Sting of the Scorpion (13 page)

“Was my sister involved in the plot to poison me?” Ramose asked the vizier.

“No, Your Excellency, but in the months that you were absent, she developed a greed for power. She thought that she would make a better pharaoh than you or your brother. She planned to rule from behind the scenes. Not even Queen Mutnofret realised.”

Ramose sighed. His sister was lost to him, but he had a brother now. He glanced at the vizier. And he had friends in very high places.

Karoya sat down next to him. Her face showed a mixture of joy because she was going home, and terror because she had to spend weeks on a boat with the Nile in flood. The boat plunged through the surging waters. Karoya held on to Ramose’s arm.

The wind filled the sail and the prow of the boat cut through the waters of the Nile. Ramose breathed in the familiar air—moist, and laden with the smell of vegetation. He turned his face to the south. He was on his way to the very edge of Egypt and beyond. And he was eagerly looking forward to it.

People who study ancient Egyptian history are called Egyptologists. They have written books about every aspect of life in ancient Egypt. Reading these books, I was able to find out what people in ancient Egypt wore, what they ate, how they travelled. Egyptologists learned a lot of this information from the writings that they found in ruins of temples, palaces and inside the pyramids. Some of the writing was carved into stone, some written in ink on papyrus or stone chips. Fortunately the ancient Egyptians liked to write everything down, so that a lot of writings have survived.

When people first started studying ancient Egyptians, they couldn’t understand their writing. A single stone inscription was responsible for unlocking the mysteries of hieroglyphics. In 1799, a stone was discovered in a village called Rosetta. On it was a decree from the year 196
BCE
. The decree was written in three ways: in hieroglyphics, in demotic (another form of Egyptian writing) and in Greek. Egyptologists were able to compare the Greek writing, which they could read, to the Egyptian writing.

It wasn’t easy though. More than twenty years passed before someone managed to translate the hieroglyphs. A French man called Jean-François Champollion realised that the names of pharaohs were always written inside an oval shape called a cartouche. He found that this was true on all the temples and pyramid writings as well. Using this he was able to break the code of hieroglyphics.

After that, the writing on all the tombs, temples, papyri and stone chips that had been found could be translated. People began to understand the world of ancient Egypt a lot more. If the Rosetta stone hadn’t been found, we would know very little about the way ancient Egyptians lived and it would have been a lot harder for me to picture Ramose’s daily life.

Amun

The king of the Egyptian gods.

cataract

A place where a river falls to a lower level in a waterfall or rapids.

cornflower

A tall herb plant with bright blue flowers.

crook and flail

The pharaoh carries these. They are symbols of kingship. The crook is a short metal rod with a hooked end. The flail is a metal rod with strands of leather hanging from the top.

cubit

The cubit was the main measurement of distance in ancient Egypt. It was the average length of a man’s arm from his elbow to the tips of his fingers, that is 52.5 centimetres.

goblet

A bowl-shaped drinking cup with a long stem and a base.

gourd

The dried shell of a melon or similar vegetable, used as a bowl to eat or drink from.

Great Place

The area in Egypt which is now known as the Valley of the Kings.

griffin

A mythical monster which has the body of a lion and the head and wings of an eagle.

Hapi

The god of the Nile.

hieroglyphs

A system of writing used by the ancient Egyptians.

Horus

The god of the sky.

jasper

A dark green gemstone.

lapis lazuli

A dark blue semi-precious stone which the Egyptians considered to be more valuable than any other stone because it was the same colour as the heavens.

Maat

The goddess of justice.

mirage

A false image of a sheet of water caused by light being distorted by very hot air in the desert or on a hot road.

nomads

A tribe of people who have no permanent home. They wander from place to place according to the seasons and food supplies.

oracle

A person who can tell what is going to happen in the future.

Osiris

The god of the underworld.

palm-width

The average width of the palm of an Egyptian man’s hand, 7.5 centimetres.

papyrus

A plant with tall, triangular-shaped stems that grows in marshy ground. Ancient Egyptians made a kind of paper from the dried stems of this plant.

Pharaoh

The title of the ancient kings of Egypt.

pylon

A gateway with towers on either side that get narrower towards the top. There is often a pylon gateway into an Egyptian temple.

pyramid

A massive structure built of stone with a square base and four sloping sides that meet at a point. The pyramids were built as royal tombs for the pharaohs and their families.

sceptre

A rod held by a king or queen as a symbol of royal power.

scorpion

A small animal with a pair of pincers (like a crab) and a long curly tail which has a sting in the end of it. The stings of some scorpions are fatal to humans.

senet

A board game played by ancient Egyptians. It involved two players each with seven pieces and was played on a rectangular board divided into thirty squares. Archaeologists have found many senet boards in tombs, but haven’t been able to work out what the rules of the game were.

Seth

The god of chaos and confusion. Also, the god of the desert and foreign lands.

shrine

A box or a chest made to hold a sacred object.

sphinx

An Egyptian stone statue of a creature with the head of a person and the body of an animal. Usually they have the head of a pharaoh and the body of a seated lion.

tamarisk

A common plant of the ancient world—a small tree with thin feathery branches. The tamarisk plant still exists today.

Thoth

The god of the moon and writing.

underworld, afterlife

The ancient Egyptians believed that the earth was a flat disc. Beneath the earth was the underworld, a dangerous place. Egyptians believed that after they died they had to pass through the underworld before they could live forever in the afterlife.

vizier

A very important person. He was the pharaoh’s chief minister. He made sure that Egypt was run exactly the way the pharaoh wanted it.

For John and Lili

Other books by Carole Wilkinson
Ramose: Prince in Exile
Ramose and the Tomb Robbers
Ramose: Wrath of Ra
The Dragon Companion

The Dragonkeeper series
Dragonkeeper
Garden of the Purple Dragon
Dragon Moon
Dragon Dawn
(prequel)
Blood Brothers
Shadow Sister

Young Adult
Sugar Sugar
Stagefright

Picture Book
The Night We Made the Flag

True Tales series
Ned Kelly’s Jerilderie Letter

The Drum series
Black Snake
The Games
Alexander the Great
Fromelles: Australia’s Bloodiest Day at War

The Beat series
Hatshepsut: The Lost Pharaoh of Egypt

Find out about Carole’s books on her website www.carolewilkinson.com.au