The Finnish author Mika Waltari wrote the best-selling novel The Egyptian in 1945, inspired by the hopes, disappointments and disasters of the previous decades. The book occasioned widespread interest in Ancient Egypt, due in part to an effective reworking of egyptological knowledge into a classic moral tale. The fact that some egyptologists had already viewed the Amarna period within a Christian moral context would have been a source of inspiration to Waltari. Arthur Weigall, the British author and egyptologist, is a good, though hitherto unacknowledged example of this. In transforming his egyptological interests into a historical novel, Waltari found a ready model in Weigall's depiction of an Egyptian Phatraoh with a Christian morality.