by Jodi Picoult
A kid beside him pointed to the thin canine figure perched on a pedestal. “The jackal.”
“Very good. The jackal is the god Anubis, or as an Ancient Egyptian would say, Inpu. The hieroglyph writes his name. But what comes before it?”
He underlined a series of signs with his fingertip on the glass.
It was one of the very first combinations of hieroglyphs I had ever learned, because it was so commonly seen.
“Hotep di nisu,” Wyatt read. “An offering the king gives on behalf of…?”
“Anubis,” said the boy who’d pointed to the jackal. “The god of embalming.”
“Right. He’s quite important for mummies,” Wyatt said, and then he grinned. “And daddies. What’s next? What are these four pots tied together?”
“The offerings are in them?” a student suggested.
“No, because it’s not an ideogram,” said another girl. “It’s a phonetic hieroglyph. The picture of the pots tied together writes the word khenet. It has nothing to do with pots. It’s just a cheat for writing three letters of the alphabet: khn-n-t.”
Wyatt’s eyebrows raised. “Well done.”
The girl’s cheeks flushed crimson. “That means so much coming from you!”
“Oh, dear God,” I said under my breath.
As he launched into another transliteration tutorial, I became transfixed by a model that had been found in Tomb 10A along with the coffins of the Djehutynakhts. Two weavers, carved of wood, were kneeling by a loom. The women in the front were spinning flax. Amazingly, after four thousand years, the threads of the flax and the loom were intact, the way they would have been the day they were set in the burial chamber, with the rest of the models and pottery and shabti statues.
“Time for a scavenger hunt,” Wyatt said, handing out a list of objects. “Pick a partner, you’ll be working in teams. The answers are somewhere in this exhibit. First pair to come back to me with pictures on their phone gets ten points on their next homework assignment. And…go!” He turned to me as the undergrads dispersed. “Was I that stupid once?”
“Do you really want me to answer that?” I said.
Wyatt wandered toward the coffins of the Djehutynakhts. “No,” he said. “But look at this.”
We both stood, hypnotized by the Book of Two Ways on the inner coffin of Governor Djehutynakht. There was the red rectangular door to the horizon. The blue water and black land routes through the Netherworld. The crimson line between them, a lake of fire. After so many years of studying this through pictures and drawings, I felt like I had reached the Holy Grail, only to find it locked inside a glass exhibit case.
“I wonder who first looked at that and thought it was a map,” Wyatt murmured.
“Well, the coffin wasn’t empty. It’s pretty clear that the deceased was meant to stand up and walk one of the two paths to reach the Field of Offerings.”
“Not to poke holes in your theory,” Wyatt said, “but this Book of Two Ways was on the wall of Djehutynakht’s coffin. So…that sort of disproves your point.”
I stepped away from him, staring at the richly painted cedar panel of the front inside of the exterior coffin. There was a false door through which the ba—part of the soul—could pass between the afterlife and this world. Djehutynakht was painted in front of the false door. The text nearby requested offerings from the king and Osiris: incense, wine, oils, fruits, meats, bread, geese.
In the interior coffin, Djenutynakht’s mummy would have been placed lying on his left side, eyes looking east. Spells from the Coffin Texts wrapped around the inside walls, protecting him like another layer of linen.
“The Coffin Text spells surrounded the mummy for a reason,” I said quietly.
“Yes,” Wyatt agreed. “Papyri disintegrate, and cedar doesn’t. Look, I don’t mean to be a jerk—”
“But it comes easily to you?”
He shrugged. “They’re texts, Olive. It’s a stretch to try to squeeze them into your theories about iconography.”
I folded my arms. “My name is Dawn. I hate when you call me Olive.”
Wyatt leaned close to the glass, his breath fogging it. “I know,” he said. “That’s why I do it.”
* * *
—
AS THE DIG House bakes in the late-afternoon sun, so does everything living. The fans can’t keep the air circulating fast enough, and heat shimmers from the mud brick walls. A fly that has been circling my lunch collapses on the scarred table. The alfalfa and corn growing along the Nile drape their lank arms over each other, a line of drunken soldiers staggering home.
This is the time of day when, as a grad student, I trudged back from the dig site with the sun forging a crown on my head. Sometimes we would work in the magazine, but more often, we made up for our early-morning departures by drifting to each of our rooms and taking a nap.
I think back to my old room, with the fan I had to jerry-rig with duct tape in order to work. I would strip down to my underwear on the narrow twin bed and pretend to sleep until I heard the knock on the wall between us. I’d knock back. While the rest of the house was hibernating, he would slip into my room, curl his body around mine, and we would burn each other alive.
Harbi offers to make up a cot for me, but that feels presumptuous. After he goes back to his living quarters, I am left to wait alone.
It is nearly 10:00 A.M. at home. Brian will be at work. Meret will be at school.
I should tell them where I am.
But there are some feelings that the English language just doesn’t fully capture. An emotion like grief spills over the confines of those five letters. The word joy feels too compact, stunted, for what it evokes. How can you even put into words the confession that you made a mistake, that you want to turn back time and try again? How do you say it without hurting the people who have been sitting across from you at the breakfast table for fifteen years, who know your Starbucks order and which side of the bed to leave you at a hotel?
So instead, I poke around the Dig House, trying not to snoop. Avoiding the laptops and iPads that litter the main room, I slip into a small alcove behind it. There are narrow cedar shelves inside, stacked with books. When I was a grad student, we used them for research. Plucking a few newer-looking journals off the shelves, I sit down on the floor cross-legged, and begin to reconstruct the history of Wyatt’s success.
In 2013, he found the tomb of Djehutynakht, son of Teti, who lived during the Eleventh Dynasty just before Montuhotep II reunified Egypt. This Djehutynakht—as common a name during the Middle Kingdom as John—was known to scholars from some hieratic ink graffiti he left in the tombs of his ancestors, touting the work he had done restoring the damage there. And yet, the location of Djehutynakht’s own final resting place had never been located.
Then came the 2003 discovery of a dipinto—ink written on stone—which offered a clue. The message described a visit by a later nomarch—Djehutyhotep—to Deir el-Bersha to see the Sothic rising, during which he stayed overnight in the forecourt of Djehutynakht’s final resting place.
I bite my lip, running my fingers over the familiar image of the hieratic, followed by Wyatt’s hieroglyphic translation, to clarify how he read each sign.
How we read each sign.
On this day, the count, hereditary noble, and nomarch of the Hare Nome, Djehutyhotep, came to this mountain to see the rising of Sothis.
After having received the letter from the Residence foretelling the rising on fourth month of Peret, day 15, I came together with the lector priests and mortuary priests.
We spent the night in the forecourt of the tomb of Djehutynakht, born of Teti, which is […] cubits from […]
In the deep of the night we went forth from this mountain […]
It’s breathtaking, seeing this in its final, published form, and I find myself riveted by each line and symbol. Yet w
hen I close my eyes, I can feel the rock under my hand, still warm from the sun.
More proof that once, I was here. That what I did mattered.
I scan the journals, but there’s nothing in them yet about Wyatt’s discovery of the tomb. Then I spot a slim bound volume on the bottom shelf. The title is printed on the spine: Ritual Speech and Interlocutory Verbal Patterns in the Coffin Texts.
I look at the date on the title page: 2008. Wyatt’s thesis, finished and published after I left.
I am halfway through the first paragraph when he notes an article—“The Corpse Makes the Coffin Whole”—published by McDowell in 2002.
My breath catches in my throat. I touch my fingertip to my own last name.
Conversations with the author of this article in front of a coffin at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston challenged my original thesis, Wyatt wrote. During the course of my grammatical analysis, I mapped out where different speech patterns (first person, dialogue, third-person narration) occurred on the coffin, and in the process realized that the texts were distributed according to a geographical pattern corresponding both to parts of the body and parts of the Netherworld.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I say softly.
It is impossible, Wyatt concluded, to separate the grammar from the context.
It may have taken years, but I got him to admit I was right.
I realize that the words are swimming on the page, and I wipe my eyes. I am about to shut the book when I notice the first footnote in Wyatt’s thesis. In academia, the first footnote is often how the author of an article will dedicate the piece to someone. At the bottom of the page Wyatt has written his inscription, a poem translated from P. Chester Beatty, presented without comment.
One unique is the sister, without her equal, more beautiful than all women.
Behold her like the star,
Having appeared in glory at the beginning of a good year.
Shining of excellence, luminous of hue;
Beautiful of eyes when glancing, sweet her lips when speaking—
For her no word is excessive.
Long of neck, luminous of chest;
True lapis is her hair,
Her arms putting on gold,
Her fingers like lotuses.
To anyone who might read Wyatt’s thesis, this would be taken at face value: a beautiful example of Ancient Egyptian love poetry.
That is…to anyone but me.
* * *
—
THE FIRST EUROPEAN to visit Deir el-Bersha was a Dominican friar, Johann Michael Vansleb, who wrote about his visit to the “hieroglyphick cave.” What people who aren’t Egyptologists don’t realize is that the art is not just fine lines and chicken scratch. It fills the walls and the ceilings of tombs with vivid cobalt, russet, turquoise, yellow, ocher, pitch black. The figures show movement, sound, emotion. These aren’t just monuments to the men and women who were buried inside. They are stories.
Unlike the later New Kingdom tombs of royals, where texts about how to get to the afterlife were written on the walls and images of the gods were the norm, the tombs of nomarchs in the Middle Kingdom were filled with scenes of ordinary life. You’d see cooking, grinding grain, dancing, games, music, wrestling, basenji dogs, hunting, sex, trapping game, winemaking, harvesting, building, plowing. The tomb of Baqet has an entire wall of wrestling holds. There’s one tomb where the owner is pictured with a pet griffin on a leash, to suggest that the man was an explorer—someone who had traveled so far and so wide he met a magical creature at the edge of the known world. There were cryptographic hieroglyphs meant to be puns and puzzles for visitors. All in all, you couldn’t walk into a Middle Kingdom tomb without thinking that these people had fun, even four thousand years ago. Their tombs were celebrations of here and now—what you did during your life and what you would take with you after you died.
In July 2003, I was back at the Dig House for my third season in Deir el-Bersha with Yale Egyptology. It was not our normal season—that was in January—but Professor Dumphries had scheduled an extra trip before the start of the fall semester because of an upcoming publication deadline, and there was no way I was missing it, even if it was brutally hot. Wyatt and I were working in the tomb of Djehutyhotep II, who ruled in the mid-Twelfth Dynasty.
We had a routine. Every morning, my alarm would go off at 4:30, and I would stumble in the dark to pull on my long-sleeved cotton shirt and khakis, and to lace up my boots. Whoever got to the table earliest got the first omelets that Hasib would make and didn’t have to wait. I was usually the fastest, along with an osteologist from England, who was working with us that season. There was also a first-year grad student, a conservator who was cleaning some of the art in the tomb, and Dumphries.
Wyatt was always the last to get to the table, his hair wet and shaggy, his eyes bright. He was the type of cheerful morning person that the rest of us wanted to kill. “Well,” he announced, as forks clattered against plates. “I’m a four, if anyone’s wondering.”
“Out of a possible ten?” asked Yvonne, the osteologist.
“More like a possible hundred,” I murmured.
“It’s not a ratio,” Wyatt said. “It’s the Bristol stool scale. Type four: like a smooth, soft sausage—”
“Shut up,” I said. “Please. For the love of God. We’re eating.”
Dumphries laughed. “It’s good to monitor, in the desert. I’d put myself at a Type three, actually.”
“Clearly someone’s a Type two.” Wyatt grinned at me. “Mild constipation.”
“If I’m having any digestive issues, it’s because you’re a pain in my ass,” I replied, and the others laughed.
I usually managed to time my breakfast so that as Wyatt sat down, I could get up and begin to pack my bag for the day. I had to spend eight hours with him inside a rock-cut tomb, but outside of that, I tried to stay out of his presence. Every other grad student on digs worked so hard during the day that by eight o’clock at night we were fast asleep, but Wyatt wasn’t like every other grad student. He didn’t fear Dumphries’s censure—in fact, he courted it, brandishing a bottle of whiskey one night that he’d carried down from Yale and challenging the rest of us to a game of Never Have I Ever; playing poker with Dumphries until midnight; teaching the local workmen how to curse fluently in English.
As Wyatt regaled the table with a story that began with the Bristol Royal Infirmary, which developed the scale, and ended with an overweight bulldog and Prince Charles, I rose from the table and moved into our work space, to pack up.
I rolled up a fresh sheet of Mylar and set it next to my bag. Then I checked the contents: a small mirror, a dozen Sharpies, brushes, a notebook, a camera, a centimeter scale for measurement, a bottle of water, and printouts of the reference photos of the scene we were working on. Packing the bag had become a science, because I had to carry it all the way to the dig site. Dumphries and the larger equipment went in the Rover; underlings walked.
“T minus five,” Dumphries announced, and he stood up from the table, heading to collect his own materials and to talk to Hasib.
I glanced down at my bag again, sensing something missing. My scarf. I wore it to keep out the blowing sand and dust, but I must have left it in my room.
I hurried down the hallway toward the sleeping quarters and was on my hands and knees, crawling under my iron bed frame to get the scarf where it had dropped, when Wyatt stuck his head through the door. “That’s an improvement, Olive.”
“Why are you in my room?” I shimmied backward and sat on my heels, the scarf caught in my hand.
“I’ve lost my notebook.”
“Why would your notebook be in my room?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “That’s why I’m looking for it.”
I got to my feet. “Ask the last person in your family that die
d.”
He blinked. “What?”
“That’s what my mother says. It’s a superstition. She’s Irish.”
“Of course she is. No wonder we get on like oil and water.”
I shrugged. “I’m not the one without a notebook.”
Wyatt ran a hand through his hair. “I don’t know the last person in my family who died.”
I turned off the light beside the bed, and the fan. “Sounds like a you problem.”
“For fuck’s sake. Fine, then. Uncle Edmond, from Surrey.”
I folded my arms, and raised my brows.
“Uncle Edmond,” Wyatt ground out, “where’s my notebook?”
Suddenly Dumphries appeared in the doorway. “There you are,” he said to Wyatt, holding out a small brown notebook. “Is this yours?”
I breezed past them both. “Erin go bragh,” I murmured to Wyatt.
* * *
—
THE TOMB OF Djehutyhotep II had an entry that always reminded me of Planet of the Apes—an impressive rock-cut stone façade, listing to the left after years of earthquakes and quarrying and robbery. The architrave and doorway were carved and decorated with Djehutyhotep’s titles and the names of the kings under whom he served. The porch was supported by two fluted columns, and the outer chamber had a large desert hunting scene and fishing scene. A narrow doorway led to the inner chamber—the spot where I worked that July—which was 25 feet deep by 20 feet wide by 16.5 feet high. Inside was the most famous scene in the tomb: a massive statue of Djehutyhotep II being transported. It was accompanied to the left by a large image of Djehutyhotep joined by his family and guards and important officials. The gate of the building where the statue was being hauled was on the right, and in front of that gate were people bearing offerings. In Egyptian art, you’d see hierarchic scale—the most important people were the biggest—but you also would see composite perspective. The faces of the individuals were in profile, but the eyes were straight on. The artists back then would take the most salient feature—eyes, or for the torso, a nipple—and emphasize it.
