The Egyptologist (16 page)

expertise, we were based in a Cairo suburb, responsible for prisoner in•
terrogations (the occasional suspicious Arab tribesman bearing a Ger•
man or Turkish weapon or document) and counterintelligence
operations (trying to convince Arab tribesmen to carry Turkish
weapons but not mean it).

I know it is hardly fashionable to say this about the War, but I had
the most marvellous time, until I was asked to advise the ANZACs in
that jolly trip to scrap with Johnny Turk and catch bullets at Gallipoli.
For in the months before that sad exploit, Marlowe and I took advan•
tage of our happy posting in our beloved Egypt, scouring the sands
whenever passes could be acquired and, when the opportunity arose,
making ourselves known to some of the old hands of archaeology still
trying to do their work, uncovering the past even as the present col•
lapsed around them.

My dearest friend and I spent our free moments (more than you
might guess in what was for me, to tell the truth, a theatre of war with
a very light repertory schedule) on motorcycles, finding official justifi•
cations for visits to the pyramids, the Sphinx, even making excursions
of several days to the south in order to see the Valley of the Kings and
Hat-shep-sut's temple at Deir el Bahari—all of the fantastical places of
my childhood and varsity days, suddenly there before me in the most
extraordinary reality. To long for something, from the age at which the
very first foundation stones of one's personality are laid and cemented,

to long for something from the best part of one's heart simply because it
is more beautiful than anything else in one's entire life, to study it,
aching to trap it and master it, to spend years in pursuit of it, and then,
all at once, through the miraculous intercession of a modern, nonsense
war, to have it all delivered up to one's fingertips . . . and then to realise
with shock and rapture that all one has learnt in one's years of amorous
study are mere surfaces, that the luminous object of one's adoration is
so vast that one might spend one's life and every life one may yet re•
ceive straining to sound its depths and make oneself as one with it, to
make it acknowledge one's love and presence, knowing all along that
one will never taste even a fraction of what she hides—all of this I felt

in my first weeks and months serving King and country in my prom•
ised land.

When military duties prevented me and Marlowe from leaving our
base to ramble amongst the pyramids and colossi and cliff tombs and
temples, we would instead, from our tents and offices, explore—as we
had done at Oxford—the holes of Egyptian history, those thrilling mo•
ments when for all the world's scholarship and speculation, we simply-
squint into darkness and we
do not know.
Peering into the shadows
where parenthetical question marks pursue every date and reference
like vengeful cobras unfurled to devour any stray, careless certainties —
as in "Atum-hadu (?) reigned (?) circa 1650 B.C. (?) at the tail end of
the XIIIth Dynasty (?), of which he was (?) the final king (?)"—the
scholar must strain to make out the silhouettes of the kings and queens
whose very
existence
is in doubt. These once-great men and women now
cling to their hard-won immortality by the thinnest of filaments (half
their name on a crumbling papyrus written a thousand years after their
hypothetical death) while, across that chasm of time from them, histori•
ans and excavators struggle to build a rickety bridge of educated
guesses for those nearly vanished heroes to cross.

At Oxford, even as Marlowe and I mocked those reckless historians
who too freely plant ancient papyrus in their own fertile imaginations
and chronicle the resulting growths of fantasy with loving care, we
were nevertheless drawn to the halo of uncertainties surrounding the
purported XIIIth-Dynasty hero-poet-king Atum-hadu. Marlowe and I
spent long nights in the Balliol Junior Common Room toiling over the
photographic or sketched reproductions of the first two Atum-haduan
Fragments. We debated the possibilities, charted the chronological im•
plications, interpreted the verses' hidden meanings, and of course
laughed at those first two efforts to translate the Fragments: the skittish
evasions of prim Harriman and the perfumed seductions of Vassal.

Reader, would you know and understand me, as a man and an ex•
plorer? Then pay no attention to my childhood; despite my father's in•
fluence and our family's ease, it truly does not matter. Rather, if you
would know my passions and understand how I came to be searching

for Atum-hadu's tomb, focus your vision intently on Oxford; these
searing sessions of impassioned scholarship formed me, almost literally
made me, it seems now. They gave me historical heft, a third and most
crucial dimension, while the feeble light of an Oxford winter's dawn
crept unnoticed through the leaded glass and we pored over Lepsius
and Mariette and the other classic texts of Egyptology. Marlowe and
I—nineteen, twenty, twenty-one—fiercely debated the mysteries of an•
cient Egypt, especially the possibility of Atum-hadu. Our devilish ad•
vocacy proceeded with rigour but without rigidity; we debated as a
relay, readily passing back and forth the baton of doubt, all in a race to
illuminate some shadowed crevice of evidence, an unnoticed nook of
possibility. Where, if he existed, might Atum-hadu fit in the chronolo•
gies, as his name did not
definitively
appear in the (tantalisingly incom•
plete) king lists discovered in the preceding decades?

And in these days and nights, you would have witnessed something
more: the emergence of a certain voice, the blazing red dawn of voca•
tion, of effortlessness: Marlowe had these without question. More than
just memorised knowledge or facility with the language or a hand at
drawing the 'glyphs: Marlowe had a manner of mastery that one sees in
the
elite
field men, at a deep sepulchral place, far beneath their control
or even their consciousness. Even if you draw their attention to their
power, such men do not believe it, they do not understand what you
mean, they do not seem even to care. For the others, the strivers
,
there
is—no matter how much trivia or technique they scrape together—
something missing. They lack and can never acquire, no matter how
hard they exert themselves, a certain ability to sniff out likelihood, a
certain unconscious grace, a lack of doubt or worry, a complete and
thoughtless fulfilment of the role. You see lesser men, even acclaimed,
accomplished journeymen, shake their heads in admiring frustration
when the true masters are at work.

During our time at Oxford, Marlowe and I (under the influence of
Clement "I Doubt It" Wexler's trademark scepticism) were still agnos•
tic as to Atum-hadu's existence. It was undeniable that the two Atum-
haduan Fragments — Fragment A, translated and published by

E Wright Harriman as
Athens on the Nile,
and Fragment B, translated
and published by Jean-Michel Vassal as
Le Roi Amant
—were discov•
ered separately but overlapped in content, copies of the same source
text. And it was tempting to agree with Harriman and Vassal that the
"king" mentioned in some of these verses, the narrator-poet-protagonist
"Atum-hadu," was in fact an historical figure rather than a literary fig•
ment. But we were not yet Atum-hadu zealots, Marlowe and I. We
were open to either possibility—that Atum-hadu had been real, or that
he was a vengeful fiction, a creation of the dispossessed of the Second
Intermediate Period, the folkloric hero of exiles or slaves or dissidents
or nostalgics who dreamt that once there had been, if not a conqueror,
at least a man who fought and died for Lost Glory, as Sir Thomas Mal•
ory imagined King Arthur. And he had his appeal, this Atum-hadu, an
intoxicating appeal: he was self-aggrandising, sexually omnivorous,
doomed, bold, violent, beloved, feared, and proud most of all of his
ability to create the world in his image and control it according to his
deific will. The extraordinary, amusing name
{Atum-hadu!)
and the po•
tent final determinative-hieroglyph necessary to produce such a name
(see frontispiece) certainly captured Marlowe's and my imaginations,
but neither of us was (as a limp critic
of Desire and Deceit in Ancient Egypt
later aroused himself by calling me) "a wishful thinker, a dreamer of
unspeakable dreams, a distraction to scholars, and a corrupter of
amateurs."

The pale and unravelling scrap of papyrus now known as
Atum-hadu Admonitions Fragment A
came to light in the lily-white hands of F.

Wright Harriman in 1856. A bachelor Scotsman of incomplete religious
training who explored Egypt with his mother in tow, Harriman is in•
variably portrayed from the waist up, a delicate handling of his
dwarfish stature and the remarkably proportioned posterior that won
him so many unflattering nicknames in Arabic.

Harriman is—as many men are who strain to achieve immortality—
embraced by posterity for something other than what he had intended.
He had dedicated his career to hunting for evidence of Mary, Joseph,
and Jesus' fugitive sojourn in Egypt. And when at home in Glasgow,

he wrote a little verse himself, rugged nuggets of fierce Scotch religion,
tinted with a dull pewter irony:

Atheism, too, I suppose, is an act of faith

That demands of its practitioners a sort of devotion.
For they slouch through this world, grey as a wraith
And traipse off to Hell with so little commotion!

But instead Harriman was immortalised by uppity serendipity: chasing
the baby Jesus, he stumbled into a lost Sadist, omnisexualist, brutal
warrior, symbol of loss and immortality, King Atum-hadu.

When at the site, Harriman insisted that all of his native workers at•
tend Christian education sessions. One afternoon, while he was irritat•
ing his dozing Mohammedans with the fish and the loaves, one of his
men—having apparently thought his time was better spent working—
rushed in from the field cradling in loving, calloused hands a bulky and
peculiar item. Harriman stopped his lecture and relieved his man of the
scroll he was so excitedly offering, then fired the wretch on the spot for
digging instead of praying (thus neatly saving the negligible cost of the
baksheesh,
the cash bonus the worker was due for bringing in his own
find). Leaving the relic untouched next to his tea, Harriman finished
his hour-long lecture, while his team of Muslim boys and old men nod•
ded off or discreetly faced east and bowed. Finally, they were sent back
to the field, duly deterred from hard work by the example of their dis•
missed colleague.

No great scholar and hopeless at hieroglyphs, Harriman now toiled
all night trying to copy down the symbols he found in his fast-
crumbling prize, transcribing what he did not understand and was de•
stroying by his ignorance of preservation techniques. (All it would have
taken was some damp cloth.)

It is a glorious image to conjure: the midnight return of King Atum-
hadu to our world. Harriman bashfully admits in his memoir,
Seven Lean Years,
that the text's prevalent references to certain acts made him
stop frequently for cold baths and prayer as his hand was forced to

copy, over and over again, my favourite of all the hieroglyphs. And
when the overheated archaeo-missionary had finished, he had twenty-
six verses or parts of verses, and Atum-hadu's name in a cartouche (the
oval drawn around any royal name, see frontispiece). The presence of
this entirely new and strange royal name, while fascinating, was never•
theless inconclusive, as it was not clear that the text's author and sub•
ject were one and the same. And there was still no other document that
referred to this kingly name anywhere in Egyptology. But to give the
idiot Harriman his due, he translated the verses (badly) and published
them with an essay in which he rashly but correctly identified the au•
thor and the king as one and the same Atum-hadu, declaring Atum-
hadu a real historical figure, a nervy assertion in 1858, based solely on
his shred of scribbled papyrus. Unjustifiably right, but right.

Enter Jean-Michel Vassal, a French amateur off spending his fam•
ily's money in the sand and in the casbahs, who in 1898 pieced together
several shards of limestone into a coherent larger tablet. This find,
Fragment B, had been unearthed quite near the site of Fragment A,
and it included fourteen of the same verses as well as eighteen "new"
verses, but no explicit mention of Atum-hadu as an author, nor of any
other author.

Finally, the now-legendary Fragment C, fully forty-eight verses, of
which sixteen appeared in neither of the previous Fragments, ten ap•
peared in A but not B, twelve in B but not A, and ten in all three. (In•
ternal evidence implied that at least eighty had existed.) Fragment C
more explicitly stated that these verses were written
by
"King Atum-
hadu," but still there simmered the historical puzzle: while the verses
suggested a king reigning in the chaos that blurred the end of the Mid•
dle Kingdom,
none
of the standard chronicles contains any reference to
"Atum-hadu," although the first two characters of his five-character
hieroglyphic name—the symbols forming the name of the god
Atum
or
the first half of the name of the king
Atum-hadu
—
do
appear, beckoning,
in one of the king lists, at the very end of a section, immediately before
the edge of the papyrus unravels into an oblivion that may represent an
inch or a foot.