by Tom Holland
“Very bad,’ the foreman stammered. ‘Very bad indeed. Not good to know.’
‘Why not?’ I asked, growing more and more intrigued.
The foreman gazed about him as though searching for help, but none was forthcoming, and so he shook his head once more and breathed in deeply. ‘This,’ he whispered, ‘this is a curse.’ He pointed to the line I had copied from the quarry. ‘The curse of Allah. “Leave forever,” it says. “You are damned. You are accursed.” So it is written in the Holy Koran.’
‘And who is the object of Allah’s curse?’
Now the foreman began visibly to shake. ‘Iblis,’ he stammered. ‘Iblis, the Evil One, the angel who fell. And so, you see, please, sir -- it is not good to know.’
I ignored his plea and pointed to the second line. ‘And this one?’ I asked him. ‘Is this one too from the Holy Koran?’
The foreman’s nervousness now was almost painful to behold. He muttered something softly, then moaned and shook his head.
‘I am sorry,’ I pressed him. ‘I did not quite catch that.’
‘No,’ he whispered. ‘It is a very wicked verse. Not a verse from the Holy Koran at all. The Holy Koran was written by Allah. But this’ - he pointed -- ‘it was written by Iblis . . . written to deceive.’
What does it mean?’
Again he shook his head, but with the assistance of a considerable financial inducement, I was able to help him to overcome his qualms. He took the sheet of paper, and in a ghastly whisper he traced the meaning of the script. ‘“Have you thought upon Lilat,” he read, “the great one, the other? She is much to be feared. Truly, Lilat is great amongst gods.” ‘
He stared at me wide-eyed. ‘That is what it says.’
‘Who is Lilat?’
The foreman shrugged.
‘You must know.’
‘It is forbidden to know’
I tried to offer him more money, but this time he would not accept it, and again he shook his head. ‘Truly,’ he protested, ‘I do not know. A great demon -- much to be feared -- but otherwise, sir . . . truly -- I cannot say. I am sorry, sir. I cannot say.’
I believed him; and indeed, hearing his talk of demons, I was suddenly gripped by a sense of the ridiculousness of it all. I dismissed the foreman and, left alone, smiled ruefully at the thought of how my careful investigations, pursued with such hope and with such high ambitions, had led me into nothing but a morass of superstition. Iblis! Lilat! Verses from the Koran! What had I to do with such mumbo-jumbo? The very thought of it served to fill me with shame. I returned to my excavations; and as I resumed the hard work of sifting fragments from the sands, I vowed to banish all wild conjectures from my mind for ever.
I stayed true to this resolution for the next few weeks -- and indeed, would willingly have continued to do so had I not made, in the final days of our excavations at El-Amarna, a second and far more startling find. I say it was I who made the find -- but that is not strictly true, for as summer came on and the temperatures rose, so also I began to suffer from the heat and then to grow quite ill. It was while I was seeking to recuperate one midday beneath the shelter of some palm trees that a workman came to me. He held out his hand and I saw, gleaming upon his palm, a beautiful golden ring. I took it with no especial show of enthusiasm, for I was still feeling faint, when suddenly, gazing upon it, all my strength was restored. I inspected the design on the ring with disbelief, rubbed my eyes, then inspected it again. Yet there could be no mistake -- I had recognised it at once: two figures crouching beneath the disk of the sun. I paid the workman, then hurried to my tent. I drew out my papers, and found the copies I had made of the two Arabic designs. I compared them with the ring. I breathed in deeply . . . they were the same in every way.
I returned to search out the workman. He led me to where he had made the discovery and I realised, inspecting the stratum of rubble, that the ring was certainly an artefact from the age of Akh-en-Aten, for it had been found amidst brickwork and shards of pottery all dateable to Akh-en-Aten’s reign. Yet despite the evidence before my own eyes, I could still barely credit it, even less explain what it appeared to suggest. For how could the designs - separated in time by more than two thousand years -- be so clearly identical? Was it just a coincidence? Or maybe, somehow, something more? I had no way of answering these questions -- yet at least I could now be certain that they needed to be asked.
Not at El-Amarna, though, for soon after the excavation was brought to a close, and with the end of the season I left the site for good. What I had learnt there, however, was to alter the entire course of my life. Under Petrie’s supervision, I had begun my transformation into an archaeologist, a true professional, able to dig and examine systematically, and to temper the wildness of my untutored enthusiasms. But I had also, so I thought, stumbled upon the evidence of a remarkable and puzzling enigma - one which was to haunt me, as it proved, for the length of my career.
After leaving El-Amarna, I was fortunate, in the autumn of 1893, to obtain a post which kept alive my concern with the mystery. Indeed, I was fortunate to obtain a post at all, for I had briefly feared that I would be left unemployed and with no alternative but to depart Egypt altogether. However, with the assistance and recommendation of my former patrons, I was able not only to continue at work in the country, but to do so in that part of it I had most desired to visit. Ever since Petrie had spoken to me of its magnificence, I had longed to behold the great temple of Karnak and to inspect the environs of ancient Thebes. The post I had obtained gave me just such a chance - and brought me to that place where I sit writing even now.
Nor, despite the many years I have spent here, has it ever ceased to excite my wonder. For it is the spot, perhaps, more than any in Egypt, where past and present can seem most annihilated; even the Nile, the palms, the very crops in the fields, when they are outlined by the brilliance of the midday sun can appear like the features of a timeless architecture, unchanging, unchangeable, so distinct and stilled they seem. I can remember being struck by this thought on my very first arrival at Thebes, leaning from the window of my train and then, a moment later, seeing a flash of stone above the distant palms, stone and yet more stone, and knowing that I was glimpsing the great temple of Karnak. I visited it that same afternoon and imagined, lost amidst its stupendous and grandiloquent bulk, that the centuries might indeed have learned to dread such a monument. Courtyard after courtyard, pylon after pylon, the temple appeared to extend without end, and I could not help but contrast it with the sands and barren waste of El-Amarna 200 miles away to the north. Certainly, I felt the mystery of Akh-en-Aten’s revolution all the more keenly now, for I could understand, gazing about me, that in seeking the destruction of Karnak, he had been attempting what Time itself is yet to achieve. What dreams could have inspired him to challenge so awesome a place? What dreams, what hopes -- or, it may have been, what fears?
I would have welcomed the chance to stay in Karnak and consider further such mysteries. My post, however, required me elsewhere, and so that same evening, as the twilight began to deepen, I crossed the Nile to the western bank. Mud-rich fields soon gave way to tawny sands and beyond me, its peaks dyed red by the setting of the sun, arced a low range of mountains. Here, in the ancient mythology, had lain the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead; just as the sun each evening would disappear beneath the western horizon, so also, it was conceived, would the spirits of the departed journey west towards the desert. I had come to work within the shadow of this boundary, for it was marked by monuments of unparalleled romance and interest, built as gateways to the underworld and forming, to this very day, one vast and fabulous city of the dead.
Here, over the next six years, I laboured hard to become the master of my chosen calling. I had been employed to work upon the greatest of the Pharaonic mortuary temples, barely visible when I first arrived upon the site but gradually revealed to be a masterpiece of art. The excavation was a back-breaking one, and I found nothing which could she
d any direct light upon the mysteries of El-Amarna. But I was not impatient, and indeed I have ever looked back upon those years with the most cheerful of reminiscences. I have often considered how, if life had dealt me some other hand of cards, I might have made an excellent detective: not a Sherlock Holmes, perhaps, producing solutions with some great flash of insight, but rather one who accumulates his evidence with a steady care, hunting out every scrap of information, observing and analysing every clue. Certainly, I had realised that to pursue my ambitions I would need all the grounding I could possibly obtain -- and this I drew from my six years’ work upon the temple. For I learnt more there about the Ancient Egyptians, their history and their way of life, than in any other place or time; and it left me well equipped for the great adventure of my life.
Not that I had wholly neglected - during this period of my apprenticeship -- to explore those mysteries which had first set me out on such a course. Beyond the temple on which I was working there rose a mighty cliff; and beyond that cliff there stretched a bleak and wild ravine, remote from every mark or sound of life. The Valley of the Kings! Of all Egypt’s wonders, there is none, I suppose, which makes more instant appeal to the imagination. Here in ancient times whole dynasties of Pharaohs had been entombed within the rock, and still to this day, thousands of years after its abandonment, it can seem an awesome, holy, death-haunted place. One might almost believe that one is on another world, and the very paths which wind across the contours of the valley, whiter and more blinding than the sand and rocks themselves, can seem like the veins of some calcified monster, the beat of its life long since drained and turned to stone. Certainly, it is hard to explain those impressions which go to make the entering of the tombs themselves so unsettling, for one cannot adequately express the silence, the echoing steps, the dark shadows, the hot, breathless air; nor describe the aura of vast Time, and the penetrating of it which stirs one so profoundly.
Yet although the tombs of the Valley possessed an incomparable magnificence and beauty, I found nothing on the walls which could compare with the portrait of Nefer-titi, whose face, beauteous and deathly, still rose on occasion before my mind’s eye, surprising my fancy, or sometimes my dreams, as though luring me onwards to some unglimpsed goal. Nor did I discover any of those strange symbols and Arabic inscriptions which I had traced at El-Amarna; yet in truth, the finding of such marks would have surprised me more than their absence did. For the Aten had never been the guardian of the Valley; it was not the radiant image of a single god who had kept watch upon the tombs, but rather the ancient divinities of the underworld -- those same divinities Akh-en-Aten had been so desperate to suppress.
Above all, reproduced again and again upon the walls, I found the image of Osiris -- Osiris, the first King of Egypt, whom his own brother Seth had sought to overthrow. Inspecting the artwork, I would recall the legend which Newberry had related to me; how twice the god of evil had murdered his brother, first by sealing him within a sarcophagus, then by dismembering and scattering his limbs across the world. Yet I was also reminded of how Osiris had then been brought back from the dead by Isis, his sister, the Great Goddess of Magic, to reign for ever in the Underworld; and it was in this role that he had been portrayed upon the walls of the tombs, as the eternal King of the realm of the Dead. The legends did not reveal how Isis had achieved the mystery of his resurrection; and yet his presence as a guardian over the royal sarcophagi - his expression inscrutable, his lips faintly smiling -- appeared to hint that the secret had somehow been vouchsafed, to the souls of the Pharaohs at the very least. Again, thinking of this, I would find myself puzzling over Akh-en-Aten; at what had persuaded him to abandon such a god, and the prospect of an eternity of life after death.
Regrettably, without the opportunity of excavating in the Valley I had little chance of discovering answers to such questions. Indeed, only one faint avenue of investigation suggested itself. Recalling Newberry’s discovery of the legend of the restless King, it struck me that there might perhaps be similar folk tales abroad in the neighbourhood of Thebes. Certainly, there was one tradition which had been preserved from time immemorial amongst the villagers of the area, for the Valley remained what it had been since the age of the Pharaohs, the profitable hunting-ground of tomb-thieves and robbers. Evidence of their labours was everywhere to be found: open or half-filled mummy pits, heaps of rubbish, great mounds of rock debris with, here and there, fragments of coffins and shreds of linen mummy-wrappings protruding from the sand. Surely, I thought to myself, the accumulated wisdom of such professionals might contain some fragments of information which I could put to my own use. By this time I was able to converse in Arabic with tolerable ease, and on the darker nights, when the pestilential gnats and midges had tired me out of all patience, I would sometimes rise from my quarters and visit the headman of a neighbouring village. It is true my inquiries met with no immediate response, but I was neither surprised nor especially disheartened by this. For I had the impression, when I asked about the legends of the ancient tombs, that something was being kept back from me, and I found evidence enough that such legends might indeed be still alive. Sitting by the coffee-hearth of the headman of a village, one could often listen to reciters of romances who, without any books at all, had committed their subjects to memory, and afforded the villagers wonderful entertainment. Their recitations contained a good deal of history and ancient lore, and I would occasionally hear, with reference to the Valley, vague allusions to some great and wonderful secret, protected, so it seemed, by a terrible curse. It was hard to make anything specific of such stuff, but it certainly served to pique my curiosity, and I would often find myself wondering what more the village poets might not know.
While I was being employed upon the mortuary temples, away from the Valley, such a question might not have seemed an urgent one. But then in the autumn of 1899, towards the end of my sixth year of field work at Thebes, a dramatic upturn in my fortunes occurred which was to place the question into the sharpest of focus. It appeared that my efforts to prepare myself for the excavator’s life had not gone wholly unnoticed, for I was suddenly offered, as though from the blue, the post of Chief Inspector of Antiquities. This was a doubly unexpected honour, for not only was I still very young -- a mere 25 years old -- but I had the far worse disadvantage of not being French. Petrie’s prejudices had influenced me strongly: I had always assumed the worst of the Service des Antiquites. But the head of that organisation, Monsieur Gaston Maspero, was in reality a man of remarkable discernment, and it may be, indeed, all the more so for his not being English -- only a Frenchman, I suspect, would have appointed a man of my humble background to the post. I accepted it, of course, with the utmost alacrity, and with a sense of excitement intermingled with the utmost anticipation; for henceforth I was to be responsible for the antiquities of the whole of Upper Egypt -- and in particular, for the exploration of the Valley of the Kings.
At last, then, I reflected with a measure of satisfaction, I could count myself a true archaeologist. Nevertheless, in those first few months of my appointment, I remembered the lesson I had learned years before when I had seen the portrait of Nefer-titi dissolve before my eyes, and I bore in mind how the pre-eminent virtue of my chosen calling must ever be patience, patience, patience. Of course, I longed to plunge into excavations and make great discoveries, but the over-riding requirement, as I saw it, was first to make a close inspection of the already discovered tombs. And so it was, in my favoured character of a detective investigating a crime, that I began my hunt for clues.
Almost straight away, I uncovered something startling. It appeared that someone had already been around the tombs before me: in all the most recently uncovered ones tiny amulets had been left, either upon the breasts of the mummies in their sarcophagi or at the feet of paintings of Osiris on the walls. The amulets themselves appeared to be of recent manufacture, and yet the image they bore made my heart begin to pound, for although very roughly reproduced, it was unmistakably a portra
it of the sun, with the two familiar worshippers crouching underneath. Here was a pretty puzzle to be sure! What a copy of the Aten was doing in Thebes, many hundreds of miles away from El-Amarna, I could not begin to imagine -- nor what the natives might be up to, manufacturing an image of such a clearly pagan nature. Yet I was certain, remembering the graffiti I had found at El-Amarna -- similarly by a Muslim, similarly of the sun -- that the parallels were exact, and that such a correspondence, perhaps, was the greatest puzzle of them all.
Some faint light at least was shed upon the mysterious affair by the supervisor of my workmen, Ahmed Girigar. He was a man in whom I had an absolute trust, for he had worked under a succession of excavators and possessed an integrity which was rivalled only by his knowledge of the Valley’s terrain. One day, when I had found another amulet laid upon a mummy, I handed it over to him. Ahmed inspected it suspiciously.
‘Do you recognise it?’ I asked.
He shrugged with disdain. ‘It is a proof,’ he answered me, ‘that folly is still alive and flourishing.’