The Buried by Peter Hessler

Author:Peter Hessler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2019-05-06T16:00:00+00:00

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Ancient Egyptians rarely explained themselves. They never identified why they built in the shape of the pyramid or what those monuments symbolized. We don’t know how they moved two-ton blocks of stone to a height of more than four hundred feet. We can trace the architectural progression from the Shuna to the Step Pyramid to the Great Pyramid, but there’s no contemporary source that describes this process. Even basic social traditions remain a mystery. Illustrations on tomb walls provide rich details about funerary practices, but we lack an equivalent source for weddings. In three thousand years of Egyptian history, there’s no direct evidence that any marriage ceremony ever took place.

In ancient Greece and Rome, people left many contemporary commentaries about political and social events. “There’s none of that in ancient Egypt,” Kemp said. “You have to infer a great deal. And you infer with parallels in mind that you’ve picked up from more recent periods. It becomes difficult to tell how much support somebody like Akhenaten had. Was he totally unpopular? Or was he popular and the military removed all traces of that support?”

Without many sources, one inevitably excavates the imagination. In 1905, the Egyptologist James Henry Breasted described Akhenaten as “the first individual in human history,” because the king stands out so brilliantly against the patterned past. Over the course of the twentieth century, the ancient king was portrayed variously as a proto-Christian, a peace-loving environmentalist, an out-and-proud homosexual, and a totalitarian dictator. His image was embraced with equal enthusiasm by both the Nazis and the Afrocentric movement. The Nazis connected the Aten to the Aryan tradition of sun worship, and they even convinced themselves that Akhenaten was partly of Aryan descent. In turn, black thinkers celebrated the king as “Blackhenaten,” a symbol of African power and genius. Thomas Mann, Naguib Mahfouz, Frida Kahlo, and Philip Glass all incorporated Akhenaten into their creative work. Sigmund Freud was so excited by Amarna digs during the 1930s that he wrote, “If I were a millionaire, I would finance the continuation of these excavations.” He once fainted during a heated argument with Carl Jung about whether Akhenaten had suffered from excessive love of his mother. (Freud’s diagnosis: Akhenaten was oedipal, almost a thousand years before Oedipus.)

Dominic Montserrat, an Egyptologist whose Akhenaten book is subtitled History, Fantasy, and Ancient Egypt, noted that the king has become “a sign rather than a person.” But there’s enough evidence for a more grounded view of this figure. He was part of the Eighteenth Dynasty, which rose to power in conflict with the Hyksos, a group from the eastern Mediterranean that gained control of the Delta during the time now known as the Second Intermediate Period. In order to drive out the Hyksos and reconsolidate the empire, the forefathers of the Eighteenth Dynasty had to adopt key innovations from their enemy, including the horse-drawn chariot and the composite bow.

This struggle also motivated the Egyptians to professionalize their military. The Eighteenth Dynasty, which began in

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