Egyptian Enigma

by LJM Owen

  ‘Do we have the person from the sarcophagus?’ Nathan asked eagerly.

  ‘From the length of the thigh, I suspect not, but let’s check.’ She grabbed her tape measure again. ‘Forty-two.’

  ‘The meaning of life!’ Nathan and Llew chorused.

  Elizabeth shook her head in mock disapproval, though the same thought had occurred to her when she’d taken the measurement.

  ‘I don’t understand the reference,’ Alice said.

  ‘Me neither,’ Rhoz agreed.

  ‘It’s from a British fiction series,’ Henry said. ‘Seriously funny, actually.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘So, forty-two,’ Elizabeth repeated.

  Nathan had pulled out his phone. ‘By two point four seven, plus fifty-four point one…one point five eight metres.’

  ‘Again, there’s a slight margin for error in these estimates, so she may have been up to three and half centimetres taller or shorter than that, but either way, too tall to fit inside the cartonnage.’

  ‘So not the occupant of the sarcophagus?’ Henry asked.

  ‘It appears not,’ Nathan said. ‘What can you tell us about this person?’

  As Alice continued to hand across the bones of the second mummy, it struck Elizabeth that they looked exceedingly similar to the bones from the first mummy in both size and shape. ‘I’ll walk through the same basic analysis again.’ Elizabeth turned the cranium to and fro in its bed of foam. ‘This person is quite similar to the first mummy, again with no discernible brow ridge and a small mastoid process…’

  ‘Meaning it’s another woman?’

  Elizabeth ran her hand over the flare of the skeleton’s iliac crests. ‘Yes. See the shape of the bones in the pelvic girdle here?’ The others nodded. ‘Her hips, in real life, would have been fairly broad. It’s not a guarantee that this person was female, but along with the skull markers and the overall slight muscle attachments, it all goes together to indicate this person was also female.’

  ‘Does she…’ Nathan hesitated.

  ‘Have the same cuts to her face?’ Elizabeth asked.

  He nodded.

  Elizabeth picked up a magnifying glass. ‘They’re fainter but, yes, she does.’ She moved the glass lower. ‘As well as a trace of a possible cut to one of her cervical vertebrae, which again reflects the damage to the flesh of her neck that I could see in the CT scan.’

  ‘Her throat was also slit?’ Nathan sounded despondent.

  ‘It appears so.’

  Everyone in the room was silent for a few moments, digesting the news.

  ‘Could both of them have been female servants from the cache behind the false wall?’ Llew asked.

  ‘I suspect there was nothing to the assertion that they were female servants but pure supposition,’ Elizabeth said. ‘The first archaeologists to uncover the Tomb might just as easily have decided the mummies behind the false wall were the workmen who had built it. There’s nothing in any of the records I’ve been able to find that indicates a gender for any of the mummies.’

  ‘What else can we tell about her?’ Alice asked.

  Elizabeth tilted the cranium backwards, exposing the teeth. ‘The dentition shows very little wear, and the third molars haven’t erupted. I’d say she was an older teenager, possibly sixteen or seventeen. Recalling the teeth of our first mummy, the shape of these teeth is incredibly similar. And she has an extra tubercle on the buccal surface of her upper second molars.’

  ‘Um…’ Nathan said.

  ‘See what looks like an extra little drip of bone on the outside of this tooth?’ Elizabeth pointed to the middle of the maxilla, the upper jawbone. ‘I noticed it on our first mummy too. I didn’t think it was particularly significant, but perhaps it is.’ Elizabeth tilted the skull back and forth. ‘I’ll run some additional analyses as soon as we have a few more mummies to include in the sample, but I’d guess, given the overall similarities, the two were closely related.’

  ‘Are there any pathologies?’ Rhoz asked.

  ‘Nothing that jumps out at me immediately, but once we have a few more occupants from the Tomb I’ll see if it’s possible to run some population analyses of their cranial and dental metrics and non-metrics. That might tell us where these guys – or girls, rather – fit within the ancient Egyptian population in general.’

  As Elizabeth and Alice packed away the second mummy and meticulously laid out the third, Nathan raised something that seemed to have been bothering him. ‘I have to admit, I don’t understand why the ancient Egyptians put so much time and effort into this whole mummification thing,’ he said.

  ‘Why mummify?’ Henry joked.

  ‘Because the ancient Egyptians saw the afterlife as far more important than this one,’ Rhoz answered. ‘For them, the whole point of this life was to gain entry into the next. And to do that they needed a well-preserved corpse and a good tomb.’

  ‘Their immortality depended on their mummi­fication,’ Elizabeth added. ‘They believed that their ka, their spirit, was inexorably linked to their physical bodies. If your corpse was destroyed then your spirit – the eternal part of you – was destroyed along with it. Then you truly died for ever.’

  ‘Seems like one big con to me,’ Nathan said, ‘a way for the priest class, embalmers and tomb builders to make a living and assert power over everyone else.’

  ‘The afterlife is an idea common to most religions, and a clever way to moderate people’s behaviour while they’re alive,’ Elizabeth partly agreed. ‘Ancient Egyptians thought that if they lived this life a certain way, they’d gain entry to the afterlife and for eternity spend their days in the Land of Two Fields and their nights in a well-preserved corpse surrounded by a luxurious tomb.’

  ‘So they believed they went back to their tomb every night?’

  ‘That makes sense of why they went to all the effort!’ Henry exclaimed.

  Elizabeth nodded. ‘That’s why their tombs were so beautifully decorated, as well as filled with practical things.’

  ‘But why the mummification?’ Nathan pressed. ‘Why not straight burial?’

  ‘It was all about the heart,’ Elizabeth explained. ‘If your body was preserved correctly, and you either had your heart or a carving of a heart scarab beetle where your heart should be, you were allowed into the Hall of Judgement.’

  ‘What happened if your heart wasn’t preserved properly?’ Llew asked.

  ‘Then you wandered between worlds, homeless and alone for ever,’ Rhoz answered.

  ‘It was all to encourage piety and abiding by the laws of Ma’at, the goddess of balance,’ Elizabeth said, while setting out the bones of one foot. ‘It’s hard to explain simply, but Ma’at was also a set of forty-two laws, such as thou shalt not murder, or steal, or lie, or swear, or commit adultery, or cause trouble, or be mean to other people.’

  ‘That’s a pretty comprehensive list,’ Alice said.

  ‘The idea was that if you lived your life according to the laws of Ma’at, and had your tomb prepared just so, and your body prepared just so, then after your funeral your soul would enter a series of tests on the way to the Hall of Judgement. Once there, you would stand before forty-two divine judges and answer questions to do with the forty-two laws of Ma’at.’

  ‘Perhaps that number wasn’t completely random after all,’ Nathan said.

  ‘It was certainly very important in ancient Egypt,’ Elizabeth noted. ‘The soul would have to recite forty-two negative confessions in front of the judges, saying, essentially, I didn’t steal, I didn’t lie, etcetera. If you convinced them, you were sent for final judgement by either Osiris or Anubis – that changed over time – who placed your heart on a set of scales and weighed it against a Feather of Ma’at. Your heart had to be lighter than the feather. If you passed all the spiritual trials you could then sail on Ra’s boat to the Land of Two Fields.’
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  ‘And if things went wrong?’

  ‘The crocodile god, Ammit, came and gobbled you up!’ Elizabeth had laid out the last of the phalanges, the finger bones. ‘Okay, we’re ready.’

  The group gathered around the table again.

  ‘This one looks shorter,’ Rhoz said. ‘A possible fit for the cartonnage?’

  ‘A little too short, I suspect.’ Elizabeth grabbed her tape measure again. ‘Thirty-five.’

  Nathan ran the height formula through his phone again. ‘One metre forty centimetres.’

  ‘Four feet seven inches?’ Henry said. ‘Way too short!’

  ‘Meaning the mystery of which mummy was actually in the sarcophagus continues,’ Henry said.

  ‘Yup!’

  ‘Does that height mean this is a child?’ Nathan asked.

  ‘Yes.’ Elizabeth felt as though she was delivering bad news.

  ‘How old?’

  Elizabeth examined the maxilla. ‘This person has their permanent upper central and lateral incisors and first molar, while the first and second premolars and second molars are erupting. Ooh!’ She tilted the crani­um right back to look at the teeth inside their bony sockets. ‘It looks like there’s that extra tubercle on the part of the upper second molar that’s visible…no adult canines or third upper molars yet.’ She shifted her gaze to the inside of the mandible. ‘In the lower jaw again there’s the permanent central and lateral incisors and first molar, and the first premolars are just starting to emerge.’

  ‘All of which means?’ Nathan asked.

  ‘They were about ten years old.’

  ‘And their throat?’

  Elizabeth studied the front of the cervical vertebrae with her magnifying glass. ‘Yes, there’s a mark there, which, again, I’m sorry, reflects the scan of the tissue over it.’

  Nathan closed his eyes. ‘And the face?’

  She scanned the forehead of the ten-year-old. ‘No.’

  ‘Does that mean this was a boy?’

  ‘Possibly.’

  As they finalised the analysis of their third mummy from the Golden Tomb, Elizabeth wondered what to do about Nathan’s disturbed reactions to her analysis. She wanted to minimise the impact of the gruesome details on her friend as far as she could.

  Alice provided her with a timely distraction. ‘I’ve been meaning to ask,’ she began.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘There’s a night-time tour of Queanbeyan I’d love to do with you sometime this year, if you think you could make it?’

  Elizabeth very much enjoyed visiting the nearby town, Canberra’s cousin across the paper border between the Australian Capital Territory and New South Wales. Queanbeyan was only a ten-minute drive away, so they were effectively contiguous but felt surprisingly different. ‘Sure. What’s involved?’

  ‘It’s essentially two or three hours of running around old buildings, tunnels and cemeteries in the middle of the night, hearing all about local murders, ghosts and dastardly deeds.’

  Elizabeth grinned into Alice’s enthusiastic brown eyes. ‘Sounds wonderful!’

  Chapter Eight

  The following Monday morning, Elizabeth heard the lonely cry of Andrew the peacock as she raced up the oversized concrete stairs of the Mahony Griffin Library. She hadn’t seen him for quite some time. She stopped, raising one hand to shield her eyes from the early-morning glare, and spied him in the shadows beneath a purple-leaved plum tree by the edge of the lake. He was in fine fettle, shaking his enormous fan of a tail, blue and green eyes shimmering in the dappled sunlight. Sadly for Andrew, the nearest peahens – the intended audience of his dance – lived many suburbs over in one of the original peacock colonies.

  Minutes later, as the automatic doors at the front of the Main Reading Room were freed from their overnight constraints, the first clients of the day piled in. Elizabeth’s annoyance with Judy, who was still in the staff change rooms swapping her Lycra bike gear for suitable work clothes, evaporated as she spotted Frith, one of her regulars.

  Frith had brought a friend, who seemed a touch nervous, quite a contrast to the confident, assertive Frith.

  ‘How have you been?’ Elizabeth asked her teenage client.

  ‘Great!’ Frith said. ‘This is Linda.’

  The young woman smiled shyly. ‘Frith said you have a ghost here?’

  Elizabeth was nonplussed for a moment. ‘Oh, you mean the Phantom of the Stacks?’

  ‘I told Linda how cool he…’

  ‘Or she,’ Elizabeth interjected.

  Frith smiled. ‘Or she is. So we’ve come to get Linda a library card so she can start borrowing!’

  Elizabeth explained the basics of how to use the library’s services to Linda as she filled out an online form for her library card.

  Linda pointed to the marble dais in the middle of the reading room. ‘Wow, that’s cool.’

  ‘The platform?’ Frith asked.

  The dark-haired teenager shook her head. ‘The books on the history of libraries.’

  Amy had meticulously set out a rich, interesting display on the history of libraries across the world, including a glorious photographic book depicting magnificent buildings and collections both ancient and modern. Elizabeth’s personal favourite was the tome on the Library of Alexandria and the life and appalling death of one of its most outstanding librarians, Hypatia.

  ‘I’ll just print out your card,’ Elizabeth said. ‘It’ll be a few minutes.’

  As Frith and Linda wandered over to the marble dais to examine the books on libraries, Christopher Bredei rounded the corner sporting his usual Tweed Man outfit. The ever-present patron of the Library’s Meirionnydd Room – a space for serious researchers – always reminded her of 1950s Britain.

  ‘How are you today, Elizabeth?’ Christopher flashed her a warm smile. ‘I’m here to pick up my order from yesterday.’

  Elizabeth turned to retrieve his books from the pigeon holes behind her. ‘Here you are.’

  ‘Thank you. And are you happy with the data you received from the Petrie collection?’

  Elizabeth was nonplussed. How did Christopher know about her investigation into the occupants of the Golden Tomb?

  ‘Judy mentioned it,’ he said, answering her unspoken question. ‘I know the curator there, so I asked Llew if I could help in some way.’

  This wasn’t the first time. Feeling caught out somehow, Elizabeth stammered her gratitude.

  ‘My pleasure. Now, if you’ll excuse me,’ Christopher touched one finger to the brim of his pelage hat, ‘I’ll retire to the Meirionnydd to digest these records.’

  Watching his slight sway as he walked away, Elizabeth wondered why Judy always seemed to be gossiping about her. In the phrenic library, Oliver stirred. This was what she had been referring to when she’d said that, for all Elizabeth liked to find the truth of things, she often probed in the wrong direction.

  The question wasn’t why Judy talked about Elizabeth to others. It wasn’t even why Christopher had gone out of his way to help her, which might have been simple academic courtesy. Rather, the relevant pattern to query was why Judy so often acted as a catalyst for Elizabeth’s breakthroughs. Judy had gone to great lengths to help her and her family a number of times in the past, especially financially, and it was never clear why. Now she seemed to be lining up evidence for Elizabeth’s Egyptology investigation. Why?

  There was another, less pleasant, question to be asked: why hadn’t Llew mentioned that Christopher had arranged their access to data from the Petrie? Had he assumed Elizabeth knew, or was he hoping the group would suppose he had arranged it all?

  Elizabeth frowned in the direction of the Meirionnydd Room, then put aside her annoyance and turned to greet the next person in line. ‘Hi, how may I help you?’

  —

  Rhoz had come through for the sleuths in
a major way. Not only had she arranged access to scan data for the mummies of Ramesses the Third, his patricidal son Pentaweret, and Ramesses Fourth and Fifth from the Cairo museum, she had also tracked down two more of the mummies from the Golden Tomb. They had been stashed in the archives of an obscure French museum that Elizabeth would never have had time to check for herself. Also, her French – while passable, thanks to Grandmère – was certainly not up to the level of international diplomacy required to negotiate the release of scan data.

  As she helped Alice and Nathan ferry the boxes containing Golden Tomb mummies four and five into Taid’s library – Rhoz keeping a watchful eye on the front door for any would be furry escapees – Elizabeth wondered if it meant anything that Llew had said he was busy today. She had run into him in the Library foyer on Thursday, and asked him why he hadn’t mentioned that Christopher had also been involved in helping the group gain access to the Petrie collection material.

  ‘I’ve seen you talking to him quite often,’ Llew said. ‘I assumed Christopher mentioned his role in things.’ Later he had emailed the group, saying he was busy today.

  ‘I’ve had time this month to print out the skeletons of our two new mummies from the Golden Tomb,’ Alice said, ‘but not the Ramesses or Pentaweret.’

  ‘Two more candidates for “Whose Tomb is This Anyway?”’ Henry said from his screen.

  Working in tandem, Alice and Elizabeth began to lay out the skeleton of the fourth Tomb mummy fairly quickly. She was struck again by how feather light the plastic bones were, and uniformly white, unlike the real thing.

  ‘You’re getting good at that,’ Rhoz said to Alice.

  Nathan returned to the topic of mummification. ‘So, the one mummy I’ve heard a lot about is Tutankhamun. Were all mummies made the same way?’

  Elizabeth reminded herself not to seem too enthu­siastic about the gory details, given Nathan’s reactions to some of her previous revelations. ‘Unexpectedly, the mummification of Tut-Ankh-Amun was probably the least typical example ever found.’

  ‘Because of that glorious mask?’ Henry asked.