Why was Sigmund Freud so obsessed with Egypt?

Twenty years ago, I visited the ancient Egyptian city of Amarna with a party of American journalists. Even in those days this place, near Asyut on the Middle Nile, was regarded as a dodgy destination for western tourists. As a tribute to the value of an entire CBS television crew as a terrorist target, we were accompanied by a squad of heavily armed, black-clad Egyptian special forces. But the sense of daring adventure was dented when, shortly after arriving at the ruins, we were joined by a couple of intrepid Germans who had come in a taxi.

The Germanic world has long been fascinated by Amarna and its ruler, the pharaoh Akhenaten — which is why many of the best finds from the place are in Berlin — and none more so than the founder of psychoanalysis. That much is clear from an intriguing little exhibition, Freud and Egypt, at the Freud Museum, Hampstead.

Akhenaten features prominently in one of Sigmund Freud’s last books, Moses and Monotheism, published in 1939 while he was living in exile in London. In this Freud argued — startlingly — that the prophet, rather than being Jewish, was actually an ancient Egyptian noble. And, furthermore, that Jewish monotheism was derived from Akhenaten’s cult of the sun god, Ra, who was the only deity venerated at Amarna.

It is fair to say that few have been convinced by this thesis. Rowan Williams, the ex-Archbishop of Canterbury, rather tartly described the idea as ‘painfully absurd’. But being wrong is not the same as being uninteresting, and Freud’s Egyptomania is an absorbing theme.

Akhenaten, who ruled in the mid-14th century BC, is full, you might say, of Freudian possibilities. Why, for instance, was he represented as a weirdly androgynous figure, with wide hips and almost feminine breasts? A pair of statuettes in the exhibition of the Pharaoh and his queen Nefertiti show them with almost interchangeable bodies.