Authors: Carol Thurston
I glanced to where Aset stood and saw her eyes grow wide with fear and shock as the man she must have recognized as her father jerked the beast’s head up and back, then with one quick slash opened his throat. Hot blood spurted from the wound, dropping the bull to his knees. Again the Anubispriest wielded his knife, and a moment later presented the beast’s forefoot and still-beating heart to the dead Pharaoh,
causing several women to spill the contents of their stomach on the ground. The sour odor of vomit along with the stench of hot blood was enough to make the strongest stomach uneasy, but Aset only stared, wide-eyed with disbelief—as if she beheld a scene of such horror that it robbed her of the will to look away.
Next came Nachtmin, to speak the words that would make his master’s name live forever, an honor that usually falls to the dead Pharaoh’s eldest son or daughter. After him, Ay came forward draped in the leopardskin of a sem priest to perform the sacred gesture of opening the mouth—always the first act of the new Pharaoh—and a low murmur rippled through the crowd.
Astute as Ramose has been in recovering their former wealth, the priests of Amen do not yet command enough support among the provincial nomarchs, mayors, and judges. Instead, the grizzled old Master of the Horse held the governors in the palm of his hand because he controlled the royal treasury and storehouses during the seventy days of mourning. When the military commanders threw their support to him as well in order to secure the throne for General Horemheb, who still fights the upstart Syrian princes, the High Priest and his Sacred Council had little choice. Ay may once have served the Heretic and his god, but he has no children to follow him and, at sixty-two, little chance of getting any on Ankhesenamen. And since Nefertiti is said to seethe with frustration at being unable to alter this turn of events, it is certain that she had no part in Tutankhamen’s demise, which leaves only the man who takes his place.
Ay spoke the dead king’s throne name, followed by his birth name. Then he touched the bronze blade of the sacred adze to the dead King’s mouth, to return speech and sight to Osiris Tutankhamen’s now imperishable body, reuniting the six parts of a whole man. As he did so he recited the words given to him by the High Priest.
“You live again, young once more and forever.”
The boy had lived on in the man, to laugh at the playful
antics of his clumsy hound and boast of the deadly skills of his Horus of the Sky. Where is he now, I wonder. Does he stand before Osiris and his forty-two judges, declaring his innocence?
“I told no falsehood, nor robbed any man. Neither have I killed or given the order to be killed.”
By the time the God-masked priests carried him into his eternal home, Re had slipped behind the cliffs, creating narrow canyons that stretched to where we stood. Aset’s hand crept into mine when Ankhesenamen tried to stop the priests with the words they had taught her.
“I am your wife, O Great One, do not leave me! Is it your pleasure, my husband, that I should go far away? How can it be that I am to go away alone? I would accompany you, but you remain silent and speak not!” Only the Queen was allowed to trail after the priests to where her husband would be enclosed within a sealed gold case, to me an even greater hypocrisy on the part of the man responsible for his end.
Aset never uttered a word as we joined the trail of mourners making their way back to his funerary temple, nor did she loosen her hold on my hand. Perhaps she feared the encroaching darkness of night on the Western Desert, I thought, remembering the time she had recited a line from the Heretic’s Hymn to Aten.
In the dark every lion leaves its lair and all snakes bite.
Now, trudging across that landscape without pity, surrounded by an enormous nothingness, unchanging and eternal, those words did not sound nearly so fanciful as they had then. Nor did the line that follows them.
And the earth is silent, like the dead.
Kate was washing the clay off her modeling tools when the phone rang, but she grabbed a towel and picked it up on the first ring. “Do you happen to know how that jug with two handles got to be the hieroglyph for heart?” Max asked without identifying himself.
She didn’t miss a beat. “It evolved over time from a drawing of the heart with the large blood vessels attached, the same way the glyph for childbirth did. That one started as a woman kneeling on two stacks of bricks with the head and arms of an infant emerging beneath her. Eventually it was simplified to three down-curving lines representing the baby’s arms and head, over two open squares—the bricks.”
“S’that right?” he drawled. “Interesting. Thanks. Talk to you later.” She was left with a dial tone and the impression that he was working on something. But what?
That night Kate called him, late, when she was sure he’d be home. He had given her the 800 number at the clinic, but she was reluctant to call there in case he was with a patient. “The hieroglyph for many is a lizard,” she said as soon as he picked up the phone.
“Hi, glad you called. I’ve been trying to read, but I keep going over the same line again and again. When the phone rang I was dreaming up a new game for Sam and wishing I could see what you got done today.”
“I’m taking pictures every step of the way. Have been from the very beginning. You could always look at them.”
“Not the same thing, but yeah, I’d like to see them. What was that about a lizard?”
“It’s the glyph for many.” She glanced at the page from his pocket notepad, which he’d left on her worktable. His writing met the requisite scrawl for physicians, so it had taken her a while to decipher, except for the word DOG at the top. Below that he’d made a kind of list.
1) Appears 13 times. Number significant?
What’s the sign for many?
2) Anubis (dog) is son of Osiris by Nepthys (O’s sister)=adultery AND incest
3) Possible parallel with Tashat?
“Oh, you found my note. I guess that means there were a lot of them around. Listen, something else I meant to ask you—was it kosher to name an ordinary person after a god?”
“I guess, but combinations were more common. Amenhotep, for instance, which means Amen is content or satisfied. Thutmose translates as son of Thoth.”
“Mose is Egyptian for son?”
“Or heir, since it can go either way, male or female.”
“Does that mean the biblical Moses was branded fatherless just by his name, because he was found floating in the bulrushes?”
“Maybe. Not necessarily. I don’t know.” Without thinking, she asked, “Are you wearing your reading glasses?”
“Yep.” He sounded amused. “Why?”
“I was just trying to picture you while we’re talking. What were you reading?”
“An article by an archaeologist who’s been digging in the Egyptian Delta, where the cities built by the Jews held in bondage by Pharaoh were supposed to be. He claims no such cities or towns existed in those places at the time of the Exodus.”
“Aahhh, but when was the Exodus?” Kate breathed.
“Who was the pharaoh of the Oppression? One theory has it that the volcanic eruption on the island of Santorini in 1483
B.C.
explains the parting of the waters and tower of fire seen by the Israelites as they wandered in the wilderness. Another puts the Exodus just before the Eighteenth Dynasty, when the Hyksos, the foreign rulers—maybe—who brought the composite bow to Egypt, and horses—another maybe—were driven out. Others say it occurred three hundred years later, during the reign of Ramses the Second, or his grandson. Some people think Akhenaten was Moses, or else one of his followers. Freud, for one.”
“Uncle! I get it. I get it!” Max yelled, making her laugh. “Egyptology and medicine have too damn much in common—too much we don’t know. Oh, something else. Does the bandaging pattern the priests used to wrap her body tell you anything?”
“I don’t know, but I can ask Cleo. Or Dave.”
“Better not wave any more red flags in front of the bull,” Max advised. “I’ll put the question to the Egyptologists’ Electronic Forum, on the Internet. They’re a pretty solid bunch even if some of the academics on the list get pretty pedantic at times.”
“All I know is that they knew every pattern we do, ways of wrapping that your medical colleagues think
they
originated for a particular wound or part of the body. But then bandaging the dead was tied to the central myth of their lives. Osiris and Isis.”
“I have to confess I find all that pretty confusing, with Horus the Elder, and—”
“Basically, Osiris was murdered and his body hacked to pieces by his jealous brother, Set, who scattered them up and down the Nile. Except his phallus, which Set fed to the fish. Isis, who was both sister and wife to Osiris, searched until she found all the pieces, bound them together, and turned herself into a bird to fan the breath back into his body with her wings. Osiris took the form of a bird, too, and impregnated her before he returned to the Netherworld. That’s whv
their son Horus has the head of a falcon. Think of them as the Egyptian trinity. The resurrection of Osiris is symbolized by new crops that follow the annual flood, said to be the tears of Isis mourning her husband. Isis is the goddess of love, a nurturing deity with the magic power to heal.”
“Women with magical powers sure go back a long way,” Max teased, a smile in his voice.
“So do witch doctors,” Kate returned without missing a beat. ‘The priests had a lock on medical training and practice back then, too.”
He laughed. “Sounds like your engine is running too fast.”
“I know. I may never get to sleep tonight. Listen, did you notice anything special about that little dog on Tashat’s cartonnage?”
“Just that he’s all over the place, like you said.”
“I think he was her pet and went everywhere she did.”
“Suggestive,” he agreed, “but not conclusive. They’re all male. They’re also all wearing fancy collars, but each one is different. That points to more than one dog.”
Max was definitely a detail person, she decided. “It also could mean one dog with several collars, because there’s writing on them. Always the same word—Tuli, which means brave. I think that’s his name, like Prince Valiant in the comic strip.”
“I didn’t notice any hieroglyphs on the collars.”
“Because there aren’t any. It’s written in hieratic, a more abstract, cursive form of writing. I missed it, too, until I got to thinking about what Dave said—that Akhenaten ordered everyone to use hieratic script as an economy, except on monuments or the sacred texts copied out by the funerary priests for people to put in their tombs. Dave advised me to put those cartouches in a religious context, yet the dog’s name is written in hieratic. That casts a distinctly secular light on him. Maybe that’s how we should be looking at those painted scenes.”
“Okay, but does that really change anything?”
“Most gods had more than one face. Hathor was a cow.
Thoth a bird, Amen a ram. Remove the religious slant and we’re looking at a menagerie of animals at play in a medicinal garden—a zoo.” She paused and heard her heart beating in her ears. “I made a reservation on a flight to Houston a week from today, the Monday after Christmas, but they’re just holding it for me. I can change it if you’re busy then.”
“No, that’s good,” he said without hesitation. “I’ll have Marilou reschedule the few appointments I have. How long can you stay?”
“A couple of days. I’m hoping to finish the head this week. The closer I get the harder it is to do anything else, even go home at lunch to let Sam out.”
“Bring your photographs, also some drawings to show that surgeon I mentioned.” Kate was trying to decide if she should ask him to get her a motel room or do it herself, when he added, “I’ll reserve a room for you at the Warwick. It’s half a block from the art museum and close to the Medical Center. Not far from my place either. Which airport are you coming into, and what time?”
“Hobby. Two-twenty-five, but—”
“I’ll be there,” he said, cutting her off. “Have you tried going to sleep with some problem on your mind, then wake up with the answer?”
“Doesn’t everybody? Some nights that’s the
only
reason to go to bed.”
He laughed as if he were shaking his head, indulging her. “Time for you to hit the sack, Mac. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
Cleo suggested they try Vince’s for lunch Tuesday, but Kate wanted to go home to check on Sam. “He didn’t eat his breakfast, and I’m worried that he might be sick. Why not come with me and we’ll fix a sandwich?”
Fifteen minutes later they found Sam squirming with excitement at hearing more than one set of footsteps. Cleo grabbed his paws, but Kate could tell his heart wasn’t in it. He had been hoping it was Max.
“Phil says I have the build and coordination to be really
good,” Cleo prattled as she followed Kate to the kitchen and let Sam out the back door.
“So how did Dave take it when you told him?” Kate asked as she washed her hands and got out the sandwich makings.
“I didn’t. He’s tied up with family stuff during the holidays, so it didn’t come up.” Kate didn’t say anything, so Cleo changed the subject. “I talked to Max this morning. No luck on finding anything more on that necklace among his grandmother’s papers. I told him the truth—that it’s museum quality, primarily because of the unique melding of iconographies in that ram’s-head catch.”
“Could it have been carried to Egypt as trade goods?” Kate asked after they sat down. “Aswan was a source of marble and a major way station for trade up the Nile.”
“I doubt it. Three things are happening in that piece. One is the willingness to modify form for the demands of function—the need to suppress the horns to allow that oval ring to pass over the ram’s head, and the unnaturally elongated nose to hold the ring in place. That’s very un-Egyptian. Or so we thought,” Cleo admitted with a wry smile. “But it still feels Egyptian, influenced by some other sensibility. Assyrian, maybe.” She pinched off a bite of her tuna salad sandwich for Sam and set it on the edge of her plate. “I told Max what I thought it might bring at auction, and said we’d like to have first shot on an offer. Guess what he said.”
“That it wasn’t for sale—at any price.”
Cleo shook her head and nodded, then carried her dishes to the sink. Kate did the same, and broached the subject she’d been dreading. “Listen, Clee, if you haven’t changed your mind about going home between Christmas and New Year’s, would you mind keeping Sam for a couple of days?”
“Sure. Where are you off to?”
“Houston. Max wants to show me some special equipment they have at the Medical Center there.”
Cleo gave her a knowing grin. “Okay. Bring Sam along when you come for dinner on Christmas, so he and Bastet can warm up to each other before you have to leave him.”
Kate nodded. Sam didn’t much care for Cleo’s cat, with good reason, which made Kate feel guilty. While Cleo went to the bathroom, she let Sam in and put cottage cheese in his bowl, then added some tuna salad as a special treat.
On the way back to the museum Kate mentioned that she was picking up the wigs later that afternoon. “Come by the workroom before you go home and I’ll show them to you.” The museum would be closed Friday, for Christmas, but she hoped to finish the head before then.
“Okay, I’ll bring Max’s necklace, too,” Cleo replied, “so you can take it with you to Houston. Better carry it in your purse, though, or else wear it. It’s too valuable to put in your luggage.”
Kate worked without interruption until closing time, and was getting her coat from the closet when the phone rang.
“Did you know there’s a description of angina in the Ebers Papyrus, including the pain in the left arm?” Max asked, without bothering to say hello—tacit understanding that they each recognized the other’s voice by now. “Like you said, it’s pretty tough trying to strip away all the stuff we take for granted and imagine what it was like without even the crudest microscope, when all you had was the naked eye plus your fingers and nose. Makes you wonder, though, if they traced the source of that pain to the heart, how the hell they could think those same vessels carried everything from blood, air, and saliva to urine and feces.”
“Hippocrates didn’t live for another thousand years, and
he
thought the vessels carried both air and blood,” Kate reminded him.
“Yeah, but the Egyptians eviscerated their dead.”
“That’s not dissection. The priests who performed that part of the ritual were outcasts and had to live away from the rest of society, but they only made an incision and groped around inside with their left hands.” It wasn’t until she heard herself say it that she realized what that could mean. “Oh, God, Max, do you think—”
“Look, right and left has always had another meaning—
right and wrong. But even if natural lefties
were
ostracized, her father was in a position to protect her, had to be if he managed to marry her off to a Theban nobleman.” Max paused. “See what Cleo thinks. I’ve got to run. Talk to you later.”
Later turned out to be nearly midnight. The first ring sent Sam racing for the front door.
“What’s with Sam?” Max asked.
“He was asleep, really out of it. I think he mistook the phone for the door.”
“What are you doing up so late?”
She could hear the smile in his voice. “Duplicating Nefertiti’s blue war crown. It feels like ten people have moved into my head, and they’re all talking at once. Arguing. I thought doing something mindless with my hands might make me sleepy.”
“Arguing about what?”
“How much my feelings have influenced what I’ve done. Something keeps niggling at me, about Tashat’s face, but I can’t figure out what, or why, so I’m trying reverse psychology, hoping it will come to me if I don’t think about it.”
“Okay, so tell me about this crown you’re making.”
“Remember the straight-sided crown Nefertiti is wearing in that painted head? It looks black there, but supposedly it was covered with blue-enameled disks. She designed her own crown, probably because the traditional one wasn’t very flattering. Too bulbous. Anyway, I made one out of Bristol board, a card stock that holds whatever shape you give it. Now I’m sticking blue-paper dots all over it to get the same effect.”