The most controversial part of ancient Egypt’s long history is its most popular one, with a cast-list of famous names headed by Akhenaten, Nefertiti and Tutankhamen. People seem comfortable with the established characters of the Amarna Period, portrayed as the eccentric revolutionary, his beautiful queen and the tragic boy-king who played out their lives in palatial surroundings, beset with all the usual intrigue, murder, homosexuality and incest. After all, this is ancient Egypt.
With the limited amount of evidence available endlessly scrutinised and argued about, the few hard facts about the Amarna Period are inevitably set against a background of theory, supposition and possibility, and the means by which the ‘established version of events’ came about is a fascinating story in itself. Many of the mysteries and controversies associated with the Amarna Period and ancient Egypt in general began when the first European travellers visited the land of the Nile. Already familiar with the Egyptian statues and obelisks that the Romans had brought back to Italy in the early centuries ad, many pilgrims to the Holy Land took detours south to see the pyramids, which they believed to be ‘the granaries of Joseph’.
The biblical version of Egypt as little more than the home of cruel pagans was then knocked off balance somewhat during the Renaissance, when translations of Greek and Roman texts revealed that the classical world had regarded Egypt as the source of all wisdom. The Egyptians were even believed to have been able to transform base metals into gold, the science of alchemy derived from the Arabic al-keme, which simply means ‘of Egypt’. Even the Pope was impressed: for his Vatican apartments Alexander VI commissioned paintings of Egyptian gods alongside images of Moses; and the more adventurous of Europe’s clergy were inspired to visit Egypt as part of the Grand Tour. One of the earliest tourists was a Yorkshireman, George Sandys, who saw the pyramids for himself in 1610 and was the first to realise that they were nothing to do with Joseph but were the tombs of Egypt’s kings.
The first Europeans known to have ventured any further south were a couple of French Capuchin friars who toured Luxor and the Valley of the Kings in 1668. Their countryman Claude Sicard moved permanently to Cairo in 1712 until his death from plague fourteen years later. As a Jesuit, Sicard’s travels around the country saving souls took him to remote places that no other European had ever seen. With considerable foresight the Regent Philippe of Orleans ordered him to investigate all the ancient monuments he saw and keep a written record.
On his first trip south, in 1714, Sicard sailed nearly 200 miles up the Nile and stopped off at the town of el-Ashmunein to see the large Christian basilica built on the ruins of a temple to Thoth, the Egyptian god of wisdom. The ancient Egyptians regarded picture writing as the ‘words of Thoth’, and this pictorial script was known by the later Greeks as ‘hieroglyphs’ or ‘sacred carvings’. However their meaning was eventually lost and by Sicard’s day the ancient language had been indecipherable for over thirteen hundred years.
As Sicard travelled on a few miles further west to the limestone cliffs of Tuna el-Gebel, he discovered a fourteen-foot-high inscription carved into the rock face. The lines of mysterious picture writing were topped by two strangely shaped, rather obese-looking human figures raising their arms to the sun, and beside the tablet-shaped stela were two groups of statues, their headless, distorted bodies reaching blindly forward to grasp at a smaller stela and hold out an altar. Before their mutilation, the curiously proportioned figures had once stared out across the Nile to the East Bank where the cliffs pull back in a vast arc, creating a wide desert plain. The plain itself was a windswept, barren place, uninhabited save for a few Beni Amran nomads, who had a reputation for shooting strangers on sight. It appears that Sicard wisely made no attempt to cross the Nile to convert them, and so the place was left free of curious foreigners until more French turned up right at the end of the eighteenth century, this time armed to the teeth.
These were the troops of Napoleon Bonaparte, who were not to be put off by the unsavoury reputation of a few villagers. But this was far more than a show of force. Bonaparte’s military expedition included 164 of France’s greatest scholars, there for the sole purpose of recording and documenting all they saw in a country that Bonaparte himself regarded as ‘the cradle of the science and art of all humanity’. Under the protection of the troops his scholars catalogued, mapped and drew everything they saw in a country ‘all but unknown to Europeans’, and also made the most significant discovery in the history of Egyptology.
During the reinforcement of Egypt’s coastal defences in the summer of 1799, a French officer of the Engineers uncovered a slab of rock while demolishing the wall of a fort at el-Rashid, also known as Rosetta. He noticed that it was inscribed in Greek, but there were also sections of the ancient Egyptian picture writing known as hieroglyphs, and, suspecting it might be something important, he took the intriguing slab of rock back to his general. The Greek part of the text revealed that this was a decree issued by ancient Egyptian priests as a means of announcing the great honours they would bestow on the pharaoh Ptolemy V in 196 BC in return for tax exemptions. And because they wanted the message to be understood by both Egyptians and Greeks, the priests put their words down in ‘sacred writing (hieroglyphs), document writing (demotic) and Greek writing’. And so it was the Rosetta Stone, as it is now known, that finally provided the means of understanding the ancient culture through its own words.
As the French scholars headed south, recording and drawing as they went, they became the first Europeans to set foot on the windswept plain first seen by Sicard, and here they made another discovery. The plain was covered in a huge expanse of ancient ruins, comprising brick-built walls, a large gateway and enclosure and a great wide roadway, all of which were now mapped out and drawn by surveyors and artists. The French team’s map of the ruined city appeared as one of the three thousand illustrations in their thirty-six-volume blockbuster The Description of Egypt, which gave birth to the whole subject of Egyptology. Not only was it a priceless resource for scholars; it became something of a ‘style Bible’ for those swept up in the growing fashion for all things Egyptian and also initiated the craze for treasure hunting, even providing the maps!
In the meantime, the slow process of deciphering the hieroglyphs from the Rosetta Stone finally achieved success in 1822 when the brilliant young Frenchman Jean François Champollion (1790–1832) cracked the code. During his work, Champollion corresponded with the English classicist Sir William Gell, whose own fascination for hieroglyphs and all things Egyptian soon rubbed off on his protégé, John Gardner Wilkinson. When Wilkinson set out for Egypt in 1821, he was so enamoured of the place that he stayed for twelve years, continuing his studies of hieroglyphs and exploring as many of the ancient sites as he could.
In 1824 he too visited the mysterious ruin-strewn plain shown on the French map and discovered a whole series of rock-cut tombs in the surrounding cliffs to the north. ‘These grottoes I had the good fortune first to notice on my way up the Nile in 1824,’ he wrote, ‘at which time they had not been visited by any modern traveller’– at least not since early tourists had left Greek graffiti in them some two thousand years earlier. Although the walls beneath were covered in figures and texts which mystified him, Wilkinson immediately realised their similarity to those on top of the great stela that Sicard had discovered a century before at Tuna el-Gebel: ‘The sculptures are singular and nearly in plain style as those of Gebel Toona [sic], tho’ not quite so much out of proportion. They are all of the same king as that Tablet [stela], who may possibly be some Persian, since the arms and drapes are not common in Egyptian sculptures.’
Finally deciding that the figures must be Egyptian, albeit rather strange ones, Wilkinson wrote to an acquaintance describing how ‘the sun itself is represented with rays terminating in hands thus which is never seen in other parts of Egypt. In addition to this the name of the king (written in Hieroglyphics) has been purposefully effaced, tho I have managed to get a copy of it.’ The damage seemed to have been done by those wanting to obliterate all trace of an apparently much-hated predecessor, and with the tombs lying open the scenes had been further vandalised by the early Christians. Politely referred to as ‘hermits’, these superstitious squatters had used the tombs as houses and churches, carving crosses and an apse into the ancient scenes and blinding the eyes of the ancient figures who looked down on them.
Wanting a second opinion on the tombs’ mystifying scenes, Wilkinson went back to the site two years later with his friend James Burton, who seems to have been equally bemused. He also noticed that, unlike the scenes in tombs and temples he’d seen elsewhere in Egypt, ‘No other deity but the sun is anywhere to be found, either sculptures, or, I believe, written.’ He was also unimpressed with the scenes themselves, stating: ‘I think the style of sculpture is very peculiar and very bad.’ Nevertheless the pair made numerous drawings and, in the days before the camera, took wet paper squeezes by pushing against the carvings soggy blotting paper which dried to give a perfect, crisp image.
Their mutual friend Gell was equally perplexed by the images Wilkinson then sent him, and assumed that the figure of the king, and a second who was presumably his queen, must be ‘two pregnant females’. Certainly there was little to choose between them, as both were portrayed with the same long neck, swelling breasts, broad child-bearing hips and massive thighs, not to mention saggy chins and elongated faces. A funny-looking couple, to be sure.
After discovering one of the site’s alabaster quarries, Wilkinson and Burton believed the ruins on the plain to be the lost city of Alabastron, described by classical authors. However, Wilkinson subsequently gave the site its more familiar name of Tell el-Amarna by combining the names of the two local villages, el-Till and el-Amarieh.
When their friend Robert Hay visited the region in 1827, he made a pencil study of the great stela at Tuna el-Gebel which featured a self-portrait for scale, leaning in contemplation against the stela’s base in the Turkish dress adopted by Europeans in an attempt to ‘blend in’ with the local people. Yet the Egyptians remained bemused by such foreigners and, believing the stela to be a doorway concealing hidden treasures in the cliffs, they asked Hay and his colleagues why they always shut the door as soon they saw them coming!
Over the next few years Hay made studies of many of the city’s tombs, their walls filled with figures of the ill-proportioned king and queen standing beneath the sun accompanied by their small daughters, with their city, its people and palaces, temples and houses. These were all carefully drawn with the aid of a camera lucida, a device that assists a draughtsman by using a prism to concentrate the light from the object being drawn and project it on to a sheet of paper, enabling it to be traced accurately.
As news of Alabastron and its curious inhabitants, dubbed the ‘Disc Worshippers’, spread throughout the academic community, the great Champollion himself arrived in 1828. Still working towards a complete understanding of the ancient hieroglyphic language, he made notes of the inscriptions while his draughtsman, Nestor l’Hôte, began patiently recording every single hieroglyph. Although l’Hôte’s eventual seventeen volumes remain unpublished, some of his papers were passed on to his family and fired the curiosity and imagination of his young relative Auguste Mariette (1821–81), the future founder of the Egyptian Antiquities Service.
In 1840 a couple of tourists visiting the famous northern tombs spotted a second huge stela (‘Stela U’), similar to the one Sicard had found (‘Stela A’) but on the East Bank near the city and even bigger. Extending the full height of the cliff face, battered statues of the king and queen stood in deep recesses at each side, while the top featured more defaced images of these famous disc worshippers beneath the ever-present spider-like arms of their sun disc god. Soon another French team copying the northern tomb scenes found a third such stela, ‘Stela S’ (Fig. 1), again flanked by battered statues with the same curious proportions as those engraved on the stela top, a faceless king and queen with arms raised to the sun. Although the workmanship was described as ‘beautifully fine’, the profiles were ‘hideous and the forms of the body outrageous’ and quite unlike anything else seen hitherto in ancient Egyptian art. So who exactly were the mysterious Disc Worshippers of Alabastron?
The answer was finally provided in 1841 when Champollion’s epic work Egyptian Grammar finally revealed the full meaning of hieroglyphs to the world. Sadly, it was a posthumous revelation, since the great man had been dead for nearly ten years, killed by a work-induced stroke at the age of forty-one. Today his remains lie beneath an Egyptian-style obelisk in Paris’s famous Père Lachaise cemetery, which also houses Oscar Wilde and Jim Morrison.
Champollion’s legacy allowed his successors to translate hieroglyphs for themselves, and when Karl Richard Lepsius arrived in Egypt in 1842 at the head of the Prussian Epigraphic Expedition their three-year progress up the Nile and back again provided a tidal wave of new information. With time to throw an impromptu birthday party on top of the Great Pyramid in honour of their sponsor, King Wilhelm IV of Prussia, Lepsius’ team visited Amarna in 1843 and again in 1845, intensively copying absolutely everything. Although many of the names, like the faces, had been largely hacked away, what remained allowed them to identify the disc-worshipping duo as an Egyptian pharaoh and his wife. When their names were spoken aloud for the first time in over three thousand years, the king was finally revealed as Bech-en-aten, later corrected to Akhenaten, whilst his queen had been a woman named Nefertiti. But with no such names to be found in any of the ancient king lists or official records, what had they done to deserve such a fate?
As early as 1837 Wilkinson had made a few conclusions for himself, and in his Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians, the first ‘popular’ – meaning readable – book on the subject, he astutely referred to a group of ‘Stranger Kings’ who ‘introduced very heretical changes into the religion, they expelled the favourite god from the Pantheon, and introduced a Sun worship unknown in Egypt’. He also noted that ‘their reign was not of very long duration; and having been expelled, their monuments, as well as every record of them, were purposefully defaced’.
Lepsius too had referred to several kings not found on the legitimate lists, and with the benefit of hieroglyphs he was able to make the connection between those who changed the religion and the disc worshippers. Lepsius declared that a king named Amenhotep IV had built a new royal capital at Amarna and had tried to abolish the entire religious system, replacing it with sun worship and erasing all other gods’ names throughout the country. And because his own name contained the name of Amen he had changed it to Akhenaten, meaning ‘Worshipper of the Aten’, the great sun disc which dominated every scene.
Yet not everyone was convinced that this unusual king had been a man at all. When the French scholar Eugène Lefébure examined the images, he concluded that this was surely a woman in masquerade. Using the well-known female pharaoh Hatshepsut as a precedent, he supported his claim with the evidence of classical scholars who had mentioned that a woman had ruled after a king named Akhenkheres, whom Lefébure equated with Akhenaten. Although Lefébure has been described as an able man who made valuable contributions to Egyptology, he was also characterised as ‘by nature a poet and a mystic’ and his theories were largely ignored by subsequent scholars.
Ever more keen for new information on this revolutionary trans-sexual who was starting to take shape before them, the French returned to Amarna and worked there on and off between 1883 and 1902 under the direction of Gaston Maspero, the newly appointed Head of the French-run Egyptian Antiquities Service following the death of its founder, Mariette. During 1881, his first year in office, Maspero had to deal with two major discoveries. No fewer than five royal burial chambers were found inside the pyramids of Sakkara, covered in Pyramid Texts, the world’s oldest body of religious writings. This was followed by the largest-ever find of royal mummies – over forty of them buried together in a single tomb in Luxor.
That same year, a villager at Amarna discovered the most exquisite carved stone plaque, obviously an antika, amongst the ruins. He sold it to a dealer and it was bought by a wealthy American collector for twenty-two piastres – quite a bargain at the equivalent of around 4p in today’s UK currency. Having lain safe beneath the sand for the last three and a half thousand years, the plaque finally revealed the faces of the king and queen in pristine condition. It also showed what might yet lie undiscovered elsewhere around the site, so the locals began exploring the one place they knew no foreigner had so far ventured into – the remote and desolate Wadi Abu Hasah el-Bahri, the valley which cuts right through the eastern cliffs between the northern and southern tombs.
After scouring all the likely nooks and crannies along four miles of inhospitable, boulder-strewn dry river bed, they finally came across a great square doorway cut out of the rock in the valley floor. Summoning up their courage, they went inside. After going down some ninety feet into the darkness, they would have had to push their way through the remnants of a blocked doorway, coming out into a great square burial chamber strewn with all manner of debris. By the light of their flaming torches they made out the remains of a once lavishly appointed tomb whose floors were covered with fragments of granite sarcophagi, alabaster canopic equipment, and over two hundred smashed up funerary figurines. There were pieces of brightly glazed pottery, alabaster bowls and jars, seals from jars of vintage wine, bright blue amulets and colourful glass beads, and, no doubt to their great delight, jewellery of gold and precious stones. Yet most importantly of all, though certainly not regarded as such by the superstitious villagers, the tomb still contained mummified remains. They had found the tomb of Akhenaten himself.
Managing to keep the tomb’s whereabouts secret, the villagers gradually sold off its contents piece by piece, from ‘fragments of a royal mummy’ to ‘numerous trinkets in ivory, glass, alabaster, bronze and gold’. Although details of such illicit dealings are inevitably scarce, it is known that a local dealer sold some of the jewellery to an Irish clergyman who happened to be passing through the region in 1882. Looking for scarabs to add to his antiquities collection, the Reverend W. J. Loftie bought a whole range of ‘trinkets’, including gold foil scraped from a coffin, a gold rosette from a linen funeral pall and a blue-glazed model throwstick, together with parts of a jewelled collar, golden ear studs and several rings, one of them a solid gold knuckle-duster inscribed with the name ‘Nefertiti’. Having purchased all he could afford, in 1893 Loftie sold the pieces on via a London dealer to Edinburgh’s Royal Scottish Museum, then returned to Amarna with more money to try to obtain what remained. Although, sadly, the gold foil ‘winding sheets’ inscribed with the name of Akhenaten’s mother, Queen Tiy, were no longer around and had probably been melted down, he bought the two remaining large gold rings on behalf of fellow collectors, including the novelist H. Rider Haggard; both rings ended up in Liverpool’s City Museum.
Apart from the French, who turned up in 1883 to do a few days’ exploration amongst the low hills to the south, life went on much as it had always done in the nearby villages of el-Till, Hagg Qandil and el-Amarieh. Farmers worked their fields, fishermen cast their nets across the Nile and children ran about amongst the ever-present dogs and chickens. And the women attended to the eternal round of household tasks or dug for sebakh, a fertiliser made from the crumbly mudbricks of the ancient city. Then on one fateful day in 1887 a woman from el-Till, whose name is sadly unrecorded, made one of the most extraordinary discoveries in the history of Egyptology.
In her quest for compost she unwittingly wandered into the ruins of what could be described as an ancient office block. Just below the sand she found a box containing a pile of small clay tablets, each covered in tiny, wedge-shaped indentations. After digging around a little further she had uncovered several hundred more. To her they were just bits of useless old clay, so she sold them to a neighbour for the meagre sum of ten piastres. But the tablets were in fact some of ancient Egypt’s most priceless records.
After the canny neighbour had made at least a hundredfold profit by selling them to a local dealer, they were picked up by the big-time middlemen who supplied foreign museums. Recognising the wedge-shaped indentations on the tablets as ancient cuneiform script, they approached one of their best customers, E. A. W. Budge, the British Museum’s Keeper of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities, who was then touring the region. Offering to pay for his professional opinion, they handed him a few tablets to peruse. He instantly realised their significance: each lump of clay was an ancient communication between Egypt and her foreign neighbours. Although he must have been beside himself with excitement, Budge was a shrewd character and stayed deadpan, managing to take away eighty-two pieces to the British Museum for further study.
Now known as the Amarna Letters, the tablets contain correspondence between the kings and queens of Egypt and their opposite numbers abroad, using cuneiform as the international language of diplomacy. The earliest had been sent to Amenhotep III and Queen Tiy about 1360 BC and brought from their palace at Thebes to Amarna by their son Akhenaten. He and his family received the bulk of the letters, which continued to be sent throughout the Amarna Period to end in the reign of his son Tutankhamen about 1330 BC, when the court had returned to Thebes.
Whilst the great potentates of Babylon, Mitanni (Syria) and Arzawa (Anatolia) address the omnipotent pharaoh as ‘Brother’, the smaller vassal states kiss the ground before their lord ‘the Sun’. Egypt was then the most powerful and wealthy country in the ancient world, although some of Akhenaten’s later correspondence revealed that all was not well with Egypt’s empire. Palestinian rulers repeatedly asked for military support as they came under attack from their neighbours, but it seemed that Akhenaten was either unable or unwilling to deal with their pleas.
As news of the letters’ existence spread throughout the scholarly world, Budge’s acquisition for the British Museum was soon duplicated by the museums of Paris, Berlin and Cairo. Villagers worked overtime, digging gleefully through the ruins to meet demand. The letters’ discovery also prompted the first real excavation of the ruins, by the indefatigable Flinders Petrie who arrived there in 1891. After the usual arguments with the French-run Antiquities Service in Cairo, who would not allow him access to the tombs on which the French themselves were working, Petrie set up camp on the plain where the village dogs kept him awake at night with their incessant howling. He quickly realised that ‘It is an overwhelming site to deal with. Imagine setting about exploring the ruins of Brighton, for that is the size of the town.’
With only a six-month excavation season in which to undertake the task, it was impossible to do anything more than get an idea of where the main features had been. So with Lepsius’ fifty-year-old plans in hand, Petrie walked the site trying to locate the palaces, houses and temples of ancient Amarna. Almost immediately he found the outlines of the Great Official Palace. Built, like all ancient dwellings, from mudbricks, its surface was littered with chunks of smashed stonework and statues, fragments of bright-coloured glazes, glassware and tiles glittering in the sunlight amidst hollows in the sand which had once been lush garden pools.
After three days’ digging he uncovered parts of a truly palatial pavement covering an area of some 2700 square feet. Surrounded by a great painted border, its centre was a trompe l’oeil blue lake filled with fish and lotus flowers. It was immediately reminiscent of the painted designs discovered only a few years earlier at the Theban palace of Amenhotep III and Tiy, where their son Akhenaten had grown up. Naturalistic scenes of ducks flying up from the reeds where small calves frolicked were bisected by a contrasting pathway of bound Nubian and Asiatic captives, designed to be regularly trampled underfoot by the king and queen in a subtle piece of political theatre. Petrie realised, however, that the same actions by the growing numbers of tourists arriving by sailing boat and steamer would have disastrous results, and decided to conserve his pavement with a protective shelter and raised gangway. To the painted plaster surface itself he painstakingly applied a solution of tapioca with his fingertip, a cost-effective way of providing a transparent coating once it had dried.
Even more beautiful were wall scenes decorating the royal family’s private quarters in the less formal ‘King’s House’. One large fragment showed two young princesses playing at Nefertiti’s feet, all of them sitting on plump red floor cushions in surroundings which hinted at the original sumptuous luxury.
One of the first to appreciate Petrie’s new discoveries was a seventeen-year-old Norfolk artist, in Egypt for the first time working on behalf of his patron, Lord Amherst. Hearing of the new discoveries being made at Amarna, Amherst was keen to add to his growing collection of antiquities and encouraged his young artist to offer his services to Petrie and ‘learn something of his methods’. The artist was none other than Howard Carter, who in January 1892 joined Petrie at Amarna, the city where Tutankhamen is believed to have been born.
Carter was completely in awe of Petrie, calling him an archaeological ‘Sherlock Holmes’. Petrie in turn described Carter as ‘a good-natured lad whose interest is entirely in painting and natural history: he only takes on this digging as being on the spot and convenient to Mr Amherst, and it is of no use to me to work him up as an excavator’. Yet he soon changed his mind and conceded that, with Carter’s help, he could achieve much more. After building his own accommodation, the young man was sent to work in the place where Akhenaten and Nefertiti had worshipped the solar disc, the Great Temple, which covered an area some 2500 feet by 800 feet.
Although everything inside had been systematically smashed to pieces, Carter recovered the remains of seventeen superb limestone statues which had been mutilated and unceremoniously dumped over the temple’s boundary walls in ancient times. Sharing a feminine-looking physique, these figures of Akhenaten and Nefertiti were depicted holding out offering trays and clad in the finest linen robes, embellished with jewellery inscribed with the name of the sun disc Aten and a whole range of interchangeable crowns, head-dresses and wigs. They also wore the same costume on smashed up sections of the temple’s wall scenes, which showed them standing beneath the Aten’s myriad arms, offering up endless bouquets, incense, perfumes and precious ornaments to the tinkly accompaniment of their small daughters’ sistrum rattles.
Carter was beginning to enjoy himself, and wrote to a friend, ‘As regards the work I like it very much indeed and find it very exciting. I did not find anything of any great value until yesterday. One of my men found another gold ring.’ The piece in question was decorated with seated figures of Akhenaten and Nefertiti facing each other beneath the sun disc.
Working their way through some of the private houses in the central and southern parts of the city, Petrie and Carter also came across images of the royal family in people’s homes, set up as objects of worship. One of the finest, found by Carter, showed Akhenaten on a lion-footed throne with Nefertiti on his lap, her long, graceful feet swinging below the fringed hem of her linen robe while their baby daughters Meritaten and Meketaten clamber over her lap.
In addition to such great works of art, Petrie made some of his most historically important discoveries by looking in places his contemporaries would never have considered. Working through the rubbish heaps, ‘where the waste was thrown from the palace’, he found piles of broken Mycenean and Cypriot pottery alongside native Egyptian vessels, whilst further rummaging turned up large quantities of discarded amulets, seal stones and rings of brightly glazed pottery naming members of the Amarna royal family. Having located the ancient ‘industrial estates’ and glass factories, Petrie also discovered buildings which he dubbed ‘The Foreign Office’ where the Amarna Letters had been found. He even managed to fit in a spot of survey work, mapping out the plain and surrounding hills which enabled him to discover no fewer than seven more of the fourteen great stelae set up to mark the limits of the city. Pacing up and down, compass in hand, Petrie calculated that they covered between twenty and twenty-six miles a day, and Carter almost had to run to keep up.
Then Petrie refers to his ‘disabled foot’, and as the summer temperatures began to rise both men succumbed to a combination of exhaustion, malnourishment and ‘stomach pains’. Life on a Petrie dig was famous for its complete lack of just about anything, and as one of his students, T. E. Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia, later remembered, ‘A Petrie dig is a thing with a flavour all its own: tinned kidneys mingle with mummy-corpses and amulets in the soup.’
Eventually Petrie grew disenchanted with working at a site he described as ‘so ransacked that I have got very little and am almost ready to close work here’. Nevertheless, he and Carter still managed to fill 160 packing cases with Amarna finds. After being informed that Oxford University had decided to give him an honorary degree, most of Petrie’s share was, unsurprisingly, presented to Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum. The rest was given to University College London, to Petrie’s sponsors and to Lord Amherst, with pieces eventually ending up in places as diverse as New York and Harrogate.
Regardless of his initial disappointments, Petrie’s excavations had revealed the basic facts of the entire period. He had worked out that Akhenaten’s reign had lasted around seventeen years, and had been able to date the city to the fourteenth century BC on the basis of the Greek pottery he had found. He even concluded, on the basis of the dates on fragments of food and wine jars, that the place had only been inhabited for a total of twenty years. From broken and discarded amulets and finger rings he also discovered the names of those who had lived at the site, and even established the exact order of succession – not an easy thing to do when each pharaoh traditionally had five official names and these were known to change from time to time. He concluded that the third Amenhotep had been succeeded by his son, Amenhotep IV, under ‘the vigorous and determined tutelege of his imperious mother’, Queen Tiy, who Petrie believed had been a Syrian from the land of Mitanni. After five years Amenhotep IV had changed his name to Akhenaten, confirming Lepsius’ finding that Amenhotep IV and Akhenaten were one and the same person.
During his next twelve years’ rule as Akhenaten the king apparently took a co-regent named Smenkhkara, described as ‘beloved of Akhenaten’. Petrie also believed that this Smenkhkare ‘may well have married’ the eldest princess, Meritaten, and, after becoming the next king, was followed in turn by Tutankhamen. When Petrie asserted that the king’s wife, Nefertiti, was also a Mitannian princess he revealed the little-seen romantic side to his usually rather dour nature, especially when describing how Akhenaten was ‘truly devoted to his one queen’.
In response to continuing doubts about the pharaoh’s gender and French descriptions of the king’s ‘effeminate plumpness’, Petrie said he believed that this was simply the result of ‘good living and luxurious habits’. He asked: ‘Is it credible that the most uxorious king of Egypt, who appears with his wife on every monument, who rides side by side with her in a chariot and kisses her in public, who dances her on his knee, who has a steadily increasing family – that this king was either a woman in masquerade or an eunuch?’ Petrie’s admiration for this icon of family values knew no bounds; with his apparently revolutionary views on art, religion and ethics, he stated, ‘Akhenaten stands out as perhaps the most original thinker that ever lived in Egypt and one of the great idealists of the world.’
Meanwhile, the French-run Antiquities Service had finally found out about Akhenaten’s tomb, sending Alessandro Barsanti – an engineer, conservator, technician or odd-job man, depending on who is telling the story – to move what was left of the contents to the Cairo Museum and then fit metal security doors to all the tombs. Although the date when the tomb was ‘officially’ discovered by the authorities is unclear, Barsanti finally took Petrie, Carter and their friend Henry Sayce to see it on 20 January 1892, their small group clambering over four miles of rocks and boulders as they made their way up the valley’s dry river bed. Once inside, they witnessed the way in which the tomb’s contents were being hoovered up with little supervision, although it seems that the mummy – or at least part of it – was still around, having been dragged outside into the daylight and picked clean by treasure hunters. Sayce remembered that immediately outside the tomb the French ‘found the remains of a mummy which had been torn to shreds not long after its interment, and which I still believe to be the royal heretic’, as Akhenaten was often described.
These remains seem to have become more and more ‘fleshed out’ each time the tale was told, and by the time Sayce wrote his Memoirs, the fragments had turned into ‘the body of a man which had been burnt some time after mummification’. Yet this ‘burnt’ appearance was far more likely to have been due to the resins used in the mummification process. Although they were presumably packed up and sent to the Cairo Museum, no trace of either the mummified remains or the mummy’s wrappings was ever seen again. Rumours that the villagers had taken a body away and burnt it persisted into recent times.
Whilst Petrie could only look on as vital clues were lost for ever, Carter took up his sketchbook and drew some of the extraordinary carvings which then still covered much of the tomb’s wall space. With an eye for the unusual, exaggerated proportions of Amarna art, his efforts, published in The Daily Graphic, represented his first time in print. The most interesting scenes related to the early death of Meketaten, second daughter of Akhenaten and Nefertiti, who are shown ‘lamenting over the body of this little child – weeping and casting dust in the air, like the bereaved in a modern Egyptian funeral. Here, too, were inscribed the thoughts, the feelings, the outgushings from the hearts of a people long ago.’
There was soon considerable bad feeling amongst the local people, who objected to the fact that the gates being fitted to the tombs would deprive them of a potential source of revenue. Many of the unique scenes in the southern tombs were destroyed before Barsanti’s gates materialised, and, believing that piles left of gold lay behind their doorway-like exteriors, in 1906 local Christians used gunpowder to blow up the most southerly of the great boundary stelae (Stela P). Even the palace pavement so carefully conserved by Petrie was hacked to bits by farmers fed up with the endless hordes of tourists arriving by Thomas Cook steamer and trampling down their fields to get to the sites.
Some of the more intrepid tourists also made the long trek up to the Royal Tomb, which still contained numerous fragments of granite and alabaster from the sarcophagi and funerary goods. As one of them described on a visit in the 1890s, ‘We found the tomb; it had only been lately rediscovered, but had been rifled and destroyed thousands of years ago . . . I saw where the coffin had lain. It had been a handsome red granite sarcophagus. I picked up many little fragments, each showing remains of the polished surface and some with traces of carving. I also found many pieces of alabaster showing remains of hieroglyphs...’ Fragments of the sarcophagi were also being offered for sale by local dealers, as well as pieces hacked out of the crumbling wall scenes which were repeatedly the subject of vandalism as more and more of Amarna’s history was lost for ever.
In the face of such damage the Egypt Exploration Society decided to make a complete record of all the tombs and boundary stelae at the site, and in 1901 arranged to send out a brilliant artist named Norman de Garis Davies. A former clergyman from Ashton-under-Lyne in Lancashire, Davies had got to know a local woman, Kate Bradbury, who was a close friend of Amelia Edwards and, like her, greatly enamoured of ancient Egypt. Bradbury’s family wealth had helped support the Egypt Exploration Society and the fledgling Egyptology Department at UCL, and would also help finance Oxford University’s Griffith Institute, named after Bradbury’s future husband. Bradbury herself is yet another of Egyptology’s unsung, behind-the-scenes heroines who also provided a great deal of practical help, from sorting books for the Edwards Library to treating the ancient textiles that Petrie was known to bring to her house in a suitcase.
Having been inspired by Bradbury, Davies studied Egyptology for himself and, arriving at el-Till in January 1902, immediately began work. Over the next six years he made facsimile copies of all the decorated tombs of the ancient city’s officials, including the Aten priests Meryra and Panehesy as well as those who served the royal household, including the chamberlain, Tutu, Tiy’s steward Huya, and a second Meryra, ‘Steward of the Household of Nefertiti’.
Here Davies copied an unfinished wall sketch in which the king and queen rewarded their loyal servant Meryra. Although their names had recently been hacked out by vandals, Davies checked the old copies made by Lepsius and found that Akhenaten’s name had been replaced in ancient times by that of ‘Ankhkheperura Smenkhkara’, the same name Petrie had first discovered, and evidence that an individual named Smenkhkara must have ruled after Akhenaten.
The second cartouche, which had once named Nefertiti, had also been recarved, and Davies made out ‘Meritaten’, the name of the couple’s eldest daughter. On the basis of this information, it was assumed that Smenkhkara must have married the royal heiress. The suggestion by the French scholar Henri Gauthier that Ankhkheperura might simply be Nefertiti made little impact, just like the comments of his fellow countryman Lefébure before him.
Having established the basics of the highly distinctive Amarna art style, Davies concluded his six volumes of tomb scenes with the wish that ‘the new excavations which have been begun with such promise by Professor Borchardt will throw additional light on this interesting subject’. They would certainly do that.
Between 1907 and the start of the First World War, the Berlin-based Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft, the German Oriental Society, undertook large-scale excavations at the city funded by a wealthy Berlin merchant, James Simon. Directed by the small, pith-helmeted figure of Ludwig Borchardt, hundreds of local workers grafted away amidst clouds of dust in scenes worthy of a Cecil B. de Mille epic. Concentrating his efforts on the city’s southern suburbs, Borchardt uncovered the spacious country villa and studios of Tuthmose, ‘Overseer of Works and Sculptor’, one of the very few ancient Egyptian artists whose name has survived. Here, in Tuthmose’s once-thriving workshop, he made the greatest-ever find of Amarna art when he discovered a whole range of statues and figurines, in a variety of materials, of the ancient city’s most illustrious inhabitants. They included superb heads of some of the royal princesses, but the most famous of all Tuthmose’s masterpieces represented their mother, Nefertiti, whose painted limestone bust has become the very icon of ancient Egypt.
The life-size image represents the queen in her signature flattopped blue crown, perfectly balanced on a long, slender neck. Although recent analysis has revealed that the bust originally had a longer, thinner neck and shoulders of rather uneven height, for some reason, perfect proportions were subsequently achieved by applying gypsum plaster to even up the imbalance. The haughty grandeur of her slightly smiling face is by no means diminished by the fact that one of the inlaid eyes is missing, the incredibly life-like effect owing much to the subtle use of mineral-based pigments and the queen’s tasteful choice of cosmetics.
This fabled image of Nefertiti, described in endless detail, has certainly eclipsed her other less aesthetic portraiture in which it can be hard to tell her apart from Akhenaten. Even her name is routinely interpreted to fit this single image, repeatedly translated as ‘Beautiful’ rather than the more accurate ‘Perfect’. And whilst the ancient texts do indeed describe Nefertiti as ‘lovely faced’, they also say the same about Akhenaten. But for all its stunning qualities, the famous bust leaves me completely cold. Lacking the warmth of the glorious golden death mask of Tutankhamen, her only rival in the attention stakes, this version of Nefertiti has always unsettled me – even scared me a little with its expression of thinly disguised disdain.
When Borchardt found the great icon on 6 December 1912, unceremoniously stuck upside down in a sand-drift, he worked out that she’d originally been placed on a wooden shelf in a cupboard, side by side with a similar limestone bust of her husband, Akhenaten. When the shelf fell prey to termites and eventually collapsed the heads flipped over as they fell, and whilst Akhenaten was smashed Nefertiti landed upside down on her flat-topped crown. She had suffered little more than a few scratches and damage to her ears, although her left eye, presumably made of glass and stone like the right, was absent, having possibly been knocked from its setting.
What happened next is something of a mystery, whose details again depend on who is telling the story. It appears that Nefertiti’s bust was taken to Cairo along with the other spectacular finds of the season, and, in the division of the artefacts, the head was allocated to the excavations’ financial sponsor, James Simon. He gave it to the Berlin Museum in 1920, and Nefertiti was finally unveiled to the public three years later.
Her appearance in Berlin caused an absolute furore across the world. Following the discovery of Tutankhamen’s treasures the year before, the Egyptian Government had tightened up export laws for antiquities and demanded her immediate return. By the early 1930s this had almost happened, but then Adolf Hitler took power and declared that ‘what the German people have, they keep’. During the Second World War, Nefertiti was forced into hiding until liberated by American troops in 1945 and put back on display in what was then the western sector of Berlin.
Apparently her ‘Aryan’ looks had made her particularly attractive to the Führer, and this description was also applied to some of the amazingly life-like plaster-cast masks which Borchardt had found in Tuthmose’s workshop. In 1927 the Keeper of Egyptian Antiquities at the British Museum described one of them as being ‘not that of an Egyptian nor a Semite. It is that of a Northerner; it is a Nordic type.’ He described another as ‘no Egyptian woman; there never was any Egyptian woman like her, or Syrian or other Semite either. She is a European . . . I believe that we have here a contemporary facsimile portrait, taken from her own face, of some Minoan Cretan lady belonging to the royal harem.’ And although ‘Nordic characteristics’ may be somewhat far-fetched, the ‘Minoan’ description was not such an unreasonable assumption, given Petrie’s discoveries of imported Aegean pottery.
Some of this varied interpretation reflects the different nationalities of the scholars in question, and with the English, French, Germans, Italians and Americans all involved in two catastrophic twentieth-century wars in which millions lost their lives, Petrie’s peace-loving philosopher pharaoh must have seemed a very attractive character indeed. Petrie initially compared Akhenaten to the ‘plundering, self-glorifying, pompous cruelty of his conquering forefathers’, and this already high opinion was later confirmed in the inter-war years, when Petrie sadly noted that ‘the world is still far from ready for such a leader as Akhenaten; he would have no chance in Europe at present, where truth and beauty are strangers to men’.
Each generation built on Petrie’s highly influential opinions. The American Egyptologist James Henry Breasted, for instance, regarded Akhenaten as a man before his time, ‘a brave soul, undauntedly facing the momentum of immemorial tradition, and thereby stepping out from the long line of conventional and colourless Pharaohs, that he might disseminate ideas far beyond and above the capacity of his age to understand’. Having studied the hymns of praise to the Aten sun god, which have repeatedly been likened to Psalm 104 of the Bible, Breasted followed the convention of the day and translated them into the antiquated English of the King James Bible: ‘Praise to thee! When thou risest in the horizon, O living Aten, lord of eternity. Obeisance to thy rising in heaven, to illuminate every land, with thy beauty . . . when thou risest, eternity is given [the king]; when thou settest, thou giveth him everlastingness. Thou begettest him in the morning like thine own forms.’ Indeed, Breasted’s Akhenaten was something of a religious fundamentalist, and
Among the Hebrews, seven or eight hundred years later, we look for such men; but the modern world has yet adequately to value or even acquaint itself with this man who, in an age so remote and under conditions so adverse, became not only the world’s first idealist and the world’s first individual, but also the world’s first monotheist, and the first prophet of internationalism – the most remarkable figure of the Ancient World before the Hebrews.
Sigmund Freud, in his less familiar capacity as an amateur Egyptologist raised the hypothesis ‘If Moses was an Egyptian and if he communicated his own religion to the Jews, it must have been Akhenaten’s, the Aten religion.’ So now Akhenaten had inspired Moses and initiated Judaism too. And given the distinctly ‘supporting’ role of women in the Christian and Jewish traditions it was unsurprising that Nefertiti was nowhere to be seen in either interpretation, even though the Hymns to the Aten involve both Akhenaten and Nefertiti in a form of worship traditionally reserved for gods and kings alone.
Set against the backdrop of the First World War Akhenaten became something of a hero, certainly for the British Egyptologist and theatrical impresario Arthur Weigall. As the first to write a biography of the king, he considered him a complete pacifist with a ‘conscientious objection to warfare’, and ‘not only a Christ, but a nineteenth-century Romantic, with a touch of Hamlet thrown in for good measure’.
The Amarna royals were certainly a ready-made soap opera and perfect fodder for dramatists. Married to the archaeologist Max Mallowan, the crime writer Agatha Christie penned a couple of novels with Egyptian themes, whilst her little-known drama Akhenaten is full of the most wonderful 1920s’-style dialogue. Nefertiti is told by her sister, ‘Darling, I know I’m frightfully indiscreet in the things I say . . . That’s why 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...’ You can just see their bobbed haircuts and long cigarette-holders.
Christie was no doubt inspired by her husband’s colleague Leonard Woolley, who directed work at Amarna in 1921–2 after permission to excavate the site had passed to the British. With the Egypt Exploration Society concentrating their efforts on the central and northern parts of the city, their sixteen seasons of digging were directed by a succession of learned men including, from 1930, John Devitt Stringfellow Pendlebury. Curator at the palace of Knossos in Crete, Pendlebury divided his time between the two ancient sites, and with increasing amounts of Aegean material turning up he was the perfect person to appreciate the cross-cultural connections.
Focussing largely on the architectural and domestic side of life (one of their dig houses was even built up from the ruins of an ancient dwelling), the British team began to uncover all manner of houses built of mudbricks stamped with the names of Akhenaten and Nefertiti. Surrounded by high walls, the grand villas of the wealthy revealed a luxurious standard of living with beautifully decorated reception rooms, shrines to the royal family and bedrooms complete with en-suite facilities. It was all quite different from the back-to-back housing of the workers’ village which had been home to those who had built the city and its tombs. Their dwellings contained few luxuries – just their looms, tools and numerous amulets that related to the traditional gods, with little sign of excessive devotion to the royal family. Pendlebury believed that their village ‘was set as far as it could be from the residential quarters of the city because the workmen were a rowdy lot’; it was in fact surrounded by patrol roads and guard houses along the main road to the city.
Further security arrangements were revealed by the discovery of the police headquarters with its offices, armoury and stabling. Beside it was the ‘House of Life’, where official inscriptions were composed and copied out by scribes, and next door again lay Petrie’s ‘Foreign Office’ where the Amarna Letters had been found almost half a century earlier. Although its walls had by then almost entirely disappeared as a result of locals searching in vain for more of the precious tablets, the discovery of small ovens caused Pendlebury to wonder whether there could have ‘been any hot drink corresponding to the perpetual coffee of modern government offices in the Near East’.
Beneath the floors of some of the houses, the archaeologists even discovered proverbial ‘buried treasure’ when a large pot was found to contain silver rings, earrings, an amulet of a god from the land of the Hittites (modern Turkey) and twenty-three gold bars, some of which were sold to the Bank of England and melted down to provide an unusual form of funding for the following season’s work.
Using aerial shots of the site provided by the Egyptian Air Force, the team worked out the relationship between the Great Official Palace and the less formal King’s House, where the royal family seemed to have spent ‘quality time’ relaxing on a day-to-day basis. Random daubs of coloured paints around the bottoms of some of the walls, and the presence of paintbrushes still scattered across the floor, led Pendlebury to identify the rooms as ‘the quarters of the six princesses with their night-nurseries and their playroom’. The excavators also found the ruins of a third ‘North Palace’ with its own zoo and aviaries, and gathered more information about the types of temples in the city, from the Great and Small Aten Temples to the summer-house-type ‘viewing temples’ with their flying duck paintings and garden pools.
Such flashy excess didn’t seem to impress Woolley. After his own excavations, he noted that
much has been written about Akhenaten, his religious reforms, his monotheism, his idealism and his enthusiasm for truth, and I think a good deal more has been read into his words than the Egyptian language warrants. ‘By their fruits ye shall know them’, and the archaeologist who works at Akhenaten’s capital, Tell el Amarna, gets a very different impression of the Heretic King. That through sheer neglect of his duties he let the Egyptian Empire go to pieces is a matter of common knowledge, but at Tell el Amarna we can see how the Empire’s wealth was frittered away in fantastic extravagance.
He pointed out the shoddy, hasty workmanship of many of the buildings and highlighted a self-indulgent, superficial ostentation which ‘is scarcely consistent with idealism and a passion for the truth, and in one further respect our discoveries seem to challenge the reputation in which the king has been held’.
What’s more, the archaeologists had started to find disturbing evidence that the name and image of Nefertiti had everywhere been replaced with that of the eldest princess, Meritaten. ‘This was a public affront if she [Nefertiti] were still alive,’ wrote Woolley, ‘and if she had died the devoted husband would not have taken the opportunity to obliterate her memorials; we are driven to assume that even the family affection of the royal household was superficial and that a quarrel so serious as to lose Nefertiti her position had ended the idyll which had hitherto been the standing theme of the court artist.’ The cosy family scenario was suddenly shattered. As imaginations worked overtime, questions turned to what the famous beauty had been up to. She had obviously fallen from favour, been in some way disgraced and so much have been banished from court to the extreme north of the city, where large numbers of small inscribed objects bore her name but apparently not that of Akhenaten. The area in which she’d lived out her last tragic days was the same place where the Egypt Exploration Society had built their dig house, a romantic notion which gave one of the team members, Mary Chubb, the title for her highly entertaining book Nefertiti Lived Here.
So while the beautiful, vulnerable queen sought sanctuary in the outermost reaches of the city, her position and even her second name, Neferneferuaten, were apparently taken by the mysterious Smenkhkara, ‘the young prince whom Akhenaten had co-opted on to the throne towards the end of his reign’. And evidence for the kind of relationship which had apparently existed between this ‘young prince’ and the king was soon found on a small, unfinished stela belonging to a military officer named Pase. Similar to the scenes of domestic bliss found elsewhere in the city, showing Akhenaten and Nefertiti with the children, this one depicted affection between two unnamed royals whom Egyptologists had always identified as Akhenaten and Nefertiti. Yet both wear kings’ crowns, and the British Egyptologists Howard Carter and Percy Newberry decided that they must both be kings – which of course meant that they must both be men. Hatshepsut was very much regarded as the exception who proved the rule, and the scholars were apparently unable to accept that the female-looking figure sitting with Akhenaten might just be Nefertiti herself wearing a king’s crown. As a result, the stela was taken as proof of an ‘intimate relationship’ between the two men. Described in 1928 as the same kind of relationship which had existed between the Roman Emperor Hadrian and the young Antinous, this was ‘the love that dare not speak its name’.
So now Akhenaten was gay and Smenkhkara his effeminate-looking young lover, and the pair had banished the inconvenient Nefertiti from court. In an attempt to find more ‘evidence’ for their argument, the same scholars cast around for any conveniently uninscribed figures of royal males they could find. A newly discovered sculptor’s trial piece showing two versions of Akhenaten’s profile was suddenly redesignated ‘almost certainly Akhenaten and his putative co-regent Smenkhkara’. And there he was again, Smenkhkara strolling in the garden with his young wife Meritaten, both delicately rendered on a small painted limestone scene showing an unnamed royal couple who are almost certainly Akhenaten and Nefertiti. Yet as recently as 1984 the scene was described as ‘Meritaten and the young man her husband, Akhenaten’s successor, King Smenkhkara. This interpretation has generally been accepted by the experts.’
Back in the 1920s only one expert, Norman Davies, seems to have ventured alternative suggestions, based on his own extensive work in the tombs at Amarna and Thebes. Having studied an ink inscription referring to a third regnal year of a certain King ‘Ankhkheperura Neferneferuaten’, Davies wondered who this might be. After discussing the possibilities of a male candidate, he then asked ‘if Neferneferuaten can be Queen Nefertiti herself, who, having come into the king’s disfavor in the thirteenth year of his reign (a broken idyll, of which there were some signs in the recent excavations [at Amarna]), set herself up, [reigning] like another Hatshepsut as rival of her husband till his death four years later’. Yet little seems to have been made of his comments at that time.
As the British continued to excavate at Amarna, Pendlebury ventured up the Royal Valley in 1931 and 1935. Sifting through the debris left by Barsanti’s men in and around Akhenaten’s tomb, his team recovered fragments of coloured glass and blue-glazed vessels, beads, inlays and fragments of a human skull. Pendlebury also told his team about the ‘stories – about as wonderful as they are unreliable – about people at the end of the last century seeing a golden coffin carried down from the high desert . . . But when the tomb was excavated – in the [eighteen] eighties – a man’s body was seen there, a body that had been burned some years after it had been mummified.’ Based on earlier sketchy descriptions of burnt-looking mummified remains found in the vicinity of the Royal Tomb, there seems to have been some kind of romantic belief that Akhenaten’s mummy, or at least part of it, had survived until very recently. As for the reference to the ‘golden coffin’, it is just possible that this may have been a reference to the ‘gold mummy wrappings’ which the locals briefly offered for sale to the financially embarrassed Rev. Loftie before they were, presumably, melted down.
Whatever the truth, Pendlebury realised there was still much to be learned from a careful study of the Royal Valley, including three unfinished rock-cut tombs built into the adjacent valley as part of a new dynastic cemetery, Amarna’s version of the Valley of the Kings. But he never got the chance to publish what he found here, and 1936 was his last season in Egypt. In England later that year, visiting his family in Wigan, he gave a lecture to the town’s Education Society whose ‘interest in archaeological work was roused to fever heat about eighteen months ago by the visit of Sir Leonard Woolley’. So when Pendlebury turned up too, they were delighted. Before a spellbound audience, the archaeologist revealed that Akhenaten had become king when already married to Nefertiti, whom Pendlebury believed was his sister – ‘an attempt to keep the royal blood pure’. Both ‘were what today we would call religious fanatics’, and their devotion to a universal god ‘the result of the internationalism which had been creeping into Egyptian life’. Even the new ‘revolutionary’ art style was described as a direct result of Cretan artists working in the city.
Contrary to Petrie’s belief in an ethical king, Pendlebury had found ‘no ethics at all’. Not only was there ‘no sense of sin whatever, but no idea of afterlife. The ancient Egyptians very often considered their present life as prelude to the one to come, but there they got the idea wiped out completely. It was the King’s tragedy that he took away the standards his people already had, and gave them nothing in their place.’
Returning to his beloved Crete, Pendlebury continued excavations until the beginning of the Second World War when he joined up. Seriously wounded in the invasion of Crete, he was captured by the Germans and, refusing to reveal information, was put before a firing squad in May 1941, aged only thirty-seven.
In the bleak aftermath of the war, Amarna itself was left alone while scholars spent the next thirty years trying to make some sort of sense of the massive amounts of material recovered. As so often happens in Egyptology, many objects were only examined years after their discovery, if at all, and there are still many hundreds of ancient Egyptian artefacts whose significance remains unrecognised as they await rediscovery in the basements and storerooms of museums across the world.
The Amarna material sent to the Petrie Museum joined what Petrie himself had found but never had time to unpack, let alone deal with, and here it was studied in detail by Julia Samson who published some of it in Pendlebury’s posthumous excavation report. Following her description of the museum’s small ‘coregency’ stela naming Akhenaten and his co-regent ‘Ankhkheperura’, the report’s editor, Herbert Fairman, noted that one of the two figures accompanying the names ‘seems to be that of a naked woman, though differing somewhat from the normal Amarna portraiture of the female form. Are we to conclude that here Smenkhkara was depicted rather like the extraordinary Akhenaten of some of the Karnak statues?’ Although assuming that Ankhkheperura-Smenkhkara was a man who just happened to look like a woman, Fairman had nevertheless hit the nail on the head without realising it. Some of these Karnak statues did indeed depict the distinctly female form of Akhenaten’s co-ruler and had been set up at Karnak in the traditional capital, Thebes, where Akhenaten and Nefertiti had spent the first five years of the reign.
The first of twenty-five huge painted sandstone colossi were discovered by the French on the eastern side of the temple at Karnak in 1925, their distorted body shapes so extreme that they are regularly described as grotesque and even hideous. Widely regarded as showing the king as he really must have been, with elongated head, drooping jaw and malformed body, they are among the most complete statues of the reign. Conveniently ignoring statuary in which the king is portrayed ‘normally’, these are the images of Akhenaten that people remember, especially the one which appears to be naked, the so-called ‘Sexless Colossus’. Presumed to be of a man, its lack of male genitals has long been seen as ‘proof’ of many things: that the king was a hermaphrodite, or a eunuch, or suffered from the pituitary gland disorder acromegaly, or had any one of a whole range of diseases and ‘syndromes’.
In 1907 Grafton Elliot Smith, then anatomy professor at Cairo School of Medicine, stated that he believed the king had suffered from Froehlich’s syndrome, an endocrine disorder which would have given rise to feminine-like fat deposits around the breasts and lower body and rendered him impotent and sterile. It was a convenient explanation for Akhenaten’s body shape, and the logical extension of the argument was that Nefertiti’s six daughters must have been fathered by a mystery lover – candidates ranged from Amenhotep III to Smenkhkara. Although most Egyptologists eventually dismissed the idea of Froehlich’s syndrome as a non-starter, some have recently suggested that the symptoms resemble those of Marfan’s syndrome. This genetic disorder creates similar physical abnormalities, but because it doesn’t affect the sufferer’s reproductive capabilities Akhenaten could still have fathered children.
The controversial statues originally stood in the Aten temple complex which Akhenaten and Nefertiti had set up in the very heart of Egypt’s traditional religious capital. The walls of these new temples were built from thousands of small sandstone talatat blocks adorned with repeat scenes of king, queen and sun god being universally adored by their people. Dismantled after Akhenaten’s death, the small blocks were recycled in the buildings of later kings, albeit defaced and upside down to render their offensive images impotent. Finally rediscovered in the inter-war years during reconstruction work by the French, over thirty thousand of these blocks were recovered from the foundations of Karnak’s famous Hypostyle Hall and the second and ninth pylon gateways. Then the same thing happened just across the river from Amarna when the Germans discovered around fifteen hundred more blocks, dismantled from their original position and ferried over the river for use by later kings in the foundations of their own temples. But as it was 1939 and war was imminent the Germans were forced to leave Egypt after reburying the blocks, which were immediately dug up by locals and sold abroad, mainly to private buyers in the USA.
With these blocks dispersed and those at Karnak simply stacked up haphazardly in rows, their scattered scenes lay undiscovered and unappreciated until an American businessman, Ray Winfield Smith, visited Karnak in 1965. Finding it unthinkable that such important evidence should simply be neglected, he initiated the Akhenaten Temple Project the following year, opening up a revolutionary new chapter in Amarna studies. It would involve photographing each block and reassembling the immense jigsaw puzzle with the help of a computer. The project’s work was then continued by Egyptologist Donald Redford and, beginning excavations at East Karnak in 1975, he was able to identify and locate several parts of the Aten temple complex, including the massive Gempaaten – ‘The Aten Is Found’ – Temple, which incorporated the potent benben stone, an ancient cult fetish of the sun god worshipped by troupes of musicians and singers.
Much to everyone’s surprise, the scenes revealed that the rituals had been led by Nefertiti alone as she worshipped the Aten on the temple’s 30-feet-high columns. In fact the archaeologists soon realised that not only was Nefertiti shown alone in the Benben Temple, but on all the other talatat blocks she appeared nearly twice as often as Akhenaten. As they rightly point out, ‘It is hard to avoid the conclusion that this high profile which Nefertiti enjoyed in the first five years of the reign is evidence of her political importance.’
In front of these extraordinary scenes had once stood the so-called grotesque statues, their true meaning finally interpreted by a British Egyptologist, J. R. Harris. Building on Fairman’s original comment, Harris was able to demonstrate that the royal figures represented the primeval creator deities Shu and Tefnut: Akhenaten as Shu in his tall feather head-dress, Nefertiti as the goddess Tefnut in a close-fitting gown. So that’s why some of the sculptures looked like a woman! No eunuchs, no hermaphrodites, but a woman. And, just like the male figures, she clutched the royal regalia of crook and flail in her crossed hands and wore the traditional false beard of kingship, as the female pharaoh Hatshepsut had done before her.
The royal couple were also portrayed as the creator deities Shu and Tefnut on a wide range of objects, from the huge colossi to the gold signet ring found by Howard Carter at Amarna, each showing Akhenaten and Nefertiti as the two essential halves of the creative whole. While Harris was gathering more and more evidence that Nefertiti had indeed once wielded kingly powers, Julia Samson was independently coming to similar conclusions. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s the two of them published convincing evidence that Nefertiti and Smenkhkara were one and the same.
Just as Amenhotep IV had simply become Akhenaten, Nefertiti had adopted the name Neferneferuaten. Apparently made her husband’s co-regent in his twelfth year as king, she then added the name Ankhkheperura to become co-ruler Ankhkheperura-Neferneferuaten. Then finally, at Akhenaten’s death, she took the throne herself as King Ankhkheperura Smenkhkara. This standard use of multiple names by Egypt’s ancient kings, which had so misled Egyptologists, seems to have confused even the ancient Egyptians themselves. Often at a loss to know which was the correct name to write during times of political confusion – whether under Hatshepsut and her co-regent Tuthmosis III, Cleopatra VII and an assortment of male relatives, or indeed in the case of Nefertiti and Akhenaten – they often left the car-touches blank, figuring that no name was often better than the wrong name.
Regardless of the occasional blank cartouche, however, Nefertiti’s regal status is confirmed in a whole host of other ways. The crowns, clothes and false beard worn by Akhenaten were worn by Nefertiti too, who also carries the royal crook and flail. To her, as the dominant, often exclusive, figure at Karnak the Aten extends both the ankh sign and the sceptre, signifying dominion. She rewards her officials with gold collars, just like a king, and is shown sitting alone on the royal throne decorated with heraldic plant designs; one example even shows Nefertiti on the royal throne while Akhenaten perches on a stool. With her throne dais adorned with a long line of bound captives, Nefertiti is shown in an exclusively kingly pose executing prisoners with her scimitar, a bow and arrow case attached to the chariot she drives as another symbol of her kingly privilege. And, although generally ignored in the stampede to reach the ‘beautiful’ version, an amazing statuette found in the sculptor’s workshop at Amarna represents a slightly older Nefertiti, wearing the cap crown and standing alone as sole ruler.
Yet even this wealth of evidence was not enough, and the establishment remained largely unconvinced. Nefertiti’s use of kingly regalia was explained away as ‘the devaluation of royal symbols’, the assumption being that a woman’s touch would presumably devalue their worth. Although credited at least with being ‘ingenious’, it was stated that Harris and Samson’s hypothesis ‘has won few adherents’ and it was dismissed as ‘un-acceptable’.
Nevertheless, what had been revealed in the city of Amarna and Karnak Temple was by no means the only testimony for Nefertiti’s growing powers, and Samson’s UCL colleague Geoffrey Martin was engaged in re-examining the Royal Tomb based on Pendlebury’s notes from the 1930s and his own work there in 1980. Managing to shed a great deal more light on its chaotic history, Martin commented that the tomb had been not just plundered but systematically reduced to the smallest fragments by ‘iconoclasts, intent on obliterating everything associated with Akhenaten’. Yet he still managed to find pieces of the original sarcophagi, numerous pot sherds, fragments of stone vessels, wine labels, jar seals, parts of hemp ropes and pieces of textile.
His meticulous methods also allowed much of the original burial to be recreated on paper. Some of the pieces of jewellery recovered from the tomb in the 1880s were ‘exact parallels’ to pieces found in the mysterious royal tomb KV.55 in the Valley of the Kings, and although he could find no trace of the human skull fragments that Pendlebury had found, or any trace of the
‘burnt’ mummified remains, there were nevertheless still clues to who might once have been buried there.
A plain rectangular brick found by Pendlebury was identified as one of those used during the mummification process to support the corpse, whilst some of the granite sarcophagus fragments were splashed with a black goo-like substance. Although the splashes were initially thought to be from the unguents used during burial ceremonies, their appearance across the broken edges of the stone suggested that they must have appeared after the sarcophagi had been broken up. So, working on the assumption that those smashing up the tomb had allowed their flaming torches to drip over the work in progress, Martin sent off samples for chemical analysis which revealed that the goo was bitumen. Although this was believed to indicate a modern origin, more recent analysis has shown that bitumen was actually used as early as c.1400 BC, intriguingly as a coffin varnish.
Working from hundreds of fragments of granite, it was discovered that Akhenaten had been buried in a granite sarcophagus carved with his names and those of the Aten, although it was Nefertiti who dominated the entire piece. She had replaced the four protective goddesses who usually appeared at the corners, and, like them, had been placed there to give the maximum protection to the dead pharaoh in the Afterlife. This was hardly an action to have been carried out by a disgraced and banished queen. Her role of safeguarding the eternal future of the pharaoh suggested instead that Nefertiti had wielded tremendous powers over this world and the next.
There were also fragments of at least two more sarcophagi, one for the second princess, Meketaten, and another, according to more recent studies, belonging to Queen Tiy, who also seems to have been buried in the Royal Tomb. Its labyrinthine structure certainly incorporated several other rooms used as burial chambers for members of the royal family who had died before their own tombs elsewhere in the Valley were finished.
The wall scenes showing Meketaten’s funeral, copied so long ago by Howard Carter, were recopied by Martin. Although most of the scenes had been reasonably intact when Carter and then the French had drawn them in 1894, acts of vandalism as recently as 1974 now made the work a matter of urgency. In his expert scrutiny of these images Martin identified two separate sets of funeral scenes, one relating to the princess and another, almost duplicate, set which he believed was made for the burial of a shadowy royal woman whose existence only came to light in 1959 after her name was discovered on a cosmetics jar.
This was Kiya, the ‘Greatly Loved Wife’ of Akhenaten and Amarna’s ‘other woman’. As more and more evidence came to light, scholars began to realise that Nefertiti had had a rival, someone whose unknown existence had seriously misled earlier archaeologists. For it was Kiya and not Nefertiti whose names and images had been hacked out and replaced by those of Princess Meritaten. Martin suggested that it was Kiya whose funeral was portrayed in the second series of wall scenes, and that, because she appeared to have died in childbirth, the child may have been the royal prince, Tutankhamen.
As for the large unfinished suite of rooms just inside the Royal Tomb’s entrance, these may well have been begun for Nefertiti, although she does not seem to have been buried there and may well have planned to be buried in one of the other substantial tombs in the Valley. One is particularly grand, its entrance corridor cut down through the limestone some forty feet deeper than the king’s own tomb and suggesting that it too was designed for a king; perhaps it was even for Nefertiti herself, if she outlived her husband – which more and more evidence seemed to suggest.
A fragmentary funerary figurine naming Nefertiti as simply ‘the royal wife’ was once interpreted as meaning that she could not have succeeded Akhenaten and must have died before him while still a queen, to be buried somewhere in the vicinity of the Royal Valley where the fragment was found. Yet preparations for royal burials – including the manufacture of hundreds of such funerary figurines – generally began well within the individual’s lifetime. In some cases funerary equipment was even stockpiled close to the tomb rather than having to be hastily thrown together during the seventy-day mummification period. Nor do such figurines prove where an individual was buried, since similar figures naming Queen Tiy have been found in the tomb of her husband Amenhotep III back in Thebes, even though she is now believed to have been interred in the Royal Tomb at Amarna where fragments of her sarcophagus were also found.
With so much of Amarna’s history based on such small pieces of evidence, be they broken figurines, fragments of stonework or sherds of pottery, it is certainly true that the most unlikely-looking objects can often hold significant clues to Egypt’s ancient past. This was certainly true of my own choice of specialist subject, ancient hair, which to many people can look quite un-appealing. Yet if we give it the same attention as the ancient Egyptians themselves obviously did, it can start to reveal some fascinating clues.