Immortality (5 page)

Like other ancient Egyptians, Nefertiti was set on pursuing all four options for attaining eternity. But the odds cannot be good on her having escaped the fate of other mortals, especially given the anger she aroused. So she likely had little success with the first narrative, Staying Alive. Assuming she did succumb to the frailties of the flesh, she would certainly have been mummified. But given the thoroughness with which her successors sought to destroy her, it is unlikely they would have left her remains intact—therefore ruling out any hopes of the second narrative, Resurrection. And her
ka—
deprived of the sustenance the Egyptians believed it needed—would long ago have withered away. So the Soul Narrative could also provide her little solace. The only way left for her to satisfy her overweening will to immortality was therefore the fourth: Legacy.

S
IX
weeks after Ludwig Borchardt first set eyes on Nefertiti, the mood in the German camp was tense. The inspector of antiquities, Gustave Lefebvre, was due the next day, and it was this Frenchman’s duty to take half the spoils of the season’s excavations for the Egyptian state, in accordance with Egyptian law. He was free to choose which half, and no one in the German team believed he would allow the bust of Nefertiti to go back to Berlin. After sunset that night, the Germans processed by candlelight into the hut that served as her temporary throne room and said their farewells to the lady they called simply “Her Majesty.”

The next day, the inspector was greeted by Borchardt and taken into the hut where the artifacts had been gathered. The sun rose high over the plain as the rest of the expedition waited for the decision. Eventually the pair emerged to sign the paperwork; the Frenchman ordered his half packed up and prepared for the return to Cairo. As the boxes were assembled, realization slowly spread through the unbelieving German camp: they were to keep Her Majesty.

No one knows what sorcery Borchardt wove in that hut to prevent Nefertiti from disappearing into the cavernous cellars of the Cairo museums. Wild accusations of duplicity, corruption and incompetence continue to fly. Some say the inspector was shown only a hazy photograph of the bust, or that he was permitted to see her only in a dark box in the darkest corner of the hut, or that Borchardt lied and told him it was a worthless plaster cast—even that he was bought off with a forgery Borchardt had had made in the Cairo underworld.

But Borchardt’s—and Nefertiti’s—battle was not yet won. Fearing she might still be stolen from him at the heavily controlled Egyptian customs, Borchardt commissioned the German Foreign Service to help him get the bust back to the kaiser, “not only
discreetly, but secretly.” They succeeded—and the great queen arrived in Germany. When she was put on display in Berlin she caused an instant sensation across Europe—and outrage in Cairo. The Egyptian government immediately called for her return and stopped all further German excavations. To this day the Egyptians continue to demand that Berlin restore this
Mona Lisa
of the ancient world to her homeland.

Borchardt took his secrets with him to his grave. All we know for sure is that Nefertiti’s striking beauty seduced him as completely as it once seduced the young pharaoh Akhenaten. Now she resides on Museum Island in Berlin, where more than half a million visitors per year come to pay tribute. Her name is once again spoken; her image can be seen all across Egypt, just as it could during the reign of the Aten. With her serene and confident smile she says simply: I am returned; I am immortal.

T
HE
king of Qin was right to be paranoid: they really were out to get him. His predecessor, who may or may not have been his real father, had lasted only three years on the throne, and the king before that a mere twelve months. His court was built on a legacy of conspiracies, plots and coups. Even his own mother had conspired against him, planning to put her younger sons on the throne. The poor king of Qin could trust no one. But then, he did have a particular knack for making enemies.

This was China in the period known as the Warring States Era, a little over a thousand years after Nefertiti’s fall. It was a blood-soaked time, as competing warlords allied, intrigued and fought for survival. In one action alone—the infamous Battle of Changping—the armies of the king of Qin’s great-grandfather had killed some four hundred thousand men from the neighboring state of Zhao. Our hero was eagerly following this family tradition: his reputation was one of arrogance and cruelty, a barbarian in borrowed finery.

He, however, considered himself simply misunderstood. For in truth, the king of Qin was a man of vision—and his vision was of a
unified China, its many peoples living in harmony with each other and with heaven. And this was why his black-clad armies had been steadily encroaching on his neighbors’ territory, pushing eastward from his northwesterly mountain stronghold. His soldiers—who were promoted according to the number of severed heads they gathered—were ruthlessly effective. Soon Qin had swallowed two of the other warring states whole and was turning its attention to the small easterly state of Yan.

To the king’s satisfaction, in 227
BCE
Yan sent two emissaries offering submission to the overlordship of Qin. As signs of their goodwill, they brought with them gifts: a detailed map of Yan’s most fertile regions … and a severed head.

The head was that of a senior Qin general who had fallen out of favor with the king and fled to Yan. Most pleased at news of the traitor’s decapitation, the king, who had already killed the general’s entire extended family, prepared to receive his two visitors in grand style. What the king did not know was that the general had willingly given his head—assisting Yan’s emissaries by cutting his own throat—in the hope that it would bring about the king of Qin’s downfall.

The envoys were granted an audience. One climbed the steps to the throne and presented the gifts. The king put the casket with the head to one side and slowly unrolled the map. Just as he reached the end, he saw a glint of metal—but too late. Concealed in the map was a poisoned dagger. The envoy grabbed the weapon with one hand and the sleeve of the king’s robes with the other, and stabbed.

But the king was too fast and had already reared backward, the sleeve of his robes tearing off. He reached for the mighty ceremonial sword that hung at his side, but it was too long to shift from its scabbard, and the assassin was coming at him again. The king fled behind a pillar while his courtiers, all ironically unarmed to prevent their making an assassination attempt, scattered in terror. The guards
who stood outside the throne room were allowed in only on the king’s express order—and he was too busy fighting for his life.

As the assassin made another lunge, the king’s old physician blocked the weapon with his medicine bag, giving his master time to swing the scabbard behind him and free the blade. Suddenly the assassin was confronted by an angry king with a very large sword. He threw the dagger at him but missed. The king hacked him down; it took eight blows until he was dead.

The next day, the king sent the armies of Qin to attack Yan. Within a year they had taken its capital, and within five years, they had wiped it from the map. One year after that, his armies had conquered the known world—“all under heaven.” And the king declared himself the first emperor of China.

I
T
is little wonder that the First Emperor, as he is usually known today, was acutely aware of his own mortality. Many people would have liked to have thrust a dagger between his ribs, and a good few tried. In another legendary assassination attempt, a blind lute player lured the emperor into his proximity, then attacked him with his specially lead-weighted lute. Being blind, the lute player missed and was summarily executed. In another attempt, a hired strongman dropped a 220-pound metal cone from a mountainside onto the emperor’s carriage as it was passing below, destroying it utterly. The emperor, however, was traveling in another carriage in anticipation of just such an ambush. Lest he be tempted to forget his mortal frailty for a moment, the world conspired to remind him.

The first part of the Mortality Paradox tells us that we must live in the consciousness of our own frailty; we are all aware that everything born must die. But for most of us the trappings of culture exist to keep this fact from our minds. Except when death suddenly claims a friend or relative, we are happy to be distracted from our
inevitable end. Those who live in the shadow of the assassin, however—the pharaohs, dictators and kings—are continually reminded of the precariousness of their lot. It is a nice irony that this consciousness of vulnerability clings to those in positions of greatest power—as Shakespeare’s Henry IV put it, uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.

It is therefore in these rulers that we see the full effects of this awareness of inexorable extinction. The First Emperor prohibited—on pain of capital punishment—all mention of death in his presence. Instead, his courtiers were to compose odes on the theme of immortality to be sung wherever he went. On once hearing that graffiti suggesting he would soon die had been found in a distant part of the empire, the emperor sent officials to find the culprit; when they failed, he had all the people living in the district put to death. He was not a man to take intimations of mortality lightly.

But rulers do not just have an exaggerated awareness of the Mortality Paradox; they also have the means to do something about it. By unifying China and declaring himself emperor, the king of Qin had become the most powerful man in the world. If anyone could summon the means to defy death, it was him.

S
TAYING
Alive is the first and most straightforward of the immortality narratives. It is a dream that can be found in the earliest recorded cultures and still thrives today. Indeed many believe that we are now on the verge of the scientific breakthroughs that will finally make this dream a reality. We will examine these claims in the next chapter, when we assess our prospects of following this path to the summit of the Mount of Immortals by banishing disease, aging and death for good. First, we will see how the promise that we can stay alive indefinitely is at the very foundation of civilization.

The psychologists behind Terror Management Theory, discussed
in
chapter 1
, argued that if we confronted the inevitability of death without any protective narrative, we would become “twitching blobs of biological protoplasm completely perfused with anxiety.” The First Emperor certainly appears to have been perfused with anxiety, but he was otherwise successfully able to direct his energies with enormous productivity—because of his belief in an immortality narrative. He believed that it was possible to become invulnerable to death and so stay alive forever. In his attempt to do so, he created China.

Staying alive indefinitely is a continuation of staying alive here and now; it is our day-to-day struggle for survival extended without end. It therefore begins with the basics, the things that all humans need to keep going: food and drink, shelter and defenses. As societies develop, they refine the provision of these essentials, through collaborative efforts, specialization of labor and passing on of skills. At its core, a civilization is a collection of life-extension technologies: agriculture to ensure food in steady supply, clothing to stave off cold, architecture to provide shelter and safety, better weapons for hunting and defense, medicine to combat injury and disease.

But whereas most people are satisfied with applying these technologies to themselves, their families or their villages, the First Emperor had a much grander vision. He ruled an empire, and his intention was to make it everlasting, with himself forever at its head. To achieve this, he began to separate his dominions from all that was unpredictable and dangerous—all that could bring death. And he went about this literally, in the form of a wall that would stretch for over six hundred miles along his northern border. People of many cultures had long been in the habit of building barricades around houses, villages and even cities—but never before an entire empire. This was the beginning of the Great Wall, built on the blood and sweat of conscripted labor and in whose construction hundreds of thousands of people are thought to have died.