Radio Plays 1972

CITY OF THE HORIZON....1972, repeated 1976.
By David Spenser. Total running time about 150 minutes.

Part 1 : The Dream; 29.1.1972, Gary Bond/Mary Morris/Kate Binchy.
Part 2 : The Reality; 5.2.1972 Gary Bond/Mary Morris/Kate Binchy.

Fascinating historical drama of the life of Achnaton, the "heretic Pharoah". Sometime after ascending the throne, around 1500 BC, Amenhotep IV changed his name to Achnaton - a consequence of his religious reform away from the old god Amon-Ra. This has been the subject of a great number of books and essays. James Breasted called Achnaton the "most remarkable of all the pharoahs and the first individual in human history". Arthur Weighall, also an Egyptologist, describes him as "the world's first idealist".

In the fifth year of his reign Achnaten (Akhnaten, Akhnaton - alternative spellings) moved from Thebes with his wife Nefertite (Nefretete) and built a new capital city, Akhet-Aton, "the place where Aton rises", or "City of the Horizon", halfway between Thebes and Memphis. His mother Queen Tiy stayed as regent in Thebes.

Achnaton did not wage wars and was rather indifferent to the raids made by warring parties into his Asiatic domain. He built palaces, homes for his favourites, and sepulchural chambers for himself and them, for the life hereafter was of intense concern to worshippers of both Aton and Amon. His city was intended to last for as long as the sun above the earth.

This pair of linked plays (which can be played without a break) tells the story of the city - the dream, and the reality.

Immanuel Velikovsky points out, in his "Oedipus and Achnaten" (1960) some intriguing parallels between the Oedipus story and Achnaten's life. He goes so far as to say that Achnaten was the figure upon which the Oedipus legend was based - but that's outside the scope of the play. Whatever the truth, it's a joy to read.....N.D.

The legend of Oedipus cycle, in which Velikovsky finds a parallel to the House of Akhnaton, involves the family of Oedipus, King of Thebes - his blinding and exile, his curse on his sons who subsequently slew each other at the gates of Thebes, and the courage of his daughter, Antigone, who entombed her fallen brother despite contrary official decree and was herself immured in a pit-tomb as punishment. The tale, filled with unsurpassed suspense, becomes even more compelling as it is related to historical fact.

...(short extract from www.knowledge.co.uk/velikovsky/oedipus.htm)

Excerpts from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

Daniel Paul Schreber (25 July 1842 – 14 April 1911) was a German judge who suffered from what was then diagnosed as dementia praecox. He described his second mental illness (1893–1902), making also a brief reference to the first illness (1884–1885) in his book Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (original German title Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken). The Memoirs became an influential book in the history of psychiatry and psychoanalysis thanks to its interpretation by Sigmund Freud.[2] There is no personal account of his third illness (1907–1911). Schreber died in 1911, in an asylum.

Schreber was a successful and highly respected judge until middle age when the onset of his psychosis occurred. He woke up one morning with the thought that it would be pleasant to "succumb" to sexual intercourse as a woman. He was alarmed and felt that this thought had come from somewhere else, not from himself. He even hypothesized that the thought had come from a doctor who had experimented with hypnosis on him. As his psychosis progressed, he believed that God was turning him into a woman, sending rays down to enact 'miracles' upon him, including little men to torture him.

Although Freud never interviewed Schreber himself, he read his Memoirs and drew his own conclusions from it. Freud thought that Schreber's disturbances resulted from repressed homosexual desires, which in infancy were oriented at his father and brother. Repressed inner drives were projected onto outside world and led to intense hallucinations which were first centred around his physician Dr. Flechsig (projection of his feelings towards brother), and then around God (who represented Schreber's father, Daniel Gottlob Moritz Schreber).

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