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FOR THE NEXT month, Wyatt and I did an excellent job of avoiding each other unless we were forced to interact, which happened Mondays and Wednesdays at 9:15 when we both TA’d sixteen undergrads in Dumphries’s course Gods of Ancient Egypt. Even then, we sat on opposite sides of the seminar table. Then, in October, we were told that we would be accompanying Dumphries and the class on a field trip to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts to see the new exhibit on the Book of Two Ways.
I had only seen the map of the Netherworld in books. Nothing was going to spoil the excitement I felt at being so close to an image of the Book of Two Ways. Not even Wyatt.
The day of the trip, Dumphries stood in the front of a classroom in the museum, clicking through a series of excavation slides from Deir el-Bersha. “Imagine it’s 1915,” he began, “and you’re an Egyptologist who’s found a thirty-foot burial shaft under a pile of boulders in a necropolis from the Middle Kingdom. You’ve cleared the debris, and you’ve just crawled into Tomb 10A for the first time. You let your eyes adjust to the darkness and what do you see? A coffin, with the decapitated head of a mummy sitting on top of it.”
A student in front of me shook his head. “Fucking Indiana Jones shit, man.”
Beside me, Wyatt snorted.
“Tomb 10A belonged to a nomarch named Djehutynakht, and his wife, also named Djehutynakht.”
Wyatt leaned toward me. “Imagine how confusing sorting the post must have been,” he murmured.
“They lived around 2000 B.C.E., in the Middle Kingdom, and ruled one of the provinces of Upper Egypt. Sometime in the four thousand years between their death and the early twentieth century, grave robbers broke into the tomb, stole the gold and the jewels and all the valuables, and threw the headless mummy into the corner. Then they set fire to the chamber, so they didn’t leave any evidence behind. But some of the material in the tomb survived and was brought to the MFA by Harvard Egyptologists in 1921. This is the first time it’s been exhibited.”
I stared at the slide on the screen: the mummy head, wrapped in its frayed linen, brown with ancient resin. It had hand-painted eyebrows and slightly bulging eye sockets. Its mouth turned down, as if it were mildly disappointed.
An undergrad raised her hand. “Where’s the rest of him?”
“Egypt,” Dumphries replied. “But is it the rest of him? Or her? Amazing to think that we’ve had four thousand years to figure this out, and we still don’t have all the answers.” He flipped to the next slide. “The evolution of the Coffin Texts and the Book of Two Ways was more about changing tastes in funerary decoration than it was about more people having access to the blessed afterlife. As coffins became more common in the Middle Kingdom, those spells that used to be on precious papyri could now be painted on the wood of the coffin.”
He clicked again, and the slide became the familiar image of the Book of Two Ways, its snaking blue and black lines and the red lake of fire that kept them from crossing.
PHOTOGRAPH © 2020 MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON
“The Book of Two Ways is yet another confirmation of the unity between Re and Osiris,” Dumphries explained. “The main purpose of Re’s journey through the Netherworld is to unite with the corpse of Osiris. The roads through the Netherworld are for Re to travel to reach Osiris. The goal of the deceased is to become both Re and Osiris, in order to attain eternal life.”
He traced a finger over the wavy lines on the projected image. “Mind you, the Book of Two Ways doesn’t actually mention two ways. Just…ways. The black and blue roads are not labeled directly, but we can imagine them as a land and a water route to the Netherworld that lead to the same outcome.”
Dumphries glanced around the room, and I realized he was looking for me. “McDowell,” he said. “Tell us what the key to resurrection was, according to the Book of Two Ways.”
“Knowledge,” I said, straightening. “That’s why the texts were placed in the coffin. They’re spells the deceased has to have in order to pass all the obstacles en route to the shrine of Osiris.”
“Exactly. And frankly, who doesn’t need knowledge to survive tests in this world…or the next?” He faced the students. “Questions?”
A student raised his hand. “Will this be on the midterm?”
Dumphries flicked his eyes away, dismissive. “Next?”
“Did you have to be super rich to have the Book of Two Ways painted in your coffin?” another student asked.
“The ones we’ve found at Bersha have come from nobles of the Hare nome, but a good death wasn’t linked to economic status. Every Egyptian could become an akh—a transfigured soul.”
A third student raised her hand. “What about gender? Did women get the map, too?”
“Yes,” Dumphries said. “It’s been found in the tombs of noblewomen.”
Wyatt crossed his arms. “There are some Egyptologists who claim that women had to take on male characteristics to become an Osiris, much like a female pharaoh would wear the ritual false beard of the king.”
“I doubt it,” I said. “The word corpse in Ancient Egyptian is already feminine. And there’s a woman’s Middle Kingdom coffin where the spells have pronouns that were all changed from male to female, tailored to the deceased.”
Wyatt and I stared at each other, facing off, as Dumphries shut the projector. “If Mommy and Daddy are done arguing,” he said drily, “we’re going to turn you loose in the museum. Armstrong, McDowell, I pass you the torch.”
While Dumphries left with the museum curator to look at objects from Bersha that weren’t on display, Wyatt and I herded the undergrads through the MFA. He was the primary TA; even if I’d wanted that position I wasn’t as adept at teaching hieroglyphs. I had to admit, he was good at it.
Wyatt gathered the undergrads in a semicircle at the doorway of the new exhibit. The undergrads held packets with hieroglyphs that had been copied from the coffins they were about to see firsthand. The girls, and some of the guys, were gazing at Wyatt as if he had just created the cosmos. I knew that there were undergrads who signed up for Dumphries’s courses because of the British TA who, if you believed the gossip, was apparently Harrison Ford and the Second Coming all rolled into one.
“We tend to think of literacy in Ancient Egypt as black and white—either you could read or you couldn’t. In antiquity, it was actually a continuum. If you were a priest or a bureaucrat, you’d learn hieroglyphs. If you were training to be a scribe, you learned hieratic—the cursive form of hieroglyphics—for everyday use in contracts and wills and village documents. But even if you were in the public, you could still recognize basic symbols, the way we’d know a stop sign by its shape even if we couldn’t read the letters on it. All of you are going to hopefully achieve the reading level of a bureaucrat. Let’s get to it, then.”