiti (and two other girls who seem to have resulted from incestuous relationships between the king and his own daughters). An alternative suggestion, first put forward by the Canadian Alwyn Burridge, is that Akhenaten might instead have suffered from Marfan’s Syndrome. Quite a good case can be made for the latter (which is a severe disorder caused by a single abnormal gene), given that the symptoms include a pigeon chest, a wide pelvic area, elongated skull, spidery fingers and a long face with protruding chin, and it would be additionally applicable given that sufferers and their children were susceptible to sudden death (through weakness of the cardiovascular system). Symptoms also include likely blindness, which might possibly tie in with his obsession with the sun-disc, given that it may have been the only phenomenon that he could perceive. There are still, however, many Egyptologists who argue that such physical and medical theories take the appearance of the art far too literally, and that the peculiarities of the representations of the Amarna royal family might have lain much more within the realm of symbol and metaphor. The likelihood that we are dealing with a chosen style rather than a physical condition is backed up by surviving depictions of Akhenaten in the early part of his reign (before he had fully espoused Atenism and changed his name from Amenhotep), which show him with the standard idealized features more reminiscent of his father.

All of the above factors have the effect of making Akhenaten, his wife Nefertiti, and the Amarna period over which they presided endlessly fascinating to the modern observer. There are any number of ‘mysteries’ about the period, and constant opportunities for speculation on such topics as why Nefertiti disappears from the records before the end of Akhenaten’s reign, or whether she perhaps reinvented herself as the ostensibly male ruler Smenkhkare, who enjoyed a very brief period of joint rule with Akhenaten at the end of the Amarna period. One of the other burning questions concerns the fate of the corpses of the entire Amarna family: where were they initially buried and where are they now? Then there are the barrage of questions about Akhenaten’s ideology and personality: was he a saintly monotheist who anticipated (or even precipitated) the rise of the Jewish faith, or was he an unreasonable tyrant who almost ran the Egyptian economy into the ground (or all of the above at the same time!)?

It was not until the late 19th century that Egyptologists became fully aware of Akhenaten and the Amarna period, but, as John Ray has pointed out, in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek assessment, the timing of Akhenaten’s emergence from the shadows could not have been better:

the 20th century turned out to be made for him: he could be seen as a tortured genius who took on a sclerotic establishment, a loving husband and father, an exceptional visionary and artist, a pacifist who believed in human brotherhood and a master of religious symbolism.

One of the tantalizing aspects of the Amarna period is that we have an enormous quantity of artistic, monumental, and textual data, and yet we still do not seem to have enough evidence to reconstruct anything like the full picture of this remarkable but relatively brief phase in Egyptian history. As the British Egyptologist Nicholas Reeves has put it, ‘the real problem with Amarna is not so much a shortage of good evidence as a superabundance of speculation misrepresented as fact’.

Given Reeves’s statement, it is perhaps appropriate that there have been numerous fictional rewritings of the Amarna episode, including a Noel-Coward style play by Agatha Christie (Akhnaten) in which one of the characters says, ‘Akhenaten and I would never have got on. I don’t believe he’s got any sense of humour. He’s so frightfully religious too.’ There has been an Amarna opera: first performed in 1984, Philip Glass’s Akhnaten used his non-Western-influenced minimalist musical style, together with a libretto including ancient Egyptian, Akkadian, and Hebrew, to conjure up a poignant picture of Akhenaten and Nefertiti as tragic figures, whose spirits eventually haunt the ruins of their abandoned city at Amarna. We can add to this one of the most famous Hollywood forays into ancient Egypt with The Egyptian, directed by Michael Curtiz in 1954; based on Mika Waltari’s novel, it is set in Akhenaten’s court and starred Victor Mature as Horemheb. Each of these renditions of Amarna is as idiosyncratic as the last, and the one thing they have in common is their tendency to cast Akhenaten as a revolutionary dreamer and visionary.

Perhaps the most sensible thing that anyone has said about the Amarna period is Margaret Murray’s comment in 1949 (ironically even before the Akhenaten-industry had fully built up steam) that

The Tell el-Amarna period has had more nonsense written about it than any other period in Egyptian history . . . In the case of Akhenaten, the facts do not bear the construction often put on them.

The Rise of the Ramessides I

Image of Seti I from his temple in Abydos.

Ancient Libyans & Nubians. Scene from the tomb of Seti I, Dynasty XIX.

Horemheb succeeded in establishing the authority and legitimacy of his reign, and bringing military discipline to bear on a country weakened by three decades of political upheaval and uncertainty. There was only one fly in the ointment: his lack of an heir. Without children of his own, Horemheb could not risk a disputed succession undoing his hard-won reforms. His solution mirrored his own rise to power. Looking among his closest followers, he identified an ideal successor from the ranks of the army. Paramessu was an army man through and through. The son of a battalion commander, he had started his career as a simple soldier, and had then won an officer’s commission and subsequent promotions to fortress commander, aide-de-camp to the king, and finally general. He was a man in the same mold as Horemheb, someone who shared the same background and the same fundamental outlook. Even better, he already had a son, and a grandson was on the way—the perfect ingredients for a new military dynasty. Horemheb proceeded to give Paramessu a series of high civilian offices to prepare him for the eventual succession, appointing him king’s deputy and vizier. At the same time, Paramessu had to relinquish his military titles while Horemheb remained in charge of the army. It would have been unwise to hand over such a powerful institution to a subordinate, however trusted. 

Yet by conferring the titles “king’s son” and “hereditary prince” on Paramessu, the pharaoh was clearly signaling his resolve to hand over the kingship itself, in due course. As Horemheb’s reign neared its close, his chosen heir changed his name to “Ramessu beloved of Amun” and began to write his name in a royal cartouche. The stage was set for the rise of the Ramessides.

While Horemheb may have promoted the new dynasty, its first member had no doubts that he, not his patron, was the real founder. To signal this new beginning, Ramessu—better known as Ramesses I (1292–1290)—deliberately chose his throne name to echo that of Ahmose, founder of the Eighteenth Dynasty. Where Ahmose had been Nebpehtyra, “Ra is lord of strength,” Ramesses styled himself Menpehtyra, “Ra is enduring in strength.” Yet Ramesses was not to endure in strength for very long. Already an old man at his accession, he entrusted much of the day-to-day running of the country to his son Seti. It was a wise decision. Within eighteen months of coming to the throne, Ramesses was dead. The new king, Seti I (1290–1279), was a vigorous and energetic man, tall and athletic with a distinguished countenance—high cheekbones and the characteristic aquiline nose of the Ramesside males. Horemheb’s law code had successfully bolstered royal authority and rooted out corruption, so Seti could now set about restoring Egypt’s fortunes, at home and abroad.

Prosperity and security had always been demonstrated through state construction projects, and for the next decade the country echoed to the sound of masons’ chisels and the shouts of builders, as Seti commissioned an astonishing series of new monuments at important sites throughout Egypt. Not since the days of Amenhotep III had government architects and artists been kept so busy. Seti’s grandest project was a fabulous new temple at Abdju, ancient cradle of kingship and cult center of Osiris. The temple was designed to a bold new plan, and was equally radical in its dedication. At the back of a columned hall fronted by two great courts, there lay not one sanctuary but seven. Each of Egypt’s chief deities had a place in this national pantheon: the holy family of Horus, Isis, and Osiris; the solar gods Amun-Ra and Ra-Horakhty; Ptah, the god of Memphis and of craftsmen; and, finally, predictably, Seti himself. A further suite of side rooms provided space for the cults of the Memphite funerary gods Nefertem and Ptah-Sokar, so they wouldn’t feel excluded. This bringing together of the greatest deities in the land under one roof, to honor Seti with their presence, was part of a conscious effort to establish the theological credentials of the new Ramesside Dynasty.

The theme of dynastic legitimacy was reinforced in a long corridor that led southward from the columned hall. Its exquisite relief decoration showed Seti’s eldest son, Prince Ramesses, reading a papyrus inscribed with the names of sixty-seven royal predecessors, stretching all the way back to Menes, legendary founder of the Egyptian state. The Abdju king list drew upon ancient temple archives, but its primary purpose was religious rather than historical. Designed to stress the unbroken succession of rightful monarchs from the beginning of the First Dynasty down to Seti I and his son, it included the ephemeral kings of the First Intermediate Period but conspicuously omitted the hated Hyksos, the dubious Hatshepsut, the heretic Akhenaten, and his three tainted successors. In the context of a royal ancestor cult, such controversial forebears were best forgotten.

Abdju was the theological center of Seti’s regime, and he went to extraordinary lengths to guarantee its proper functioning in perpetuity. First, he endowed it with substantial land and resources, many of them located in the farthest parts of conquered Nubia (where nobody could object). Next, Seti took a leaf out of Horemheb’s book and promulgated a wide-ranging decree to protect the assets from improper appropriation by other institutions. Carved into the side of a sandstone hill near the third Nile cataract, in the vicinity of a fortified garrison, the Nauri Decree spelled out the penalty for requisitioning or interfering with the annual shipment of produce sent from Kush to Abdju:

As for any overseer of the fortress, scribe of the fortress, or agent of the fortress who boards a boat belonging to the temple and takes … anything of Kush that is being delivered as revenue to the temple, the law is to be enforced against him in the form of one hundred blows, and he is to be fined … at a rate of eighty to one.

Having thus secured regular shipments of produce to fill the coffers of his temple, Seti set about guaranteeing an eternal supply of gold, the commodity above all others that betokened wealth. He ordered new gold mines to be opened up in Egypt’s remote Eastern Desert, and took a close interest in the production and transport of the mines’ precious ore to the Nile Valley. An inscription at a remote temple in the Wadi Barramiya recounts the king’s personal involvement:

His Majesty surveyed the hill country as far as the mountains, for his heart wished to see the mines from which the fine gold is brought. After His Majesty had walked uphill for many miles, he halted by the wayside to mull things over. He declared, “How irksome is a track without water! What is an expedition to do to relieve their parched throats?”

His answer was to order the stonecutters to leave their mining posts and instead “dig a well in the mountains, so that it might lift up the weary and refresh the spirit of him who burns in summer.”

The king’s penchant for innovation was also put to great effect in the preparation of his final resting place, a great royal tomb in the Valley of the Kings. Not only is it the longest and deepest of all the royal tombs at Thebes, but it was also the first to be decorated throughout: every wall and ceiling of every passage and chamber is covered with the finest paintings and reliefs. This tomb established the decorative program that would be followed by all subsequent tombs in the valley, until the very end of the New Kingdom. Amid such splendor, one masterwork is justly famed—the magnificent vaulted ceiling of the burial chamber, painted with astronomical scenes so as to resemble the very vault of heaven. The Ramesside Dynasty might have been less than a decade old, but Seti I had no doubts about his immortal destiny.