Out of the Black Land (49 page)

Afterword

On the State of Egyptology

A scholar, says poet A. E. Housman, is in the position of a donkey between two bales of hay who starves to death because it cannot make up its mind which bale to eat. Even though my friend Dennis Pryor says the natural position of a scholar is between two mutually antagonistic theories, I find the state of Egyptology unduly contradictory.

Consider the following, which confronted me just before I lost my temper with the whole thing. I am considering the position of scribes in the 18th Dynasty.

Barbara Mertz, author of
Red Land, Black Land
and a notable authority, says on p 134: ‘there were no little mud-brick schoolhouses in Egypt.’

Strouhal, also a notable authority and author of
Life In Ancient Egypt
, says on p 36 that there is evidence: of whole classes run for trainees…scribes…in the capital city of Thebes…(and) at the Ramasseum…and in later times…at other centres too.’

Now, although they may not have been made of mud-brick, they sound like schools to me.

Mertz adds, ‘girls were not taught.’ Strouhal retorts, ‘we know the princesses joined in (the classes) because one is portrayed with a writing tablet in her hand.’ Mertz says: ‘there were no schoolbooks;’ to which Strouhal replies: ‘the textbook was called Kemyt’.

Mertz says: ‘arithmetic was not taught’; but Strouhal states that: ‘the teaching (of mathematics) was limited to simple arithmetic and algebra which scribes might need…there were textbooks.’

Mertz says: ‘we do not know what age education began’; while Strouhal says without any qualification that: ‘schooling was from the age of five to eleven, though there was one scribe who was there when he was thirty.’

All this disagreement is on a relatively minor point. Both go on to quote extensively from the
Satire of Trades
, where a scribe urges his son to be a scribe and get a job where he can sit down. Both scholars agree on the palette, the pens, and the habit of learning to write on ostraca or on a plastered board which could be wiped clean—because these objects have been found in tombs.

What, I ask, is one to make of this? Strouhal and Mertz both sound authoritative, which is the habit of scholars. Both clearly have read widely and know their subject. But they can’t even agree on what age Egyptian scribes began their training; and this is repeated across the whole spectrum, from analysis of various hieroglyphics to the names of Gods and the outcome of wars and the dates of reigns.

To say that Egyptology is in a state which my mother would call ‘a dog’s breakfast’ is, in my view, to understate the case. I studied this area for some years. Then I travelled to Egypt to see it for myself. After a week of hard reading on my return, I was on the point of homicide; and if an Egyptian scholar had asked for my aid in extracting him/her from a deep pit it would have gone hard with them.

The other problem is that, much more than Greece or Rome, Egypt has been an ideal
tabula scripta
for each person to overwrite their particular religious—particularly religious—views upon.

Thus James Henry Breasted, the learned translator of every document in Ancient Egypt, except the ones I want—and who trained for the priesthood before being captured by Egypt—insists that Akhnaten was a secular pre-Christian saint because the cult of the Aten was an attempt at monotheism, and [unsaid] monotheism is good, solid and worthy; a real religion, while polytheism is crude, primitive and superstitious.

The utterly worthy and very learned Wallis-Budge, Keeper of Egyptian Antiquities at the British Museum and translator of hieroglyphics, wrote a long monograph on the subject, also insisting that the whole Egyptian culture was monotheist. This argument, though fascinating if that’s what interests you, has taken up an awful lot of scholarly capacity which could have been directed to finding out, for instance, what the calendar of festivals looked like; something which six month’s work could not do for me.

The Akhnaten/Nefertiti marriage has also attracted more past-life regressions and reincarnations than any other; and the general reader could easily sink into a wallow composed of new age air-headedness and 19th century religious intolerance if some sort of sceptical lifebelt was not available.

The prejudices of the writers seem much more to the fore than in, say Greek scholarship, which even so certainly had its debates. The arguments over Orphism, for instance, should not be attempted by the infirm or those susceptible to sudden shocks.

But most Greek scholars seem to have admitted that there was a strong homosexual element to life in ancient Greece, and have not been unbearably shocked by it. After all, it was Greece, and it was a long time ago, and chaps don’t have to behave like that now.

But when Akhnaten is suddenly seen without Nefertiti and in the company of his brother Smenkhare, who has been given the title of Great Royal Wife, and is pictured playing kitchy-coo on the Berlin Stele, it provokes indignation.

The ‘saint’ who made a brave attempt at a real religion could not possibly have been perverted! says a shocked and horrified Mertz. He couldn’t have had an endocrine disorder, impossible! He had six children! (I have an explanation for this) and in any case it is out of the question. Breasted and Strouhal agree with her.

I have never seen such a parlous state of scholarship. Surely there is nothing which is, per se, out of the question? What have these people been doing with their remarkable learning? What is wrong with Egyptology? The scholars can’t consider an ordinary case of transferred parenthood, and the wild edge are convinced that the pyramids came here from Mars.

Attitudes like these must have driven some fine fresh minds right out of their heads and into the latest discoveries in Anatolia, rather than take on Egyptian Scholarship. The rest belong to the Velikovsky/Ahmed Osman lunatic fringe. There doesn’t seem to be anything in between.

So, gentle reader, I have been forced to make Executive Decisions. I have based them not on anyone’s theories but on the papyri and the tomb inscriptions. As far as I can manage, the Egyptians speak in their own words. Where they were silent, I have supplied my own and if I have four contending theories as to what something means, I have picked the one I liked best.

I am quite probably wrong in some cases, but with the state of learning in this field, who could possibly prove me so?

On the Pathology of Akhnaten and Related Subjects

I don’t know what some historians think with (see previous remarks on the state of Egyptology) and I do not exempt myself from this criticism. Much study can send one mad, and much study on a small bit of a complex subject can render one bonkers faster than an indulgence in white crystalline powders of unknown origin.

The pathology of Akhnaten is a case in point. The depiction of the King grew progressively more grotesque with every passing year, as can be seen by comparing the early shabti of a plump boy with drooping breasts and a belly which overflows his cloth, with the full blown freak on the colossi in the Cairo museum. This is not a normal person. He has an exaggerated jaw, sloping, bulging eyes, a receding forehead, breasts, no visible penis or scrotum, and the fat distribution seen in such women as the author. He had classic childbearing hips, a belly which bulges and folds, and thick, heavy thighs.

There are some signs that this physique was adopted by courtiers for their own portraits—and this is not uncommon. There was, for example, a short-lived period in China where all the court ladies were fat, because the Dowager was fat (and they were very attractive, too) but this reverted to the Chinese ideal of a willowy beauty as soon as the Dowager departed the scene—but there are no ‘Akhnatens’ after Akhnaten is gone.

Two theories are extant: the general freedom of Amarna art produced mannerism; or the king had Frohlich’s syndrome, or some other endocrine disease, possibly caused by a pituitary tumour. The second has the advantage of combining with the first—the realism of Amarna art meant that the king was depicted as he was, i.e., deeply strange.

There is, as far as my untrained eye can discern, no mannerism in Amarna art beyond the freeing of the figure to be depicted face-onwards, the addition of many subjects which were not drawn before (like the lady throwing up at a party), and a certain fluency of drawing. Egyptian art was never realistic—consider the unpleasantness of meeting a man with two visible sideways shoulders and one leg perpetually advanced—but Akhnaten’s reign certainly loosened the style considerably.

I therefore was immediately drawn to the second theory—that there was something wrong with the king which was not wrong with other members of his immdediate family, as evidenced by the examination of their mummified bodies. There was nothing awry Akhnaten’s brothers, Smenkhare or Tutankhamen; or with his father Amenhotep III, afflicted with toothache as the poor man must have been.

We do not have Akhnaten’s body, so all this must be speculation.

However, the learned Cyril Aldred, author of
Akhenaten Pharaoh of Egypt,
has considered that Frohlich’s syndrome is the most reasonable explanation.

On p 104 he says: ‘Until recently it was possible to speculate that though the daughters of Nefert-iti were described as begotten of a King, it is by no means certain that the king was Akhnaten, particularly when Amenhotep III was alive two years after the youngest had been born…’

This entirely agrees with the theory at which I had independently arrived; and I was astonished to read Mr Aldred’s conclusion:

The discovery of damaged texts at Hermopolis…has made it reasonably clear that Akhnaten claimed responsibility at least for begetting the eldest daughter Meryt-Aten; and the presumption is that he is also the father of the other five daughters of Nefert-iti. If he is not, he cannot also be the father of the daughters of Meryt-Aten and Ankhes-en-pa-aten….[it might be argued that they are the children of Smenh-ka-re]… but it seems that both princesses bore children before Smenh-ka-Re could marry either of them. In that case the royal father of their children can only have been Akhnaten.

In that case the father can
only
be Akhnaten?

Historians are bound by the mores of their own time (as am I) but all of them assume that there must be some betrayal or deception if children are not fathered by the husband of the mother, because
they
lived in a biologically-limited society, when marital fidelity was fidelity and adultery was adultery.

In my time, when surrogate motherhood, reproductive technology and sperm banks exist, there need be no breach of marital faith if children are fathered or even mothered by someone other than the person who claims parenthood.

Akhnaten’s lack of ability to father children was dynastically disastrous and his own father—who had proved his fertility—might have considered it his duty to impregnate the Queen. In a more squeamish century, the Queen might have taken a secret lover to ensure the succession—as Queens have done in historical time.

In the Amarna dynasty, when all beliefs were up for grabs and the King believed in an immortal unknowable God, when Amenhotep III himself was the product of a divine birth, when the King believed that he was personally and by virtue of his deformities, growing into a God himself, would he not have claimed fatherhood of any child his wife and daughters bore? The daughters’ children would have been sired by someone in the Royal line, probably Smenkhare, but possibly a priest of the Aten. The child would be seen as a child of Aten, fountain of all fertility as Hapi, the God of the Nile whom Akhnaten strangely resembled.

Also, I have always been suspicious of anyone who proclaims so consistently that he is a family man.

Anyway, the fathering of her children by her father-in-law need not have interrupted Nefertiti’s relationship with her husband, any more than it destroys the amity of the couples who presently resort to IVF or sperm donation. The use of a donor does not mean that these children are any less their parent’s, or that they are loved any less than those born by the conventional method. Akhnaten and Nefertiti could have been blissfully happy together. By the pictures, they were.

Transliteration of Egyptian

This is really difficult. Ancient Egyptian is not the father of modern Arabic, so few useful comparisons can be drawn, unlike modern and ancient Greek or Latin and Italian. Like Hebrew, written Egyptian did not have vowels. Intelligent guesses can be made about vocalisation, but no one knows how it really would have sounded (though the Copts still speak an extensively modified version). It had also interesting dialectic points, like three versions of h. Much as I appreciate authenticity, I contemplated a few names in their direct transliterated form Smnk’r’ for Smenkhare, Nfrtyt3 for Nefertiti, Akhnaten is Gm.(t) p3-itn, for instance and decided that I would stick to a uniform spelling, using the system which employs an ‘e’ as a default vowel, even though this may occasionally be erroneous. I have thus used Amen instead of Amun. I have also used Maat for the Goddess of Truth rather than M’3t or Mut on purely euphonic grounds and to avoid confusing her with Mut the Mother of the Gods, wife of Amen-Re.