[An extract from recent correspondence with a specialist in ancient astronomy. Akhenaten's reign is not often considered to have been one concerned with a technical understanding of astronomy (though through his veneration of the Divine Aten, his interest in the sky is clear). There are interesting reasons for this neglect]
January 24, 2019
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I’ll respond to your mail in order. First the Egyptian paper.
I had the opportunity to look at pharaoh Akhenaten in some depth at university. His reign was covered in the general course on Egyptian history, largely from the point of view that most scholarly writing on Akhenaten doesn’t fit very well with the evidence. I liked this aspect of the teaching of ancient history in London: a highly critical approach to what could actually be known, which sometimes isn’t very much. Other things I disliked, but I’ll get on to that later.
The title of the upcoming paper is ‘The Horizon of the Aten’ – the Aten being the sun disk, which is most associated with Akhenaten, though not exclusively. Most writing on Akhenaten suggests that his religious reforms were actually innovations, which the priesthoods – particularly the priests of the cult of Amun, probably the most important divine cult in Egypt in the 14th cent B.C.E – regarded as heretical.
At the least, the religious changes instituted by Akhenaten, threatened the power of the cult. It does not follow however, that such changes represented innovation and heresy, whatever the priests of Amun said.
After a little digging last year, I came across a piece of information, never mentioned in college, and which did not appear in any of the books on the reading list. It surfaced first in a book published relatively recently. It is evidence which appears in contemporary texts. It wasn’t deemed worthy of a mention in any of the many studies of the 18th dynasty, because it didn’t appear to make any significant sense in that context.
For me, it was like a bolt from the blue. It made sense of half a dozen other pieces of information rattling around in my head, almost simultaneously. Akhenaten now looked like the adherent of one of the oldest cults in ancient Egypt. This ‘new’ information, made sense of what he understood himself to be doing (it is hard to understand any ruler who builds a temple with 400 sacrificial tables, as he did). A reformer, but not an innovator or heretic at all. The evidence ties his reforms, and the concept of the Horizon of the Aten, with the equinoxes and the precession. A reform which was intended to restore a pattern of thought which was contemporaneous with the earliest of Egyptian dynasties. Several features of the Giza plateau would not otherwise be present. They set things up so they could not possibly have missed the precession.
The new paper connects texts, architecture and cultic evidence to make the case.
Thanks for the information about the King Den tablet, which I had not seen before. I think you may be right about the astronomical aspect to the image. One of the problems in studying ancient history, particularly in the ancient Near East, is that real events are often presented in terms of mythical images, since what happens on earth echoes what is in the sky. The sky is the more real. So sometimes it is difficult to tell whether an image represents a myth, or whether it represents a physical event dressed up in mythical imagery.
A similar issue of what is being represented occurs with images of the gods – when are representations of the gods just that, and when are they the gods themselves? I remember attending a lecture in Cambridge more than twenty years ago where the speaker spent twenty minutes talking about this question, and why the Egyptians would create a statue of a god standing on a sled (they did), which indicated that it was a representation of a statue of the god, and not a representation of the god itself.
I first read Hamlet’s Mill sometime around 1978, which is a long time ago now. I accept the argument, but the book is in many ways poorly constructed, though there is a mass of useful information in there. The fugal aspect of the structure was not likely to be appreciated in academia, and the text is very dense, so I think they did not give a lot of thought to who was going to read it (sometimes writing a book for yourself is the only way). I have read academic books which are much more difficult to read, but which have credibility among academics – I’m thinking particularly of Lynn Thorndikes’ eight volume ‘A history of magic and experimental science’. No points for style or clarity.
I’m not a mathematician, but I’m comfortable with numbers. I worked out pretty early on that the rate of precessional movement means that the intersection of the celestial equator and the ecliptic moves a degree in about 70 years. That is about two diameters of the moon as seen from the Earth. How blind do you have to be in order not to see that? Especially if those observing the sky belong to long-established professional priesthoods, with a background in astronomical observation and lore, and in possession of a temple library?
Why was Hamlet’s Mill shunned by academics? Because as far as the scholarly consensus goes, the argument of the book is faulty in conception, as well as execution. The book was not simply ahead of its time, but it argued outside the paradigmatic frame in which scholars were willing to consider evidence. That’s an important thing in academia: the field in which scholars operate has to have its limits defined. They study and write within a frame in which it is possible to make a case for this or that. It is a mistake to think that academics engage with what the whole range of evidence might have to tell us. It is not about understanding, but about developing an understanding of the subject under study.
This is not altogether a bad thing. Sometimes it is necessary to narrow a focus of interest in order to understand what is being considered. I’ve often engaged in this kind of process myself. It becomes problematic where the artificially constricted parameters ossify into the definition of an academic discipline or sub-discipline. When people talk about the value of interdisciplinary research, they actually mean that the nature of much contemporary research is too narrow to keep students supplied with interesting or useful Ph.D proposals…
Which is why I am working outside academia, and self-publishing my work.
Yes there is a reluctance to see the prevailing paradigm as untenable. But you are right that established paradigms are always difficult to overturn, just because they are established, and a lot of scholars have an investment in preserving the status quo. Is there another agenda? Yes there is. In fact, there are several. For the moment I’ll just pick out a couple of them here (we’ll get through all of them in the course of our conversation I’m sure!).
1} Not everybody who writes about human intellectual history has a practical grasp of astronomy. Or philosophy. Or theology. And sometimes their heads are filled with nonsense ideas, many of which first saw the light of day as late as the European Enlightenment. One of these nonsense ideas is that our distant ancestors were subject to a primitive stupidity, for which the Germans have an appropriately ugly word: ‘Urdummheit’. It is the myth of progress over time. If that notion is firmly
planted in a scholar’s head, then it is clearly straining the bounds of possibility to credit ancient peoples with any kind of understanding of precession. It is just common sense that they wouldn’t notice such a thing. Primitive stupidity is a scholarly presumption which is powerful enough to override the need to engage with facts and observation. There is less of this presumption in academia than there used to be, but it is still there, and not always hiding in the corners.
2) Historians in academia generally work within a paradigm which owes its character to the writings of Karl Marx, as mediated through the writings of Max Weber and other sociologists. This way of looking at things got its foothold in Britain through the London School of Economics in the early years of the twentieth century. What it means is that society is studied in material and economic terms. Ideas are deprecated as fundamentally irrelevant to the forces which have shaped history and human cultural development. This appreciation of the forces which underpin our society is assumed to be universally true, and so is equally applicable to the study of ancient societies. If ancient scholars did not know this to be the case, it was because they were victims of what Marx and Engels called ‘false consciousness’. In other words, history was to be explained in terms of power and propaganda, and ideological struggle between competing groups. All my teachers at university shared this point of view, to some extent at least, but some did allow that it might be too narrow a perspective.
From this point of view, if you are talking about priestly ideas, which you are if you are talking about ancient astronomy, you are talking about a subject which is irrelevant to our understanding of antiquity. The real history of humanity is to be teased out of a knowledge of priestly power and the propaganda developed to support that power. Religious ideas and iconography serve that priestly power, and are to be interpreted in such terms. So the detail of a concern with astronomy, and a knowledge of precession, is, for some historians, beside the point.
I describe myself as a historian of ideas. It is a scholarly discipline, working outside the Marxist-inspired model, which came into existence in the mid 1930s, specifically to deal with the materials and questions other historians were ignoring. The book which kicked-started the discipline was authored by Arthur Lovejoy. It was called ‘The Great Chain of Being’. It considered the concept of ‘plenitude’ from the Greeks up to the European Renaissance. My first book can be understood as an extension of the argument into more remote times.
Best, Thomas
