Aluminum Christmas Trees: Yes, ancient Egyptian and Greek physicians actually knew skull surgery.
Stupid Good: Akhenaten, especially in his attitude toward Egypt's enemies, as well as his economic policies.
What Do You Mean, It's Not Symbolic??: The novel works on several levels, and often very deliberately so; the religion of Aten, for instance, stands for both Christianity and Communism. In general, you can tell it was written just after a world war.
Adaptations
Ensemble Dark Horse: Jean Simmons as Merit, even if she did get top billing due to Billing Displacement. The performance is easily the most memorable in the movie while those of others are somewhat one-note.
Squick: The Finnish audio adaptation from the 80's adds in nice chipping sound effects while Phator opens a skull. Fortunately it's only chipping sounds but they still get hard to listen to after a while.
After Akhenaten dies, having given his "One day God himself will speak in words that cannot be misunderstood" speech, we see Sinuhe out in the desert finishing his memoirs and taking a nap (or dying?, it's not clear) as the words "These things happened thirteen centuries before the birth of Jesus Christ" appear on the screen.
Modern readers will probably go through the part about the conflict between Egypt and Syria thinking "hmmm, that sounds familiar..."
