The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [141]
The illustrations are not of an impressive accuracy, by Western art-critical standards, nor are they quite typical of Egyptian art, yet still how affecting!
Analysis: Despite my easy childhood, the men whom I admire most in this world are self-made men, a description which seems to fit the king.
By self-made I do not mean poor men who have become rich. I mean, rather, those men who gathered the fragments made available to them as abandoned or downtrodden children and then, with the boiling, creative force of their own minds, forged a self marked by strength and, more importantly, by style. Such men create selves that bear no trace whatsoever of their dark inheritances, no trace of foolish parents or dusty childhood towns or the crimes committed against them, no trace of the deprivations (money, affection, nourishment, friendship), no trace of any source material at all, but instead an aesthetic and practical creation, godlike in its simplicity and in its completeness. Simplicity: everything is from within this one head, no parental influence, no village tradition, nothing that did not hail from the self-creating mind itself. Completeness: everything must be created, every attitude, every mannerism, every belief and value and stylish gesture. Nothing inherited can be tolerated from an intolerable past.
And yet, great irony that is our world, such men are often not honoured, while men like me—born with love, guidance, every advantage—are. I admire, perhaps most of all the verses, his Quatrain 24 (Fragments B & C):
Atum-hadu looks behind him and marvels at the height.
Atum-hadu looks at all he has surpassed with great delight.
Atum-hadu owes nothing, is in debt to no man,
And will therefore act as no other man can.
One can easily imagine the young man composing this verse not long after he found he had become the king of Egypt.
On Atum-hadu’s Name: Underneath the story’s typically Egyptian mythology, we find two details of crucial historical importance: Atum-hadu came from nothing, and Atum-hadu named himself. The legend allows for no other explanation. He was not of royal birth but of peasant birth; in the chaos marking the end of the dynasty, a climb like his was possible. The king’s full five-name titulary—which opens the text and ends with the “Son of Ra” name Atum-hadu (Atum-Is-Aroused)—is given here for the first time. Usually, the “Son of Ra” name was the king’s birth name and was unsurprisingly royal in tone, given to a royal newborn. But it appears that, in this case, this extraordinary mind risen from humble beginnings had some other name at birth.
One pities him as a boy, of course, telling himself stories to fall asleep, creating this dream of a celestial parent. An analysis of Atum-hadu obviously benefits from modern sociology: in these terrible modern cases one hears of, research reveals that there is typically a critical moment, the age at which the child first realises his predicament, finally understands his relationship to his mother, for example, and thus with the entire world. This moment is too easily bathed in retrospective bathos, as I fell victim to just now, above, but in truth, one need not pity such children. On the contrary, see the beautiful and heroic aspects: a boy of eight runs for the very last time into his ramshackle home (for there must have been a last time, whether he knew it or not just then), and he shouts with pride about some accomplishment, still expecting (with the dregs of his childish instincts for love) to receive praise from the