Egyptian Enigma

by LJM Owen

  Elizabeth picked up the group assignment and waved it in the air again. ‘Carol will receive the hundred per cent.’

  David, who had yet to say a single word, shuffled a foot on the carpet.

  ‘James will receive nought, and will be reported to Dr Williams for threatening another student. He will fail the course and be officially put on notice by the university.’

  ‘It’s only a stupid assignment,’ David muttered. ‘No-one got hurt.’

  Elizabeth allowed some of her fury to show. ‘It wasn’t just an assignment. It was part of a pattern. If you do this for every assignment, in every course, when you graduate you may have a piece of paper, but it will be meaningless.’ She paused, staring at him, but he wouldn’t raise his gaze from the table in front of him. ‘What if you conned your way into a legal job without knowing the law? What would happen if you cost a client their livelihood or their home? Would no-one be hurt then?’

  David shrugged.

  Elizabeth was repulsed. ‘How can you be so hollow?’

  ‘I’m not,’ David spat, and glanced up angrily at her but could not hold her gaze.

  ‘Prove it. You will also receive nought, meaning you also fail this course. This episode will be added to your student file, and all your other lecturers will be informed.’

  David looked up with a gasp. ‘But…’

  ‘You have only two choices. Decide now. Start earning your degree or leave.’

  A fierce joy filling her, Elizabeth cleared her throat and began to provide feedback on the other assignments.

  —

  After several minutes of talking to an excited Carol post-tutorial, Elizabeth was reassured that the young student did not feel overly anxious about James’ threat. Nevertheless, Elizabeth warned her that she might feel differently once her current adrenaline spike had worn off, and said she would check in with her again tomorrow to see how she was feeling. Either way, she would ensure the incident was formally recorded in case Carol wished to make a complaint later.

  With the exception of that one sour note, Elizabeth was exceedingly pleased with the outcome of her showdown with James and David.

  Sauntering down the hall to Dr Marsh’s office, on the threshold of revealing the outcome of her investigation into the occupants of the Golden Tomb, Elizabeth spotted Alice headed towards her. ‘Hey!’

  ‘There you are.’ Alice grinned. ‘Come on, Dr Marsh is waiting.’

  ‘Have a seat,’ Dr Marsh said, as they entered her office. ‘How did you go with your tutor group, Elizabeth?’

  ‘Great! Thank you.’

  Dr Marsh looked from Elizabeth to Alice. ‘Alice is aware of the difficulties you’ve had?’

  Elizabeth nodded. ‘Off the record, of course.’

  ‘Total discretion assured,’ Alice added.

  ‘Good,’ Dr Marsh said. ‘Did you manage to confirm that neither of the students we discussed contributed to their group assignment?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Right.’ Dr Marsh pursed her lips. ‘There’s a lot of follow-up paperwork to be done, which I will go over with you later. But I want to say good job. You’ve handled what is always a difficult situation very well.’

  Elizabeth felt herself flush.

  ‘This raises something that, unfortunately, I end up needing to broach with all my female graduates.’ Dr Marsh looked even more intense than usual. ‘In academia, and in your working lives in general, you will encounter one person after another who will waste your time, undermine you, discount your contribution, then attempt to steal the credit for it.’

  Elizabeth felt her good mood ebb. This wasn’t what she had hoped to focus on with Dr Marsh this afternoon.

  ‘I may sound like I’m overstating the case,’ her supervisor continued, ‘but I promise you, I’m not. This is something you can always talk about with me, and I will always support you to find a way to address it.’

  Elizabeth felt her tension ease slightly.

  ‘Right. Moving on…’ Dr Marsh’s tone lifted.

  ‘Okay,’ Elizabeth and Alice said simultaneously.

  ‘I’ve reviewed the feedback on your Olmec and Maya papers. They’re looking good for submission.’

  ‘Excellent!’ Alice said.

  ‘I’ll email you the feedback later, and in the meantime you should think about the journal you’d like to submit to. But for now would you be so kind as to present your findings regarding the Golden Tomb?’

  Elizabeth’s mind shimmered with excitement. ‘My pleasure.’

  ‘Take me through it from the beginning, please,’ Dr Marsh said. ‘Starting with what you could find of the original material recovered from the site.’

  ‘We managed to track down seven of the eight original mummies, all the components of the sarcoph­agus and most of the scrolls,’ Elizabeth said.

  ‘One was in Egypt,’ Alice said. ‘Some were in the UK, others in France, and we found two in the US.’

  ‘And you were able to create accurate 3D printouts of the skeletons inside the mummy wrappings?’ Dr Marsh asked.

  ‘With a bit of computer magic from Alice here, yes,’ Elizabeth said.

  Alice flushed. ‘I had quite a bit of help, but we got there in the end. We were able to extrapolate sufficient data from existing CT and MRI scans of the mummies to create the right files for the printouts.’

  ‘At the museum?’

  Alice nodded.

  ‘This is very promising,’ Dr Marsh said. ‘I’ll have to look into other projects we might collaborate on with it.’ She looked at Elizabeth. ‘I apologise again that I couldn’t spare any laboratory space for you this year. Your workaround was adequate for storage and analysis?’

  ‘Yes, although I think my grandfather will be glad to have his library back.’

  ‘You’ll have to give him a special acknowledgement in your paper.’

  ‘Of course,’ Elizabeth said.

  ‘Excellent,’ Dr Marsh said. ‘So how many people were involved in your investigation?’

  ‘Alice,’ Elizabeth gestured at her friend, ‘Henry Evans, a philologist at New York Main Library, Nathan Trevivian, a maps officer at the Mahony Griffin who worked on the data of the skeletal printouts, and two international scholars at the Mahony, Rhozan de Wyck and Llewellyn Gruffudds, who helped us gain access to data from institutions in Egypt, England and France.’

  ‘Quite a team. And you brought everyone together, Elizabeth?’ Dr Marsh asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You seem to be developing some solid project-management skills. Along with your forthcoming publications and the work you’re doing as a tutor, I think your career is progressing nicely.’ Dr Marsh smiled at Alice apologetically. ‘But we can discuss Elizabeth’s career another time. So, having located the mummies, what next?’

  ‘The first mummy we were able to print out was the one on display in the Museum of Antiquities in Cairo,’ said Elizabeth.

  ‘They also hold the cartonnage from the Golden Tomb as well as some of the scrolls,’ Alice added. ‘After examining the dimensions of the cartonnage and estimating the height of the skeleton, it was apparent that this particular mummy couldn’t have been the one from the sarcophagus. It was too tall.’

  ‘The Cairo mummy was also almost certainly female,’ Elizabeth said, ‘which meant it didn’t match the information provided by early archaeologists that the sarcophagus contained a prince. However, as you know…’

  A look of pure frustration shadowed Dr Marsh’s face. ‘Oh, yes, I know.’

  That was one of the most comforting things about working for Dr Marsh. She really did know. ‘Reckless assumptions aside, we knew this couldn’t be the mummy from the sarcophagus, but her throat had been slit…’

  ‘Which wasn’t unheard of in royal ancient Egyptian circles. So we went back over the original records
from the excavation, such as they were,’ Alice said.

  ‘The tomb of Nefertari was found barely a week after the Golden Tomb,’ Elizabeth explained, ‘so resources were diverted to the larger find, leaving only a skeleton crew documenting the Golden Tomb. There was enough recorded to confirm the nature of construction of the tomb, the method of mummification and the detail of the sarcophagus. It all suggested we were looking at construction in the Nineteenth or early Twentieth Dynasty.’

  ‘Given that the mummy’s throat had been slit, we wondered if it indicated a connection with Ramesses the Third – the second Pharaoh of the Twentieth Dynasty – whose mummy was found to have a slit throat courtesy of his son Pentaweret.’

  ‘Shakespeare really was spoilt for choice when it came to historical inspiration, wasn’t he?’ Dr Marsh quipped.

  ‘We wondered if our Golden Tomb mummy was murdered during the attempted coup or in retribution for it,’ Elizabeth continued.

  ‘So we looked into getting hold of the data to create the skeletons of Ramesses the Third and Unknown Man E from Deir el-Bahari, who is thought to be Pentaweret. We were successful,’ Alice said.

  ‘By the time we’d found five of the Tomb mummies, we also had the printed remains of Ramesses the Third, his son Pentaweret, and his two successors, Ramesses the Fourth and Fifth. There was a definite familial relationship between the five Tomb mummies, and between that group and Ramesses Three, Four and Five.’

  ‘There were originally eight mummies?’

  Elizabeth nodded. ‘The records indicate there were seven mummies in the side chamber to the main Tomb in addition to the one in the sarcophagus. They seem to have been sold off in lots, combined with parts of the coffin and packages of scrolls.’

  ‘And the missing one?’

  ‘The last trace we could find showed the eighth was sold to a scientific research establishment,’ Elizabeth’s fingers placed scare quotes around the phrase scientific research, ‘owned by some wealthy investors in London. They were apparently looking into, among other things, the efficacy of cannibalism-as-medicine when mixed with laudanum.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘In all likelihood the mummy was cremated and ground into a powder, mixed with opium and alcohol, then imbibed.’

  ‘Twentieth-century cannibalism in drug-addled high-society England.’ Dr Marsh chuckled roughly. ‘I really should find a way to work that into my lectures.’

  Elizabeth chose not to comment. ‘As we tracked down the other mummies from the Tomb, we realised that wherever a part of the sarcophagus went, each institution that had a section claimed it also had the original mummy from inside the sarcophagus, making our task a tad harder.’

  ‘But you did manage to make copies of the skeletons from the other six mummies?’

  Elizabeth nodded. ‘As we went we found that four more mummies’ throats had been slit – a male of around eighteen years old, a likely female of around sixteen, a probable female of thirteen and a child of around ten. Our sixth mummy was a female of around fifty and showed no obvious signs of how she had died,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Of all these mummies only the older, shorter woman and the second youngest child were a potential match to the inside of the cartonnage. So at that point we weren’t really any closer to figuring out who the Golden Tomb was built for.’

  ‘The final skeleton we were able to print out was of a tall male with intriguing pitting on the inside and outside of his bones all over his body,’ Alice said.

  ‘We thought at first it was an error in the data, and then that it was some kind of pathology – perhaps some kind of growth disorder or cancer – but in the end realised it was insect activity. We’re not certain, but it looks like this could have been a case of execution by milk and honey.’

  ‘I’m not familiar with that.’

  Elizabeth explained.

  Dr Marsh blanched. ‘Every time I think I’ve gotten used to the extremes of human behaviour something new comes along.’

  ‘As we gathered the skeletal remains, we translated the scrolls from the Golden Tomb as well. They were mostly slightly unusual versions of stories from the Book of the Dead in that they were wordy and overwritten. There didn’t appear to be any clues to the identity of the person in the sarcophagus in them, though.’

  ‘So we broadened our collection of printed skeletal remains to include known members of the Nineteenth Dynasty,’ Alice said. ‘We were able to secure the data for every Pharaoh in it…’

  ‘Once we added the Nineteenth Dynasty Pharaohs,’ Elizabeth continued, ‘we found strong links between the first adult female Tomb mummy and Merneptah, Seti the Second and Tausret, three of the four final rulers of that Dynasty. We also found close links between the second last Pharaoh, Siptah, and six of the Tomb mummies.’

  ‘And even though Elizabeth worked out how to confirm all of that with cranial non-metrics, we thought we were at a dead end,’ Alice said. ‘We didn’t think we would be able to conclusively determine the occupant of the Golden Tomb.’

  Elizabeth waved her hands in the air with excitement. ‘Then we realised there was a skip code in the scrolls!’

  Dr Marsh’s eyes grew wide. ‘A what?’

  ‘It’s a long story, but we figured out that some unusual markings in the margins of the scrolls – tiny stars and crescent moons – constitute a skip code. The number of stars indicate how many words or symbols to skip. The phase of the moon tells you which direction to go in,’ Elizabeth explained, a touch breathlessly. ‘That’s why the stories in the scrolls were odd. They were written around the words the author needed to have at certain points in every sentence. Once we transcribed the messages in the scrolls using the code we discovered all kinds of exciting things.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘When the skip code is applied, one scroll translates as a long list of women’s names. It contains the names of a number of known female Pharaohs, royal women and high-ranking female bureaucrats and generals, beginning with Neithhotep, the third Pharaoh of the First Dynasty.’

  ‘So we wondered if this was a secret women’s code, possibly something similar to nüshu used by women in the Hunan province of China,’ said Alice.

  ‘Perhaps there was an unbroken chain of scribes and royal women who were transmitting messages to later generations for at least two thousand years,’ Elizabeth added. ‘Towards the end of the list there are a number of names from the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Dynasties, ending with Seben.’

  ‘There was one particular message signed by Seben, who identified herself as the personal physician of Pharaoh Tausret. The message refers to Nitocris – pur­port­edly the last Pharaoh of the Sixth Dynasty – leaving a message for all who came after her: “When the floods do not come, when old men have ruled for too long, guard jealously the water. Only that will save Egypt.”’

  ‘Looking back over Egyptian history, it could make a lot of sense. Nitocris ruled not long after Pepi the Second, who had reigned for at least sixty years at a time of extreme drought. Egypt was plunged into disarray not long after his death. That was reflected in the aftermath of the death of Ramesses the Second, Tausret’s grandfather and possibly great-grandfather. He also ruled for more than sixty years and died as Egypt lurched into drought, famine and widespread displacement of the population.’

  ‘Are you saying that people have been warning each other against the hazards of ignoring a changing climate for thousands of years?’ Dr Marsh asked.

  ‘It seems some lessons are never learnt,’ Elizabeth answered. ‘Anyway, Henry went through MA-XRF images of the linen wrappings of each mummy, and found only one word, on the sixth mummy: Swenett.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘It’s the ancient name of a city in Egypt, now called Aswan. At first I thought it was where the woman who was the sixth mummy had come from,’ Elizabeth explained. ‘But it turns out that the city Swenett was named after a go
ddess Swenett, whose name was some­times written as Seben!’

  ‘As she was one of only two of the Golden Tomb mummies we found to fit inside the cartonnage, we’re certain she was the person in the sarcophagus and Pharaoh Tausret built it for her since Seben would not have had the influence to do it for herself.’

  ‘This will make for excellent papers,’ said Dr Marsh. ‘We can certainly aim for major journals. And the other mummies in the Tomb?’

  ‘We’ve confirmed as much as we can by analysing x-rays of their nasal cavities, and it seems mummy one and mummy seven from the Tomb were both related to Pharaoh Siptah, but only mummy one was related to Tausret. Mummies two to five also seem to be strongly related to mummies one and seven, but we’ll have to wait until someone runs a DNA analysis to get any final answers.’

  ‘The fact that all six apparently died horribly or were murdered suggests perhaps they were killed in an effort to remove a set of rivals for the throne,’ Alice said.

  ‘So, we know who the Golden Tomb was built for, we know who was in the sarcophagus, we have a good idea of who was in the hidden chamber, and we’ve discovered a whole new method of written communication used by ancient Egyptians.’ Not bad for a year’s work, not bad at all!

  ‘Great job by everyone on your team,’ Dr Marsh said. ‘You’re both producing excellent research, and I’m impressed with how you’ve handled the situation in your tutorial group this year, Elizabeth. I can see both of you heading toward full-time research or teaching positions here one day, if that’s what you’re aiming for.’

  Such resounding praise from Dr Marsh was rare, and all the more gratifying for it.

  Following that tremendous affirmation, Elizabeth planned on catching up on a whole lot of missed sleep in the coming weeks.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Year 1, Reign of Pharaoh Tausret (1187 BCE)

  The Great and Majestic Necropolis of the Millions of Years of the Pharaoh, Life, Strength and Health in the West of Thebes, Khemet (The Great Field, now Valley of the Kings, Egypt)

  Beneath the searing Khemet sun, the Chief Priestess of Nephthys raised an adze high into the air then brought it crashing down towards Seben’s mouth. She mimicked hacking into the painted face on Seben’s coffin as the Opening of the Mouth ceremony began.