Authors: Carol Thurston
Max sat staring at the last sheet for a while before he remembered to add, “It’s signed Merenptah, onetime Master of Physicians to the Army of the North and Chief Physician to Pharaoh, now
sunu
to the people of Waset, as was my boyhood friend before me.” He glanced up and saw the silent tears running down Kate’s cheeks. “Would you rather wait and read the rest another time?”
She shook her head. “I have to know what happened to her, don’t you?”
He nodded and picked up the next sheet. “I found Pagosh first …”
Kate’s heart thundered in her ears when Tenre looked up to see Aset’s spread-eagled body against the blue sky. She recognized the thin, high-pitched scream she’d heard once before, ending with a sharp crack. Bones snapping. When Aset appeared to bounce up into the air, it was because the momentum of her legs flipped her over onto the god’s balcony. In her mind’s eye, Kate watched the pink foam ooze from Aset’s lips, and in the next instant saw the monochrome X ray of Tashat’s chest.
Later, when Tenre mentioned the pain in Aset’s left shoulder, Max mumbled, “Ruptured spleen.” Finally, as if dreading what he knew was coming, he reached across the table to grasp Kate’s hand.
Day twenty, second month of planting. It is as if she occupies two worlds at the same time, and travels back and forth between them. Still, she recognized her father, though he has taken on the appearance of an old man. For a time Ramose sat watching her labor to breathe, speaking to her from time to time, then waiting for her to respond. I was too far away to hear what passed between them, except when she cried out in the voice of a child. ‘I will never… borrow my … lady mother’s … eye paste … again, Father. I promise. Will you love me then, please?’ Despite the pain it brought her, she sniffed again and again, trying to stifle her tears, while images from the past flashed before my eyes, leaving
me without pity for the man who had hurt her in ways no physician can heal.
An instant later, a wild look in his eyes, Ramose leaped to his feet and fled the room. So does Sekhmet punish him for staying away so long I thought, for only one person has ever touched him at the core. Now she lies suffering the agony of the damned, and he is helpless as a babe.
Since our return from Aniba, Ramose and I finally have learned to talk to each other. I understand now that it is not a golden idol he puts his faith in so much as the need for structure and order. And that, he believes, requires higher beings who act as larger-than-life parents to set the course for their children, to bring them to the proper behavior. Otherwise, all would be chaos.
So, after Re abandoned
us,
letting darkness fall over the land, I called Merit to come sit with Aset while I searched him out, and found him at the table in his library. There he often stays through the night writing theological treatises that he keeps hidden from his priestly colleagues, just as I do with my medical scrolls. He sat with his chin resting on his chest and one arm flung out across the papyrus on which he had been writing.
For a minute I hesitated, believing he had fallen asleep at his task. Then I noticed his other arm hanging by his side, and in the silence of the night heard the slow drip … drip … drip of his life’s blood into the bowl he had placed on the floor beneath his now lifeless hand. I knew then that Ramose had taken revenge on the one he judged more harshly than any other, even before he went to face Osiris and his forty-two judges.
Max laid the onionskin upside down on the stack of sheets he’d already read, pausing to straighten the edges before taking up the last page. Someone else might think he was simply being careful with the delicate paper, but Kate knew better. She turned her hand to clasp his, to remind him that they were walking this road together.
Day 21, Second Month of Planting. I cannot chance offending the gods, so I recite every spell exactly as prescribed in the scrolls of the priest-physicians. ‘Oh Isis, great in sorcery, deliver her from everything bad and evil and vicious. From affliction caused by a god or goddess. From dead man or woman. From male or female adversary. As you delivered your son Horus. Dispel the disease in her body, the ailing in her limbs. Osiris call away your serpent. Protect the one who suffers, who is pure of heart.’ I even burned the yellow resinous seeds from the land of Punt, which give off the hypnotic fragrance I hoped would allow me to feel or see what she does—so I can see into her body and in that way find a way to heal her. All to no avail.
Day 22, Second Month of Planting. Because she taught me even as I taught her, we grew in understanding together. And love. Did I ever use that word before she came? From her I learned, too, what it is to be brave. Pagosh was right about that as he was about so many things.
So it is done. As her breath began to slow, I took her in my arms to wait for Osiris. When next I glanced up his rigid green form was beginning to take shape in the shadows of the room. “This time you may take her,” I told him, “for only you can make her whole again.”
A moment later I felt her
ka
brush the back of my hand. A final caress as she left me.
So did the god claim what once I had denied him, yet for a time I stayed as I was, letting the knowledge that she is gone sink into my bones—to know that never again will my thoughts be enlightened by her quick wit. To never again feel the fire in my body flare up at the touch of her lips. Nor will my ears ever hear her take me to task simply by calling me husband.
Then as Re-Horakhte crept above the eastern horizon, I wrapped her in a soft linen sheet and carried her to the Per Nefer, to accomplish what once she asked me to do for her beloved Tuli. When I saw how broken and torn she was inside, not only her ribs and lungs but her liver and stomach,
I wondered that she could have stayed so long, strong-willed or not. Afterward I registered her under the name she once talked of taking to hide who she was, to protect her even in death should I not succeed in what I intend.
But first, while Senmut and the others make the long trek to Horemheb’s eternal home, I will go to Mena’s to leave Aset’s goatskin bag for our daughter. I have added my own legacy to hers—Aset’s map of the vessels that carry blood, along with this journal—that one day Meri may know her mother as I did. Also that she may come to understand what happened to Aset, and why. I want our daughter to know, as well, should I fail to return, that I do what I must to make sure the same is never visited upon her. Hapimere. Beloved of my heart.
So for now I bid you farewell—daughter conceived in joy, favorite of the River God. May you rise like the sun, rejuvenate yourself like the moon, and repeat life like the flood of Mother Nile, forever and ever.
The mummy of a Lady Tashat does, in fact, exist, and is on display in the Minneapolis Institute of Art. The inscription on one of her two elaborately painted coffins reveals little beyond her age at death (15), and that she was the daughter of the treasurer of the Temple of Amen at Karnak and the wife of a Theban noble.
X rays taken in 1975 show a broken and contorted skeleton—and a second skull between her legs. Curators at first thought the extra skull might have been an embalmer’s mistake, but a CT scan by Dr. Derek Notman, a radiologist at the University of Minnesota, revealed that it was the head of an adult male, “carefully embalmed and wrapped in layers of linen before being bound with the mummy. Notman saw further that the back of the second skull had been beaten in—whether before or after death is not clear—and that fragments of the skull had been set back in place with a mudlike packing material. Since Tashat’s outer bandaging appeared to be undisturbed—each layer of thin linen bandaging is visible in the axial scans—this means the head was placed there intentionally at the time of mummification, and that its placement was not the work of vandals or grave robbers” (
The New York Times
, Nov. 22, 1983).
Whether Tashat’s injuries occurred before or after death remains a mystery, as does the identity of her companion and how or why his head came to be where it is.
The names of the ancient Egyptians are as foreign to our eyes as they are to our tongues, providing few clues even as to gender. Many incorporate the names of gods, especially aspects of the sun god such as Aten and Amen. There was Amenhotep, meaning Amen is content, and Ramose, son of Ra, and Ankhesenpa
aten
, so named by her father, Akhenaten, later changed to Ankhesenamen but still a tongue twister. Yet “to speak of the dead is to make them live again,” so we cannot simply change Senmut to Sam, or Tenre to Tom.
Far more difficult to comprehend, I believe, is the length of time these people lived as a coherent culture, a span equal to the “distance” from Stonehenge to modern-day England—so long that by
450 B.C
., when Herodotus wrote his famous history, the Egyptians themselves could no longer read the hieroglyphs of their ancestors. So it was not until 1822, when Jean-François Champollion found the key to deciphering the stone uncovered by Napoléon’s troops at Rosetta, unlocking the door to that long-lost language, that modern Egyptology truly was born. Now another door has been opened by nondestructive techniques such as computerized tomography, endoscopy, and DNA analysis, all capable of revealing a mummy’s “secrets” while preserving these artifacts of human history for the even more sophisticated technologies to come.
Some missing pieces of the puzzle are gone forever, of
course, thanks to the avaricious thieves of both antiquity and modern times, the tomb-robber mentality of so many early excavators, and the widespread belief that powdered “mummy” could cure everything from gout to impotence (coincidentally contributing to the spread of the plague in sixteenth century Europe). And then there were the ubiquitous tourists on the Grand Tour! Not all the “souvenirs” they carried home ended in the dustbin of time, however. The mummy of Lady Tahathor, for instance, purchased in 1856 for the sum of seven pounds by one George H. Errington of Colchester, England, eventually was presented to his hometown museum. Several such mementos have found their way into museums in the United States as well, where they are being examined with techniques that allow them to continue their voyage through eternity.
So the history of the ancient Egyptians is still being written. And rewritten.
Through much of this century, Amenhotep III was dismissed as the strong-willed Queen Tiye’s amiable but indolent husband. His fame, such as it was, derived from his son, Akhenaten, who probably established the first monotheistic religion. Yet today the thirty-eight-year reign of the Magnificent Amenhotep—“Egypt’s Dazzling Sun”—is recognized as Egypt’s Golden Age, when painting began to depict life instead of death, literature described human experience rather than divine, and Egypt’s physicians were in demand throughout the Middle East. Indeed, it appears now that the legacy of Amenhotep III was individualism and naturalism in artistic expression, the foundation on which classical Greece was built.
There also is evidence that Amenhotep III favored the god Aten over Amen even before his “heretic” son came to the throne. Certainly he physically and symbolically distanced the throne from Amen’s great northern temple (Karnak) by building his royal palace across the river, a move he would not have made without reason. Not when the only residents of the land west of the Nile at the time were the souls of the
dead. So it is likely, at least in the beginning, that Akhenaten was driven by the same political imperative: the need to constrain the growing power of the Amen priests. But the father never fell victim to the religious fanaticism of the son, who eventually outlawed and then confiscated the property and wealth of the other gods—just as Henry VIII did to the Catholic Church of England twenty-eight centuries later. In the process, though, this ancient Heretic swept away both the organizing structure of his people’s lives and the source of their livelihood—employment in the fields and workshops of Amen-Re and a host of lesser gods—plunging the Two Lands into social and economic chaos.
With Akhenaten’s passing, the resurgent power of Amen brought a return to tradition, repression, and conformity that led eventually to the degradation of artistic expression and science, even of their highly developed embalming techniques and funerary art, while magical incantations began to dominate the practice of medicine—the kind of regression we see today in the rise of Muslim fundamentalism and, closer to home, in demands that “creation science” be taught in our schools.
No one knows what happened to Nefertiti, Akhenaten’s Queen, not even when or where she died. Nor do historians agree on her parentage. Or on Tutankhamen’s for that matter. Only that both Nefertiti and Tutankhamen as well as Akhenaten
could
have been sired by Amenhotep III. Egyptologists J. R. Harris, Julia Sampson, and others have asserted, based largely on an accumulation of physical evidence, that she assumed the public representation of a man and ruled as Akhenaten’s coregent during the final three years of his reign—that “the elusive” Smenkhkare was none other than Nefertiti.
As for the plausibility of a political cartoonist in the time of the pharaohs, the satirical papyri in the British Museum along with the many cartoonlike sketches found on limestone chips (ostraca) all up and down the valley of the Nile suggest that was not only possible but highly probable.
The sun god Re (or Ra), the father of creation, was the universal god of the Egyptians, but several aspects of the sun also were worshiped: Re-Horakhte, the early-morning sun (Horus Rising); Aten, the full face of the sun; Re-Atum, the afternoon sun; and Amen, the hidden or midnight sun. Yet it was the goddess Maat and the concept she represented—an amalgam of truth, order, and justice—that constituted the moral ideal of the People of the Sun. Thoth, on the other hand, was unique among all gods, then and now, in trying to dispel the darkness with learning.
The Egyptians followed a twelve-month calendar but with three seasons of four months each. The New Year began with the reappearance on the eastern horizon of the dog star Sopdet (Sirius) after seventy days of absence because of the halo of the sun, signaling the flooding of the Nile in mid-July. The Season of Inundation extended through October, when the average high temperature in present-day Luxor ranges from 98 to 107° F. The Season of Planting was November through February, while the Season of Harvest ran from March through June.
I chose to use the Egyptian Amenhotep rather than the Greek Amenophis, and the spelling convention followed by most American Egyptologists today. The city of Amen—Luxor today—was called Waset by the Egyptians, Thebes by the Greeks. Ipet-isut, Amen’s great northern temple, in Arabic became Al-Karnak (the fort); Ipet-resyt, the southern temple of Amen built by Amenhotep III, became Al-Uqsur (the palaces), since corrupted to Luxor. The Shasu were foreigners of nomadic habits including several Semitic tribes. Some sources suggest that the name Hebrew did not come into use until after the Exodus, but when that event took place, if indeed it ever did, is still the subject of debate.
I also chose one chronology of the pharaohs from several, none of which rests on uncontested ground. But it is during the twenty-five years following the reign of Akhenaten, when the glorious Eighteenth Dynasty came to an end, that
The Eye of Horus
plays out.