“Sabah el-noor,” he replies.
I give him my destination, a little over an hour away. He takes the eastern desert road out of Minya. I stare out the window, counting the gebels and wadis—hills and valleys—that rise in the darkness at the horizon. At the security checkpoints, where boys too young to grow a beard hold battered old machine guns from the sixties, I wrap my scarf around my head and pretend to sleep.
The driver keeps stealing glances in the rearview mirror. He is probably wondering what an American is doing in a taxi in the heart of Egypt, the one section that isn’t on tourist itineraries. I imagine what I might say to him, if I had the courage or the language to do so.
One of the questions I ask my clients is What’s left unfinished? What is it that you haven’t done yet, that you need to do before you leave this life? I’ve heard nearly every response: from fixing the front door where it sticks to bathing in the Red Sea; from publishing a memoir to playing a hand of poker with a friend you haven’t seen in years. For me, it’s this. This dust, this tooth-jarring ride, this bone-bleached ribbon of landscape.
In a previous life, I had been planning to be an Egyptologist. I fell in love with the culture first, when we studied Ancient Egypt in fourth grade. I remember standing at the top of the jungle gym and feeling the wind and pretending that I was in a felluca, crossing the Nile. My prized possession was a guidebook from the Tut: Treasures of the Golden Pharaoh exhibit that my mother had found at a secondhand bookshop. In high school, I took French and German, because I knew that I would need those languages to translate research. I applied to colleges that offered Egyptology programs, and studied on full scholarship at U Chicago.
Most of what I learned about Ancient Egypt can be boiled down to two subjects. The first is historical—Egypt was ruled by thirty-two dynasties of pharaohs, split across three main time periods: the Old Kingdom, the Middle Kingdom, and the New Kingdom. The First Dynasty began with King Narmer, the pharaoh who unified Upper and Lower Egypt around 3100 B.C.E. The Old Kingdom is best known for being the time the pyramids were built as tombs for the kings. But around 2150 B.C.E., civil war broke out in Egypt. There were forty-two separate territories—or nomes—each headed by a nomarch. During this period, each nomarch was fighting for his own nome. There were alliances, but the pharaoh in the north didn’t rule over a unified Egypt; instead, it was like the Egyptian Game of Thrones. The Middle Kingdom began when a king named Mentuhotep II reunified Upper and Lower Egypt around 2010 B.C.E. That lasted until the Hyksos invaded from the north and a period followed where rulers were from foreign lands. It wasn’t until King Ahmose crushed the Hyksos that Egypt was reunited again during the New Kingdom, in 1550 B.C.E.
The second key subject involves Ancient Egyptian religion. Much of it was related to the sun god, Re—who, as the sun, was pulled across the sky daily in a long boat called the solar bark—and Osiris, the god of the Netherworld. Osiris was also the corpse of the sun god, and so they were flip sides of the same coin. This was not a logic bomb for the Ancient Egyptians because Osiris and Re were simply two faces of the same entity, like the Christian trinity of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Every night, Re visited Osiris and reunited with his corpse, which powered him up to make the sun rise the next day. The Egyptian model of the afterlife imitated this cycle: the deceased’s soul was reborn daily like Re, and reunited nightly with its corpse.
A lot of what we know about Ancient Egypt comes from tombs, so we have proof that great pains were taken to prepare for dying, and what came afterward. Even people who don’t know much about Egyptology have heard of the Book of the Dead—or, as Ancient Egyptians called it, the Book of Going Forth by Day. It’s a New Kingdom collection of spells to help the deceased make his or her way to the afterlife—but it evolved from earlier, lesser known funerary texts. First came the Old Kingdom’s Pyramid Texts: spells to ward off evil creatures, words to be spoken at funerary rituals by the dead king’s son, and instructions for the deceased to reach the next world. By the Middle Kingdom, funerary texts were found painted on the coffins of nobles and other citizens, including spells to restore family relationships, because death can separate us from people we love; spells to help the deceased travel with Re in his solar bark to defeat Apep—the serpent of chaos—who tried to suck the water out from underneath; and spells to help the deceased become one again with Osiris every night.
Also part of these Coffin Texts was the Book of Two Ways, the first known map of the afterlife. It was found only in certain coffins in Middle Egypt during the Middle Kingdom, usually painted on the bottom. It showed two roads snaking through Osiris’s realm of the dead: a land route, black, and a water route, blue, which are separated by a lake of fire. If you follow the map, it’s like choosing between taking the ferry or driving around—both ways wind up in the same place: the Field of Offerings, where the deceased can feast with Osiris for eternity. There is a catch, though—some of the paths lead nowhere. Others push you toward demons or circles of fire. Embedded in the text is the magic you need to get past the guardians of the gates.
The first passage I ever translated from the Book of Two Ways was Spell 1130: As for any man who knows this spell, he will be like Re in the sky, like Osiris in the Netherworld, and into the circle of fire he will descend, but no flame will be against him forever and ever.
Forever and ever. Neheh djet. Time, for Ancient Egyptians, moved differently. It could be linear and eternal, like Osiris. Or it could be cyclical, with daily reincarnations, like Re. These were not mutually exclusive. In fact, to have a good death, you couldn’t have one without the other. The tomb was the connective tissue, the magical battery that provided the juice for eternal life. Most Egyptologists studied the images and hieroglyphs in a vacuum, but as a young academic, I started to think about their placement in the coffin, and the Book of Two Ways on the floor. What if the mummy inside was meant to activate the magic, like a key?
The versions of the Book of Two Ways that have been published have come almost exclusively from coffins of nomarchs from the necropolis at Deir el-Bersha, a sprawling collection of rock-cut tombs of nobles, a city of the dead. Fifteen years ago, I was a graduate student working in those tombs, trying to prove my thesis.
What’s left unfinished?
As the driver turns south, bringing me back to Deir el-Bersha, I glance out the window again, struck by the beauty of the sky yawning over the desert. It’s blue and pink and orange, the stripes of a day that’s only beginning. A star winks at me for a moment before it’s swallowed by the sun.
Sirius. I’ve arrived in Egypt the day of the Sothic rising.
Because Egypt is a valley, you can see stars there like nowhere else, and the Ancient Egyptians tracked the rise of groups of stars in their solar calendar. Every ten days, a new group of stars would appear in the east at dawn, after being absent for seventy days. The most important of these was the star Sirius—which they called Sothis, or Sopdet. The Sothic rising signaled rebirth, because it occurred in the season when the Nile would flood and leave silt to fertilize their crops. To celebrate, Ancient Egyptians would travel to festivals, often leaving graffiti where they went. But mostly, they would get drunk and have sex—it was like Coachella, every time the Nile overflowed.