Commentary on ‘The Arrows of Akhenaten’

Spoiler Alert!

PLEASE read the story Max Rush / The Arrows of Akhenaten FIRST, before reading this. You’ll find the tale on Hunter Graham’s Prose page: @hunter_graham

Commentary

Once again, it has been a delight to collaborate with Hunter Graham on a further adventure with Max Rush. This one is set in the autumn of 1948 - some fifteen months or so on from the first story. The Greek civil war is at its height, the Arabs are battling against the newly established state of Israel, and West Berlin is under blockade. But Max’s attention will soon be focused upon events from more than 3,000 years ago: the golden reign of Egypt’s most enigmatic ruler…

The reign of Pharaoh Akhenaten is one of the most intriguing periods of ancient Egyptian history. By the time Akhenaten came to the throne, what Egyptologists refer to as the Eighteenth Dynasty had already been ruling for two hundred years. It was perhaps the most successful dynasty in ancient Egypt’s long history, and had already produced many notable rulers such as Ahmose, the dynasty’s founder; Thutmose I, under whom the borders of Egypt’s empire reached its greatest expanse; Hatshepsut, only the second female to reign as Pharaoh in her own right; Thutmose III, perhaps ancient Egypt’s greatest military commander; and Amenophis III, also known as Amenophis the Magnificent.

Amenophis III was succeeded by his son Amenophis IV, who soon took the name by which he is now better known: Akhenaten. He is remembered as the ‘heretic king’, who turned away from the traditional polytheism of his predecessors by promoting one God, ‘the Aten’ - represented as a golden disc, originally an aspect of the sun god Ra. Scholars are divided as to whether or not ‘Atenism’ was true monotheism, or not: but it was certainly radical in the sense of making Aten as the focus for all worship within the royal court, which Akenaten relocated to a city later known by archaeologists as Amarna (halfway between the traditional capitals of Memphis in Lower Egypt, and Thebes in Upper Egypt). Here Akhenaten oversaw a remarkable cultural revolution that was without parallel, which saw his wife, the beautiful Nefertiti, elevated almost to the status of a co-ruler, and depicted the royal family in art with a degree of tender intimacy that had never been seen before (and would not been seen again until the European Renaissance some three thousand years later).

The Hymn to the Aten (a line of which is quoted in our tale) was reputedly written by Akhenaten himself. Some scholars have noted the resemblance between Akhenaten’s hymn and certain of the psalms, particularly Psalm 104: the Christian apologist C.S. Lewis popularised this view in his 1958 book Reflections on the Psalms.

Akhenaten’s religious reforms were ultimately unsuccessful. He was succeeded by his young son Tutankhaten (possibly after the extremely short-lived rule of another king, Smenkhkare). Tutankhaten soon changed his name to Tutankhamun - a sign of his embracing the old orthodoxies of the priests of Amun, who had vigorously opposed Akhenaten’s innovations. Tutankhamun was in all likelihood a puppet of ambitious members of Akhenaten’s court such as the vizier Ay and chief general Horemheb, each of whom succeeded Tutankhamun in turn as rulers, before power passed to a new dynasty - the Nineteenth. Tutanhkamun’s brief and largely inconsequential reign is only remembered because of the remarkable discovery of his virtually intact tomb by Howard Carter in 1922.

The burial site of Akhenaten is an enduring mystery. It seems likely that his original intention was to be buried at Amarna. It’s been suggested that his remains were later moved to the Valley of the Kings near Thebes - the traditional burial site of previous pharaohs of the Eighteenth Dynasty. However, none of the mummies recovered from this site have been conclusively identified with Akhenaten (it was for a long time believed that the mummy found in the tomb known as KV55 in 1907 was that of Akhenaten, but this is now disputed by many scholars). Similarly, although several mummies have been identified with Nefertiti, none of the candidates has yet been shown conclusively to have been Akhenaten’s consort.

This air of mystery surrounding the possible fates of Akhenaten and Nefertiti was a great opportunity for Hunter and myself when it came to the writing of Max Rush’s second adventure: particularly when coupled with the enigmatic tale of Zerzura…

The story of Zerzura is an intriguing one, inspired by the 1996 film The English Patient (itself based on the book of that name by Michael Ondaatje). The English Patient tells a heavily fictionalised account of the story of Count László Almásy, a Hungarian adventurer who in the 1920s and 1930s was a leading member of the ‘Club Zerzura’, a band of desert cartographers and explorers who spent much of their time hunting for the legendary ‘Shangri-la of the sands’ - Zerzura.

Zerzura was long rumoured to have existed deep in the Sahara Desert. The allure - and danger - of the deep desert dates back at least to Herodotus, who recorded that the Persian king Cambyses once lost a great army in the desert wastelands (another incident that Hunter and I refer to in our tale).

But the first certain mention of the name Zerzura - which in Arabic means ‘Oasis of Little Birds’ - dates from the 13th century. Later, in the 15th century, an anonymous treasure-hunter’s guide entitled Kitab al Kanuz (‘The Book of Hidden Pearls’ in Arabic) describes Zerzura as a white-washed city of the desert, on whose gate is carved a bird. The description of Zerzura that Templeton gives is taken directly from this 15th century manuscript.

Another intriguing tale is that of a camel driver called Hamid Keila, who in 1481 was rescued from the deep desert, following an unusually severe sandstorm, by a group of men the like of whom he had never seen before. They were tall, fair-haired and blue-eyed. What is more, they carried straight swords, not scimitars. The strange men came from a city in the desert called Zerzura where they took the half-dead Keila and treated him with kindness. The citadel was well watered with springs, and vines and palms sprouted, and the dwellings were richly furnished. The people of Zerzura spoke Arabic, but with many peculiar words that the camel driver could not understand until they were carefully explained. The strange people were evidently not Muslims, because their fair-skinned women were unveiled, and Hamid Keila saw no mosque and heard no muezzin. Some months later, the camel driver turned up in Benghazi, and was brought before the local Emir, to whom he told his tale. The Emir asked the camel driver how he came to be in Benghazi. Looking uncomfortable, he said he escaped one moonless night when he had regained his strength, and after a difficult journey north had arrived in Benghazi. The Emir was puzzled and wondered why, if his rescuers were so kindly, it had been necessary to escape. The Emir ordered his guards to search the luckless camel driver and they discovered in his robes a huge ruby set in a gold ring. Asked how he had obtained the stone, Hamid Keila could not answer and the Emir judged that he had stolen it from people who, although apparently infidels, had shown him great kindness. The Emir ordered the unfortunate man to be taken into the desert again and to have his hands cut off. Had the hapless camel driver encountered the descendants of a lost band of Teutonic crusader knights?

The first European reference to Zerzura comes from 1835, from the English Egyptologist John Gardner Wilkinson, based on the report of an Arab who claimed to have found the oasis whilst searching for a lost camel. According to Wilkinson, the oasis abounded ‘in palms, with springs, and some ruins of uncertain date’. The hunt for Zerzura began in earnest between the two World Wars - but although explorers, including Count Almásy, found evidence of human settlement from days when the Sahara Desert region was far less harsh than today (such as the exquisitely-beautiful Cave of Swimmers), of Zerzura and its hidden treasures there was no such trace. Over the centuries, Zerzura has joined the ranks of Camelot, Shangri-la and El Dorado as a mythic place of wonder and delights.

But what if Zerzura truly existed? And what if the king and queen buried there (according to ‘The Book of Hidden Pearls’) were none other than Akhenaten and Nefertiti? This is the premise underlying The Arrows of Akhenaten.

A note now about the political backdrop to our tale. The reappearance of Donald Maclean (also known as ‘Homer’) from our first Max Rush story is fortuitous. In reality, Donald Maclean was transferred from the British embassy in Washington in 1948 to the British embassy in Cairo (he would soon be followed in Washington by Kim Philby, then Guy Burgess, both members of the Cambridge spy ring). Maclean’s transfer to Egypt came at a critical time for the Middle East, with the outbreak of the First Arab-Israeli War (following Britain’s withdrawal from the Palestinian Mandate and the foundation of the state of Israel). In 1948, the Americans were still the sole nuclear power: but the Soviets were only a year away from exploding their own atom bomb, and were undoubtedly emboldened by the knowledge (gleaned from Maclean in Washington) that the Americans still had only a few atomic devices at their disposal, and none were easily deployable against the Soviets directly. The outbreak of the Arab-Israeli War coincided with the beginning of the Berlin blockade - perhaps the first overt action of the Cold War - as the USSR attempted to force the Western allies to withdraw from Berlin. The Berlin blockade, combined with the tightening Soviet grip over the Eastern European bloc, were factors that contributed to the creation of NATO just six months after the events of The Arrows of Akhenaten. Max Rush’s search for the Pharaoh whose arrows pointed to the light is played out against a darkening world order. For in the famous words of Winston Churchill, from two years earlier: ‘From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.’

Finally, the character of Nick Flaire and the seedy dive ‘Club Cleo’ is inspired by Rick Blaine and his ‘Rick’s Café Américain’ in the 1942 American romantic drama Casablanca - relocated to Port Said. As Nick might have said to Agent Marigold (or perhaps to Merrily Mountjoy): ‘Here’s looking at you, kid…’