Authors: Carol Thurston
And so, because one small girl had such unwavering faith in me, I made my way to the palace with my back straight and chin held high—as befits the physician to Ankhesen-men, Queen of the Two Lands and Great Royal Wife to Ne-khepru-re Tutankhamen, Lord of Upper and Lower Kemet, Son of Horus on Earth.
“Even if the Jews did pick up the practice of circumcision in Egypt,” Kate told Cleo, who stood watching her fit narrow strips of clay between the tissue-depth blocks already in place on the replica of Tashat’s skull, in a pattern similar to the supporting structure of a geodesic dome, “there’s no evidence that the Egyptians ever performed clitoridectomies on their women, partial or otherwise. Despite the pharaonic label attached to one style of genital mutilation today.”
“Herodotus says they did,” Cleo countered. “And modern Sudanese and Somali women, even those who have had their clitoris cut away completely, claim they feel
something.”
Kate didn’t even look up. “Anyway, I only threw it in to rev up Phil’s motor.” Cleo watched her press a strip of clay into place and blend the joint. “What comes next, after you get all those strips in place?”
“I’ll fill in the empty spaces, except around her mouth and eyes, where I plan to sculpt in the musculature, since certain muscles determine the angle at which the eyes appear to slant. Also the inner and outer corners of the eyes. That’s where the really iffy part is, around the eyes and mouth.”
“Okay, say she
is
twenty-three or twenty-four. That’s still young enough to want more sex than she’s getting. It
is
unnatural not to need it, you know.”
“Leave it alone, Clee,” Kate warned, not wanting to hear any more lectures about how a monastic lifestyle goes against the nature of innately social animals.
Cleo waited for her to scrape and measure and scrape again to get the thickness exactly right over one browridge. “It’s just that I hate to see you get involved with an older man. He may be in halfway decent shape now, but give him ten years and his batting average will be in the basement, just when you’re hitting your prime.”
Kate shook her head. “The only reason I brought up that it’s been three weeks since we’ve heard anything is because I’m anxious to see the workup he promised.”
“I can call him if you want, ask if he’s found anything to do with that necklace among his grandmother’s papers, then kind of offhandedly mention the workup.”
“I’m sure he’ll get to it soon as he has time,” Kate assured her, “and I have plenty to do.” She could tell Cleo was keyed up by the scatterbrained way she jumped from one subject to another, probably excited about spending the weekend with Phil.
“Listen, Clee, I’ve gone over both the coffin and cartonnage with a magnifying glass,” Kate told her, “comparing them every way I can think of. I’m sure they were painted by the same hand. A switched coffin just won’t wash. There has to be another explanation for the discrepancy between that inscription and her true physical age.”
“The same artist probably painted hundreds of masks and coffins, Katie!”
“I also think they were painted by a woman.”
Cleo pursed her lips and blew out a puff of air. “Okay, let’s hear why.”
Kate couldn’t explain why any more than she could explain the fragmented images that came to her in the night—black flies crawling over the torn belly of a little dog, white-robed men bent under the burden of pulling a loaded sledge across the barren desert.
“I just think we should look at all the possibilities before we jump to some knee-jerk conclusion, like those boobs did with the mummy in Tomb Fifty-five. First it’s Queen Tiye because the left arm is folded and they found grave goods
bearing her name—until a professor of anatomy happens along and points out that it’s a male. Right away everybody jumps to the conclusion that it’s Akhenaten. Except it turns out he would’ve been too old, which leaves the elusive Smenkhkare. With half the ancient sites in Egypt untouched, why does it always have to be one of the above instead of we just don’t know?”
“Point taken,” Cleo agreed, knocking the wind out of Kate’s self-righteous sails. “Anything else?”
“I didn’t mean to preach, but, well, I don’t want to see you slip in Dave’s dirty water. Scientific technology has brought archaeology out of the dark ages, yet dinosaurs like Dave are the first to attack any scientist who dares suggest that his precious theory leaks like a sieve.” She straightened and dropped her voice. “I’m afraid you’re too much the rational scientist, Dr. Cavanaugh, to understand the ancient Egyptian mind. That’s the defense of a desperate Egyptologist—accuse the messenger of garbling the message.”
“I already asked Larry to search the literature for any mention of females with an arm folded across the chest, beginning with Amenhotep Three,” Cleo responded, pulling the plug on Kate’s ballooning indignation.
Kate laughed and give her friend a hug. “Have fun.”
“Let’s have lunch Monday. I’ll tell you all about it.” Cleo glanced at her watch. “Got to run. Phil is picking me up at four.” Kate waved her away but called, “Don’t break a leg!” as she left.
With no more distractions, Kate’s thoughts wandered to the painted floor of Tashat’s coffin. Ptah was the patron of craftsmen and artists, said to have created the world by thinking, which made him the god of imagination. The other figure was Khnum, the ram-headed form of Re, who had fashioned the body and soul of man out of clay. But if Tashat was an educated woman, why Ptah instead of Thoth, the god of learning and wisdom? Could there be some connection between Tashat’s broken fingers and how she used her hands? Surely the wife of an aristocrat would never be a potter,
but what about an outline scribe, the closest thing to an artist the Egyptians had?
“Mind if I watch?” Startled, Kate’s hand jerked, gouging a hole in the clay strip she was smoothing. “Sorry,” Dave mumbled. “I figured you heard me come in.”
“That’s okay.” She pinched off a small piece of clay to patch the hole.
He watched her for a while, then, “How can you tell how big to make her nose with nothing to go by except a hole in the skull?”
“In a Caucasoid, the width of the bony aperture is about three-fifths of the total nasal width across the wings. And the projection of the nose is about three times the length of the nasal spine, measuring from the lower edge of the nasal opening to the tip of the spine. The exact shape of the nose is always something of a guess, though, even if the length and width are not.”
“What about the lips?”
Kate guessed where he was heading, but she wanted him to spit it out. “The width of the mouth depends on where her canine teeth were, also on the distance between borders of the iris. The mouth slit is about a third of the way up the upper incisors, but the lips themselves—the red part—is guesswork. Not that I won’t be keeping several other things in mind.”
“How would you know if she was fat or skinny?”
“Unless a person was so obese it affected the curvature of the spine or knee joints, we have to go with an average based on size of the skeleton plus age.”
“She could have been black, you know,” he murmured, finally getting to it.
“Then the nasal opening would be heart-shaped, and it isn’t.”
He watched a curl of clay roll up in front of her looped-wire tool. “The extra skull is Caucasoid, too?” Kate nodded. “No room for doubt on the gender?”
“Men generally have thicker skulls,” she said with a
straight face. “There’s an overlapping area where it could be either male or female, but this one is beyond that, where the chance of finding a female is extremely remote.”
“Even so, don’t you think it would be wise to get a second opinion before we stick our necks out?” He sounded edgy. Kate wondered if the rumor she’d heard was true—that the Oriental Institute at Chicago was about to make him an offer.
“Sure, if you want to that’s fine with me. But even Cleo couldn’t push Max to commit himself without at least one piece of corroborating evidence.”
“I don’t suppose you know where she is. Secretary said she left early.”
Kate made a pretense of sighting along one of the strips. She didn’t like lying, even for Cleo, but when Dave interpreted the dip of her head as a negative answer she decided to let it be.
“Listen, there’s something I’d like to ask, if you have a minute.” She pointed to the lid standing next to the open coffin with the inside facing out, where the painted scene showed a flower-lined road, the traditional symbol of a spiritual journey. “What do you make of these cartouches? They look like two footprints, side by side, walking up the road. Didn’t cartouches always contain the names of pharaohs?”
“Plus three queens. Hatshepsut, Nefertiti, and Cleopatra,” Dave agreed as he moved closer. “But this mummy is
not
Nefertiti, if that’s where you’re headed. I hear you’ve been teaching yourself to read hieroglyphics, so how would
you
read them?”
“The little pot is n-w,” Kate ventured, naming the letters rather than trying to pronounce the word. The written language of the ancient Egyptians contained no vowels, so how the words sounded was a guess. “The arrow over the pot makes it s-n. Or s-w-n. With the seated man, that makes it s-w-n-w. Physician.” It was the determinative that made the difference in whether the other signs stood for medicine or the person who administered it. And since physicians had to
know how to write, the seated man—a scribe—pointed to the person rather than a disease or treatment.
“Sunu,”
Dave confirmed, adding the vowel sounds Kate was shy of voicing, “an ordinary lay physician with no priestly titles or royal appointments.”
“What about the cartouche with a loaf of bread in place of the arrow?”
“Just another way of writing the same thing.”
“Can’t it mean shoe … or sandal?” She was fishing, but the cartouches looked like footprints, Tashat’s cartonnage was fitted with palm-frond sandals, and the soles of her feet had been slashed.
“I said
sunu. Senu
means shoe in Akkadian, an early form of cuneiform that originated somewhere between the Tigris and Euphrates. Are you trying to learn that, too?” He seemed to find the idea amusing.
She wasn’t about to tell him that languages had always come easy for her, or that she was taking a class at Denver University. “Then how do you explain the word ‘physician’ in a cartouche? Even if it’s used symbolically to mean that some physician reigned in her heart, it still doesn’t make sense. There’s no way her husband could be called ordinary. Or her father.”
“Papyrus was a lucrative export. That’s why Akhenaten ordered everyone to write hieratic, to save space. From then on hieroglyphs were used only for sacred writing. So put this in the religious context. Pharaohs were named sons of Amen-Re when they took the throne and became gods themselves. Akhenaten considered himself the son of Aten, and wore a gold bracelet inscribed with his immortal father’s name inside the double cartouches of a pharaoh. He preached that Aten was the ultimate healer. That’s why the practice of medicine went downhill during his reign.
Sunu
is a kind of generic word for physician, so enclosing it in cartouches probably means something like ‘God is the physician who heals all ills.’”
“I guess that does make sense,” Kate agreed, giving Dave his due.
He surprised her by responding in kind. “Don’t get discouraged, McKinnon. You’re not doing half-bad for a beginner.”
Kate had gone only two blocks when it started snowing, small icy flakes that stung her face like windblown sand. By the time she reached her street she couldn’t see two feet in front of her, her toes had gone numb, and she could hear a squishy noise with every step she took.
Sam heard her stomping around on the front porch and began jumping against the door. Once inside she hugged him close and let her cold fingers sink into his thick fur. Then she started through the house, turning on lights as she went. In the bathroom she peeled off her wet panty hose and pitched them into the sink before heading for the kitchen. “Come on, Sam, let’s put some crunch in your bowl so I can go get warm in the shower.”
She was letting the needles of hot water pummel her back when she heard him barking, reminding her that she had forgotten to let him out. She was drying herself when she heard the door chime, gave a quick swipe down each leg, slipped into her robe, and padded barefoot across the living room to the front door.
“Quiet, Sam,” she whispered, and put her eye to the peephole viewer. It had stopped snowing, and a pristine white blanket covered everything in sight, except for the dark shadow in her driveway. A car with its parking lights on. A movement caught her eye and she saw a figure moving away from her front steps. In that instant she recognized the way he moved and started fumbling with the dead bolt, trying to get the door open before he reached the car.
“Max?” she called, stepping out onto the icy porch. Sam shot past her ankles, lost his footing at the bottom of the snow-covered steps, then scrambled to right himself.
The shadowy figure bent to catch the dog. “Sorry I got
you all upset, boy.” The voice was right, and Sam was wagging his tail off, sending snow flying in all directions, but when Max straightened and started toward her, she didn’t recognize his face.
“Uh, listen, I didn’t mean to interrupt anything. Thought I’d just swing by for a minute on the way to my hotel”—he kept glancing over her shoulder into the lighted house—“and let you know I was here.”
Shivering, bare feet freezing, she wished he would hug her the way he had Sam. “I didn’t recognize you without the beard.”
“Oh! Yeah, I shaved it off.” He hesitated, obviously at a loss for words. “I should’ve called before coming. It was a stupid idea.”
“You caught me in the sh-shower”—her teeth started to chatter—“trying to get warm. I just walked a mile in the snow.”
He nodded. “I noticed your shoes.”
“They were brand-new.” A rush of tears hit her at the thought that Max was standing on her front porch acting like a stranger. “If you don’t turn off those lights and come inside right now, I’m going to catch pneumonia and die.
That
would be stupid.”
“You’re sure?” A familiar smile started in his eyes and Kate decided he looked younger. Not so sure of himself. She nodded and went back inside, leaving Sam with Max. A few minutes later man and dog burst through the door, grinning like a couple of kids.