At the start of his reign Akhenaten adhered to tradition, and his early portraits show a conventional New Kingdom monarch performing typical kingly deeds. By the end of Year 5, however, the king had developed a startling range of features. His narrow head, perched atop a long, thin neck, was now elongated, its length deliberately emphasized by his preference for tall head-dresses plus the traditional pharaoh’s false beard. His face, in spite of its narrow almond-shaped eyes, fleshy earlobes, pendulous jaw, long nose, hollow cheeks, pronounced cheek-bones and thick lips, had a curious sensuality in its knowing and secretive smile. His body had become the exact opposite of the king’s traditional manly physique. His shoulders, chest, arms and lower legs were weedy and underdeveloped and his collar bone excessively prominent, and yet he had wide hips, heavy thighs, pronounced breasts, a narrow waist and a bloated stomach which bulged over his tight-fitting kilt. The colossal statues which once lined the colonnade at the Theban Gempaaten, when viewed as intended, from below and in profile lit by the uncompromising Egyptian sunlight, must be classed among the most effective and disturbing pieces of dynastic art. Even today, housed in the less appropriate setting of Cairo Museum, they retain a haunting power to disturb. Weigall, a great admirer of Akhenaten, chose to see in these portraits of the young king:
… a pale sickly youth. His head seemed too large for his body; his eyelids were heavy; his eyes were eloquent of dreams. His features were delicately moulded, and his mouth, in spite of a somewhat protruding lower jaw, is reminiscent of the best of the art of Rossetti.2
Others have been less kind, employing emotive words such as hideous, travesty, grotesque and weird in their descriptions of Akhenaten’s face and physique:
A son of more unlikely appearance than Amenophis IV [Akhenaten] could hardly have been born to altogether normal parents. Though his earliest monuments do not present his features and figure as markedly different from those of any earlier Egyptian prince, the representations of only a few years later provide us with frankly hideous portraits the general fidelity of which cannot be doubted… the standing colossi from the peristyle court at Karnak have a look of fanatical determination such as his subsequent history confirmed all too fatally.3
The feminization of the king’s body has been obvious to everyone, while to Grimal, the swollen body of the king is representative of death itself:
The accentuation of his facial features and the deliberate sagging of his torso produce such a disease-ridden appearance in the colossal Osirid statues (executed by the sculptor Bak) that their bloated stomachs might even be interpreted in terms of bodily fluids inflating the decomposed corpse of Osiris.4
The royal artists must have found it difficult to break away from the old tradition of standardized realism and adapt to a new, more surreal way of expressing themselves. It has generally been assumed that their eagerness to change combined with their lack of expertise in the new style causing them to overcompensate, producing bizarre portraits of the king and queen with the new elements inadvertently exaggerated beyond the point of realism. In fact we have no reason to suppose that these new representations are in any way accidental or a mistake, and it seems equally, if not more, valid to assume that we are witnessing a deliberate experimental phase inspired by Akhenaten and implemented by his chief sculptor, Bak. Bak, trained in the classical Theban style, was responsible for the earliest and most unusual monuments of his patron’s reign, and it was only following his replacement by the chief sculptor Tuthmosis that Akhenaten’s art mellowed into a softer, more relaxed realism. With the move to Amarna and the subsequent employment of locally and northern-trained sculptors, the king became more human in form. His face seemed less haggard and his body appeared altogether more masculine, although still flabby and out of condition. Even with these modifications Akhenaten remained the most striking and instantly recognizable pharaoh in Egypt’s history. The art of his reign, with its increased sense of movement and expression plus its emphasis on informal scenes from daily life and nature, is now widely recognized as one of the high points of Egyptian culture, yielding what Egyptian art expert Cyril Aldred has considered to be ‘more than its proper quota of masterpieces’.5
Akhenaten must have been the inspiration behind his own revised image. No artist would have taken it upon himself to challenge tradition in such a dramatic fashion, and indeed Bak explicitly tells us that he was merely ‘the pupil whom His Majesty taught’. Bak would have learned his technical expertise from his father, Men, chief sculptor to Amenhotep III and probable author of the Colossi of Memnon. Father and son are shown together on a rock relief at Aswan, where a miniature Men worships before a seated statue of Amenhotep III, possibly one of his own colossi, offering ‘every good and pure thing; bread and beer, oxen and fowl and every good vegetable’, while Bak presents an offering table heaped with delicacies to a statue of Akhenaten which is now erased from the scene.
The move from the old art style to the new seems to come as a sudden and shocking change, a swift response to the king’s abandoning of the old religious beliefs. Indeed, the Theban tomb of Ramose, where the two contrasting styles sit uncomfortably side by side, gives the impression that the change occurred overnight. In fact Akhenaten was not so much inventing a new style as speeding up and exaggerating a natural evolution and, just as his religious ‘revolution’ was rooted in the theology of the past, so several of Akhenaten’s innovative artistic features may be traced back to the art of his forebears.
Egypt’s increased internationalism during the 18th Dynasty had already allowed foreign influences to infiltrate the hitherto insular arts and crafts. Gradually the strict artistic conventions of the Old and Middle Kingdoms had started to relax and informal poses, flowing draperies, modern clothing and hairstyles, and pierced ears had already made their way into the repertoire. This trend towards modernism was reflected in the literature of the period which now showed a greater freedom of composition and an increased awareness of modern language; the New Kingdom was the period of divine hymns, lyrical love poetry and action-packed fiction. At the same time had come an increasing tendency towards realism in royal portraiture. The wooden head of Tiy recovered from Gurob (Plate 3) shows the queen not only with her habitual down-turned lips but with heavy eyelids and deep furrows running from her nose to her mouth; it is the portrait of an individual rather than a stereotyped queen, and it shows a woman who is well beyond the first flush of youth. While his father and grandfather had already appeared more stolid than their predecessors, Amenhotep III, towards the end of his reign, became the first pharaoh to be depicted as a fat and frail human rather than an immortal demi-god. Some of Amenhotep’s statues show the almond-shaped eyes, full curved lips, sharp features and obvious breasts of the early Amarna pieces, and he also adopts the more relaxed poses and informal garments which have contributed to his diagnosis as a sad and worn-out failure.6
Many early egyptologists sought to interpret Akhenaten’s new image as a true representation of the king himself. Akhenaten consistently stressed his devotion to maat, which in its simplest form may be translated as truth. Thus they reasoned that the king, in the grip of religious mania, had decided to ‘come clean’ about his unfortunate appearance. This led, not unnaturally, to the assumption that Akhenaten suffered from some serious medical complaint. His body as seen in both two- and three-dimensional art, with its breasts, narrow waist and wide hips, is certainly not the body of a healthy male. Indeed the Egyptian historian Manetho had recorded the succession as passing from Amenhotep III to an unknown Orus and then to ‘his daughter Acencheres’ who is presumably the effeminate Akhenaten, although some have taken Orus to be Nefertiti, and who is reported to have ruled over Egypt for a little over twelve years. Flinders Petrie, writing in 1894, was able to dismiss what was perhaps the most bizarre suggestion then current:
It has been proposed that Amenhotep IV died after a very few years; and that Akhenaten, a man, or a woman was raised by intrigue into his vacant place, adopted his throne
name, and his diadem name, and introduced the new style. It has been proposed that the new ruler was a woman, masquerading with a wife and suppositious children; such a notion resting on the effeminate plumpness of Akhenaten, and the alleged prevalence of feminine courtiers. It has also been proposed that he was a eunuch.7
As Petrie reasoned, with logic which holds good today:
Is it credible that the most uxorious king of Egypt, who appears with his wife on every monument, who rides side by side with her in a chariot, and kisses her in public, who dances her on his knee, who has a steadily increasing family – that this king was either a woman in masquerade or a eunuch?8
Needless to say, speculation over the nature of the king’s supposed medical condition was rife. Unfortunately, as Akhenaten’s mummy has never been identified, all diagnoses had through necessity to be based on the artistic evidence and were therefore, to say the least, highly speculative.
Weigall’s suggestion that Akhenaten was an epileptic whose condition caused him to hallucinate and therefore inspired his devotion to the sun’s disc can be dismissed as mere guesswork perhaps inspired by the epilepsy attributed to Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar. Most plausible is the suggestion that Akhenaten may have suffered from the feminizing Fröhlich’s syndrome, a group of symptoms caused by damage to the pituitary gland and thalamus.9 Sufferers from Fröhlich’s syndrome may experience a female-type distribution of fat over the breasts, hips and thighs, while the genitalia may be so underdeveloped as to seem invisible amid the surrounding folds of fat. As this disease generally becomes apparent only at puberty, it would conveniently explain the change from the conventional images of the young king at his accession to the new style some four years later.
The major stumbling block in attributing any such feminizing disease to Akhenaten is the fact that he appears to have fathered at least six children, and most sufferers of Fröhlich’s syndrome are impotent. Of course, the father of a baby is not always the husband of its mother, but if Akhenaten was not the father of the princesses, who was? His fertility was obviously a matter of huge importance to the king, who displayed his ever-increasing brood of daughters as a means of reinforcing his link to the Aten, the most powerful creator god. Is it possible that Akhenaten, aware but ashamed of his illness, sanctioned or turned a blind eye to the use of an anonymous, surrogate father? Perhaps, but lacking the bodies of both Akhenaten and his daughters for DNA testing, this is something which would be very difficult to prove.
No specific clue to their paternity is provided by the titles of the princesses, who are most frequently described as:
King’s bodily daughter whom he loves, [Meritaten], born of the Great King’s Wife whom he loves, Mistress of the Two Lands, Nefertiti, may she live
As we have already noted, all the women in the royal family bore titles which reflected their relationship with the king. The closer this relationship, the more important was the lady. Therefore just as there was no Egyptian title of ‘queen’, merely ‘King’s Wife’ or ‘King’s Great Wife’, so there was no equivalent of princess and all the king’s female offspring were ‘King’s Daughters’, a title which they would carry all their lives without necessarily needing to mention the name of the king. It is not therefore unusual that the princesses’ father goes unnamed. What is unusual is that they are specifically identified as the daughters of Nefertiti; we would not expect to find a queen’s name included in her children’s title in this way, as the queen was very much the minor parent. Just as Tiy’s high status seems confirmed by her inclusion on the commemorative scarabs of Amenhotep III, so the inclusion of Nefertiti’s name in her daughters’ titles can be read as a sign of her own prominent position. Their affiliation thus seems entirely in keeping with the hierarchy within the royal family where the line of authority descended downwards from the Aten to the king, then to the queen and finally to the royal children. In fact, towards the end of their father’s reign, two of the princesses are directly affiliated to Akhenaten on blocks recovered from Hermopolis Magna.
More recently it has been suggested that Akhenaten may have suffered from Marfan’s Syndrome, a genetically determined abnormality caused by defective collagen formation; sufferers from Marfan’s Syndrome tend to be tall, with long faces and chest deformities. There may also be a high palate and eye defects, but a female-type distribution of fat as shown in Akhenaten’s statuary would be unusual.
One curious colossal statue recovered from the Theban Gempaaten must be considered before concluding any discussion of Akhenaten’s health and sexuality. Gempaaten took the form of an open courtyard surrounded by at least twenty-four colossal figures of the king. These statues, which were carved at the start of his reign and were highly exaggerated in style, were based on traditional Osirid mummiform statues but show Akhenaten dressed in his favourite pleated linen kilt, carrying the crook and flail in his crossed arms and wearing head-cloth plus either the double crown of Upper and Lower Egypt or the plumed head-dress of Shu. His upper body and arms are carved with the double cartouche of the Aten and his kilt, which bears his name on its belt, is actually carved into the stone of the statue and would originally have been painted. One unfinished and slightly damaged statue, however, displays a naked torso without any sign of a kilt and without any genitalia (Plate 10). The long thin head seems to be that of Akhenaten and the figure wears the king’s beard and double crown, although unusually the head-cloth is missing. The upper torso again has the crossed arms carrying the crook and flail, and is decorated with the cartouches of the Aten. The lower torso has a well-defined waist and an indented navel. The upper legs appear in proportion to the body, while the lower legs and most of the crown are missing.
Fig. 4.1 Nefertiti’s trademark blue crown and flimsy linen robe
It would be wrong, in view of the evidence discussed above, to leap to the conclusion that the figure must be true to life. Had Akhenaten been born without any genitalia he would undoubtedly have been classed as a woman and would never have become king. Nor is it likely that the genitalia would be omitted simply for reasons of modesty; the god Min was always depicted with a larger than life-sized erect penis and this does not appear to have caused any offence. While it was very unusual for the king to be portrayed without any clothing, on those occasions when a monarch was depicted naked he was shown as nature made him. Egyptian art was very literal and, as the king was in one of his aspects a fertility god, it would have been inappropriate to have presented him as in any way disabled.
Given that all the other Gempaaten statues are clothed, it is possible to argue that this unfinished figure was not in fact intended to be naked and would have eventually been carved or painted to show a kilt. However, given the shaping of the torso, the definition of the upper legs and the apparent completeness of the navel, this seems unlikely; the kilt would have needed to be a micro-skirt which would have hugged the king’s figure in an unprecedented and impractical fashion. It may be that the sculpture would eventually have been dressed in clothing made from some separate material, perhaps a skirt of precious metal. The genitalia may therefore have been omitted either because they would not be seen or in order to allow the garment to hang flat. However, this again is not a particularly convincing explanation. The torso bears no sign of any attachment for a permanent garment of metal or stone, while the sheer size of the piece makes it unlikely that the body would have been clothed in a less permanent linen kilt. There are so far no known examples of colossal statues clothed in this way and, while composite statues do occur during Akhenaten’s reign, these were made by manufacturing separate body parts to be attached to much smaller-scale bodies.
Worthy of more serious consideration is the suggestion that the figure is that of a woman, Nefertiti rather than Akhenaten. The lower body certainly has feminine curves and the breasts, although partially obscured by the arms and perhaps slightly small for a woman, could have been equally at home on either Akhenaten or Nefertiti. Male breasts were, however, a feature of the r
oyal family and Akhenaten’s father and grandfather before him had both been depicted with well developed chests. The fact that the figure lacks a pronounced female pubic triangle is perhaps slightly inconsistent with this interpretation, since Nefertiti is usually shown as decidedly feminine with a prominent pubic mound. To Julia Samson, the interpretation of the figure seems obvious:
The breasts are carved more like those of a woman, although Akhenaten was plump-chested. It must have been one of several colossal statues of Nefertiti … Presumably this nude feminine figure was to have been finished as Nefertiti, wearing her open robe and the tall crown of the kings of a united Egypt, a part of which remains on the statue.10
However, it is possible that Samson is influenced in her interpretation by her belief that Nefertiti ruled alongside Akhenaten at Thebes, as previously she has indicated her belief that the incomplete figure is male.11
The suggestion that the statue would eventually have been carved or clothed with Nefertiti’s open robe again presents certain difficulties, as the definition of the legs combined with the carved cartouches and the positioning of the arms across the upper body would have made it very difficult to apply to the figure a voluminous full-length robe with sleeves or shawl. Representations of Nefertiti did not necessarily conform to modern ideas of feminine modesty, and her garments are occasionally so clinging that they can only be detected by the presence of the thin line denoting the neckline. If the statue does represent the queen it is entirely possible that a skin-tight sheath dress would eventually have been carved or painted over her form, or that she would have been left naked. If this is the case, the statue might have been intended to portray Nefertiti in the guise of Tefnut, a parallel figure to the colossi depicting Akhenaten as Tefnut’s twin Shu. Alternatively, the figure may have been intended to show Nefertiti in her most regal aspect, as the female counterpart of the king. This interpretation of Nefertiti’s role would be entirely in keeping with her appearance in the smiting scenes where she acts as a substitute for the king, and is perhaps paralleled by her appearance at Akhenaten’s heb-sed celebrations where she is shown riding in a palanquin carrying royal regalia.
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