Reviewed by Jill Kamil Lise Manniche, The Akhenaten Colossi of Karnak, The American University in Cairo Press, Cairo and New York, 2010 You will want to read this book -- but perhaps not in the order in which it is published. In The Akhenaten Colossi of Karnak, Lise Manniche examines the colossal statues of the pharaoh Akhenaten erected at the beginning of his reign (1353 -- 1335) in his new temple to the Aten at Karnak. Fragments of more than 30 statues are now known, and show paradoxical features of the king combining male and female, young and aged. Akhenaten was one of the most controversial rulers of Egypt. Soon after his death his monuments were taken apart and hidden inside or under subsequent buildings. His statues were overturned, mutilated or destroyed. His name was included on none of the subsequent king lists carved in stone or recorded on papyrus by his successors. In other words, the art of the so-called Amarna period, and the life of the pharaoh Akhenaten and his wife Nefertiti, were all but stricken from the record and would have been obliterated were it not for modern scholars. In 1925 the first two colossal statues of Akhenaten were found in the temple of Karnak, and they were extremely surprising. The king's strangely feminine body and elongated face were perplexing and set off a flurry of opinion and debate that continues until today. Among the adjectives used by early scholars to describe them were "monstrous", "sexless", "bisexual", "naked", and "an individual whose member has been cut off". Later scholars considered the possibility that the so-called sexless colossi were executed in haste and that a garment was perhaps tied to or painted on the statue. The fact that his body was shown with the swelling shapes of a male-female creator-god, and that the pharaoh's role was as mother-and-father of all humanity, even suggested to one scholar that the hidden Osirid-statues of the pharaoh were executed early in Akhenaten's reign and rejected by him. The art of the Amarna period, as it is known after the king's new capital near Tel al-Amarna in Middle Egypt, is the most fascinating of all Egyptian artistic achievements for the very reason that it is different from the rest, and that it was produced during a reign of just 70 years. From the moment of its discovery it accelerated a debate on the king's physical imperfections -- his soft, pendulous belly, his overly-thick thighs and buttocks, his spindly arms and legs, his brooding eyes exaggerated into heavy-lidded slits, his receding forehead, thin neck, elongated skull, drawn-in cheeks and arching neck. With the discovery five years later, in 1930, of a colossus of a male deprived of sexual characteristics, everyone was perplexed. There has been an ongoing debate ever since about their artistic merit, their purpose, and the pathology of the king who erected the "sexless" statues. Some scholars have called the statues "unrealistic" or a "caricature". Others have argued in favour of their being of a woman -- Neferti -- dressed "in a perfectly normal way" in a clinging outfit. And there are those who refer to them as "ethereal, if not haunting". Lise Manniche, painstaking researcher and author of numerous books and articles on ancient Egypt (art, music, sexual life and perfume), has presented a history of their discovery from 1925 to the present day. Carrying out a study of more than 30 colossi of the same size and material found in the same location at East Karnak, a more in-depth study was possible, and Manniche presents a profusion of opinions on the appearance of the king and his alleged medical conditions, as well as various suggestions for an interpretation of the perplexing evidence. She draws conclusions on the basis of current research and on the appearance of Akhenaten, but with the focus of interest away from the genital area to settle on the shape of the belly-button, corrections in the area of the eyes, details of the knees, and so on. Half a century ago the "sexless" statues were regarded as obscure, lden with symbolic meaning. No pharaoh had ever been sculpted in this way. The only deity similarly represented was Hapi, the Nile god associated with water and fertility, who had bulbous breasts but who always wore a kilt so an association was made. Studies on the colossi have come a long way since then. Some have attributed homosexual inclinations to the king; others have noted (for what it is worth) that his bulbous breasts are carved with male nipples. It has been noted that the beard is in its original position on a number of colossi, being made in one piece with the rest of the statue, but that on one "sexless" statue there is a deep cavity under the chin, "carved so carefully that it cannot be a mark of a beard having been chopped off, but rather a beard having been affixed separately; either as an after thought, or because of some damage or change in plan during the initial stags of the work". The depth of the research carried out by Manniche is little short of amazing. "The Karnak colossi have been subject to an astounding degree of negative comment ever since they resurfaced some eighty years ago", observes Manniche, who continues that scholars are faced with a dilemma that affects their aesthetic criticism. Are we, she asks, to judge them by today's standards and limit ourselves to admiring form, material, colour, size and craftsmanship? Or may we attempt to transport ourselves back into the company of those Egyptians who lived three thousand five hundred years ago? The element of novelty, undoubtedly experienced in antiquity, may be dimmed by the fact that we cosmopolitans of today have seen faces faintly reminiscent of Amarna art before, for example in the paintings of Modigliani and distorted bodies in the bronzes of Giacometti...but in the context of ancient Egypt this has helped neither the appreciation nor the understanding of Akhenaten's intentions. Manniche writes in her introduction that her book had, as its starting point, an ongoing study on sexuality in ancient Egyptian society, and that this necessitated an attempt "to disentangle not just the mythology of the colossi, but also the fundamental issue of their number", which turned into a project in itself. And a remarkable project it has proved to be, well worth publication. It seems that 3,500 years after the event, we continue to live with the fact that there is no final answer to our questions about the meaning of the colossi. My only criticism is that the information in Manniche's extremely valuable catalogue, derived from various sources, painstakingly recorded, and accompanied by appropriate images, comes at the beginning of the book, and not where catalogues belong, at the end. This is what I meant by the first sentence of this article. Had Chapter I, on the Discovery of the sculptures, been followed by their Interpretation, Aesthetics, and Pathology, rather than picking up the story only after plying through 70 pages of Catalogue after the Introduction, it would have made for better understanding. Manniche's book is more than a valuable record; it is a worthwhile story. My recommendation to potential readers, however, is to read the first 15 pages of the book, then skip to page 85 and read on, flipping back to the Catalogue (in Chapter 2) for photographs, line drawings, excavation report(s), location, place(s) where exhibited, bibliography, and description.
