by LJM Owen
The following afternoon, as the family filed into the loungeroom for a matinee, where Grandmère would knit and everyone else would snooze, Elizabeth felt a pang. She would miss many relaxing Sunday sessions this year, in exchange for working on her Egyptology project.
Taid had gone ahead of her to his library to – as he termed it – tidy it. Elizabeth knew he used the term lightly, as Taid’s version of tidying was usually little more than a paper shuffle.
As she entered the room, she saw him shove one pile under another. ‘You don’t need to do that. We won’t touch anything on your desk.’
‘Don’t worry about me, Beth, just fussing.’
Elizabeth thought it was a little strange, but let it go. ‘I’d like to set up my laptop on this side of the desk, though, if that’s okay?’
‘Five minutes?’
That was even more unusual. Why didn’t Taid let her share the desk now? ‘I’ll pop back to the kitchen and grab a cuppa. Would you like anything?’
‘No, thank you,’ Taid answered, not looking up.
Elizabeth returned ten minutes later to find the desk completely clear except for her laptop. Curiouser and curiouser.
Skyping Henry into the room, Elizabeth kept one ear out for the doorbell. ‘Hello, hello.’
‘How’ve you been?’
‘Great! Busy! How are you going with our scrolls?’
‘Slowly, but making progress. I’ve translated everything we’ve found so far, and it all seems to be the expected material from the Book of the Dead, as well as a few lists of gods, goddesses and perhaps ancestors, but no Pharaoh names that I can recognise. They all have the same decorative stars and moons, too, so most likely written by the one person.’
‘That’s…’
The doorbell chimed. ‘Hang on, I’ll just let the others in.’
Through icy autumn winds, Elizabeth, Alice and Nathan ferried boxes of plastic bones from Alice’s car into the house, while Rhoz stationed the front door. Llew had sent his apologies again.
‘We have four mummies to work on today,’ Elizabeth began, ‘all with known identities.’
‘Excellent!’ Henry said, from his screen. ‘Who’s behind door number one?’
‘Our first contestant today,’ Alice said, joining in the mummery, ‘is Mr Ramesses the Third, also known as the Last Great Pharaoh.’
‘And was he?’ Nathan asked, playing with a decorative brass poker that normally sat near the library’s fireplace.
‘Was he what?’ Rhoz said.
‘Great?’
‘Who knows?’ Elizabeth answered. ‘That’s the thing about history. Once you’ve got a nickname it tends to stick, even if it had nothing to do with reality. He was the second Pharaoh of the Twentieth Dynasty,’ she explained, as she and Alice set out the remains. ‘He inherited the throne from his father soon after the new dynasty began.’
‘More murder?’ Nathan asked.
‘Not necessarily the reason Ramesses the Third inherited, but his life definitely ended that way.’
‘You mentioned that before,’ he said, twirling the poker between his fingers.
‘It’s one of the best-documented cases of ancient regicide that we know of,’ Elizabeth said. ‘All right, so Ramesses the Third here was discovered in 1886…’
‘Just in time to inspire a whole world of mummy movies,’ Henry said. ‘The ubiquitous mummy in the earliest mummy-from-the-crypt movies was based on this guy.’
‘He had a rather large tomb with a red granite sarcophagus,’ Elizabeth continued, ‘and was found with a second mummy, who turned out to be, in all likelihood, his son and murderer Pentaweret.’
‘But how do you know that?’ Nathan asked.
‘Something called the Judicial Papyrus,’ Henry answered. ‘I’ve been reading up on it. It says that a conspiracy was uncovered after Ramesses the Third was murdered. There were at least four trials and many people were punished. The main conspirators were found to be his second wife, Tiye, and her son Pentaweret. Tiye’s aim was to get her son on the throne, despite Ramesses having an heir and successor already lined up, a son from his first wife.’
‘So even though the conspirators succeeded in killing Ramesses the Third, they were caught and put to death or shamed into committing suicide. And Ramesses the Third’s nominated heir succeeded him anyway to become Ramesses the Fourth.’
‘And you think that our Golden Tomb mummies might be some of the co-conspirators?’
Elizabeth nodded. ‘Or some of the conspirators and their children.’
‘There were at least thirty-eight conspirators, all of whom were put to death after repeated trials,’ Henry continued. ‘His second wife, his son Pentaweret, a chief of the chamber, some royal scribes, a herald, seven butlers, Treasury overseers, and quite a few of his family members in the House of Women all died.’
‘Some of the women were charged with trying to seduce members of the judiciary who were supposed to try them,’ Elizabeth said slowly. ‘So it has crossed my mind that some of our mummies might have been those ladies, royal but also caught up in the conspiracy.’
‘It doesn’t sound like many people from that little plot made it into the Land of Two Fields,’ Alice said. ‘Could we begin by looking at the evidence of his assassination?’
‘Okay. According to scans of the mummy his throat was cut, possibly even with an axe, and the trachea, oesophagus and large blood vessels were all severed. The cut was at least seven centimetres long, so definitely fatal.’ She pointed to a vertebra. ‘Look here – you can see a tiny cut mark on the seventh cervical vertebra.’
‘Doesn’t it bother you to be so close to death, like this?’ Nathan asked her.
‘Not really. It makes me sad sometimes to think about how the people I work on died but, by the same token, it’s only by discovering what happened in the past that we can learn from it.’ She moved to the foot of the table. ‘Strangely, he also seems to have lost his left big toe in the attack. His embalmers made a fake one out of linen and packed lots of amulets around it when they wrapped him, possibly hoping it would heal or grow back in the afterlife. As for his health in life, his bones show traces of something called diffuse idiopathic skeletal hyperostosis, which essentially means the ligaments attached to the spine hardened.’
‘Ow.’
‘It does cause some back pain and stiffness, but apparently it’s not too bad.’
Elizabeth moved back to the mummy’s skull. ‘And look at his jawline, the strong chin and those super-prominent cheekbones. To me, they’re the same proportions as the faces of our Tomb mummies.’
‘To me, he just looks like another skeleton,’ Rhoz said.
‘Me too,’ Nathan said, placing the poker on a bookshelf near the door and moving closer to inspect the plastic bones in Elizabeth’s hands.
‘I have to admit…’ Henry added.
‘Fair enough. But to my eyes he looks very similar to our mummies, especially the first one, so I think we might be on the right track. My only problem is he has some significant dental issues, which will make it difficult to run a dental non-metric analysis. See?’ Elizabeth pointed to worn, missing and damaged teeth. ‘But he does have that extra tubercle on his upper second molars, which I noticed on all the mummies we’ve examined from the Tomb.’
‘That’s promising.’
‘Very. I went back through the data I collected for my PhD and it wasn’t very common in the New Kingdom population, so it’s a positive sign that our mummies might be related to the same family as Ramesses the Third here.’
‘On to Pentaweret?’ Alice suggested.
‘Also known as the screaming mummy,’ Henry said.
‘What?’ Nathan asked.
‘You know that scene in the Rachel Weisz version of The Mummy where they open Imhotep’s coffin and he falls out, mouth open, like he�
�s screaming? Because he was buried alive?’ Henry said, with a measure of glee.
Given the travesty it made of Egyptian history – not to mention geography – The Mummy was a guilty indulgence, but Elizabeth was obviously in accepting company. ‘Yes,’ she admitted.
‘He’s based on this guy, as were all the screaming mummies in early Hollywood movies, because when they opened Pentaweret’s coffin his mouth was wide open, as though he had gone screaming into the afterlife.’
‘He was certainly not treated well for a royal mummy, even accounting for his misbehaviour,’ Elizabeth said. ‘He was embalmed quickly without removing the brain and viscera, and placed in a simple cedar box.’
‘So they gave him a chance at an afterlife but it wouldn’t have been a good one.’
‘Essentially. Looking at his teeth,’ Elizabeth tilted Pentaweret’s cranium, ‘he has good dentition and a similar eruption pattern to our fourth Tomb mummy, so was probably around eighteen to twenty when he died.’
‘How did he die?’ Nathan asked.
‘As a royal criminal he was probably given poison to take, though some damage to his throat suggests he might have been hanged.’
‘Can you see that on his bones here?’
Elizabeth looked carefully at the cervical vertebrae under a magnifying glass. ‘I can’t. That comes from the soft-tissue examination conducted by the original archaeologists.’
‘Now that we’re looking at him straight after Ramesses the Third, I can see that he doesn’t look as much like our Tomb mummies.’
‘So how were the two we have today related?’
‘Ramesses the Fourth was the Third’s son by his official first wife, while Pentaweret was a son by a secondary wife. So they were half-brothers.’
‘And Ramesses the Fifth?’
‘The Fourth’s son, again with his official first wife.’
‘Do you know anything more about the Fourth?’ Alice asked, as they packed away Ramesses the Third and laid out his son and official heir.
‘He survived the coup against his father to take the throne, which was obviously the opposite of what the conspirators had hoped to achieve. And his own burial chamber – sorry, I tend to know the facts of their deaths rather than their lives – was absolutely beautiful.’
‘We visited it in the Valley of the Kings, didn’t we?’ Henry asked.
‘It was the one with the glorious depictions of Nut as the night sky covering the walls and ceiling. And the enormous pink granite sarcophagus.’
Elizabeth minimised Henry’s window to pull up a photo of the Fourth’s mummy. ‘As you may be able to see, he was a shorter, bald man with the same large hooked nose, cranial shape and general dimensions as his father. Unusually, he was the only royal mummy found to have been buried with onions in his eye sockets and nostrils covered with onion skins.’
‘Why?’ Nathan sounded confused.
‘Possibly as some form of antiseptic, which would make sense if he suffered from dental infections.’
‘His mummification was also unusual in that, unlike all the other male rulers from the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Dynasties, he was not emasculated.’
‘Sorry?’ Nathan said.
‘Again, it was something to do with the Osiris myth,’ Elizabeth explained. ‘In the story, Osiris’s genitals were cut off, lost, found, then reattached. Most of the male Pharaohs had their bits removed, with the notable exception of Tut-Ankh-Amun and this guy, who was circumcised, par for the course in ancient Egypt.’
Every aspect of the skeleton of Ramesses the Fourth was reminiscent of Ramesses the Third, apart from his height.
‘Also unusual, this Ramesses was about ten centimetres, or four inches, shorter than his father. Most of the men in this line were around a hundred and seventy centimetres, but Ramesses the Fourth was a shortie.’
‘Nothing wrong with shorties,’ said Alice.
‘Of course not,’ Rhoz reassured her.
‘His teeth reinforce the information we have from his history, that he died somewhere in his late forties. They’re worn, diseased, and wouldn’t have been much fun to eat with.’
‘Does he have the extra tubercle on his molar?’
‘There’s only one upper second molar here and, yes, it is present.’
‘What’s the little hole in the side of his skull?’ Alice asked. ‘An accident?’
Elizabeth shook her head. ‘No, likely to be deliberate. It’s thought the hole was made to release evil spirits that might be rattling around in the empty skull case. Our next Ramesses, the Fifth, also has one.’
‘How many Ramesses were there exactly?’ Alice asked, as Elizabeth completed a few notes on the Fourth and started packing him away.
‘Hundreds. Royal families in Egypt tended to recycle names, so every generation in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Dynasties had Ramesses by the score.’
Once they had laid out their final mummy for the day everyone in the room was able to see he was much taller than his father had been. ‘He was actually taller than anyone else in his line, as far as I know. A metre and seventy-three centimetres, or five feet eight inches in Henry parlance.’
‘How old was he when he died?’ Nathan asked.
‘Fairly young, I’d say, in his twenties or early thirties. And possibly into a spot of body piercing. His ear lobes were perforated and distended, indicating he wore large earlobe plugs. His mummy also showed signs of pox scars, so it’s thought he may have succumbed to smallpox.’
‘There’s something I don’t understand.’ Nathan said.
‘What’s that?’
‘I know genetics can be unpredictable, but why does Ramesses the Fifth look so similar to his grandfather Ramesses the Third, whereas Pentaweret, one of the Third’s sons, looks only vaguely similar?’
‘It would be down to Pentaweret’s mother possibly not being royal.’
‘How could that make so much of a difference?’
‘Normally, today, mothers and fathers in each generation contribute significantly different genes as they come from families not closely related,’ Elizabeth explained. ‘But Ramesses the Fourth and Fifth were both descended from a Pharaoh and official Chief Great Royal Wife.’
‘Which means?’
‘Usually they were full brother and sister, which meant both parents were passing the same genes on to their children.’
‘What?’ Nathan was clearly horrified.
‘Most dynasties in the New Kingdom were highly incestuous,’ Rhoz explained. ‘One Pharaoh, Amenhotep the First, Hatshepsut’s grandfather, was the result of three consecutive sister-brother pairings.’
‘In the case of these guys,’ Elizabeth continued, ‘Ramesses the Third produced Ramesses the Fourth through a marriage to his own full-blooded sister. Ramesses the Fourth then had Ramesses the Fifth with his own sister.’
‘It’s why the royal houses of Egypt were plagued with genetic diseases and deformities,’ Rhoz said. ‘It’s probably why Tut had so many health issues.’
Now Nathan was outraged. ‘Why would they intermarry so much when they could see the deformities it produced?’
Elizabeth understood his question. ‘The ancient Egyptians believed that women carried the divine right to rule in their blood, so they tried to keep the throne in the hands of whoever had the most royal blood from the female line. To this end, the full-blooded sibling children of Pharaohs and their Great Royal Wives were expected to marry each other to maximise the divinity of the appointed successor, generally the eldest son produced from such a marriage.’
‘That is appalling,’ Nathan said.
‘With our understanding of genetics, yes. But from their worldview, dominated as it was by the divine, it made sense and unfortunately became common,’ Elizabeth continued. ‘Brother-sister marriages were very popular while Egypt was under Greek rul
e. Even today it’s a compliment in some regions of Egypt to tell a man that his sister finds him attractive.’
‘How could anyone stand to do that?’ Alice asked.
‘Scientifically speaking, the genetics of human attraction and repulsion within families is quite complicated, but also fairly consistent across populations,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Essentially, whoever is around you in your first six years of life isn’t attractive as a mate. At the same time, there’s also a strong attraction between people who are genetically similar. So where you have family members who are more than six years apart in age, you often have an issue with the older individual being attracted to the younger.’
Nathan didn’t look comforted. ‘That is so wrong!’
In the phrenic library, Oliver warned Elizabeth that she was being obtuse, ignoring all the signs of distress her words were prompting in Nathan. She ploughed on regardless: ‘In humans you have the added complication that, unlike chimpanzees, males are attracted to younger females instead of older ones.’
‘Why are male chimps attracted to older females?’ Henry asked.
‘Chimpanzee females are able to reproduce all their adult lives, so the older a female chimp is, the more experience she has in successfully raising offspring. That makes her a more attractive mating proposition for a chimp male in terms of successfully bearing and raising offspring,’ Elizabeth said. ‘But in humans the setting is reversed, with a strong preference in males for younger females. All this feeds into humanity’s horrendous rates of male sexual violence against young women, especially young female family members. And it’s not culturally based. It’s across the whole planet.’
‘I don’t want to think about this,’ Nathan said abruptly. ‘I have to go now.’ He stood up, grabbed his jacket and left, slamming the front door behind him.
