by Mike Ashley
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Constable & Robinson Ltd.
55–56 Russell Square
London WC1B 4HP
www.constablerobinson.com
First published in the UK by Robinson,
an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd 2002
Collection and editorial material copyright © Mike Ashley 2002
All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in
Publication Data is available from the British Library.
ISBN 1–84119–505–7
eISBN 978-1-4721-1489-1
Printed and bound in the EU
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
Cover design by GoodallJames
CONTENTS
Map of Ancient Egypt and Nubia
Copyright and Acknowledgments
Foreword: The Sands of Crime, Mike Ashley
Introduction, Elizabeth Peters
Set in Stone, Deirdre Counihan
Serpent at the Feast, Claire Griffen
The Sorrow of Senusert the Mighty, Keith Taylor
The Execration, Noreen Doyle
No-name, R.H. Stewart
Murder in the Land of Wawat, Lauren Haney
The Locked Tomb Mystery, Elizabeth Peters
Heretic’s Dagger, Lynda S. Robinson
Scorpion’s Kiss, Anton Gill
Claws of the Wind, Suzanne Frank
The Weighing of the Heart, F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre
Chosen Of The Nile, Mary Reed & Eric Mayer
The Justice of Isis, Gillian Bradshaw
The Wings of Isis, Marilyn Todd
Bringing the Foot, Kate Ellis
Unrolling the Dead, Ian Morson
Heart Scarab, Gillian Linscott
Made in Egypt, Michael Pearce
COPYRIGHT AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Apart from those listed below, all of the stories are original to this anthology and copyright © 2002 in the name of the individual authors. They are printed by permission of the authors and their respective agents.
“Introduction” © 2002 by MPM Manor, Inc. Original to this anthology. Printed by permission of the author and her agents, Dominick Abel Literary Agency, Inc. (US) and David Grossman Literary Agency (UK).
“The Locked Tomb Mystery” © 1989 by Elizabeth Peters. First published in Sisters in Crime, edited by Marilyn Wallace (Berkley Books, 1989). Reprinted by permission of the author and her agents, Dominick Abel Literary Agency, Inc. (US) and David Grossman Literary Agency (UK).
In the compilation of this anthology I have consulted several reference books on ancient Egypt. I have used as my prime source document the British Museum Dictionary of Ancient Egypt by Ian Shaw and Paul Nicholson (London, 1995) and the dates I quote come from this, though I am aware other books quote variant dates for the kings’ reigns.
My thanks also to F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre, Noreen Doyle and Betty Winkelman for allowing me to take advantage of their superior knowledge of ancient Egypt. I also acknowledge the help of Noreen Doyle’s fascinating website about ancient Egypt in fiction, which can be found at:
< http://members.aol.com/wenamun/Egyptfiction.html >
FOREWORD: THE SANDS OF CRIME.
Mike Ashley
Of all the ancient civilizations none seems to hold more fascination for us than that of Egypt. So much was recorded at the time about their everyday life that the people seem just like any one of us, with the same problems and worries. And yet there remain such mysteries as the Pyramids, the Sphinx, the Exodus and the Plagues of Egypt and, of course, the Curse of the Pharaohs, that we continue to look upon them with awe and fascination.
And then there is the sheer immensity of time! The predynastic period dates from over 7,500 years ago. The earliest known kings ruled about 5,000 years ago and the first pyramids were built over 4,500 years ago. The Egyptian civilizations rose and fell and rose and fell again and again, yet there was a continuity stretching for some three thousand years, three times longer than England has existed and fifteen times longer than there has been a United States of America.
The Egyptian civilization had laws and rules like ours, rules that were just as easily broken and had to be enforced. The worst crime of all was that of tomb-robbing, which was deemed even more serious than murder. Theft was not an especially common crime – there were apparently few muggers or highwaymen. Tax evasion or non-payment of a debt was far more common, so some things have stayed the same. At the time of the New Kingdom the law was enforced by a group of mercenary soldiers known as the Medjay, but there had been a police force for centuries before, charged with guarding the mines and quarries and cemeteries.
This anthology takes us through the ages, and features whodunnits from the dawn of civilization, at the time of the first pyramids, through all the well-known rulers down to the time of Cleopatra. It also includes a few stories set during the early days of Egyptology from the Napoleonic period to the years just before the First World War, all of which draw upon the magic and mystery of ancient Egypt.
All of the major writers of Egyptian mysteries have contribut
ed new material, from Elizabeth Peters to Lynda Robinson, and from Lauren Haney to Anton Gill and Michael Pearce.
The fascination with the magic of Egypt isn’t a recent phenomenon. It goes back at least as far as the ancient Greeks, whose historian Herodotus (who appears in one of the stories in this book) described the mysteries of Egypt in his travels and, in so doing, also described one of the world’s oldest mystery stories. The modern interest began in Napoleonic times with the growth of archaeology and the emergence of the science of Egyptology. The rediscovery of ancient Egypt began to fuel fiction, such as the work of Théophile Gautier in France, and mummy’s and Egyptian curses soon became a staple of horror fiction and macabre mysteries. The fascination in fiction really took off with the success of H. Rider Haggard’s books which evoked a mystique of lost times and other days.
Although I have encountered a few early short stories set in ancient Egypt involving a crime or a mystery, I don’t know of a genuine ‘whodunnit’ set wholly in ancient Egypt earlier than Agatha Christie’s Death Comes as the End, published in 1944. The story is set in around 2000 BC, though in fact reads every bit as cozy as a traditional country-house murder. Christie was married to the archeologist Max Mallowan and joined him on several archeological digs in the Middle East. Several of her stories are set in Egypt or involve an Egyptian theme, most notably “The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb” (1924) and the novel Death on the Nile (1937).
Despite setting a novel entirely in ancient Egypt, Christie’s work did not in itself set a trend for such works. In fact it was not until the current fascination for historical mysteries, in the wake of the Cadfael books by Ellis Peters, that several authors began series set in the Land of the Nile. These include Lynda Robinson’s novels set at the time of Tutankhamun and featuring the pharaoh’s inquiry agent, Lord Meren; Lauren Haney’s series featuring Lieutenant Bak of the Medjay Police during the reign of Queen Hatshepsut and Paul Doherty’s novels featuring Egypt’s principal judge, Amerotke, in the reign of Tuthmosis. All of these characters feature in new stories in this anthology.
All of the authors have endeavoured to make the stories fit into the known historical period. This occasionally means using special words and terms but, have no fear, they are all explained in each story.
The word you will encounter most is ma’at. Ma’at (with a capital M) was the goddess of truth and justice and represented harmony in the universe. She was the goddess in whose name the king ruled. If ma’at (small “m”) means order then the opposite, chaos, was represented by isfet, which also represents sin or violence. Then, as now, society was the constant tussle between ma’at and isfet.
Egypt was divided into a number of provinces. In later years these were called nomes, though that is a Greek word and the original Egyptian was sepat. There were 42 provinces, each governed by a nomarch. For a couple of hundred years (from the sixth to the twelfth dynasties) the nomarchs became hereditary rulers, but were eventually stripped of their power (see Keith Taylor’s story).
The ultimate rule of law was vested in the king, but it was delegated to a vizier, the equivalent of a modern day prime minister. Cases could be heard by a vizier but for all practical purposes each town had its own magistrate, the kenbet. The royal palace, which was the basis of all administration, was called the per-aa (or “great house”) and in later years the Greeks corrupted that word into pharaoh, the name we all associate with the king. The proper Egyptian word for king was suten.
The ancient Egyptians never called their country Egypt, of course. Their name for their land was Kemet, which means “black land”, because of the silt from the Nile which spread over the land during the annual inundation. The northern part of Egypt, around the Nile delta, is called Lower Egypt. This is where most of early kings ruled and where the main pyramid complexes were built, at Saqqara, Giza and Memphis. The southern part of Egypt is called Upper Egypt. This was the main home of the pharaohs in the Middle Kingdom and is the site of Thebes (also called Luxor) and the Valley of the Kings. If you continue further south along the Nile, you reach the first cataract at Aswan, which was the old boundary of Upper Egypt. Beyond that was Nubia, or the Land of Kush, also known as Wawat, roughly equal to modern Sudan.
And that’s about all you need to know. Now it’s my pleasure to hand over to Elizabeth Peters to declare this anthology open.
Mike Ashley
INTRODUCTION
Elizabeth Peters
I spent the earliest years of my life in a small town in Illinois – and when I say “small”, I mean fewer than 2000 people. It was an idyllic sort of existence, I suppose, except for a few minor disadvantages like a nationwide Depression and the fact that my home town had no library. For a compulsive reader this was a tragedy more painful than the Depression. Luckily for me both my parents were readers. From my mother and a wonderful great-aunt I acquired most of the childhood classics and some classic mysteries. My father’s tastes were more eclectic. By the time I was ten I had read (though I won’t claim to have understood) Mark Twain, Shakespeare, Edgar Rice Burroughs, H. Rider Haggard, Sax Rohmer, Dracula and a variety of pulp magazines, to mention only a few. I don’t doubt that the sensational novels and magazines influenced not only my reading habits but my later plots. There was quite a lot in them about lost civilizations, ancient curses, and animated mummies.
Ancient Egypt has always been an inspiration to writers of sensational fiction. There is probably no other ancient culture so evocative and so seemingly mysterious. Bizarre animal-headed gods, monolithic temples, tombs filled with treasure . . . it’s great stuff, even if you know that the historic facts do not substantiate that view of Egyptian culture.
My love affair with the real Egypt began when that same wonderful great-aunt took me to the Oriental Institute Museum at the University of Chicago, in which city we lived at the time. Everyone should have a great-aunt like that; she considered it her duty to pound culture into the unwilling heads of her younger kin. After that experience I was no longer unwilling. It’s impossible to explain an obsession. That is what Egypt was for me, from then on. A goodly number of young people feel the fascination; it usually follows the dinosaur craze. Most of them grow out of it. I never did.
After graduating from high school I went to the University of Chicago – not because it had a world-famous department of Egyptology, but because it was close to home and I had received a scholarship. Practicality was the watchword. I was supposed to be preparing myself to teach – a nice, sensible career for a woman. I took two education courses before I stopped kidding myself and headed for the Oriental Institute. I studied hieroglyphs and other forms of the language, and got my doctorate when I was twenty-three.
Much good it did me. (Or so I believed for many years.) Positions in Egyptology were few and far between and, in the post-World War II backlash against working women, females weren’t encouraged to enter that or any other job market. I recall overhearing one of my professors say to another, “At least we don’t have to worry about finding a job for her. She’ll get married.” I did. And they didn’t.
During the next few years I did manage to get to Egypt several times, and each visit strengthened my initial fascination. I had given up the idea of a career in the field. Instead I had begun writing mystery stories, because I enjoyed them and I hoped to earn a little money. They were terrible. My first book to be published was not a thriller but Temples, Tombs and Hieroglyphs, A Popular History of Egyptology. It was followed by Red Land, Black Land, Daily Life in Ancient Egypt. Finally that degree had “paid off” – in a way I never expected. Perhaps I should have taken this as an omen, but I kept on writing mysteries and finally got one of them published. It was a “Gothic romance”, as they were erroneously called in those days, under the name of Barbara Michaels. The first book I wrote under the Peters pseudonym proved I hadn’t got Egypt out of my system. It was a contemporary thriller, The Jackal’s Head, without any of the appurtenances of supernatural fiction; but there was a lost tomb and
a golden treasure and considerable skullduggery.
It has taken me over a quarter of a century to realize that I love to write, and that that career is the one I should have pursued from the beginning; but my obsession with Egypt has not faded and I doubt it ever will. I go “out”, as we say in the trade, at least every other year, and I use my training and my experience in what is probably my most popular mystery series, written under the Peters name: the saga of Victorian archaeologist Amelia Peabody, who has been terrorizing 19th-century England and Egypt through fourteen volumes (so far). The effects of my childhood reading linger; Amelia has encountered walking mummies and found lost tombs and lost civilizations. The books are fantasies in that sense, but they are soundly grounded in fact and they give me the best of two possible worlds. I collect Egyptological fiction, and attend every film featuring archaeologists, good and the bad. Some of the books are very bad indeed – not because of the wildness of the author’s invention but the ineptitude of plotting and style. The wilder the better, say I. One can never have too many mummies.
SET IN STONE
Deirdre Counihan
One of the great geniuses of the ancient world was Imhotep. He was the vizier of the Third Dynasty king, Djoser, and the architect responsible for the construction of Djoser’s tomb, known as the Step Pyramid. That pyramid complex, at Saqqara, was constructed around 2650 BC and was the first known stone building in the world. The following story takes place in Imhotep’s old age but refers back to an incident in his youth. Most of the characters named actually existed, including Peseshet who, like Imhotep, was a physician. She became the “overseer” or director of female doctors.
Deirdre Counihan comes from a literary family. Her grandfather was the prolific writer W. Douglas Newton. Her father, Daniel Counihan, was a writer, painter, journalist and broadcaster and her mother, Joan, is an historian. With her sister, Liz (who is also a writer – see my anthology Mammoth Book of Seriously Comic Fantasy) they produce a small literary magazine, Scheherazade. Previously a teacher, Deirdre is a specialist in art and art history, particularly archaeological art, and runs an artist’s Open House.
