The Problem of Marital Incest And Lying Our Way Through History

Incest of any kind is regarded with such universal distaste that few writers can handle the matter with any degree of comfort, and very often go to great pains to avoid the subject altogether. Such is the case with novelists who set their tales in ancient Egypt. Desperate for a way out, they seize upon a minority point of view offered by a minority of Egyptologists bent on cleansing history of a practice abhorent to our sensibilities. It serves no purpose to identify modern authors who prefer to circumvent truth for some imagined gain, except to say that they seemed to have gotten their marching orders from the Grand Lama of Ancient Egyptian fiction, Mika Waltari. His 1949, "New York Times" bestseller "The Egyptian," assiduously avoids the isssue of incest, perhaps in an effort to cast Akhenaten's theology as an ancient interpretation of Judeo-Christian ethics and morality.

In my two historical novels to date, "Come Kill The Pharaoh," and my current novel, to be released in May by Kunati Books--"The Woman Who Would Be Pharaoh," I have made no effort to dodge the issue of incest as it pertains to Pharaoh Akhenaten and his six daughters. There is clear evidence that when Akhenaten's elder daughters, Meritaten, Mekataten and Ankhesnepaaten, reached nubility, he sired children by them. Mekataten died in childbirth when she was no more than 12 or 13.

Before we rush to clothe Pharaoh with the labels we give to modern day deviants, it needs to be understood that Akhenaten was worshipped as the prophet of the sole god, the Aten, and sometimes referred to as "the beautiful child of the Aten," and even as an incarnation of the sole god. To preserve and perpetuate the solar purity of his issue, no mere mortal incapable of breathing the "divine afflatus" could be his consort. Accordingly, the priests of the Aten called upon their pharaoh to take his daughters in marriage. No matter how offensive to our modern day tastes and the law, novelists cannot escape their duty to inform on the historical record in the formulation of plot.