The Disc of the Sun: Egypt's Rebel Pharoh

Akhenaten is, for me, by far the most fascinating of the Pharaohs. He was a man who turned a highly conservative society upside down in his determination to establish one god in heaven and one ruler on earth. The reaction against him after his death was so complete that even his name vanished from the record, along with el-Amara, the city he built and dedicated to the Aten, the Disc of the Sun.

To understand Akhenaten, to understand why he embarked on so disruptive a course of action, one has to appreciate that the Pharaohs were not all powerful, as commonly supposed. The history of the New Kingdom was dominated for long periods by a struggle between the temporal power of the king and the priestly power of Amun, the supreme deity. A hundred years or so before Akhenaton came to the throne the priests of Amun had even managed to block the elevation of Tuthmoses III, using Queen Hatshepsut as a front for their own assumption of power.

After this episode the Pharaohs prior to Akhenaten had placed increasing emphasis on the solar cult, almost as if a struggle in heaven was mirroring a struggle on earth. From the time of Tuthmosis IV the view was promoted that the Pharaoh’s soul was joined with the Aten, the disc of the Sun, the sentient energy of the god Ra. On Akhenaton’s succession the Aten was shown not as an embodied figure, but as a disc of pure energy, pouring its rays on the Pharaoh and his family.

Akhenaten initially tried to establish Thebes as the centre of the Aten cult, thereby replacing Amun, but decided against this, presumably because of the opposition from the priestly cast. Instead construction began further to the north on el-Amara, also to be known as Akhetaten-the Horizon of the Sun. The new cult was the cult of kingship itself. It was a revolution, and like many revolutions it was accompanied by a reign of terror.

Now secure in his new capital Akhenaten began a systematic purge of the old gods, one that reached deep into all corners of Egyptian society. The name of Amun was not only removed from all public monuments, but from intimate household objects, like pots and scarabs. The Pharaohs guards were everywhere, ensuring the destruction of the old and the observance of the new.

But the Aten went down just as quickly as it had risen. The Pharaoh died in the seventeenth year of his reign, power passing to Nefertiti, the Queen-Regent. Egypt had suffered greatly during the upheavals of Akhenaten’s reign, both in economic and in spiritual terms. The cult of Amun was put back in place. The day of the Aten was over.

The Wickedest Woman in History

The legend of Cleopatra, the great seductress, was born as part of a piece of political spin, of which she is not even the main subject. We all know that history is written by the victors, and this was never truer than at the end of the Roman Civil Wars. Octavian-later Augustus-prevailed over his great rival, Mark Anthony, who after his death was depicted in the propaganda of the day as a Roman who had been unmanned by his flirtation with the 'degenerate' east. Cleopatra was cast as the very symbol of that degeneracy, the whore of the Canopus, irredeemably foreign, exotic and profoundly un-Roman.

When Antony's descendants, the emperors Caligula, Claudius and Nero, showed signs of adopting the 'eastern fashion' at court, the negative images of Cleopatra were revived in various art forms, as the great seductress, dangerous not just to individual men, but the traditional Roman conception of republican virtue. According to the historian, Dio Cassius, it was because of her that Anthony became an effeminate creature, who lost all of his virile and manly skills. Cleopatra, in other words, was a warning against the dangers of allowing a woman to become too powerful, in politics or in love. In the fourth century Aurelius Victor added to her corrupting and seductive image when he wrote, "She was so lustful that she often prostituted herself and so beautiful that with their lives for a night with her."

And thus it is that she progressed down the centuries, refashioned in accordance with contemporary taste. In the Medieval and Renaissance periods she was depicted as a great beauty; and, as we all know, since great beauties are always blonde, Cleopatra became a blonde! The traditional image only changed somewhat with the publication in France and England in the sixteenth centuries of translations of Plutarch's Parallel Lives, which gives a slightly more sympathetic, and accurate, depiction of the real woman, and was to be the chief source for Shakespeare's Anthony and Cleopatra.

But it was really only in the nineteenth century that it became fashionable to depict her as non-European, as in Delecroix's painting Cleopatra. She was by now the great femme fatale, portrayed as such in a whole range of artistic media, cruel, exotic, insatiable. For puritan societies, whether Roman or Victorian, she titillated and stimulated every prurient instinct; and in this shape she made her way to Hollywood. No tedious 'Little Woman' or 'Good Wife' she! When Cecil B. De Mille offered the part in his movie Cleopatra to Claudette Colbert he asked "How would you like to be the wickedest woman in history?" What female could possibly resist an offer like that? :-))

Why has she had such a lasting impact? Because she has become a cultural symbol, the ultimate male erotic fantasy. As such she will probably never be replaced. My favourite reference to her comes from none other than John Keats, who wrote "She makes an impression the same as the Beauty of a Leopardess...I should like her to ruin me."

The Mad Caliph

Have you ever heard of Caliph al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah? No?; well here is a story!

Caliph Hakim was a member of the Fatimid dynasty, and ruler of Egypt from 996 until his death in 1021. He was, to say the least, a highly eccentric individual, sometimes referred to as the Mad Caliph. Amongst other things, he prohibited the eating of grapes and the playing of chess, and ordered the people of Cairo to work at night and sleep during the day! His persecutions were real enough, though like many of his other arbitrary measures, they tottered between the gratuitously vindictive and the outright ridiculous. Christians were made to wear huge crosses and Jews a golden calf around their necks. His persecutions, moreover, also extended to Sunni Muslims.

There are other examples of Muslim persecution, the most notorious of which is probably the wholesale massacre of the Jews of Granada in southern Spain in 1066, following a particularly vicious hate campaign. Also in Spain, the fundamentalist Almoravids forcibly transported many Christians to Morocco in the twelfth century. However, it remains true, in spite of these exceptions, that there is little of the wholesale massacre, persecution, forced conversion and expulsion of minorities that was to be a recurrent theme in the history of Christian Europe.