Tag: akhenaten

“The Real Love Story of Joseph and the Fair Egyptian”

October 6, 2017

I went looking for something in 1919 today. I didn’t find it, but I found this instead.

This appeared in the Boston American, but as “The Real Love Story of Joseph and the Fair Egyptian” was a syndicated article, you’ll find it easier to read here. The story is, of course, not true, but I am always delighted and interested to find out something untrue that I hadn’t heard before.

There is no reference to the biblical Joseph in Tell el-Amarna. Although I cannot pinpoint its location, the line drawing above is an unmistakable depiction of two members of the royal family of Pharaoh Akhenaten, their faces and names obliterated by the damnatio memoriae that wiped them from history. The Amarna art style was so delicate and androgynous that it isn’t quite possible to tell the characters from here — Akhenaten? Nefertiti? The princess Meritaten? The prince Smenkhara?

None of them, however, are Joseph. The story related here is from the apocryphal tale of Joseph and Aseneth, known from Greek manuscripts many hundreds of years younger than the city at Tell el-Amarna. How the stories have been conflated just here I do not know, but a rummage around the internet will show you that inserting prominent biblical characters into exciting points of ancient Egyptian history is a profitable and widespread hobby. Some claim that Akhenaten’s grandfather, the nobleman Yuya, was the biblical Joseph, since it is possible that he was from Canaan, but the archaeological establishment has received this claim with a strained smile and a polite “no.”

The author of this newspaper article is hard to identify from his clipped byline, but I believe he may be the Rabbi Clifton Harby Levy (1867-1962). Rabbi Levy, best known as an influential member of the Reform rabbinate in New York and as a founder of the Center for Jewish Science, also wrote on biblical art and archaeology. If so, he would not be the first or the last erudite man to write an unintentionally misleading article on popular science.

The Amarna Period: Akhenaten, Dweller in Truth, by Naguib Mahfouz, trans. Tagreid Abu-Hassabo

May 30, 2014

If I were to recommend only one novel about the Amarna Period to anyone, it would be this slender novel by Naguib Mahfouz. This is not because I enjoyed it the most, or because it was the most exciting. It is because it is by a Nobel Prize winner and, more importantly, an actual Egyptian.
The novel is written in a Rashomon style, with the literary care that most ancient Egyptian historical novels lack. There is no dwelling on splendid palace grounds, lush ancient nights or grand monuments; Mahfouz felt no need for this. The evanescence and delicacy of his straightforward prose is enough. Salacious details and invented love triangles are beneath him. He worked with the archaeological evidence known best to him at the time.
However, like archaeological evidence, the novel itself leaves one strangely unsatisfied, and wishing that there had been more.

The Amarna Period: Why the hiatus?

May 18, 2014

I ran out of books and works that seemed, for lack of a better word, fair to criticize.  There is no shortage of Amarna Period novels published on Amazon and/or Smashwords.  There is also a good deal of . . . well, of this kind of a thing.  But there is so little that is critically valuable to say about such things.  The word “sucks” is not, I am afraid, critically valuable in all matters.  People love a good hatchet-job, of course, but hatchet-jobs are only required when there is some kind of need to punch upward — to debunk nonsense before it gets very far. 

I am looking for more books and works to review as part of the fictional historiography of the Amarna Period.  I am particularly interested in the Broadway musical Nefertiti, which died quickly and was briefly resurrected about ten years ago, but I can’t get ahold of a good cast recording.  But until I find something worth mentioning, I must keep my lips closed.

The Amarna Period: Akhnaten, by Philip Glass (1984)

March 7, 2014

Due to my old-fashioned habit of putting CDs in wallets and then saving those wallets with my college mementos, I found my copy of Glass’s Akhnaten, and I was able to give it a listen while working today.

I remembered why I didn’t take to it years ago — I got tired of the four notes.  Thank you!  A little Philip Glass humor for you, there.  Now that that’s out of the way, I have to admit that I appreciate the work, but as a Glass piece, not an interpretation of the Amarna Period.

Was there ever a composer better named than Glass?  His pieces are so clear, cool, prismatic.  Akhnaten functions as a splendid example of his work, and an excellent listen when you are otherwise occupied.  As a retelling of the Amarna Period, however, it is ultimately unsuccessful.  Due to the use of ancient languages for the singers, which sounded so cool to me when I ordered the CDs, the cast are cut off, remote from the listening audience.  They are as much as singing bas-reliefs or statuary themselves.  Yet the music is distinctly modern, lacking influence from middle Eastern styles that might themselves echo ancient music, so they lack even this verisimilitude.  Moreover, the stylized retelling of the story lacks any touch of madness.  The tangled, suffocating family tree of the Pharaohs must serve as a major element of any retelling of the whole story of Akhenaten’s reign.  Without this human folly, Akhnaten is almost divorced from the heart of its subject.

The Amarna Period: Pillar of Fire, by Judith Tarr (1995)

January 31, 2014

Here is the comforting thing about a Judith Tarr novel.  You can be certain that at some point the heroine will meet a man with olive skin, an aquiline nose, snapping black eyes and dark curly hair, and that he will be exactly the witty and confident yet tender and respectful lover she requires.  In this book, none of the figures of the Amarna period are supposed to be that guy.  Instead, he is a Hebrew, and he wins the heart of the rebellious captive girl Nofret, who is a body-servant to the embattled Princess Ankhesenpaaten.  That’s comfortably sorted out in the first few chapters.  And what are the Hebrews doing in Akhetaten?

This is a novel of Akhenaten as Moses.  The theory that Moses and Akhenaten were an influence on each other, or even in fact the same man, attracted some philosophical and literary interest in the mid-twentieth century.  Sigmund Freud initially proposed the theory of influence, and Ahmed Osman is the chief expositor of the theory that they are the same man.  Tarr’s afterword does not suggest that she actually believes any of this, but she has created a well-crafted alternate history around the theory nonetheless.

Personally, I never saw the fascination of the idea, even when I was younger and had a soft heart for nonsense.  Why should Moses and Akhenaten have to have anything to do with each other?  Why does it make sense to decide that the Bronze Age was only allowed one (1) monotheistic preacher?  Nonetheless, Tarr is a professional, and provides a depth and dignity to the idea, as a fiction, that it does not possess as mere pseudohistory.  What results is a solid historical fantasy novel, well worth a read.

The Amarna Period: A God Against the Gods by Allen Drury (1976)

January 14, 2014

Upon looking into the matter, I find that Allen Drury is not the man I would have expected to write a novel of ancient Egypt. He was an American journalist, anti-communist, and prominent observer of the Senate, whose most famous novel Advise and Consent was a dark Cold War tale of legislative intrigue. According to Wikipedia, he was a prolific author of nonfiction and the kind of novels that used to come in big chunky yellow-edged squares, mostly on contemporary American subjects, but also science fiction and two novels of ancient Egypt, of which this is one.

And yet – how could this not be someone I would expect to write a novel of ancient Egypt? That covers anyone. Anyone who wants to write, who can sling some prose together, who was ever enchanted by a glossy coffee-table book of the wonders of ancient Egypt considers themselves eminently qualified to whomp out such a novel. For proof, I direct you to the entire Kindle historical fiction section.

This is not necessarily a terrible thing, when it is combined with genuine talent and followed up with diligent research. Drury appears to have written a good deal of dreadful, sexist, didactically anti-Communist political fiction, but those flaws and obsessions do not map directly onto his work in A God Against the Gods, with the exception of homophobia. Drury did his homework as best he could with the information available to Egyptology in the 1970s, although anachronisms slip through here and there.

The novel itself is an engaging read, even though it relies on a device I no longer trust – the thoughtful first-person narration by powerful figures. You get this with a lot of period pieces about royalty – “I, Cleopatra,” and so forth. It certainly isn’t bad in and of itself – recently, I have enjoyed Juliet Grey’s Marie Antoinette trilogy, which uses just this device. But it’s frequently used with a lack of imagination as to its very premise, viz. and to wit, why should these people be so smart? Why should princes and princesses – the privileged, the powerful, the carefully blinkered – make engaging, descriptive, lyrical narrators? Can you see someone writing a purple historical novel from the sensitive, nuanced viewpoint of a Kardashian sister? How much more of a soul was Nefertiti? How do you know?

Drury’s book uses this device, with repeating and differing viewpoints, which to me at least mitigates the artificiality of the device by calling attention to it. The book makes a decent read, to be sure, but it has dated considerably in its information and its craft. At the last the book leaves the reader hanging for its sequel, as it ends with Akhenaten and Smenkhara having declared themselves double Pharaohs and consorts, to the horror of all. (This is certainly a theory in circulation.) I am unsure if I will check out the sequel, Return to Thebes, but I am tempted to, which is at least some kind of recommendation. All in all, I consider that it is probably one of the more broadly scoped and lucid Amarna novels, but not necessarily the best.

The Amarna Period: The Twelfth Transforming by Pauline Gedge (1984)

December 15, 2013

Here is the thing about not allowing your children to read grown-up books: it is not possible for you, also, to possess these books. If your child is a reader, then there is no shelf high enough and no place secret enough for them. I know, because I climbed up there. I was a lazy child and often overweight, but I climbed bookshelves like a monkey for my parents’ Stephen King* and Anne Rice** novels and – once I was done with my own age-appropriate books about Egypt – for Pauline Gedge’s The Twelfth Transforming.

I was ten when I first read it. For years, I reread it over and over, until the thing fell apart. Since it was out of print by then and I did not feel a need for another copy, I had not reread it in years, until now. As such, rereading it has told me more about the contrast between reading at ten and reading in one’s mid-thirties than about the historiography of historical fiction.

What makes Gedge’s book remarkable at the outset, to a typical reader, is the immediate and casual acceptance of incest. Pharaonic incest was practiced in order to protect the purity of Egyptian royal blood, which was regarded as literally divine. It is not clear to us whether incestuous marriages were meant to strengthen a pharaoh’s claim to the throne, or to keep royal blood (and royal claimants) out of lesser families by making sure that the sisters and daughters of a pharaoh were not free to marry and have children with anyone else. In any case, the first few pages of Gedge’s novel make it clear that this is a narrative where all members of the family are sexual rivals. It is startling and repulsive.

That is, it is now. When I was ten, I accepted the incest in this book without question. This had nothing to do with the thankfully decent world that I lived in as a fifth-grader. I never even contemplated it as such. Egypt was simply the past. The world of the book was what it was, and I had no place to question it, nor any need to.

Could I let myself be such a reader now? Today, I have a hard time reading most anything without the internal critic asking: what are we being told to accept here? Is it accurate? Is it probable? Is it pushing an agenda against some gender or race or creed? Am I, in short, being taken for a fool by some rat-bastard typist who has issues with his/her ex?

No, I can no longer do without that voice. I can never be such a carefree reader, so full of wonder, as I was when I was ten. On the other hand, I also thought that John Maddox Roberts was a good fantasy author back then; so in all such losses there is some gain.

Gedge’s novel is as rich as a rum cake. She specializes in producing a decadent, highly scented picture of the royal and noble houses of Egypt, a place you could imagine losing hours in languid drunkenness, as her characters often do. The story is one of royal intrigue and dissipation, of naivete and madness, not of ideas or of love. Egypt itself is depicted as a mass of cowlike laborers, either working or suffering, invisible to the main characters of the story.

When I was a girl, I was immediately interested in Queen Tiye, the viewpoint character, and sorrowful for her sorrows, simply because she was the queen. Now, on rereading, all I see is a woman who loved only power, who failed to be a mother to her children and was surprised and angry when they grew up to be either spoiled past bearing, or insane, or both. Did Gedge herself see that? It is hard to say.

The whole novel, as evocative and carefully written as it is, makes one feel slightly sick. Someone who read this novel without any prior interest in ancient Egypt would no doubt consider the whole wretched thing well lost to the Persians.

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* Which I read right away. I did not have to wait for Tim Curry for IT to give me sleepless nights.

** Which were boring and annoying and I could not see the point. In fact I have yet to see it.

The Amarna Period: Die! Akhnaten Die! by Joshua Norton (2008-2009)

December 11, 2013

What historical fiction is for is not, in fact, to tell the story of what happened in the past. It is for telling the story we want to hear – about the way we believe things were among men and women in a plainer, starker time, when we were not prevented from ourselves. The more keenly an author or artist realizes this, the better.

Die! Akhnaten Die! is a set of 20 consecutive woodcuts that retells the story plainly, wordlessly, in a mythical Wild West. It is as simple and bare as possible. Here, the story told is Man against the Gods, a skeleton-headed rabble of undead. Man succeeds, then Man is destroyed, and all must burn.

Go and see it; it will take you no time at all.  It is, I think, going to be my favorite of however many of these works I come upon.

The Amarna Period: The Maya Papyrus by Richard Coady

December 8, 2013

The Maya Papyrus by Richard Coady is an ebook available for only $3.20 at present.  I decided to buy it before I finished the sample.  At one point in this book, I was paging through my Kindle with one hand while stirring pasta sauce for dinner with the other.  That, my friends, is engaging fiction.  
In this novel, Akhenaten is shown as a madman, at first a pitiful, acromegalic child and then a cruel, bitter man, reliant upon secret police and a culture of fear.  Coady has a gift for depicting the inner lives of men torn by duty, and doubting the heavens.  In Yuya, particularly, he creates an affecting portrait of a man worn down by the demands of his position.  Coady also excels at action scenes, and at the everyday shoves, barks and bites of daily life in ancient Egypt, the bitter and the sweet.  The brief but affecting time spent with Hittite royalty, including the ill-fated Prince Zannanzash, was also excellent.  Coady’s depiction of Tutankhamun as a complex character, not a naif, is also not something I have generally seen in fiction of this time.  
The framing device is an old friend, the confessional false document (by which I do mean a plot device, and not a fake ID).  Personally, I am very fond of false documents, and write them all the time for my own fiction, but they slip easily into anachronism, especially so for ancient times.  We lack documentary evidence for a first-person narrative of candor and descriptive ability until much, much later, which is why that whole bicameral mind business got any traction.  Still, as I say, I enjoy false documents more than otherwise, and expect them to have some flaws.
Where The Maya Papyrus falls down is in the plotting.  At nearly every turn in The Maya Papyrus, the Most Villainous Thing is done by the Most Villainous Character.  Eventually, you think, the Most Villainous Character can’t possibly get away with the Most Villainous Thing again, can he?  And he does!  More brazenly than he did the time before! 
Half of the characters don’t have much agency to begin with, because they’re women – a very strange notion to have about the Amarna Period, or about ancient Egyptian women in general.  Every single woman in this book is either passive or insufferable.  Only one woman in Coady’s book seems to have any driving ambition of her own, and that is Thuya, the mother of Tiye and Ay.  She is depicted as a domineering nag whose only concern is for the propagation and power of her family.  To be fair, that is probably an accurate assessment of her, and of most highly-placed women at any given royal court.  
But why is Thuya the only woman in this book who decides to want anything?  None of the royal women in this story – not the prominent Tiye, not the smiting Nefertiti, not Ankhesenamun who plotted to place a Hittite prince on the throne beside her* – has a single idea about governance or religion on her own.  All of them, according to Coady, originally came from one or another of the men beside her.  To imagine that this happened in the Amarna Period, out of all eras of Egyptian history, is to cut yourself badly on Occam’s Razor.  
Nonetheless, I recommend this book, and I dare say I’ll go with Coady’s next as well, which is to be set in ancient Greece.  If you need to read an absorbing, intrigue-packed book about ancient Egypt, and you need to get it right now on your iPhone, this one is here for you.

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* Unless she didn’t do that, but in that case, either Nefertiti or her daughter Meritaten probably did it.