Shabtis

Chapter 1: Busiris - 45BCE

The townspeople of Busiris busied themselves with the day's work, the exchanges of gossip and the observances of custom and ritual that were the common round of existence in their prosperous community beside the Nile. The low, whitewashed mud brick buildings, where most of the populace lived, provided cool shade. Public buildings including fine temples in bright limestone, monumental statuary and impressive obelisks set up in public squares gave a sense of splendour. The markets were noisy with livestock and the streets pungent with the smell of donkey dung. The inhabitants, for the most part, carried themselves proudly as citizens of the birthplace of Osiris, god of the underworld. Their home might be far from the great centres of power at Thebes, Heliopolis and Alexandria but it was still renowned throughout the country.

Nofret, eldest daughter of Ity, the Chief Scribe of the 9

th

Andjety Nome in the Kingdom of the Two Lands, leaned back on a gilded wooden chair. She was sitting under a fine white canopy held aloft on ebony poles. The canopy shaded her from the fierceness of the Egyptian sun. Her arms were resting on the sculpted forms of Nubian lions. She was wearing a long, white, kalisiris robe that clung to her body more tightly than would normally be considered proper for everyday wear. With her brightly beaded usekh collar, her jet-black wig with its centre parting evoking the style of the time of the pyramid builders, and her proud posture -- a legacy in part of her Nubian heritage - she presented an intimidating figure, looking almost as though she had stepped out of a carving on a temple wall.

In front of Nofret, two naked men crouched with their heads to floor, bowed in worship, inches from her feet and not daring even to glance up as far as the golden straps of her sandals. Nofret sat impassively, enjoying their veneration. She took particular delight from the fact that these were not slaves. To earn the devotion of a slave was hardly an achievement. What choice did they have? No, these men were freeborn and high born too -- one the son of the Nomarch himself, the other a prince of a foreign power. And yet worship her was what they did.

Of course, Nofret had a little help. Even with the beauty she undoubtedly possessed -- her name itself meant 'beautiful' - it was not easy to inspire such extreme adoration. She held no rank that would compel a man to behave so. She was not wealthy, certainly such as she had was not enough to inspire fawning behaviour like this. Her help was from the gods themselves.

She looked down at the ring she wore on her first finger. It was solid gold, the gift of Queen Cleopatra a few years before. It was a token of affection and a remembrance of a bawdy night when the two girls had shared wine and lovers. "This ring was endowed with its power by Isis herself," the queen had said. "As Isis gathered up the fragments of Osiris's body so shall the wearer of this ring control the manhood of any that she chooses."

Nofret had chosen many. She had always enjoyed the company of men, especially where their attention was directed to her sexual pleasure. She took delight in using the suppleness of her body to accentuate her own stimulation. More than that, she found excitement in men sexually submitting to her. And somehow, since she had been given the ring, she found it easy to compel them to obey her. She took gratification from the act of bending them to her will and the extent to which she could have them debase themselves. It seemed the ring both gave her the power to do it and drove her to use the power too. She looked down at them men cowering in the dust, thinking they were like scarab beetles pushing the dung ball of the sun across the heavens. Their denigration served to demonstrate her greatness.

Nofret wondered if the queen had a ring of her own. Perhaps that accounted for the bewitching of the Roman, Caesar. She could be admired for that. Whether it was pleasure or political expediency none could say but her actions, even bearing the Roman's child, were keeping the Kingdom safe from the attentions of Caesar's legions better than an army of men ever could have. It was a clear testimony to the way in which a woman could have power over men.

Nofret clicked her fingers. The two men, knowing the signal and fearful of the consequences of not responding swiftly, obediently got to their knees. She beckoned to her household servant, instructing her to bind the men tightly; fixing their arms behind their backs in the manner of captives of war.

Nofret smiled as the men seemed unable to resist the girl under the cool stare from Nofret's kohl-rimmed eyes. Her servant pushed the men forward, forcing their lips down against Nofret's sandled feet. Neither of the men dared stare up at Nofret nor even look at the servant girl.

Nofret was delighted at the way the men were cowed by her power. Even this foreign prince could not resist the influence of Isis, it would seem. She was amused by the way that the arrogance shown by so many men, seen every day in the streets around the town, in the temples and in the markets was rendered as nothing by the power of the goddess.

Another click of the fingers and her servant brought out a crook and flail, replicas of the ones carried as signs of authority by the pharaohs themselves, symbols of the husbandry of animals and the threshing of grain for bread.

Nofret hooked the crook around the neck of the man nearest to her, dragging him close to her. As she beat him with the flail she could feel his gasps of pain and the bucking of his agonised body through the thin linen of her robe, driving her own lusts to a greater pitch.

The other man, the foreigner, looked on in wondering and fearful anticipation, knowing that once she had sated herself and discarded the first, she would come for him. It was hard for him to express how transgressive this felt -- the use of royal symbols for this purpose was unthinkable -- but it was certain Nofret intended the same fate for him, and that he could not avoid it.

Chapter 2: Oxford - 2021

In the quiet of the Anstruther Museum's laboratory, Angela Baxter, research assistant, was working on her post-graduate project. She was peering through a magnifying glass at a small figurine. She put it down carefully. It was a small mummy-shaped statuette, made of clay with a glassy pale-blue glaze, barely four inches long. On the front of the figure a set of inscribed characters testified to the figure's ancient Egyptian origins.

Angela copied down the inscription carefully. She had handled hundreds of these shabtis, as they were called, in her research. The shabtis were found in tombs. They were placed there as workers, intended to care for the deceased in the afterlife. Even the simplest Egyptian burials had them. Higher status tombs usually had 400 -- one worker for every day of the year and one supervisor for every ten workers; even the servants of the dead needed to be overseen. This shabti was from a late period, probably after the death of Cleopatra when Caesar Augustus had absorbed Egypt into the Roman Empire. Angela could see from the inscription that some of the characters weren't even real hieroglyphs. The inscription made no sense. By the time the Romans had taken over in Egypt much of the knowledge of the old language had already been lost. They still made the figures but the inscriptions meant nothing.

The little blue figure seemed to be saying to Angela, "They put me to work for eternity but they didn't really know what they wanted me to

do

."

Angela knew how the shabti felt. She had been working on the inscriptions for several months and her research supervisor seemed to be less and less interested in her work the more that she did. Although he didn't seem to be interested, for her it had become all absorbing. That had been the reason that her last boyfriend, Patrick, had moved out the week before, after a horrendous row between the two of them. He had claimed that the only way she was going to be interested in him was if he got himself tattooed with extracts from the Book of the Dead and laid out in a museum cabinet. She still felt guilty about the argument. She knew it wasn't her fault, but even so, she blamed herself. Maybe his insult suggested that he had taken more interest in Angela's work than she had given him credit for.

As far as the research project was going, she found herself with some sympathy with her supervisor's concerns about whether there was much new to say about the shabtis. That was a problem Angela often had, she knew. She would see the other person's point of view ahead of her own and end up doubting her own judgement. That fed through into her approach to her work and her private life. She would tell herself she needed to have greater faith in herself but somehow she found it difficult advice to take.

She picked up another figure. This one was earlier from the time of Ramses III. It was dedicated to a women called Tiye. Angela wondered if if might possibly be the Tiye who was one of Ramses' lesser wives. She had conspired to assassinate the pharaoh and put her son on the throne instead of the rightful heir. There were plenty of women in Egyptian history like that; women that were ready to take the initiative and push through their own plans. Sobekneferu the first female pharaoh from a time when it was thought only men could rule. Hatshepsut, arguably one of the greatest Egyptian pharaohs who presided over a time of prosperity and discovery. Nefertiti, famed as queen and possibly pharaoh in her own right. And of course there was Cleopatra. None of them would put up with the way Angela felt she was treated at work and at home. Angela wondered why she couldn't be more like them. She looked up at some carvings on the wall of the gallery she was working in. A woman in a long white robe was making an offering to the goddess Isis. She looked completely in control of her life, completely at ease with the world around her. Completely in tune with the way that things should be -- Ma'at, the Egyptians had called it. It couldn't have been more different from how Angela felt about her own life.

She stared at the line of clay figures. They provided no reassurance. The more work she did on them the less she felt she was close to discovering anything new.

She said as much to her boss Hugh Carfax, the museum's curator of Egyptian artefacts, hoping for some support. His response had been both unhelpful and worrying. "Probably just as well. I'm not sure how long we're going to hang on to them. The museum governors want to free up some cash and some space. Those things just fill up cabinets. They're just not the sort of thing that brings visitors in. They just sit in their rows staring out blankly. I mean, they're not telling you much and you're a specialist!"

"Surely the museum wouldn't just sell them off? All right they aren't unique, not even unusual, but it's a good collection of the various types."

"Oh no, not 'sell them off'. What do you think we are? Some sort of eBay seller? No, I think 'de-accession' is the approved term. You and I both know that some of them are worth several thousand pounds. The collection would pay for an extended cafe and gift shop. And we wouldn't have to store the dammed things; we haven't got a tenth of them on display. And even those are going back in the stores next week."

"That's inconvenient! Why?"

"Making space for the new exhibition; "Tutankhamun Centenary". Now, that

will

bring the punters in."

That depressed Angela even more. There were three thousand years or more of history under the pharaohs but everyone seemed to focus on the boy king who only reigned for 10 of them. The treasures from his tomb were stunning, of course, but there was so much more to Egyptian history than King Tut. Popular exhibitions were fine, she felt, but she didn't see why they should be allowed to interfere with her academic work, much less why less glamorous material should be sold off to fund what she saw as irrelevant additions to the museum.

"I thought you could work on some of the exhibits; come up with some exciting labels to make the most of what we've got. Sex the thing up a bit."

Angela didn't think much of that suggestion either. From what she'd seen of the stuff being assembled, it looked like the project was going to be making a silk purse out of a sow's ear. And, she thought ruefully, if anything needed sexing up at the moment, after Patrick had moved out, it was her own life. "I'd rather carry on with my research project, especially if the shabtis are going any time soon."

"Sorry, Angela, I need you to do this." Carfax passed her a folder with details of the plans for the event. "The museum governors have got high expectations of this exhibition."

Angela was sceptical. She really didn't understand why they should have any expectations at all. It just sounded like wishful thinking on their part. All right, it was certainly a reasonable thing to be celebrating 100 years since Howard Carter discovered the boy king's tomb but the Museum didn't have anything much of its own to show. It certainly wasn't sufficiently famous internationally to have borrowed any of the objects that had actually been in the tomb. The term "band wagon" sprang to mind when she thought of the Trustees' intentions.

Even so, she was going to have to do what Carfax wanted, she supposed, otherwise he would just keep on at her. She didn't feel able to argue. After all it had been decided to hold the exhibition and the work needed to be done. She would just have to try to fit in her work on the shabtis around the things that Carfax wanted doing for the exhibition. She looked at the folder Carfax had given her. She could make the time. After all, she thought, with Patrick walking out, it's not like there's much going on in my private life anyway.

That was one of her problems, she felt, she was always trying too hard to please other people.

When she went to look at the material that was being brought together for the exhibition she found herself, as she had expected, underwhelmed. She was a student of this stuff, she told herself, and even she didn't think it was very interesting. There were some very large, high resolution photographs of some of the artefacts, including the famous gold mask, which were impressive but nothing you couldn't see in any one of a hundred books on the subject. The actual objects available to be included in the exhibition were fairly dull. There were some stone fragments engraved with Tutankhamun's coronation name, Nebkheperura, which had been among the things that led Carter to believe there might be a lost tomb. There were also, on loan from the USA, a few objects with Tutankhamun's cartouche that had been found in a nearby tomb known as KV57. One thing amused Angela. It was a photograph she hadn't seen before. Howard Carter was standing near to Tutankhamun's actual tomb and staring in a besotted way at Lady Evelyn Herbert, the daughter of Lord Carnarvon, Carter's sponsor. For Angela, Carter's expression in the photograph hardly seemed an appropriate look to bestow on his boss's daughter, a woman 27 years younger than he was. If she'd been asked to describe how he looked it would have been love-struck.

The rest of the objects that had been brought together could be best be described as a collection of stuff from about the same date that had some sort of connection to one of Tutankhamun's predecessors or successors. Angela wondered for a moment if it could be put together in some sort of time-line, illustrating "Tutankhamun in Context" maybe, but that was probably not going to be "sexy" enough for Carfax.

There were a few pieces that were a bit more interesting though, Angela thought. They were to make up a part of the exhibition entitled, "Tut-mania; How The Discovery Gripped The World". There were examples of some of the products created to exploit Carter's discovery; statues and other reproductions (some more accurate than others) of things from the tomb. There were also some curious items; a cigarette lighter in the form of Tutankhamun's coffin; a lamp based on the figure of the king's head emerging from a lotus flower; a copy of the sheet music for the popular song "Old King Tut"; and perhaps most implausibly an interpretation of one of the Taweret hippopotamus goddess carvings from the tomb with a bottle opener set in the creature's mouth. These at least were genuine items of their time, Angela thought. Maybe there was a story to be put together using them. She looked at an Egyptian revival beaded handbag that would have graced the arm of some bright young thing in the 1920's. It was, she felt, a specially fine piece. She didn't know much about 20

th

century items like this but she could tell the silverwork of the bag's frame had been beautifully executed. She looked in the museum's catalogue to try to find out more and found the object's accession card showing it had been part of the collections since 1937. "Beaded handbag with Horus head pattern and sterling silver frame and chain," the card explained. "Made by Asprey, London, Hallmarked 1923, the gift of Lady Evelyn Beauchamp." There was a reference to a file in the museum's archives. Angela intended to seek it out.

Angela knew the name of the donor. Well, she thought, perhaps this was something she could build a story around. In 1922, before she married, Evelyn Beauchamp had been Evelyn Herbert, daughter of Lord Carnarvon, Carter's patron for the excavations. It was an object that had been owned by one of the first people to enter the tomb; a tangible link with the events of the 1920's that saw the discovery of the pharaoh, the sad death of her father and then her own marriage to Brograve Beauchamp around the time that the object was made.

Angela wasn't sure what made her look inside the purse but when she did so, she was surprised to see the glint of gold. Not quite -- she said to herself -- the "wonderful things" that Carter exclaimed over but gold nevertheless. She took it out of the bag. It was a ring, and at first glance, from its design, another piece of 'Tut-mania'. Why was it in a bag that Lady Evelyn had donated to the museum?

As Angela stared at the ring she became even more puzzled. The outer part of the ring carried a hieroglyphic inscription that was genuine. It was an incantation to the goddess Isis. The more Angela looked at the ring the more confused she was. It actually looked like something that was genuinely old -- not genuinely 1920's old, and perhaps not old enough for Tutankhamun's time from its design but certainly from pre-Roman Egypt. If it had come from Tut's tomb itself it would have been completely illegal for it to be here and it would certainly be a sensational story for the museum, although perhaps not in the way Carfax might want, but Angela was fairly certain it was from a later period.

As she was holding the ring, the door to the laboratory opened. Hugh Carfax walked in with his usual swagger. He stopped almost at once and then said, in a deferential manner that was quite unlike him, "I'm sorry I didn't mean to interrupt you, Miss Baxter. I can come back later if that would be more convenient."

Angela found his approach odd. Normally he ignored whatever she was up to, certain that his own agenda was more important. She put down the ring. "No, it's all right. I need to go up to archive room anyway."

Carfax seemed to relax, shook his head and went on, "Err, I wondered how you were doing. It's just that I have to talk to the Governors and..."

"I've started but I can't say much more than that, I'm afraid. I have come up with some ideas that might make a bit of a story around the Tutmania part of the exhibit but I won't know if that will work until I check some things out. The rest of it is a bit of a challenge though."