This is the time of day when, as a grad student, I trudged back from the dig site with the sun forging a crown on my head. Sometimes we would work in the magazine, but more often, we made up for our early-morning departures by drifting to each of our rooms and taking a nap.
I think back to my old room, with the fan I had to jerry-rig with duct tape in order to work. I would strip down to my underwear on the narrow twin bed and pretend to sleep until I heard the knock on the wall between us. I’d knock back. While the rest of the house was hibernating, he would slip into my room, curl his body around mine, and we would burn each other alive.
Harbi offers to make up a cot for me, but that feels presumptuous. After he goes back to his living quarters, I am left to wait alone.
It is nearly 10:00 A.M. at home. Brian will be at work. Meret will be at school.
I should tell them where I am.
But there are some feelings that the English language just doesn’t fully capture. An emotion like grief spills over the confines of those five letters. The word joy feels too compact, stunted, for what it evokes. How can you even put into words the confession that you made a mistake, that you want to turn back time and try again? How do you say it without hurting the people who have been sitting across from you at the breakfast table for fifteen years, who know your Starbucks order and which side of the bed to leave you at a hotel?
So instead, I poke around the Dig House, trying not to snoop. Avoiding the laptops and iPads that litter the main room, I slip into a small alcove behind it. There are narrow cedar shelves inside, stacked with books. When I was a grad student, we used them for research. Plucking a few newer-looking journals off the shelves, I sit down on the floor cross-legged, and begin to reconstruct the history of Wyatt’s success.
In 2013, he found the tomb of Djehutynakht, son of Teti, who lived during the Eleventh Dynasty just before Montuhotep II reunified Egypt. This Djehutynakht—as common a name during the Middle Kingdom as John—was known to scholars from some hieratic ink graffiti he left in the tombs of his ancestors, touting the work he had done restoring the damage there. And yet, the location of Djehutynakht’s own final resting place had never been located.
Then came the 2003 discovery of a dipinto—ink written on stone—which offered a clue. The message described a visit by a later nomarch—Djehutyhotep—to Deir el-Bersha to see the Sothic rising, during which he stayed overnight in the forecourt of Djehutynakht’s final resting place.
I bite my lip, running my fingers over the familiar image of the hieratic, followed by Wyatt’s hieroglyphic translation, to clarify how he read each sign.
How we read each sign.
On this day, the count, hereditary noble, and nomarch of the Hare Nome, Djehutyhotep, came to this mountain to see the rising of Sothis.
After having received the letter from the Residence foretelling the rising on fourth month of Peret, day 15, I came together with the lector priests and mortuary priests.
We spent the night in the forecourt of the tomb of Djehutynakht, born of Teti, which is […] cubits from […]
In the deep of the night we went forth from this mountain […]
It’s breathtaking, seeing this in its final, published form, and I find myself riveted by each line and symbol. Yet when I close my eyes, I can feel the rock under my hand, still warm from the sun.
More proof that once, I was here. That what I did mattered.
I scan the journals, but there’s nothing in them yet about Wyatt’s discovery of the tomb. Then I spot a slim bound volume on the bottom shelf. The title is printed on the spine: Ritual Speech and Interlocutory Verbal Patterns in the Coffin Texts.
I look at the date on the title page: 2008. Wyatt’s thesis, finished and published after I left.
I am halfway through the first paragraph when he notes an article—“The Corpse Makes the Coffin Whole”—published by McDowell in 2002.
My breath catches in my throat. I touch my fingertip to my own last name.
Conversations with the author of this article in front of a coffin at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston challenged my original thesis, Wyatt wrote. During the course of my grammatical analysis, I mapped out where different speech patterns (first person, dialogue, third-person narration) occurred on the coffin, and in the process realized that the texts were distributed according to a geographical pattern corresponding both to parts of the body and parts of the Netherworld.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I say softly.
It is impossible, Wyatt concluded, to separate the grammar from the context.
It may have taken years, but I got him to admit I was right.
I realize that the words are swimming on the page, and I wipe my eyes. I am about to shut the book when I notice the first footnote in Wyatt’s thesis. In academia, the first footnote is often how the author of an article will dedicate the piece to someone. At the bottom of the page Wyatt has written his inscription, a poem translated from P. Chester Beatty, presented without comment.
One unique is the sister, without her equal, more beautiful than all women.
Behold her like the star,
Having appeared in glory at the beginning of a good year.
Shining of excellence, luminous of hue;
Beautiful of eyes when glancing, sweet her lips when speaking—
For her no word is excessive.
Long of neck, luminous of chest;
True lapis is her hair,
Her arms putting on gold,
Her fingers like lotuses.
To anyone who might read Wyatt’s thesis, this would be taken at face value: a beautiful example of Ancient Egyptian love poetry.
That is…to anyone but me.
* * *
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THE FIRST EUROPEAN to visit Deir el-Bersha was a Dominican friar, Johann Michael Vansleb, who wrote about his visit to the “hieroglyphick cave.” What people who aren’t Egyptologists don’t realize is that the art is not just fine lines and chicken scratch. It fills the walls and the ceilings of tombs with vivid cobalt, russet, turquoise, yellow, ocher, pitch black. The figures show movement, sound, emotion. These aren’t just monuments to the men and women who were buried inside. They are stories.
Unlike the later New Kingdom tombs of royals, where texts about how to get to the afterlife were written on the walls and images of the gods were the norm, the tombs of nomarchs in the Middle Kingdom were filled with scenes of ordinary life. You’d see cooking, grinding grain, dancing, games, music, wrestling, basenji dogs, hunting, sex, trapping game, winemaking, harvesting, building, plowing. The tomb of Baqet has an entire wall of wrestling holds. There’s one tomb where the owner is pictured with a pet griffin on a leash, to suggest that the man was an explorer—someone who had traveled so far and so wide he met a magical creature at the edge of the known world. There were cryptographic hieroglyphs meant to be puns and puzzles for visitors. All in all, you couldn’t walk into a Middle Kingdom tomb without thinking that these people had fun, even four thousand years ago. Their tombs were celebrations of here and now—what you did during your life and what you would take with you after you died.