Of all the mummies which were buried in the Valley of the Kings, only Tut-ankh-Amen’s still remains in its original resting place.
TYI: The Great Queen of Amen-hetep III, she was exceptional both for her non-royal ancestry and for the extent of her influence over her husband. She was also evidently very long-lived, since a wall painting on a tomb at El-Amarna shows her with her son in the twelfth year of his reign.
Some of her funerary equipment was uncovered in Smenkh-ka-Re’s tomb; Theodore Davis’s attribution of that tomb to Tyi herself has been conclusively disproved.
HAROUN AL-VAKHEL: Fictitious character, whose adventures are largely derived from
The Thousand and One Nights.
The story of his expedition to Lilatt-ah is based on ‘The Tale of the City of Bronze’, and the account of his marriage to Leila on ‘The Tale of Jullanar of the Sea’.
YUYA: The only nobleman to be privileged with a burial in the Valley of the Kings, his mummy bears a strikingly non-Egyptian appearance. The identification of Yuya with the Biblical Joseph was first proposed by Ahmed Osman in his book ‘A Stranger in the Valley’.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Most Egyptologists appear to thrive on controversy, but I have found that those who write on the Amarna period enjoy it even more than most. The network of relationships in the late eighteenth Dynasty is a particularly heated topic of debate, and if the family tree on which I have based this novel represents a cross-section of opinion rather than a consensus, then that is because consensus, in such a field, does not exist.
There is one other major minefield across which I have wandered with the insouciance of the amateur. Tomb KV55, first excavated by Theodore Davis in 1907 and assigned by him to Queen Tyi, remains to this day the most discussed tomb in Egypt after the Great Pyramid of Giza. In
The Sleeper in the Sands,
I have chosen to assign it to Smenkh-ka-Re; on the basis of all the conflicting opinions I have read, this seems to me to conform best to the facts, but readers should be aware that in its time the tomb has also been assigned not only to Queen Tyi but also to Kiya and to Akh-en-Aten himself. Fortunately for the purposes of this novel, the truth will probably never be known for certain.
Finally, I must offer profuse thanks to Fiona Burtt at the British Museum Society, for all her help, and to Lucia Gahlin, for showing me her photographs of the quarry discovered by Carter and Newberry. Thanks also, as ever -- and they know it goes without saying -- to Sadie, Patrick, Andrew and Fil; and to my occasionally companionable, Bastet-esque cat, Stan.
Table of Contents
THE TALE OF THE SLEEPER IN THE SANDS
[THE TALE TOLD BY THE SAGE OF THE MOUNTAINS OF KAF]
[THE TALE TOLD BY THE CHRISTIAN MERCHANT]
[THE TALE TOLD BY HAROUN AL-VAKHEL]