Thayjem said, “Yan-Khety, I know the man seems to have meant a lot to you but only the richest of the rich can afford to pay the extortionate fees of the priests. How could you possibly—?”
Yanhamu opened Meryra’s trunk and showed Thayjem what he himself had suspected: the childhood toys were no ordinary items. They were incredible treasures made of gold, silver, electrum, ivory and lapis lazuli.
“Guard these treasures with your life, Thayjem, because they belong to a god.”
After providing full instructions, Yanhamu went to the quay and found passage on a cargo vessel returning to the Delta, and within two days he was dropped a discreet distance south of Akhetaten. Although he still had royal papers permitting him to be there, Yanhamu dreaded meeting the Medjay mercenaries. But by the time he reached the Hall of Records, the only life he saw was a pack of jackals wandering through the broken and deserted city.
Inside the building, he barricaded the doors so that he could work without fear and began to systematically check the urns. He emptied one at a time and read through their contents. When he finished he replaced the clay tablets or scrolls and marked the pot as having been reviewed. After many hours, he took a break and ate bread and onions washed down with beer. He counted all the pots and estimated the time it would take to review every pot and every document in the Hall. It would take weeks.
And then a thought struck him: Meryra’s secret documents were precious. He would not have put them in a broken or unsealed pot. Yanhamu walked around and looked at a few unbroken and sealed urns. Most of them were covered with dust as if they hadn’t been opened in years. He also considered that the old man had encoded the messages so that the casual eye would not notice them. This had to mean clay tablets, since papyrus was used for official documents and would be scrutinized. He worked his way through the chamber and used a series of marks to exclude old pots, ones too big to be moved and ones containing papyri. He knew he might have to go back and re-evaluate, but the number remaining was manageable in a day. He decided to start with the ones that looked most recently sealed and within an hour had found something interesting. What first caught his attention was the randomness of the documents. Most purported to be letters from state officials and vassal kings, but such documents should have been separated by category. Communications to Amenhotep should not have been stored with a letter to Akhenaten’s treasurer.
He read through the letters and then, placing three side by side, he spotted the unusual marks: a numbering system that should not have been there. From each line he read the word that corresponded with the number and immediately knew he had the right documents and the code. The first document he decoded explained something that had recently happened. After the sign of the flood and the victory parade in Memphis, General Horemheb had marched them to Thebes. The army had camped all around the city limits while Horemheb and his attendants confronted Ay. The soldiers had expected some sort of fight and the Egyptians amongst them feared drawing Egyptian blood. But it had never happened. Within days, most of the army was split to defend the borders, although this had been for show, because the majority returned to the garrisons of Memphis and the fearsome Medjay stayed at Thebes’ city limits.
Within four months, Pharaoh Ay had died, was buried with full honour, and Horemheb proclaimed Pharaoh. There had been much rejoicing in Memphis when the tellers proclaimed there would be a festival to celebrate the confirmation that Horemheb was descended from the Great Ahmose and that Tutankhamen’s wife, Queen Ankhesenamun, recognized him as the living god.
Now Yanhamu read a tablet with a very different account. Horemheb’s claimed lineage was a lie and Ankhesenamun married him only to preserve the true royal line. Yanhamu found another tablet that said Queen Ankhesenamun did not wish to marry a commoner and had sent a message to the Hittite king asking him to send a son as her husband.
Yanhamu could not believe what he was reading. The thought that a Hittite prince might have become pharaoh shocked him to the core. Avidly, he read on and discovered that Ay had consented to leave in the old way. Yanhamu could not be certain but he guessed Ay had agreed to die as a pharaoh rather than be overthrown. Ay had also been allowed to use the tomb that he had stolen from Tutankhamen.
Yanhamu found another tablet that confirmed that Tutankhamen had been buried hurriedly in the tomb with a shortened service led by Ay and without the scripts to provide instructions to the dead pharaoh’s ba. So this was why Meryra had produced the papyrus of spells for Tutankhamen. Yanhamu stopped interpreting the tablet, reached for the leather tube he’d placed in his bag and carefully removed the scroll from its sheath. As he started to unroll it he realized there was another document inside, a short a message and then hieroglyphs.
Yanhamu, I am sorry the quality of this is poor. My health is declining and I wanted to give you this so that you can face Anubis in the Hall of the Two Truths without fear. You are a good man and the gods will recognize you. Have the priest who writes your book use this spell.
Below this was text written in the old language, that the gods had taught them, explaining that his heart was pure; he could have killed a man in cold blood before, and that would have been murder. He stopped the man killing another and in doing that the man had died. It ended with the repetition:
I am pure. I am pure. I am pure. I am pure.
Emotion overcame Yanhamu then, and he cried for the first time since he had lost his sister.
FIFTY-FIVE
Alex and Marek were talking in the hotel’s dining area. They were discussing Nefertiti and whether she had become Pharaoh. Marek believed she was only ever co-regent.
The names of Akhenaten and his successors were erased from history until Tutankhamen allegedly ruled, although his grandfather-in-law, Ay, was really in control.
Marek said, “I can accept that Nefertiti was the same person as Neferneferuaten but I do not believe she was Smenkhkare. When you were in Tell el-Amarna, did you visit the tomb of Merye the Second today?”
They exchanged startled looks.
“You don’t think…?” Alex waited expectantly.
Marek exhaled. “That Merye was our Meryra? It could be!”
“What can you tell me about him?”
“Not a lot. I was just going to say he was a high official at the time of Akhenaten. In his tomb is the painting of Smenkhkare and his wife. The cartouche for his wife is that of the King’s Great Royal Wife, Merytaten—who you will know was the daughter of Akhenaten and Nefertiti. So if you are right that Smenkhkare was Nefertiti, then she married her own daughter.”
“But you said tomb. Based on the painting, it suggests he died during the reign of Smenkhkare.”
Marek poured himself some water. “Yes that would be a problem. Our Meryra was alive when the city was destroyed by the mercenaries.”
Alex clapped his hands in realization. “Unless the tomb was never occupied. Didn’t the higher classes have their tombs built before they died?”
Marek creased his face in thought. “That is true, and there was no evidence of funerary objects or his sarcophagus. You are certainly becoming an expert in this area, Mr MacLure.”
“It’s called the Internet.”
Marek looked confused and then understood what he was saying. “And as you know, there is no one checking the information. We live in a strange time when communication of gossip is more important than the facts.”
Alex smiled. This reminded him of something Ellen had said about the communication in the New Kingdom, how the official records were trivial but the true messages—the facts—were hard to find.
“Each night I’ve read and re-read your translations of the Amarna Letters. I think you were mistaken about Yanhamu being Meryra.”
“You think they were two people?”
“Yes, I think Meryra was the scribe with the secrets but it is the boy’s story.”
Marek thought for a while and sipped his water. Then he inclined his head. “You could be right, my friend. Two di
fferent messages.”
“The way the messages are hidden by Meryra is quite different to the story about Yanhamu. In fact, the boy’s story is barely disguised until the end.”
Marek said nothing. He sipped his water.
Alex wondered what the other man was thinking. Was he embarrassed that Alex had seen something he hadn’t? “Did Ellen ever discuss it?” He prompted.
Marek shrugged and looked around as though hearing someone approach. There was no one there. He shrugged again. “I have had many conversations on many subjects. I think perhaps we did have an exchange on this one. She was certainly obsessed with the Amarna period.”
Alex remembered something. “I was going through her emails and found one from you telling her to delete your communication and switch to the webmail account.”
“Right.”
“I couldn’t find it. I have no idea what the account is.”
Marek hesitated and looked up. Vanessa walked into the room. Her hair was still damp, but she looked fresh. There was a charge in the air as she joined them with a smile.
“What have you guys been discussing?”
Marek said, “The mystery of Nefertiti. Alex thinks she became a pharaoh and married her own daughter.”
“Really?”
“That might not be as strange as it sounds,” Alex said. “Perhaps it was for appearances. Maybe Nefertiti’s plan was to protect the lineage by pretending to be a male pharaoh. After all, at this time there was a movement to suggest that, like the gods, the pharaoh was a hermaphrodite—or at least, he could be both male and female.”
Vanessa sat and picked up a menu. “Is it frustrating that you’ll never know the truth?”
The men both vigorously shook their heads. “Oh no,” Marek said, “that is the allure of Egyptology—the hope that one day we will find the answers.”
Alex added, “As long as there are clues and progress, there is hope.”
Food arrived and Marek explained he had ordered the special for everyone. “I hope you don’t mind. Always have what they recommend,” he said with a knowing nod.
As they were served, Vanessa said, “About the clues, what I don’t understand is what the letters told you. What made you realize there was a map to find? And how do you know what the map is for?”
Marek answered, “The code in the letters didn’t tell us everything. Ellen and I thought perhaps half is missing. We know something happened to make Nefertiti leave Amarna. Some people stayed, but many left with her. Alex thinks she was the pharaoh, but certainly she was seen as the leader.”
Vanessa prompted, “OK, so Akhenaten had died and Nefertiti may have been a pharaoh, then what, she stood down in favour of another?”
“King Tut?” Marek said, nodding. “There’s a gap here. We don’t know what happened, but Meryra was unhappy. He also stayed in Akhetaten—Tell el-Amarna—to protect the library and maybe also guard the royal tombs. Royal cemeteries like the Valley of the Kings would have been guarded by the army, but the pharaoh took away any financial and military support for Akhetaten.”
Alex said, “Then sometime later—we’re not sure when—a character known as the Scorpion razed the city to the ground.”
“Meryra tells us he needed to confess to the gods about what he had done,” Marek said. “He wrote his own special Book of the Dead to explain. He says he went into Tutankhamen’s tomb. It looks like he was also directed to go there to make reparations, possibly for Nefertiti’s or Tutankhamen’s treatment. Everlasting life could only be achieved by convincing the gods that you were worthy.”
Vanessa’s eyes flashed understanding. “Alex has told me the Book of the Dead included some gruesome bits, like a prayer to the Eater of Entrails.”
When she said this, Alex had a flashback to his dream as Yanhamu having his heart weighed and trying to convince Thoth he hadn’t stolen the Map-Stone. He said, “For me, the most important hidden message is the one at the end where Meryra talks of burying the treasure in a tomb and taking a map to Pharaoh Akhenaten.”
“But you said Akhenaten was dead by then.” She looked from Alex to Marek and back. “I don’t understand.”
Marek shook his head. “It’s probably symbolic. Remember, in their eyes the pharaoh was a god and only his physical form had died—his ka. The ba, or spirit, goes on and can still be communicated with. Meryra would have believed Akhenaten was still present.”
Vanessa nodded and looked at Alex. “So how did Ellen know that the ceremonial block thing was the map?”
Alex said, “She didn’t say. Marek?”
“No, she didn’t tell me.”
Alex said, “Well, from the clay tablet letters it was described as a spiritual guide. The ceremonial block and the letter include the same expression: To reunite the house of the Aten.
“I think Ellen also realized that the symbols on the block were linked to the letters.”
“That’s right,” Marek said. Although Alex thought he detected a little doubt.
“Can you show us what’s on the block?” Vanessa said, enthusiastically. “I’m dying to see what it says.”
Alex considered it for a moment. Up until now he hadn’t produced too much of what he’d seen from Ellen’s notes on the Map-Stone. He’d been concerned for anyone who knew. But now they were here. And it was just the three of them. It felt like a relief to finally agree to share what he knew. “Can you ask for a pen and paper?”
Marek called the waitress over and spoke in Arabic. Moments later, Alex had a pad of paper and a pen. First he drew the block as it physically appeared and pointed out the lines he’d drawn for Vanessa, the concentric lines and steps.
Vanessa said, “It looks a bit like a maze.”
Alex stared at it and realized that the lines did indeed look like a sort of maze. He agreed and then drew the images around the sides, and then on a separate piece of paper he tried to show them in three dimensions—as though they were written on six sides of a box.
He pointed to a hieroglyph like a rectangle missing part of a side. “This means a building, especially a palace.”
To Vanessa, Marek explained, “It’s what is called a determinative. The symbols before it are the sounds confirming it is a palace.” Then to Alex he said, “Some of these symbols aren’t hieroglyphs, you know?” He pointed to lines and marks that Alex had drawn.
“I’ll come to that,” Alex said, agreeing. “There’s another with a flag and a god or pharaoh. I think this refers to a temple. In Ellen’s notes she thought the next block of symbols refers to a location. There are two parts: water and gold.”
Vanessa said, “Gold. No wonder Pete was interested.”
Alex continued: “Then we have lines forming a right angle—a triangle with a side missing. There is a spiral and there is a hoop followed by two reeds—the number twelve.”
Marek said, “The ancient Egyptian builders used a continuous rope with twelve equally spaced knots.”
“Yes, and here we see a line with twelve knots.” Alex turned to Vanessa to explain. “You’ll remember I asked your uncle about twelve and three, four and five, in case their meaning in Hebrew was important. But I see now I think it represents the perfect triangle and infinity. If you cut through a pyramid and draw a line down the middle you’d have two triangles each with a base of three, height four and side of five.” He looked back to Marek for acknowledgement and added, “So, I think we are looking for a palace with dimensions of three-four-five—the magic triangle.”
The others nodded their understanding.
Alex said, “Yesterday, I realized we have a problem. With ruins, we don’t know how tall the buildings were. I also don’t know which dimension is which. The other symbols I think will make sense when we find the right location.” He pointed to the four hoops and a column.
Marek said, “But the hoops—the heel bones—are facing in different directions.”
“Just the effect of combining the diagram, I think,” Alex said. “Four hoops is forty.�
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“And then a pillar. So the forty pillars?” Vanessa asked.
“Exactly,” Alex agreed, impressed that she was following. “And the flying geese next to that. The Northern Palace we saw used to have forty pillars. I didn’t spot anywhere else that had forty of anything. But we saw no flying geese.”
Marek said, “There were geese at the Royal Palace of Amarna.”
“But the forty pillars were at the Northern Palace.”
Marek frowned. “There’s another possibility. Geese could symbolize the journey to the afterlife or the rise of a new pharaoh.”
Vanessa said, “We don’t seem to be getting anywhere.”
“What about this symbol?” He pointed to something that looked like a portcullis. “You said you’d explain the ones that were hieroglyphs.”
“The number eight. It’s cuneiform.”
“And how does that fit in?”
“I have no idea. But there is something else. Remember what I said about 2D and 3D? I realized something while we were in the police station last night.” Alex pointed to the corners of the original drawing of the block.
“Four corners. Four directions.” He picked up the second piece of paper and folded the corners together and redrew what he saw:
Vanessa looked at both men. “Can either of you translate this?”
Alex shook his head.
Marek said, “Is it possible this is incomplete?”
“Highly likely. The paint was very faded so I’m not even a hundred per cent sure about this.”
Marek took the pen and added to the picture. “I believe it may be this.”
He pointed to the first symbol. “This is clearly a boat and could be a determinative—telling us the rest is the name of the boat. The next is a throne—it’s not normally on its own, but it doesn’t go with the rectangle.”
Map of the Dead: A mystery thriller that's a page turner Page 29
