The Ancient Egyptians can be credited with developing our alphabet. When early Semitic speakers traveled from what’s now Israel to Egypt, they didn’t have a writing system. They saw the Egyptians writing their names on rock and wanted to do it, too. So they picked hieroglyphs that represented common objects—water, an eye, a bull’s head—and used them to form the first letters of those words in their own language.
Wyatt walked into the exhibit, stopping in front of a case that had the exterior panel of Djehutynakht’s coffin. I scanned the columns of hieroglyphs painted on the ancient cedar, looking for the owner’s name.
The ibis stood for Djehuty—the ancient Egyptian name of the god Thoth. The squiggle was a line of water, the letter n. The stick beneath was khet. The circle with the horizontal lines were kh—repeating the sounds of the stick—and the loaf was t. When you translate hieroglyphs, you do it in two steps, the first of which renders the sounds of the hieroglyphs into a script that uses alphabetic signs. So the transliteration was —
“Djehutynakht’s coffin,” Wyatt announced. “What’s the first thing we need to figure out?”
“Which way the faces point in the signs,” a girl answered. “Because you read toward the faces.”
“Right. So in this case, the bird faces left, which means…?” He glanced at the girl.
“We’re reading the columns of text from left to right.”
“Exactly. Now, one of the reasons it took so long to decipher hieroglyphs is because they’re not purely phonetic or purely ideographic. It’s a mixture, with an additional sign type thrown in just to confuse you further—a determinative. Determinatives are like clues to give you information about the meanings of the words near them.”
The students crowded closer, squinting at the images on the exterior of Djehutynakht’s coffin. They were greenish blue, some standing out in stark relief against the strip of eggshell paint, others so faint they could barely be distinguished from the grain of the wood. “Who can find an ideogram?” Wyatt asked.
A kid beside him pointed to the thin canine figure perched on a pedestal. “The jackal.”
“Very good. The jackal is the god Anubis, or as an Ancient Egyptian would say, Inpu. The hieroglyph writes his name. But what comes before it?”
He underlined a series of signs with his fingertip on the glass.
It was one of the very first combinations of hieroglyphs I had ever learned, because it was so commonly seen.
“Hotep di nisu,” Wyatt read. “An offering the king gives on behalf of…?”
“Anubis,” said the boy who’d pointed to the jackal. “The god of embalming.”
“Right. He’s quite important for mummies,” Wyatt said, and then he grinned. “And daddies. What’s next? What are these four pots tied together?”
“The offerings are in them?” a student suggested.
“No, because it’s not an ideogram,” said another girl. “It’s a phonetic hieroglyph. The picture of the pots tied together writes the word khenet. It has nothing to do with pots. It’s just a cheat for writing three letters of the alphabet: khn-n-t.”
Wyatt’s eyebrows raised. “Well done.”
The girl’s cheeks flushed crimson. “That means so much coming from you!”
“Oh, dear God,” I said under my breath.
As he launched into another transliteration tutorial, I became transfixed by a model that had been found in Tomb 10A along with the coffins of the Djehutynakhts. Two weavers, carved of wood, were kneeling by a loom. The women in the front were spinning flax. Amazingly, after four thousand years, the threads of the flax and the loom were intact, the way they would have been the day they were set in the burial chamber, with the rest of the models and pottery and shabti statues.
“Time for a scavenger hunt,” Wyatt said, handing out a list of objects. “Pick a partner, you’ll be working in teams. The answers are somewhere in this exhibit. First pair to come back to me with pictures on their phone gets ten points on their next homework assignment. And…go!” He turned to me as the undergrads dispersed. “Was I that stupid once?”
“Do you really want me to answer that?” I said.
Wyatt wandered toward the coffins of the Djehutynakhts. “No,” he said. “But look at this.”
We both stood, hypnotized by the Book of Two Ways on the inner coffin of Governor Djehutynakht. There was the red rectangular door to the horizon. The blue water and black land routes through the Netherworld. The crimson line between them, a lake of fire. After so many years of studying this through pictures and drawings, I felt like I had reached the Holy Grail, only to find it locked inside a glass exhibit case.
“I wonder who first looked at that and thought it was a map,” Wyatt murmured.
“Well, the coffin wasn’t empty. It’s pretty clear that the deceased was meant to stand up and walk one of the two paths to reach the Field of Offerings.”
“Not to poke holes in your theory,” Wyatt said, “but this Book of Two Ways was on the wall of Djehutynakht’s coffin. So…that sort of disproves your point.”
I stepped away from him, staring at the richly painted cedar panel of the front inside of the exterior coffin. There was a false door through which the ba—part of the soul—could pass between the afterlife and this world. Djehutynakht was painted in front of the false door. The text nearby requested offerings from the king and Osiris: incense, wine, oils, fruits, meats, bread, geese.
In the interior coffin, Djenutynakht’s mummy would have been placed lying on his left side, eyes looking east. Spells from the Coffin Texts wrapped around the inside walls, protecting him like another layer of linen.
“The Coffin Text spells surrounded the mummy for a reason,” I said quietly.
“Yes,” Wyatt agreed. “Papyri disintegrate, and cedar doesn’t. Look, I don’t mean to be a jerk—”
“But it comes easily to you?”
He shrugged. “They’re texts, Olive. It’s a stretch to try to squeeze them into your theories about iconography.”
I folded my arms. “My name is Dawn. I hate when you call me Olive.”
Wyatt leaned close to the glass, his breath fogging it. “I know,” he said. “That’s why I do it.”
* * *
—
AS THE DIG House bakes in the late-afternoon sun, so does everything living. The fans can’t keep the air circulating fast enough, and heat shimmers from the mud brick walls. A fly that has been circling my lunch collapses on the scarred table. The alfalfa and corn growing along the Nile drape their lank arms over each other, a line of drunken soldiers staggering home.