My pleasure, Iain
What are you reading at the moment?
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Not sure if you've got Amazon Prime Iain but there's a 'lending library' included if you have from which you can 'borrow' certain books rather than digitally buying them. There's also free books available occasionally but these can vary wildly in quality.
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The kindle daily deal and monthly deals are always worth a look. A lot of crap on there admittedly, but I recently picked up some Anthony Bourdain and Christopher Hitchens books for £1 each that I've been meaning to buy for ages.
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Clive cusslers shock wave, sequale to sahara.
Audio book, im dislexic and have no attention span, yet found i can listen too books endlessly.
Audio book, im dislexic and have no attention span, yet found i can listen too books endlessly.
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...beautiful cover, immediately made me think of the word amen and it's possible Egyptian origin from the God Amen...I do not know why. Akhenaten, a man born before his time me thinks, - having given birth to an early form of monotheism - a tad too radical for his time, I suspect.
A fascinating individual. He's been understood on the one hand as the ancient world's first individual (Breasted); a forerunner of Moses (Freud); and the inspiration for the Oedipal legend (Velikovsky). Others like Reeves and (especially) Redford have been less than flattering; especially in light of the archaeological finds at Amarna. Aldred is fairly neutral, although some of the book is a wee bit dated.
I'm going to attempt Dominic Montserrat's book ‘Akhenaten, History, Fantasy and Ancient Egypt' soon. Rather than a biography (which, to be fair, there isn't a great deal beyond conjecture), this looks at him as a social construct and how his different representations have influenced gender politics and cultural media over the years.
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I am not sure if Akhenaten or his wife was the real progressive, perhaps both of them were. I also find it fascinating that some of the images and statues of him appear to display Nuban, Caucasean and Asian features - perhaps it is just me. That said his wife's image like Tutenkamen's, have almost certainly achieved immortality.
I think we tend to limit ourselves by looking at him through the lens of religion. As far as I know, it wasn't a concept back then. I don't even think there was a word for it; as it was so enmeshed in every day life, regardless of social status. I don't think that he imposed his changes in a draconian manner, either. I feel that the Aten was really another ‘god' transcending locale; in the same way as Amun of Thebes and Ptah of Memphis, for instance.
Much of his imagery is certainly very bizarre. Some of the earlier images have prompted us to espouse every theory from Fröhlich's Syndrome, Marfan's Syndrome, hypogonadism, even going so far as to argue hermaphroditism. Personally, I think he wanted to represent himself as wholly unique; as the mediator of the Aten. Interestingly, the imagery of his later years assumes a more naturalistic form of representation.
It's interesting you mention the features of him and his family. The most Caucasian one, imo, is the so-called bust of Nefertiti. Although the stone for this is old, it has been claimed to be fake. Allegedly, the features were based on the archaeologist Borchardt‘s wife. It's been claimed that he had it created to experiment with paint and pigment techniques. A member of the German Royal Family was so overcome by it, that Borchardt didn't have the heart to tell him it wasn't genuine.
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Ye're on, Gadgey!!!
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You maybe correct; I do not have a detailed knowledge of the cultural, political and "religous" changes that were being wrought at the time. That said, I am mindful that everything was done to erase Akhenaton and Nefertiti's legacy from history by their successors. And, that the quasi monotheism that they introduced during their reign was quickly abandoned after their deaths. I do agree though, it is fraught with difficulties to view these events through religious optics.
I am not persuaded Nefertiti's bust is a fake. Radiological tests, detailed computer tomography and material analysis appear strongly support its authenticity. The pigments used on the bust have been matched to those used by ancient Egyptian artisans. The 2006 CT scan that discovered the "hidden face" of Nefertiti proved, according to Science News, that the bust was genuine; still I do not discount potential shenanigans although other images of Nefrettiti in the form of reliefs do exist. Regardless, for me, the bust projects an almost hypnotic beauty - art is art and who ever created the bust created a masterpiece.
I did not know there was such discussion on his images; agreed - it is bizarre.
The final piece in the jigsaw will be the discovery of Nefertiti's tomb; there is a part of me that is open to assertions made by some that this may have already been "discovered" and will be formally "announced" some time after the new Cairo Museum is up and running properly.
Indeed. The argument re. Nefertiti is a contentious one. The British Egyptologist Joann Fletcher claims to have identified Nefertiti as ‘The Younger Woman' found in a cache of mummies in an anteroom from the tomb of Amenhotep II. Not everyone is convinced, however. Other candidates include Kiya; a lesser wife of Akhenaten; and alleged to be the mother of Tutankhamen. The most recent theory put forward is that she is a sister of the occupant of Tomb 55 in the King's Valley and the mother of Tut. Theories abound, but no conclusive proof of the identity of the male mummy in KV55 has come to light. Some say Akhenaten, Tutankhamen's father; others claim a shadowy figure named Smenkhkare (whose full name is shared by Nefertiti!!). All that is known is that the mummy is male and death possibly occurred during mid-thirties.
In many ways, this is what attracts me to the Amarna period: the controversy and the lack of information. I heartily recommend Barry Kemp's work The City of Akhenaten and Nefertiti, Amarna and its People. Kemp dug at Amarna for over thirty years and, whilst he doesn't uncover anything radically new biography-wise, his archaeological insights (and well informed conjecture) about life during this time is fascinating; details of tombs and domestic residences. Also, finds that challenge the idea of top-down enforced hierarchical ‘monotheism'.
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What I am actually reading at the moment - I just put it down to take its picture - it is a big, expensive hardback - suits the subject - wonderful
@Missoni - 'Thanks for this; just checked it out, it comes across as a must read. I have downloaded several free texts on the early history of the region and added them to my reading list but this looks like a real gem'
Thanks for saying so - that will remain - I think - a unique experience in my life - ordinarily - recommending books about Mesopotamian religion - is not fertile ground - ironically - I have found. The Jacobsen book was the perfect primer text for me - I very much needed someone to 'hold my hand' through the basics - if you didn't have a guide - the source texts would be so obtuse - as to be opaque. I think it was the guy's PHD worked up to a full book - all the quotes he uses - to illustrate and argue his point - he transliterated himself - from cuneiform - hence why its transliteration and not translation - that's quite impressive - in my book or tablet. If you are still reading this - then give it a go - what is virtually identical - in all but minor details - woven into long standing beliefs - is the biblical 'Genesis' flood - albeit being written down at least a millennia and a half before the formulation of the old testament we know now. In the Babylonian version - Enlil - the senior god - just gets sick of all the noise humans make - they had been created by the usual sort of pantheon - named deities for crops, seasons, moon & sun - that sort of thing - to do the hard work - but turned out to be too noisy for the gods. Plus ca change?
@Scotshave - I think our 'willfully obscure' book challenge might well get out of hand quite soon. I didn't have enough background on the Egyptian stuff to follow it properly - I know who Akhenaten was - at least. Ill judged ideas of monotheism before its time - the axial age hadn't been invented at that point. I'll see your obscurity - and raise you - Coptic in twenty lessons - to be honest - I could have done with another twenty - if not more. Densely impenetrable - it reads from right to left - for starters. Like ancient Hebrew and Arabic - it doesn't have anything you would understand to be a vowel - no critical marks - nothing - no guide to pronunciation - which is fair enough - nobody speaks it any more - an awful lot of primary sources for early Christian theology are recorded in the language. Mixed between Coptic and Greek - The Nag Hammad texts - most obviously. An awful lot of scripture - that circulated freely at the time - valued enough - that the enormous amount of time and resources involved with copying them happened - until Athanasius of Alexandria put a tin lid on it - the early 5th century. And thus the canon we know now - the scripture we lost - the faiths we never knew - on that obscure note - yours - I.
My obscurity has been raised, and found wanting, Iain; I doff my hat to you, Sir. I fear that teaching oneself Akkadian cuneiform would be the only subject that could enhance obscurity to the point of opaqueness
.You have, however, launched me on a quest for the esoteric...it was at this point, I was going to adopt a different tack and insert an audio clip of Kurt Schwitter's Ur Sonate, but Sundays don't always deserve Dadaism...
Best,
S.
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For @Digimonkey and @Missoni (only since we're on the subject; and not excluding anyone else, you understand).
As outlined above, not a biography (although a resumé is given). More a metabiography, which explores how he has been understood and represented in socio-cultural contexts in the nineteenth and twentieth century; and how a Eurocentric bias can limit understanding in the absence of hard evidence.
It does make some maddening claims, so watch the blood pressure...
As outlined above, not a biography (although a resumé is given). More a metabiography, which explores how he has been understood and represented in socio-cultural contexts in the nineteenth and twentieth century; and how a Eurocentric bias can limit understanding in the absence of hard evidence.
It does make some maddening claims, so watch the blood pressure...