THE SMITING TEXTS_Anson Hunter_Egyptology action adventure thrillers Read online

  Anson stopped at the strong chinned face of Seti I, the pharaoh’s thin lips frozen in a smile. The face was blackened.

  Seti Meryenptah Menmaatre, he thought. Just one of the kings in here who made their bid for a life after death. Was he successful?

  The group had decided to separate, on the assumption that Anson would be unlikely to be approached if he were moving around among a clump of people. The SCA official had agreed to show the group around. Anson had come to visit the darkened mummy room, while Kalila, the Coptic girl, had gone to revisit the treasures of Tutankhamun.

  Shadows of visitors moved in a quiet stream around the display cases, obeying signs at the entrance to observe silence.

  Anson reached the mummy of Rameses the Great. The face in profile made a craggy graph, a great curving peak of a nose and sharp chin. The hair on the king’s head was bright red as if dyed, discoloured in the process of mummification.

  The pharaoh’s bandaged hands lay crossed protectively over his chest. Rameses Meryamun Usermaatre, Anson thought. His crossed arms were slightly raised above his body, almost defensively, as if to guard his immortality - or perhaps to ward off the invasive scrutiny of the twenty-first century. None made a greater effort to achieve godlike status with his megalomaniacal building programme than this pharaoh. Was he so eager to elevate himself to the status of a god because he knew that it was his only chance of an afterlife? He looked far less threatening here than he did in his smiting pose.

  Did Rameses – and all of the pharaohs – go to their graves resting on a broken reed, believing in a non-existent eternity? He sometimes wondered if they had achieved some sort of ghostly existence within the withered husks of their remains, suspended, like their bodies, in stasis, where the relative motions of space and time no longer operated.

  Standing among that cache of god kings, it was easy to understand what had attracted his father to the ‘first mystery’, death, the gods and the magical underworld heaven of Egypt. There were few subjects on earth, or beneath it, quite so compelling.

  Chapter 15

  DANIEL FOUND her visiting the Tutankhamun exhibits, where she stood transfixed before a central display case.

  He joined her in front of the sad-eyed image of the boy king.

  “Ten kilos of gold,” he said. “If they buried that much wealth with a minor king, what did they bury with their gods in a land where gold was said to be ‘as sands of the sea’?”

  “Abuna!”

  “Sh-sh. Don’t call me that.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Don’t look at me. Just drift along with me as I move.”

  “What’s happened? We heard you’d gone missing.”

  “It wasn’t my choice. Someone came to harm me. They were asking about Emory.”

  The figure in a dark suit and open-necked shirt moved on and the girl, after a hesitation, followed.

  He paused at a wooden gilded shrine that stood on a silver sled. It showed a scene, moulded in gold relief of Tutankhamun and his little queen Ankesnamun. The boy king sat on a stool, and shot arrows from a bow, his arrows piercing birds that fluttered above a papyrus swamp. Ankhesenamun sat at his feet and handed the king the next arrow in a languid hand; subtle sexual coding that escaped modern eyes.

  “I think people want me silenced, too,” Daniel murmured.

  “Who? Why?”

  “I don’t know. But it makes me very keen to progress what Emory began, in memory of our friendship. Will you help me? I need to talk to his son privately. Where is he staying?”

  “I booked us into the Marriott, in Zamalek.”

  A Japanese tourist came close. The two moved on. They came to another golden image, this one showing the boy king seated on a chair, pouring liquid from a flask into the cupped hand of the queen at his feet. More sexual code.

  Daniel went over to inspect a display of Tutankhamun’s jewellery. His eye settled on a gold pectoral in a design of a Horus eye, inset with lapis lazuli and turquoise. He touched the glass of the display case. She came near and looked down. A small scrap of paper sat on the glass.

  “Bring him to see me at that address. Ten o’clock. But, by our shared faith, tell nobody else that I have made contact with you. Remember, not a word. I may not survive another attack. I have a cousin who is a taxi driver who will pick you both up outside your hotel. He will make sure you are not followed.” Daniel moved off quickly into the crowd.

  Chapter 16

  ANSON MADE HIS WAY to the treasures of Tutankhamun section.

  He paused at a wonderful chalice-shaped lamp designed in the form of an open lotus flower, surrounded by openwork carvings of lotuses and gods, the whole thing fashioned out of translucent calcite, or alabaster. The craftsmen had designed the cup to be filled with sesame oil and it was only then, with the glow of a lighted wick inside it, that radiant, unseen images painted on the inside of the young king and his queen, including hieroglyphs and symbols, sprang into view through the surface, like a vision of Egyptian eternity seen through the milk of the cosmos.

  Kalila broke his concentration. She leaned in to him and whispered in his ear.

  “Contact!” he said.

  Chapter 17

  “ANCIENT EGYPT is staggering – and then there are the pyramids,” Anson murmured to the group who stood at the foot of the shimmering Great Pyramid in now hazy, yet hazy sunlight. “You’re welcome to go inside and take the tour, but you won’t find the texts of power I want to show you. Apart from ancient graffiti, such as the names of work gangs - ‘The Friends of Khufu Gang’, ‘The Victorious Gang,’ and ‘The Enduring Gang’ - scrawled on certain blocks, the Great Pyramid is free from inscriptions. That’s not to say that it is mute, however. The whole thing, I believe, is a megalithic hieroglyph of creation and eternity and of light made solid.”

  The two young intelligence men that Anson had dubbed Eyes and Ears, regarded the fearsome counterweight to the emptiness of death with a frown on their faces, as if it were some kind of affront to them.

  “A challenge to your ideas of the homeland, gentlemen?” he said. “Perhaps it upsets your conviction about America being the home of monumental excess.”

  “Ripped straight off our dollar bill,” the young man with the watchful gaze said. The other one pulled out his earphones and nodded.

  “Yeah, thought it looked kind of familiar.”

  “What do you think, Browning?” Anson said to the security man.

  “It’s not for me to comment, Mr Hunter.”

  “You’re a practical man who deals in realities. But doesn’t even a casual glance at this heap get your mental toolshed buzzing? Think of the Herculean labour involved. Just imagine, this was once finished in smooth Tura limestone casing blocks, fitted together with a precision that’s been described as being ‘equal to optician’s work of the present day, but on a scale of acres.’ You won’t find a building in modern America built to such tolerances and it was all achieved with copper tools.”

  “You don’t say.”

  Saneya, the SCA girl, who seemed to have taken over the role of official tour guide, picked up the commentary in a louder voice.

  “Five and a half million blocks. Around two and a half tons each. It has been calculated that, in the early stages, workers must have set five blocks on the Great Pyramid every two minutes…”

  “And all with an unearthly precision,” Anson said. “Because it was built for a king’s unearthly future.”

  “I’m afraid the Republican in me chokes a bit,” the big man, Bloem, said in a low growl. “All this for a royal!”

  “Ah, but pharaohs weren’t just royals,” Anson said. “They were intermediaries between two worlds, the world of humankind and the world of the gods and eternity. The pharaoh was also high priest of every god in every temple.”

  “It still doesn’t justify all this.”

  “Astounding, isn’t it? And yet, believe it or not, gentlemen,” he continued, “this, the greatest surviving mo
nument on earth, is the elephant in the room of Egyptology. With a couple of exceptions, mainstream Egyptologists prefer to pretend that it isn’t here, which is quite a trick. Why? I guess cranks, alternative theorists, and too many troubling questions, have made them pack up their archaeological tents and move on. It embarrasses them on many levels. They dislike the dizzying numerical harmonies of the structure and what it seems to say about ancient technology and the language of symbol. Yet the Great Pyramid is certainly a locus of power. It was more than a tomb, it was the locus for ceremonies in the king’s lifetime that would result in his divinisation, through mystical, ecstatic ceremonies of transformation and divinisation that would raise him on high and invest him with god-like qualities.”

  “The guy had a compensation complex,” Bloem said.

  “Well, maybe he did get too big for his sandals. Time has cut Khufu down to size. The only surviving image we have of the pharaoh who built the largest structure of the ancient world is a three-inch high ivory statue.”

  Bloem approved.

  Chapter 18

  ANSON LED THE GROUP to a heap of rubble near the south-western corner of the step pyramid complex of Djoser. As they drew closer, the heap revealed a core of eroded mud bricks. A section of the original limestone facing on the south side was the only thing that marked it as a former pyramid.

  An opening below the ruined structure took them down a ramp, where they were forced to go, bent from the waist, along a stone passage.

  “Strange entranceway,” Bloem said. The large man came behind him bent double, almost touching his toes.

  “It’s not an entranceway. It’s actually an exit, corresponding at twenty-two degrees to northern stars,” Anson said, his voice funnelling down the shaft. “And it’s not meant for the living to use. It’s a passage built to allow the release of the shining spirit of the pharaoh. How do we know this? From the orientation of these incised glyphs here - they face outwards, whereas hieroglyphs, more often than not, go from right to left or top to bottom. If you listen carefully, and feel with great sensitivity, you may even detect a rustle of something streaming past your ears, and experience stirrings of the hairs of your skin.”

  They stood up at last in a lit burial chamber, a gabled vault with a cyclopean, black, stone sarcophagus at the far end, enclosed by walls of calcite and spanned by a field of blazing golden stars carved in stone.

  Where they stood, looking around, they found themselves bounded on all sides by vertical bars of text on the walls, exquisitely incised in limestone, running from ceiling to floor, the hieroglyphs still tinged with ancient pigment. A vivid blue-green paste once filled the characters and made them gleam like jewels.

  “We’re inside the pyramid of the Old Kingdom Pharaoh Unas. And surrounding us is the oldest collection of religious texts known to mankind, each section beginning with the phrase: words to be uttered’” he said. “Can you feel the resonances? We are standing in a matrix of ancient, metaphysical power and these walls hum with esoteric murmurings and whisperings of the gods. Some are spells uttered by the dead king, others by priests.

  Anson recited aloud in a voice that crackled with awe and respect. Rise up O King! You have not died! Turn yourself about, O King!’

  “And …

  He lives - this Unas lives. He is not dead – this Unas is not dead. He is not destroyed – this Unas is not destroyed.

  “That made me shiver,” Kalila said, rubbing her arms. The dimly lit interior failed to hide the goose bumps that appeared on the skin of the young woman. Well, he was getting through to one of them, but then he sensed that the Coptic Christian girl was an experiential type anyway.

  The Muslim SCA woman, on the other hand, remained detached, brushing aside any reaction by picking up the commentary.

  “The pyramid of Unas contains a large collection of spells and formulae, inscriptions that have the central purpose of empowering the king’s ascension into the heavens and of protecting him in the afterlife,” Saneya said. “There are now some seven hundred known spells of the Pyramid Texts. The pyramid of Unas contains over two hundred of them.”

  Anson said: “And certain spells are more disturbing than others, like this one, the famous Cannibal text, where the king is said to live on his fathers and feed on his mothers. He storms into heaven and consumes the power of the gods:

  Unas eats their magic and gulps down their spirits. The big ones are for his morning meal, Their middle sized ones are for his dinner, Their little ones are for his supper.

  Bloem disapproved. “All a bit barbaric.”

  “No more than we were in future ages. You must remember we ate quite a few of them. Egyptians, I mean. Mummies.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “Perfectly true. People consumed mummy as an elixir or more commonly, ground up as a powder. Picture it… figures inside a tomb chamber, lit by the flare of burning torches. They are dressed in medieval robes and have just ripped the lid off a wooden sarcophagus to reveal a mummy. Their leader, a man with a cross around his neck, grabs a piece of the mummy’s toe, crunches it between his heavily ringed fingers and samples it like a pinch of spice. In the Middle Ages and Renaissance, mummy trafficking to Europe flourished. Egyptian mummies were so sought after that the chaplain to Queen Catherine Medici of France, Andre Thevet, went on a mission to Egypt in 1549 and, together with a group of physicians, broke into tombs around Saqqara in a hunt for mummies to use in mummy medicines.”

  The Americans looked disgusted.

  “Now imagine a medieval apothecary working in a candelit chamber, a bearded man in flowing medieval robes working at a bench. The apothecary places a mummified bandaged hand on a bench cluttered with flasks and jars. He reads out notes from an illuminated manuscript that show an illustration of a gruesome wrapped mummy.

  “’To make Elixir of Mummy,’” he reads out the recipe. ‘Take of mummy, cut small four ounces, spirit of wine terebinthinated ten ounces, and put them into a glazed vessel - three parts of four being empty - which set in horse dung to digest for the space of a month. Then take it out and express it, and let the expression be circulated a month. Then let it run through manica hippocratis, and then evaporate the spirit until that which remains in the bottom be like an oil which is the true elixir of mummy. This elixir is a wonderful preservative against all infections, also very balsamical.’

  “Now picture a different scene, this time – it’s a man in a monk’s habit grinding up mummy pieces, dried fingers and toes, using a pestle and mortar to produce a fine powder.

  ‘Take mummy powder in a small bag hidden about your person at all times in case of an emergency,’ intones the monk. ‘This remedy is most efficacious to staunch the flow of blood or to effect a cure for any malady, contusions, coughs, epilepsy, migraines, ulcers, cases of poison, and as a general panacea.’ Yes, even kings and queens took mummy. King Francis I of France carried a small pouch of mummy powder inside his clothes and also carried one attached to his horse’s saddle in case he should have an accident or be wounded.

  “The use of mummy as medicine was widespread and ancient mummies without number were burned, ground up and turned into a powder in order to be sent all over Western Europe. It was as common as aspirin today. Shakespeare’s Othello carried a handkerchief dyed in ‘mummy, which the skilful conserved of maidens’ hearts.’ The powdered flesh of mummies also found its way into great paintings as pigment and was used by artists such as Rembrandt!”

  “Did mummy powder actually do anything?” Bloem said.

  “It certainly made people vomit. The French surgeon Ambroise Pare', said, ‘It causes great pain in their stomachs, gives them evil smelling breath and brings about serious vomiting.’ As recently as 1920 a powder was available in European pharmacies called ‘Mummy Powder’. Modern research has shown that the residues of the embalming oils in mummies still have active ingredients after three thousand years.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t get your attraction to this civilization.”
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br />   “There’s more to shock you.” Anson returned to the texts on the wall. “Other spells show that Pharaoh Unas intends to go on indulging himself in the next life, where his rampant earthly needs are concerned:-

  Unas eats with his mouth,

  Unas urinates, Unas copulates with his phallus. Unas is Lord of Seed, Who takes women from their husbands, Whenever he wants, As his heart urges.

  The young man, free of his iPod, snickered.

  “Way to go, dead dude!”

  But Bloem shook his head. “It was all very well for pharaohs, it appears. Not exactly democratic for the rest.”

  “The early Egyptian heaven was not a democracy, but a very exclusive place,” Anson explained. “These Pyramid Texts show that the heavenly realm was a place to which only the gods or divine pharaohs could gain access. You must remember that the king aspired to become an actual god and his afterlife would be exactly like that of the gods. The Pyramid Texts were intended exclusively to help divinise the pharaoh in sacred rites and also to assist him on the dangerous post-mortem journey to the netherworld…”

  “You talk about pagan gods as if they really existed, but I’ll bet your open-mindedness doesn’t extend to the Christian god,” Bloem said.

  “There you’d be surprised. I don’t suffer from knee-jerk agnosticism like most of Egyptology. I’m considered a bit alternative by harbouring some old-fashioned Christian beliefs. But back to the undemocratic afterlife of the early pharaohs… Another pyramid text from king Teti says: ‘Unbolt the doors of the Sky! Nu has commended the King to Atum-Ptah, the Creator God… that he may cause yonder doors to be opened for the king, barring the common man.’ The gateway to eternal survival virtually wore a sign saying: ‘divinities only’.

  “The First Dynasty pharaohs of the Old Kingdom knew that only the gods survived and that’s partly why they embarked on such superhuman and aggrandising projects as the pyramids – not only to protect their remains but to help them become gods in their lifetimes, in an attempt raise themselves on high in while alive, to elevate their status to that of gods. But then something happened.