Walking the Bible (22 page)

We began to stroll through the corridors. Now several months into our travels, Avner and I were growing more comfortable with the haphazard, make-it-up-as-you-go rhythm of our trip—and more comfortable with each other. From the minute we met up in Egypt, Avner
exuded a boyish glee that I hadn’t fully seen since Turkey. I realized that in Israel, he felt torn between his natural affinity to the tels, the Temple Mount, and other portals to the past, and his obligations to the modern world: balancing his checkbook, finding a clean shirt to wear. Here, out of reach of his cellular phone and never late for a meeting, he could fully indulge his obsessions with the minutiae of ancient life, with the subtle, ever-shifting puzzle of what event along the Nile might have prompted some cultural shift in Canaan, or what religious upheaval in Egypt might have triggered some biblical plot twist. This was archaeology as literary sleuthing (no wonder Agatha Christie felt so at home in this world) and we never played at it more than at the Egyptian Museum.

Specifically, we were looking into one enticing possibility, long irresistible to historians, that the monotheism of the Bible may have had a connection to ancient Egypt. Might the Israelites have learned to worship one god by following the lead of some maverick pharaoh? Or might the Egyptians have learned the same thing by taking an idea from the patriarchs?

We arrived at the Amarna Gallery, a well-lit room at the back of the ground floor that offers a possible answer to that question. Amenhotep IV, who ruled Egypt from 1377 to 1360
B.C.E.
, was the second son of Amenhotep III and his wife, Tiy. At the time, Egypt was continuing its aggressive empire building, which brought unprecedented riches to the priests and bureaucrats. The young pharaoh believed these courtiers had too much power and in the sixth year of his rule abruptly moved the capital 250 miles north to the desert frontier of El Amarna. Once there, he radically changed the state religion, demoting Amen-Re, the sun god, and elevating the marginal god Aten, who represents the sun at midday only, to sole god. In effect, Amenhotep was the world’s first monotheist. To prove his devotion, he changed his name to Akhenaten, “Agreeable to Aten,” and renamed the capital Akhetaten, “the Horizon of Aten.” He also closed all the temples of Egypt, erased the name Amen from all monuments, and even changed the plural
gods
to
god
. Donald Redford, the Egyptologist, has likened this gesture to throwing aside Christ, the Trinity, and all the saints, and declaring that the cross was not just the symbol of salvation but the one true God itself.

Akhenaten honored the new god by taking another radical step, ordering his artists to be more expressive. As a result, they created a protoplasmic style where everything was soft and flowing. In the gallery, several towering statues of the king featured captivating, almost grotesque, imagery—pursed lips, elongated fingers, distended belly—that makes him look like a cross between Dennis Rodman and Grace Jones. Judging by these images, some modern scholars say the king was black. Some say he was deformed or suffered from a debilitating disease, like hydrocephalus, a disorder of the brain that results in enlarged skulls, or Froehlich’s syndrome, a disorder of the pituitary gland that results in infertility, a lack of sex drive, and feminine fat distribution. Others say he was a hermaphrodite. Everyone agrees he was unique, as Egyptologist James Henry Breasted put it, “the first individual in history.”

“You have to realize how remarkable this was,” Avner said. “Egyptian art was not realistic, it was stylized. If you lined up all the statues of the pharaohs before Akhenaten, they look like the same person. Egypt hated change. The secret of life was continuity. The flood came at the same time every year; the water rose in the same way. Everyone prayed that the world would stay as it is. It’s quite a strange concept for us, but it’s very Egyptian. To change even slightly the art style was a great revolution.”

This breakthrough, especially in the realm of religion, was so unexpected that it raises the tantalizing possibility that it came from outside Egypt. Perhaps some foreigner penetrated the highest corridors of the pharaonic court and planted in the mind of the young king the idea that there was a single god. One man fits this description perfectly. In Genesis 41, when Joseph is called before the pharaoh to interpret his dream, Joseph says, “Not I! God will see to Pharaoh’s welfare.” According to traditional dating, which places Abraham around 1900
B.C.E.
, Joseph would likely have lived long before Akhenaten, during the time of the Hyksos, around 1700
B.C.E.
The Hyksos were foreigners, and thus likely more sympathetic to an outsider like Joseph; also they introduced horses, which would be consistent with the biblical description of Joseph using chariots during his tenure as prime minister.

Recently, several maverick scholars have tried to advance the theory of Joseph’s influence on Akhenaten by more closely aligning the dates
of the two figures. In his book
Stranger in the Valley of the Kings,
historian Ahmed Osman says Joseph was actually Akhenaten’s grandfather Yuya. Something of a mystery to scholars, Yuya was not a member of the royal court but eventually rose to second in command under Thutmose IV, the same title Joseph has in the Bible. Even more remarkable for an outsider, Yuya’s daughter, Tiy, married Akhenaten’s father. Perhaps Tiy whispered the tenets of monotheism to her son.

Most scholars continue to dispute this connection. First, they say, Akhenaten’s monotheism was not particularly similar to the one described in the Bible. Instead of being a populist creed, Akhenaten’s religion was more of a declaration regarding the king’s relationship with his divine father. Second, unlike Yahweh, Aten did not represent all the qualities of nature; he was merely the sun disk. Also, Aten did not display the emotional qualities of the Israelite God—revenge, violence, compassion, devotion. In the end, Yahweh is the God of a people; Aten is the god of the pharaoh. As Donald Redford put it, “Hebrew religion is essentially indigenous to a particular ethnic group, and underwent a natural evolution over centuries of prehistory. Akhenaten’s program is a self-conscious modification of an existing system, undertaken at a known point in time, based in the highest circles of the realm and involving a contretemps with a coterie of high officials.”

If Akhenaten’s system was so imposed, how did the people react?

“We don’t know,” said Avner. “We have no records whatsoever. It would seem that it wasn’t very popular because it was easy to turn back to the old style.”

“And how long did that take?” He pointed up the corridor. “Let’s go upstairs and see.”

We walked up a broad staircase to the second floor, where the chaos of the ground floor gave way to a dozen carefully preserved, perfectly clean rooms housing one of the most famous archaeological discoveries of the twentieth century, and one of the purest ways to view pharaonic power.

Akhenaten and his wife, Nefertiti, had only daughters. Late in his reign, the “heretic king,” as Akhenaten was called, actually shared
the throne with a mysterious figure who may have been his son-in-law, or possibly his wife. When Akhenaten finally died, he was succeeded by another son-in-law, a nine-year-old boy named Tutankhaten. For three years the boy king remained in Akhetaten, following his father-in-law’s religion, until the ousted priests of Amen-Re reasserted themselves and executed a palace coup. The king moved back to Thebes, changed his name to Tutankhamen, and allowed polytheism to be restored. Any chance that Egypt may have developed an overarching monotheism like the Bible’s died with this gesture.

Tutankhamen was basically an insignificant figure, the Zachary Taylor of pharaohs, who died when he was eighteen. His death was so sudden that royal gravediggers hadn’t even finished his tomb and placed him instead in an abandoned noble grave. Much smaller than his forebears’, Tutankhamen’s tomb was remarkable only because it’s the only gravesite from the New Kingdom that eluded robbers, thereby setting the stage for one of the great ironies of Egyptian history. Akhenaten may have been the world’s first individual, but Tutankhamen became a greater celebrity—more famous in death than in life.

The reason for that fame was an unusual partnership between an eccentric aristocrat and a shy archaeologist. George Edward Stanhope Molyneux Herbert, the fifth earl of Carnarvon and a distant relative of adventuress Hester Stanhope, spent eighteen years and a quarter of a million dollars at the beginning of the twentieth century on a fruitless hunt for a lost tomb in the Valley of the Kings. All the graves had been found, experts said. Anything that wasn’t found had already been looted. Robbery was so endemic that often the priests who were preparing the mummy for burial were secretly plotting to plunder the grave. By 1922, Lord Carnarvon had decided to give up his pursuit, until his excavator, Howard Carter, persuaded him to fund one final year.

On November 4, after foraging for months under another tomb, Carter came upon a closed wooden door, sealed with a jackal, the symbol of the priests. In an act of Herculean self-control (“I would have gone crazy,” Avner said), Carter refilled the tunnel, hired Sudanese guards to protect it, and sent a telegram to Carnarvon in England: “
AT LAST HAVE MADE A WONDERFUL DISCOVERY. RECOVERED SAME FOR YOUR ARRIVAL
.” It took the earl two weeks to arrive, and on November 26, Carter and Carnarvon officially broke through the second door and inserted a lighted candle, which didn’t burn out, meaning there was oxygen inside. Carter inserted his head. “A long silence followed,” Carnarvon recalled in his memoirs, “until I said, I fear in somewhat trembling tones, ‘Well, what is it?’ ” “Wonderful things,” Carter said, adding later, “As my eyes grew accustomed to the light, details of the room within emerged slowly from the mist, strange animals, statues, and gold—everywhere the glint of gold.”

That dusting of gold has helped make the contents of King Tut’s burial site one of the best-known works of art in the world. Despite everything I knew about Tutankhamen—I had a poster of him above my bed as a boy—I was still unprepared for the sheer volume, the pure beauty, of the contents of his tomb. Arranged in the museum in the order that Carter and Carnarvon discovered them, the 2,300 objects offer a macabre tour of Egyptian necrology, a pop-up
Book of the Dead
. First come the objects designed to ease the soul through the afterlife: two life-sized guards, three gilded couches, four dismantled chariots, several model boats. Then come objects for his daily use while he awaits resurrection: containers for food, game boards for entertainment, trumpets, axes, and canes—all covered in gold. In addition, there are clothes chests inlaid with images of the king fighting ostriches and antelope. There are miniature coffins containing gold figurines of the king and a lock of hair from his grandmother, Tiy. And there was a shrine, protected by four carved goddesses, and containing four gold jars in the shape of the pharaoh, holding his vital organs.

The highlight of the collection is his personal effects, which were stored in an elaborate nest of a sarcophagus, on top of a coffin, on top of a mask, on top of the mummy. The innermost coffin, in the shape of the king, was made of three hundred pounds of solid gold—worth $1.5 million at current prices. In addition, over seventy-five miles of gold thread were used in the jewelry. “Still, it’s not the gold,” Avner said. “It’s the artwork.” The closer to the mummy, the more elaborate the ornaments. The body was decorated with bracelets, pectorals, rings, earrings, collars, and belts. These, in turn, were made of turquoise,
amethyst, onyx, and jasper. And they were arrayed in a rainbow—aqua, vermilion, black, and gold—that seemed much closer to African batiks of today than anything out of Europe. The mask itself, a glimmering figurehead, was made of twenty-six pounds of gold, inlaid with quartz, obsidian, and stripes of lapis lazuli the color of the Mediterranean. Not until I stared into its black eyes, lorded over by the cobra and the vulture, did I fully understand how Egypt, a place renowned for its culture, could also be feared for its power. Even an eighteen-year-old boy like Tutankhamen, when draped in the vestments of authority, could be a terrifying sight. Perhaps this duality—beauty and terror—could explain the dual image that Egypt holds in the Bible: A land that welcomes Joseph’s family at the end of Genesis becomes, by the beginning of Exodus, a place that wants his descendants dead.

“Remember, it’s not just a single man who’s buried here,” Avner said. “It’s Egypt that’s buried here. The decorations are the whole country. On the one hand you think, what a waste. On the other hand, you think about the greatness of the nation. This is the finest art, the finest philosophy, the finest design, coming together in service to the king.”

“So when you see this, what makes you most excited?” I said. “The mask, the tomb—”

“The human touch,” he said. “This was designed by people, it was built by people.”

I told him about my conversation with Basem, in which he said he felt distant from ancient Egyptians because they had different beliefs.

“I believe that if I were to come back at that time,” Avner said, “I would be able to bridge the gap. I feel they were people like us, despite their beliefs. It’s like coming to Egypt today. People in Israel think Egyptians are different from them. Still, it was fun to talk to the driver on the way from the airport. He was very curious about Tel Aviv. He had heard it was a great city. What is the cost of living there? How are the people there? In spite of the gaps, which are big, we’re much closer than people think.”

“But what makes you think that?” I said. “In Exodus, Egypt is the enemy.”

“Not so fast,” he said. “Egypt is not a bad place in the Bible. It’s the pharaoh, he’s a bad man.”

“But I thought you said those were the same thing.” He smiled. “The pharaoh of Joseph was not a bad man. Remember, he saved Joseph from prison and invited his family to live in Goshen. It was a different pharaoh, four hundred years later, who put the Israelites into bondage. That’s when the Bible changes its mind. That’s when Egypt becomes the enemy.”