All that was a lifetime ago. Several lifetimes, in fact. Akhenaten, divine prophet of the one true god, is long since dead, and sleeps in the Red Country, along with his eldest daughter Meritaten, and Harkhuf his animal collector.
Even Nefernefruaten-Nefertiti is dead now – the lovely Nefertiti, sphinx-like in her sadness, too, for she had loved her husband with a passion.
The lovely Ankhesenpa-aten married her half-brother Tutankh-aten who, at seven, became pharaoh over all Egypt, and wearer of the cobra crown.
I did not marry, myself, and I am glad of that now. These are dangerous times, and I should not like to see children of mine playing among the ruins of el-Amarna.
Only in one respect is Pharaoh Tutankh-aten like his father. He, too, changed his given name. To Tutankhamun. No longer is Aten sole god over Egypt. Tutankhamun has re-established all the old gods, restored all the old festivals. Now, when people talk about Akhenaten, they sneer and spit and curse his memory. They all call him ‘the Great Criminal, the destroyer of gods’. I hear his tomb is smashed and looted, though the priests of Aten may have carried his body away in time and hidden it. I pray they did.
Tutankhamun has moved his court back to Thebes, to live in the palace of his ancestors, and el-Amarna is looked on as nothing more than a quarry, a source of bricks for new palaces, new temples to the old gods.
Some of us stayed on here. El-Amarna was our home, after all. But the priests of Amun are out to remove all trace of the Great Criminal and his consort queen. His altars have been smashed, his likeness disfigured in all the wall paintings. They smash his name and the name of Nefertiti wherever they can find them. They think that if they can keep the names from being spoken, they can ensure that the king and the queen will have no afterlife.
What do I believe? Sometimes, I think it doesn’t matter much what you believe, so long as you never start to doubt it. I am a craftsman. I believe in beauty, and I know beauty when I see it. It was in Akhenaten and his life. It was in his temples open to the sky and his palace with its rooms full of the laughter of the princesses. Above all, it was in Nefertiti (A Beautiful Woman is Come).
They are out there now, those devout vandals, smashing his name, smashing hers. May the vandals themselves be swallowed up by everlasting darkness, as the desert swallows up their graves.
I can hear them getting closer, working their way through the city. That’s why I’ve locked the door. Until they break it down – if they still have the energy – I shall go on working here, locked in my workshop. I am making, by the light of an oil lamp, cartouche after cartouche of the royal names. And do you see this head, I’ve made? This is a likeness of Queen Nefertiti as it is burned into my memory. So beautiful. So superhuman in her beauty.
Perhaps, they will break in here and smash my work as they have smashed so many works of mine over yonder in the palace. But while I have breath in me and light to see by, I shall go on speaking the names – their names – in stone, so that they may have everlasting life. A man must do what he can. While a name is remembered in this world, the spirit lives on in the Land of the West.
Am I a fool? One day the world will be a thousand years older, two thousand, three! Who then will remember Akhenaten or the divine Nefertiti? One thing I do know for certain! No one will remember me, Tutmose the potter, or speak my name aloud three thousand years from now.
When the ruins of el-Amarna were excavated, a beautiful carved head of Queen Nefertiti, as well as several cartouches of the names Nefernefruaten-Nefertiti and Akhenaten were found in a locked workshop. They had escaped both theft and destruction by the troops of the Pharaoh Tutankhamun.