Casting the Gods Adrift Read Free

clean, all perfect. Huge pylon gateways, palaces and silos of stored grain all soared towards the burning blue sky. Squatting around them were smaller, cube-shaped houses, and everywhere there was colour and noise and movement and smells enough to make my head spin.
    In a bakery, a man was taking honey cakes out of a clay oven. A dwarf was walking a pair of pet dogs along the shore. A row of bronze axe heads caught the sun – for sale outside a metalworker’s shop. In every house yard, incense trees cast little pools of shade where cats slept, old men snoozed, or womensat washing lentils or chopping leeks. Naked children ran about playing leapfrog or football, or towing little toys about on string. The smoke from the cooking fires rose up to mingle with steam from freshly washed clothes. Men with brick-red skin were building yet more soaring walls of brick, while in the dark houses pale-skinned women stayed hidden from the sun’s ferocious heat.
    We seemed to be expected to follow the royal family, so we did – up one of the vast smooth ramps which led to doors high in the palace walls. Through countless anterooms, the pharaoh led us through his pharaoh – his ‘great house’. I remember thinking how strange it was to call a king a ‘great house’; but then I suppose a pharaoh does afford his people shelter and safety, so in that way he is like a house. We passed through a hall with, oh, fifty pillars holding up a painted ceiling. Then we were on the King’s Bridge, on top of the city’s gateway, in a covered walkway with a view right over el-Amarna. The pharaoh stopped and so did we.
    â€˜Welcome, my friends,’ he said. ‘Welcome to the city of Aten, the
only
god.’ He turnedto one of the courtiers who bobbed along in his wake like seagulls behind a plough. ‘Take my animal collector to a temple where he can ask the priests to give thanks to Aten. Then find him somewhere to live. Tutmose here is to study handcrafts; the blind one is to study music under the royal musicians.’
    â€˜Oh, but my son isn’t—’ Father wanted to explain how Ibrim was not blind – far from it! He wanted to say how his eyes were getting better every day. But he dared not contradict the king.
    â€˜We greatly prize music here,’ said Queen Nefertiti, resting the tips of her fingers on Ibrim’s shoulder. ‘You must not fear the dark, Ibrim. Aten shines into every life, in some way.’
    Then the king’s courtier led Father, Ibrim and me over the King’s Bridge and directly to the Temple of Aten the sun. The courtier told us it was not like any other temple. It was not some gloomy secretive cave of a building, with looming statues and inner rooms where the priests communed mysteriously with images of the gods. This temple was open to the sun. ‘There are noroofs to the temples of Aten. They are open to the rays of Aten, as every heart is open to His eyes,’ said our guide in a bored, slightly routine way, as if he had said it many times before. He told us that the altars – there were many of them, either to Aten or to the divine pharaoh himself – were piled with fruit and flowers, and the walls were painted with the rays of the sun, each ray ending in a hand. I could feel the sun shining on the top of my head. I could feel the painted hands emptying blessings on my head. I was going to be a craftsman – a sculptor! – a maker of beautiful things for the beautiful daughters of Akhenaten! I was the happiest boy alive.
    â€˜But where are the other temples?’ said Father, and there was a strange, strained quality to his voice. ‘My boys must ask the priests to perform a thanks-offering ritual to the great baboon-god Thoth. Their life is preserved by the goodness of Thoth.’
    â€˜There is no god but Aten the sun,’ said our escort, haughty as an ostrich. ‘There are no other temples in el-Amarna. Aten