As Zayed al-Tamimi’s brass pestle hits the mortar, its rhythmic clink resounds with the crunch of coffee beans through the hall of the Abu Dhabi National Exhibition Centre. On a display screen above him, closeups of his motions attract the eyes of coffee professionals and enthusiasts. Watching most closely is the panel of four judges.
Al-Tamimi has traveled from Iraq to the capital of the United Arab Emirates (uae) to compete in the first-ever Gahwa Championships, held in December. He is preparing a signature pot of gahwa—the Arabic word for coffee—as he vies for honors in the category of Sane’ Al Gahwa, (literally, “Maker of the Coffee”). As he drops thick pods of cardamom and delicate threads of saffron into the mortar to crush with the beans, he fuses all he has learned about centuries-old Arab coffee-making.
A later competition includes Dubai barista Louie Alaba, who offers the judges his cold-brew “gahwaccino” that uses fig, chili and cinnamon. As the competitions hit a stride, attendees discuss the importance of coffee-making across the whole of the Arab world, and how it is not just a matter of a dark- or light-roast beverage served with optional sugar and milk. Arab gahwa is a ceremonial affair, each pour symbolic of the historical and social significance of coffee drinking and an embodiment of hospitality. Coffee is synonymous with Arab hospitality.
In the uae, 1-dirham coins pay homage to coffee culture by showing gahwa’s most time-honored symbol, the dalah, or the traditional Arab coffee pot, with its wide, stable bottom, elongated handle, finial lid and gracefully thin, beak-like spout. Across the Arabian Peninsula, it is not unusual to see a giant-sized dalah erected as public art in the middle of a traffic roundabout.
In his 1982 poem “Memory for Forgetfulness,” the late, celebrated Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish described the first cup of morning coffee as the “mirror of the hand.” He continued: “And the hand that makes the coffee reveals the person that stirs it. Therefore, coffee is the public reading of the open book of the soul. And it is the enchantress that reveals whatever secrets the day will bring.”
So important is gahwa in the Arab world the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (unesco) included gahwa in the uae, Saudi Arabia, Oman and Qatar in the agency’s 2015 Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. The designation recognized the value of preserving the historical customs and traditions of coffee drinking in these nations.
Eid Bin Saleh Al Rashid of Saudi Arabia’s Royal Hospitality House Group, and one of the supporters for the unesco designation, emphasized coffee’s importance for the future of culture in his country, “given its symbolic meaning for national identity and in order to preserve and pass this element to younger generations.”
In the desert at the eastern edge of the vast Rub’ al-Khali, heritage guides Waesam Fathalla and Ali al-Baloushy are doing just that. They share centuries-old coffee traditions with tourists, in much the same way their tribes shared with visitors centuries ago: out under the stars, sheltered by a tent, sitting with friends on floor cushions.
Like all good gahwa, they begin with green, unroasted Arabica or robusta beans. Over a makeshift pit of hot coals and sand, Fathalla roasts the beans in a shallow, circular pan with a handle long enough to keep his hands safely away from the fire. The beans bounce back and forth revealing a golden-brown shade and a faint floral aroma. Fathalla explains that while Saudi tradition favors light, blonde roasts, Emirati purists favor darker roasts. Once the beans are ready, they’re removed from the fire and ground into powder using a mortar and pestle. Water boils in a dalah, and nutmeg, clove or cinnamon is added before the coffee.
“Emiratis don’t use too many spices in their gahwa. That way, the natural flavor of the coffee can really come through,” Fathalla says as he grinds the coffee beans.
Throughout the centuries, coffee has been a unifying drink, something to do with family and friends old and new. The spices and flavoring in it can signal one’s economic status, level of respect for a guest, or both. Coffee recipes with saffron and rose water demonstrated wealth and regard for a guest most clearly.
He adds the coffee powder to boiling water and leaves it to bubble for a few minutes. Then he removes the dalah from the heat and allows it to rest, so the coffee grinds settle at the bottom. He then pours from it into another dalah with a filter, and then again into a smaller, ornate serving dalah.
Al-Baloushy begins to explain the role of the gahwaji or server of the coffee, as his assistant begins pouring. The gahwaji holds the dalah in his left hand and balances in his right hand a stack of finajin (handless cups; one cup is a finjan). He gently clinks the cups together to signal the coffee is ready.
Although there are regional preferences and variations in both the preparation and serving of gahwa, the basics of the ceremony remain much the same from place to place.
Al-Baloushy tries the first cup to determine if the coffee is suitably tasty. Then he begins serving the first of three rounds. The first guest cup is al-dhaif, and it cannot be refused without risking insult to the hosts. The coffee is a gift, the men explain, and it establishes trust. To each guest as the gahwaji hands out the cups, al-Baloushy says, “You are welcome.”
The heart of the ceremony, he says, is hospitality, a cherished Bedouin value. As nomads, Bedouins often lived in harsh conditions with scarce resources. They relied on reciprocal generosity among the communities and tribes they encountered. Still today, any traveler or visitor, as was the custom of their older tribesmen, is always hosted, sheltered and fed for three days and three nights with no questions asked. All visitors receive a welcoming cup of coffee; simply placing a dalah atop a fire pit is invitation enough for anyone to join.
The second cup he serves is al-kaif, for enjoyment and pleasure. Finally, al-saif—literally the cup of the sword—is served, traditionally when the parties have established a protection deal between them—a promise to defend one another in the event of threats against their people.
It is also significant that the gahwaji first serves the most important person in the majlis, or social seated assembly. Usually, al-Baloushy says, this is the eldest person or a guest of honor. Then he serves the remaining guests, beginning with those on the right of the guest of honor.
“There are many hidden messages in the way we prepare and serve coffee,” al-Baloushy explains.
As guests sip, they can politely communicate a message without offending or embarrassing others in the group. For example, he says that filling a guest’s cup two-thirds full means you are welcome to stay. If, however, if it is served full to the brim, this indicates the guest may not be so welcome.
“So you drink and leave,” he says.
Placing his own finjan on the ground, al-Baloushy demonstrates that this gesture communicates the guest has an important matter to discuss or a request to make of the host.
“If the time is right, I will talk to him and give him my full attention. If he is satisfied with my reply, he will drink the coffee. If not, he will leave the majlis,” al-Baloushy says.
The gahwaji remains standing to keep an attentive watch on everyone’s cup. Shaking the finjan sideways is the acceptable way of declining another cup.
Abdullah Khalfan al-Yammahi, a heritage expert and author of Etiquette of Gahwa Serving in the uae, explains how coffee brings together people of different ages, social classes and tribes.
“We sit together to discuss and debate. We talk about anything and everything,” says al-Yammahi, who is one of the four judges at the Gahwa Championships. “A dalah is seen as a living entity because it is present in our happy occasions and in sad ones.”
As al-Tamimi replicates the coffee ceremony during the Sane’ Al Gahwa competition, the judges also quiz him on etiquette.
“There are more than 44 adab [etiquette rules] of serving gahwa and more than 22 rules of receiving gahwa,” al-Yammahi explains. This is why it is important that younger generations learn how to interact with others through exposure to the majlis and its rituals. “Something as simple as bending forward to serve is an act of respect and demonstrates morals,” he says.
To encourage dialog, raise awareness and safeguard the coffee ceremony as cultural heritage, Abu Dhabi’s Department of Culture and Tourism has sponsored several programs, of which the Gahwa Championships are one. Another is the Bait Al Gahwa (House of Coffee) initiative that, since 2018, has encouraged young Emiratis to train with heritage experts and operate tourism projects related to the ceremony.
Khalid Al Mulla is owner of the Dubai Coffee Museum, national coordinator for the country’s chapter of the Specialty Coffee Association, and a promoter of regional and international coffee-culture preservation.
“The coffee business is all about education, whether that is bringing gahwa to the forefront of the global coffee industry and making it a mainstream beverage, or preserving culture by serving gahwa at formal events, or educating local customers on fair trade and ethically sourced coffee,” he says.
Al Mulla’s small, private museum in Dubai’s heritage-oriented al-Bastakiya district is one way young people and visitors can glimpse the spectrum of Arab coffee, from its origins to its ceremonies, artifacts, tools and early modern technology.
Mohamed Ali Madfai owns the cafe Emirati Coffee Co, and he observes that everywhere “the coffee bean is the same, yet the culture of brewing and serving is different.” He likens the Arab dalah to the Turkish ibrik, with its iconically wide bottom and slanted handle.
“Just like Vietnamese-style coffee gained popularity in [the Arabian Peninsula] as much as a Spanish latte, with education and promotion, gahwa could become a mainstream drink in cafes around the world,” he says, noting cafes offering traditional Arab coffee report high demand. Modernizing “gahwa culture,” he adds, will not strip away tradition because “tradition lasts longer than gimmick.”
Zainab Al Mousawi, 31, serves cold-brewed traditional Arab coffee in her Dubai cafe, To the Moon & Back.
“I find gahwa incomparable to specialty coffee. As it is brewed with spices, it makes for a special drink,” she says. “Gahwa and specialty drinks each have their own audience, how and when to be served, and consumed.”
Her gahwa uses single-origin beans and a spice mix, and she brews it over ice using a slow-drip method, another way young coffee innovators are fusing past and present as well as regional and international influences.
“Although young people may be influenced by foreign culture or trends, they always come back to their roots,” says heritage expert and author al-Yammahi. “They recognize their heritage and traditions. It makes me proud to see their involvement and investment in this intangible heritage.”
Saiful Rijal is a blur of motion as he launches into the air, reflexes synched to experience as he anticipates the path of a ball hurtling toward him from the other side of the court. With his body flying parallel above the floor, the Indonesian national sepak takraw striker twists his hips and swings his kicking leg around to blast the ball over the shoulder-high net. Like a cat, he lands on his feet ready for his next chance to spike.
Often called “kick volleyball,” the Southeast Asian sport is more like lightning-fast badminton paired with the explosive elegance of karate.
“The most challenging part of sepak takraw is the acrobatics,” Rijal says during a recent training camp in Sukabumi, a city amid the green foothills of Mount Gede, south of Indonesia’s capital, Jakarta. “It’s the jumping and somersaulting in the air and hitting the ball as you’re flying.”
Hundreds of years old, sepak takraw is played on neighborhood courts, in schools and at club level across Southeast Asia. As the game’s popularity grows in other parts of the world and more teams come to competitions from beyond Asia, the International Sepaktakraw Federation (istaf) is now vying for inclusion in the Olympic Games lineup.
The appeal of the sport—carried by emigrants and enthusiasts from Southeast Asia to the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Australia—is easy to understand. The equipment comprises a net and a lightweight ball about the size of a large grapefruit. The rules are just as simple, too: Players can touch the ball with any part of the body except their hands and arms. The pace is fast, and the precise volleys and flying kicks never cease to amaze spectators.
“You must come and see it live,” says Salleh Nanang, the coach and a former captain of Singapore’s national team. “Even if you watch on tv, on video, you will see only the jump. You will see only one part.”
Named using the Malay word for kick and the Thai word for a woven ball, sepak takraw is played on a badminton-size court. Most games are played by squads of three players—a server, a feeder and a striker. Other versions include games with two or four players on a side. (See sidebar below.)
At the most recent Southeast Asian Games, held in December in Philippines, Thailand won three of the six gold medals in the sepak takraw events. The Philippines did well, too, with two golds and three bronzes, while Indonesia took home one gold, one silver and one bronze. Malaysia came in fourth with two silvers and one bronze. Singapore went home empty-handed. Also participating were Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Vietnam.
During a game, players’ reflexes and reaction times are put to the test when a spike kick rockets the ball at up to 130 kilometers per hour. For this, strikers often get the glory moves but Nanang, who coaches the Singapore national team, sees the key to victory in the server’s position.
“The server can kill the ball and get the point,” he says in the team’s training hall at a large, well-equipped community center in eastern Singapore. “If not, then the points play like ping-pong.”
The origin of sepak takraw is lost in time. As istaf states diplomatically on its website, it is “a matter of intense debate in Southeast Asia, as several countries proudly claim it as their own.”
Victoria Williams, author of Weird Sports and Wacky Games, points to similarities to jianzi, an ancient Chinese game that used feet to juggle a feathered shuttlecock. The first known historical record of sepak takraw is the Sejarah Melayu (Malay Annals), written in the 15th and 16th centuries. It describes a game in the court of the Malacca Sultanate, whose territory comprised parts of present-day Malaysia and Indonesia, as one in which a player would “receive the ball on his foot and keep it up without falling” before passing it to another.
Originally known in Malay as sepak raga—literally “kick woven-basket”—the game survived the fall of Malacca to the Portuguese in 1511, and its popularity grew. Murals in Bangkok show evidence it was played in Siam (now Thailand) in the early 1700s, and similar games have long existed in the Philippines, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar.
Thailand gives credit to the Siam Sports Association for setting the first rules in 1829 before adding a net and holding the first public tournament a few years later.
Malaysians claim they shaped the modern version of the game in the 1930s and 1940s by using a badminton court and net and by codifying rules for team play. After this, interest spread rapidly across the region for sepak takraw as a competitive sport.
Even the current name is a multilateral compromise: Before the 1965 Southeast Asia Peninsular Games, discussions between Malaysia and Singapore on one side and Thailand and Laos on the other led to an agreement to name the sport sepak takraw.
For decades, sepak takraw has been a fixture of regional competitions and, since 1990, a medal sport at the Asian Games held every four years. Thailand is the powerhouse national team, and it has hosted the prestigious King’s Cup Sepaktakraw World Championship since 1985.
Istaf, set up in 1992 as the global governing body, now has 50 national associations as members, from the traditional Southeast Asian bastions to newer enthusiasts such as the us, Canada, Brazil, France, Germany, Switzerland, India, China, Japan, Australia and others.
This growing membership makes istaf ever more hopeful about securing a place for the sport in the Olympic Games. Those aspirations, and the chance to attract a wider audience, received a boost in July when the Olympic Channel added istaf and several other sports federations to its global media platform.
Istaf has run a series of international tournaments to popularize the game and works closely with the Alliance of Independent Recognized Members of Sport, which seeks to secure official recognition from the International Olympic Committee (ioc) for lesser-known sports.
But even at 50 national members, says istaf Secretary General Abdul Halim Kader, whose office in Singapore is filled with sepak takraw memorabilia, istaf still falls short of what it needs to qualify for the Olympics.
In the us, Lee Pao Xiong, whose family fled Laos in the mid-1970s and who is now a professor of government at Concordia University, has spearheaded the building of sepak takraw courts in Saint Paul, Minnesota. There, the game is popular among the Hmong and Lao communities, and it has started to attract rookies too. The courts, he says, reflect his city’s shifting cultural landscape.
“The baseball and football fields are empty. We’re meeting new needs of the population,” he says.
Xiong is one of many grassroots enthusiasts promoting the sport alongside the official usa Takraw Association. Xiong says the pathway to the Olympics is through developing players, teams and local leagues, while showcasing the us track record of success at King’s Cup competitions.
In the meantime, sepak takraw is no pathway to fortune: Even at the highest international levels, almost all of the players and coaches are dedicated amateurs who juggle training with day jobs.
In Singapore, a tiny city-state of less than six million people, the national team trains three nights a week after a full day of work.
“I know they’re tired but they come here, they give me 100 percent,” says Salleh, a full-time high school coach by day who coaches a national team of players that includes government workers, police and civil defense officers.
For Indonesian national men’s coach Tri Aji, part of the reason Thailand is successful is the frequency of tournaments there. For his team to stay competitive, they try to foster unity while training together. “There must be a vision of a mission to represent Indonesia together,” says Aji, a 2003 and 2011 medalist at the Southeast Asian Games and now a university lecturer in sports science.
What may also achieve on-court synergy for the Indonesian players is their early morning routine.
Before first light, the call to prayer echoes from speakers of a nearby mosque.
Inside the training center, part of a sprawling recreation complex founded by Indonesian badminton legend Tommy Sugiarto, the kitchen staff prepare breakfast and many of the players are already in the canteen.
“Physical and mental discipline, plus technique and the right attitude, are what it takes to be a good player,” says Syukur Saing, the coach of the women’s team.
By 7 a.m. the women are starting with stretching, running, skipping rope and, in a circle, volleying a ball back and forth with their feet.
“I’ve been interested in sepak takraw since I was little,” says team member Nur Qadri Yanti, a policewoman from South Sulawesi province. “I love it because of the chance to achieve something.”
The men start about 9 a.m. After warm-up, some face off in a mock game as coach Aji uses a tennis racket to smash ball after ball at players from the other side of the net.
To build spring for his gravity-defying leaps, striker Rijal does sets of jumps up onto a wooden box that stands chest-high. At home in eastern Java, he says he trains and plays every day after finishing his job as a government worker.
“Sepak takraw is part of the daily activities in my village,” he says.
At a community center in Jakarta, a tournament for high school students draws teams from across the country who compete for six days each November. It’s part of Indonesia’s efforts to invest in grassroots initiatives to bring new players into the sport.
As crowds pound drums, chant and cheer, scouts from the national team keep keen eyes out for talent. The Ministry of Youth and Sports funds the travel, hotel and food costs for the hundreds of players and coaches here.
“This is originally an Indonesian sport,” says Muhammad Yunas, the ministry’s coordinator of the tournament. “The participants are still young, but they are the future to make a strong national team.”
On the courts, even at this junior level, the pace and the high-flying kicks are explosive.
“I want to do the best for my province in takraw,” says Muhammad Fatur Rahmat, the 17-year-old captain of his team from South Sulawesi. “I want to keep playing and would love to join the national team.”
Across Southeast Asia, sepak takraw gets regular media coverage—especially during competitions—and Facebook pages dedicated to the sport can have hundreds of thousands of followers.
Outside the region, however, news stories tend to treat the sport as an intriguing curiosity for an audience that knows little about it.
Kader, of istaf, regards the relationship with the Olympic Channel as a way to power loftier ambitions.
“The chances for sepak takraw to be listed in the Olympic Games are brighter now that the Olympic Channel has given the green light to promote the sport,” he says.
“As people around the world learn more about it, I’m confident sepak takraw will attract more fans who enjoy the thrill of flying high.”
One sunny spring afternoon in 1983, I was driving a rental car near Syria’s border, admiring a spectacular view. I stopped and stepped out to take a photograph. That’s when I saw it: Lebanese license plate 316205. It was lying alone, discarded in the tall grass, its silver Arabic script and numbers handsome on its black background. This discovery stirred a fascination in me that became a 37-year hobby of license plate collecting. This first find remains on prominent display among what are now 463 others in my collection, 50 of which are from countries of the Middle East and North Africa. These include every country in the 22-member Arab League except Comoros. I’ve even been fortunate enough to acquire plates from five of the seven Trucial States that since 1971 comprise the United Arab Emirates—only Ajman and Fujairah are still missing.
Like most collectors today, I obtain most of my tin (sometimes plastic, sometimes aluminum) rectangles from eBay or organized plate-collector meetups. But as a journalist who travels frequently, there’s nothing more satisfying than going somewhere and coming home with an unexpected, unusual plate—and a story.
For example, one came to me in 1992 when an Egyptian taxi driver taking me to Cairo International Airport was thrilled to sell me the spare license plate lying in his trunk that I noticed while loading my luggage. In 2001, while in Bethlehem, I visited a metal shop in the process of minting new plates, and the proprietor happily sold me 10 expired ones that were useless to him. Years later, I happened upon several rare local plates while perusing a junkyard in Djibouti City, capital of Djibouti. In 2007 an assignment took me to Aleppo, where hidden among the treasures in the market of the city’s historic citadel, I found a lone Syrian license plate from the early 1960s: Its owner wanted $500; we settled on $200.
I’m not the only collector who appreciates the variety of colors, designs and alphabets on plates from the Middle East. Ross Day, archivist of the Automobile License Plate Collectors Association (alpca), says most of its members focus on North American license plates, and it’s a handful of dedicated others who collect from around the world, many from Muslim-majority countries.
“Their motivations are no different from their colleagues: an interest in license plate design and manufacture, a facility with non-Roman scripts or an attraction to a plate’s historical and geopolitical context,” he says, explaining that collectors often have personal or professional interests in regions from where they collect.
In the United States (us), Canada and Mexico, plates come in a standardized 15-by-30-centimeter size, mass-produced in factories and, frequently, in prisons. Throughout the Middle East, however, plates vary much in shapes and sizes, and there is a history of craftsmanship. In some cases—particularly before the 1970s, metal was at times hammered out by hand, with skilled individuals raising letters, adding colors and shaping edges. For example, early plates from Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and Syria are highly sought-after for their distinctively raised lettering and unusual cast-aluminum construction. The most common color combination on Middle Eastern plates is silver-on-black, though yellow, blue, green, red and orange are frequently used.
One especially avid collector, Jim Fox, says he enjoys plates from the Middle East and North Africa simply because the curves in Arabic script make them more visually appealing than the block letters of English and other Roman-based alphabets.
“They’ve become somewhat of a mystery to the average collector. I like them because they look so different than what we’re used to seeing,” he says.
Fox, 73, toured the globe for years as a drummer in the American rock-’n’-roll band James Gang. This afforded him the opportunity to amass a trove of international plates, taking to unimagined heights a hobby he began when he was seven years old. He says he once owned more than 30,000 plates but in the 1990s began downsizing. Now he owns 1,000, and about 60 are from the Middle East.
He recalls that one of his most memorable acquisitions came in 1971 in London. He and James Gang bassist Dale Peters schmoozed their way into a posh hotel to try to meet the driver of a valeted Lamborghini in which they had spotted, in the back seat, a silver-and-red license plate reading “Abu Dhabi 4.” After some dialog with hotel reception, Fox was informed this would be impossible, that the car belonged to a guest who wanted his privacy. A nearby bellhop overheard the conversation, however, and for a tip offered to call the driver’s room.
“Sure enough, he dialed the number and handed me the phone,” Fox says, who explained to the man who picked up the phone he was an American musician in want of the back-seat license plate. Then the driver got on the phone.
“You want that thing? I’ll be right down,” Fox says, telling the story.
They waited in the lobby for a few minutes, the elevator doors opened and out walked “a shaykh” with a small entourage.
“He looked around, saw me and smiled. We shook hands. He said, ‘Come with me,’ unlocked the door of his Lamborghini and gave me the plate. Later on, I sent him some record albums,” Fox says. “I never heard from him again.”
The first country to issue license plates for automobiles was France, in 1893. The first us plates were issued in 1901. In the Middle East and North Africa, Egypt led the way: The October 1914 issue of Ford Times magazine shows a photo of a Ford Model T parked in front of the Pyramids in Giza with a red, white and black tag on it that was made of porcelain. Turkey began issuing license plates in 1920; Morocco began in 1923. During the 1950s and 1960s, the Arabian-American Oil Company (Aramco) cast its own aluminum plates for use inside the towns and oilfields of Saudi Arabia within the company’s concession area. The changes in plate sizes, shapes and materials have made collecting license plates another window into the diversity of the region.
Dick Parker of Greenwich, Connecticut, has collected license plates most of his life. After his kids grew up and moved away 20 years ago, the hobby intensified, he says.
“My wife and I are avid travelers, so I got hooked on international plates, especially those with unusual designs and colors, and the most unique designs were from the Middle East and Latin America,” Parker says.
He’s accumulated nearly 5,500 tags, including 381 from the Middle East and other Muslim-majority countries with non-Roman scripts, such as Urdu and Farsi.
Among his prize plates, he says, “Saudi plates from the 1950s and 1960s were almost all cast, and these cast plates always command a premium because of their uniqueness.” In recent years, he notes, some buyers of such plates have been locals seeking something exotic yet with a heritage. “They can’t find any of the older stuff locally, so they’ve been bidding extremely high amounts for these older plates at various auction venues, both online and in person here in the States.”
One even set a world record for the most expensive license plate: Emirati executive Saeed Abdul Ghafour Khouri in 2008 paid the equivalent of us $14.3 million for “Abu Dhabi 1.”
Another well-known collector of Middle Eastern license plates is Vincent Moens of Paris, who began collecting in 1980 at age 15 and has since acquired 10,000 plates, including about 1,000 from the Middle East and North Africa. Travel and an overseas move in 1979 allowed him to gather plates from around the globe during the 1980s and 1990s.
“During those years, plates were easy to get—and quite cheap too. The Internet changed it all,” he says.
Today, Moens runs a Facebook group called “License Plates from Former Countries and Colonies,” with 143 members. Other Facebook groups, such as “License Plates of the Arabic/Arab World,” with 202 members, and “License Plate Collectors,” with 9,500 members, continue to attract enthusiasts. And for Day, who continues his work as an archivist with alpca, the interest in international license plates draws the curious and the avid every day, and Middle Eastern plates remain among the most sought after.
“Worldwide, the notion of preserving—let alone collecting—license plates is, well, foreign. And there is always the possibility of restrictions on the possession or export of license plates, which may be considered government property,” Day says. “While I have only a few Arabic plates in my own collection, they hold a very special place.”
As they do for my collection—starting with 316205, which, if I had been in a bit more of a hurry that day, might still be weathering in the tall grass by the road.
]]>In 1937, at age 52, she accompanied her husband, George, a British diplomat, on a three-week, east-to-west traverse of the five-year-old Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Along the way, she kept a journal that, though intended originally for publication, remained in her family for 80 years.
She became not only the first Western woman to travel openly across Saudi Arabia as a non-Muslim, but also the first to be received in public by the kingdom’s founder, King Abdulaziz Al Sa’ud, and the first to dine in the royal palace in the capital, Riyadh. Although she had been preceded into central Arabia by a tiny coterie of female travelers—notably Lady Anne Blunt, Gertrude Bell and Dora Philby—unlike them, she was neither a tenacious pioneering female traveler nor on an official mission.
Rather, she went along for the ride. Her purpose was the journey itself. Her account shows her to be a tourist with the decidedly modern attitude in which her personal responses to what she found form as important a part of her narrative as do her descriptions of, and background on, the places and people she encountered.
Until the 1930s a journey across the Arabian Peninsula by any foreigner, male or female, was rare. Least frequently visited was the interior region of Najd, where accounts came to the West through the occasional writings of explorers, scholars, political agents, horse-fanciers, English-speaking pilgrims and the occasional soldier, all traveling more on business than leisure. But in the 1930s came the search for oil, quickening modernization and deepening relations with a rapidly interconnecting world.
Diplomats and oil-company representatives came first, aided by the advent of the automobile and wireless telegraphy. With them also came cameras—a part of what became modern tourism in which the Rendels excelled. Both proved keen photographers, and their images, now in the archives of the Royal Geographical Society in London and St Antony’s College in Oxford, rank among the finest from the period.
At the time of the trip, 48-year-old George Rendel was head of the British Foreign Office’s Eastern Department. He had been responsible for Britain’s relations with Saudi Arabia since 1930, and in 1932 it was he who suggested “The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia” as the official name of the newly declared sovereign state.
When King Abd-ulaziz invited him to pay a semiofficial visit combining diplomacy with travel, the king included Geraldine in the invitation. “I could hardly believe my good fortune,” she wrote in the journal’s first pages, noting “Permission to visit Nejd is rarely given to foreigners.” The couple kept a detailed, handwritten diary, some two-thirds of it penned by Geraldine. It was this that she refined into her travelog that languished, probably for diplomatic reasons, unseen until 2017 when her grandson, Jonathan Rendel, offered it to Arabian Publishing in London.
Geraldine played no role in planning the trip that she refers to as her “Arabian holiday,” even though, like the best tourism, it would prove a transformative experience. “In so far as it is the first record of a European woman’s impressions of Riyadh and of this particular crossing of the Central Provinces of Arabia,” she wrote of her travelog, “it may have an interest of its own. For, as a woman, I was privileged to see and do things forbidden to the men who have explored the heart of Arabia.”
Her journal begins on February 21, 1937, outside the southern Iraqi port of Basra in a “frontier post” called al-Zubayr. The Rendels were on their way to Kuwait in a car convoy across the desert “with low thorny scrub not unlike gorse.” From Kuwait they took ship to Bushire, Iran, and from there to Bahrain, arriving on March 3.
From Bahrain, the Rendels boarded a dhow supplied by King Abdulaziz’s agent in Bahrain and al-Hasa (today’s Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia), Abdulrahman al-Gosaibi. Upon reaching the little port of al-‘Uqayr on Saudi Arabia’s east coast—“a mere speck of civilisation, lying between the sea and the sands,” Geraldine noted—they were met by Shaykh Hafiz Wahba, the king’s representative in London. He became “our admirable host, guide, philosopher and friend,” Geraldine recorded.
Such language can be read as an indication of the extent the Rendels were conscious of who they were and where they were going: representatives of the world’s most extensive Western empire invited to travel through the heartland of the only Arab country that had never been subjected to European imperial control. Her tone is correspondingly respectful and unpatronizing.
At the same time, Geraldine also revealed herself a traveler in the romantic mould. Like many European travelers in the East, she proved susceptible to seduction by what she took to be unchanging tradition, the more redolent of The Thousand and One Nights the better, while aspects of modernization and progressive change were often so familiar from home as to be unworthy of comment.
“I stepped off the quay into the boat feeling that adventure had begun,” she wrote upon boarding the dhow for Saudi Arabia. “I was walking right out of my life into another of which I had no real conception … I had passed through a magic door and it had shut behind me setting my fancy free. My everyday world grew dim; it was like slipping into another dimension.”
Even George, a seasoned envoy, reflected similar wonder: “As we left the port at Bahrain … we felt we were passing into another age and another world,” he wrote in his own 1957 memoir, The Sword and the Olive.
From the moment they disembarked in al-‘Uqayr, local dress became obligatory for both. Comprehensively veiled, Geraldine found the experience by turns a nuisance, an acknowledgement of local custom, and a surprisingly welcome screen against unwanted curiosity and, of course, the sun. In a society entirely unaccustomed to the public mixing of women with men, her presence elicited wildly contrasting responses.
“My position all through this journey was a mixture of that of a lady of the harem and of a European woman,” she wrote. “When with the Amir [Crown Prince Saud], I was always … put first in everything. But on some other occasions … I stood without being presented to anyone, and no man would speak to me, or even offer me a chair, because no Nejdi looks at any woman outside his own family circle.”
On the other hand, Geraldine received access to the private quarters of the Saudi elite and the women’s side of society. Her descriptions of meeting the al-Gosaibi women and children and, later, those of Al Sa‘ud in Riyadh and Jiddah afford rare insights into the side of Saudi Arabian life hidden from public view.
As her itinerary unfolded, Geraldine’s enchantment intensified. On reaching Hofuf, about 90 kilometers inland from al-‘Uqayr, she and George were accommodated in comfort in the guesthouse of the palace of Amir Saud Ibn Jiluwi. The ladies of the al-Gosaibi family in Hofuf “looked like figures out of some fine Persian miniature come to life,” she wrote.
Her stay was not without at least one harmless faux pas. The Rendels had arrived after dark, and eager to get a good view of the oasis after breakfast, Geraldine climbed to the palace parapet where she “looked out over a city of flat-roofed houses and little open courts” bordered by the gardens of the oasis and the desert beyond. Rapt by the view, she only slowly became aware of the growing noise from below. One court had filled with “the veiled forms of women and children [who] … looked and pointed upwards towards me, and I realised to my confusion that word had gone round that the foreign lady at the Amir’s Guest House was to be seen on the roof of the Palace.” She dropped out of sight as quickly as she could.
Two days later, on their way to Riyadh, the Rendels spent a luxurious night at Crown Prince Saud’s hunting camp in a “romantic tent, which took one straight back to the Golden Age of Arabian history.” One may raise an eyebrow at her preference for the picturesque, reflecting orientalist fantasies, but this was not a prepackaged, sanitized “heritage experience” so common in mass tourism today. She showed true fortitude and open-mindedness in taking off into unknown territory and enduring the discomforts, thrills, spills and frustrations of real desert travel with patience and good humor.
Indeed, the evening before, the Rendels’s car convoy had been caught in a sandstorm and separated from the vehicles carrying food and camp gear. “We were tentless and bedless and foodless,” she wrote. “Our car had only a canvas hood and was rapidly filling with sand and we were getting pretty cold.”
Then the trucks began to arrive. “The kitchen lorry, alas, was still to seek; but a camp bed and shelter from the bitter wind and driving sand was immeasurable relief. We turned in hungry but cheerful; and incredibly, in spite of the roaring of the wind and the rocking of the tent, slept sound.”
The Rendels were devout Catholics, but far from alienating them from their hosts and the people among whom they traveled, their own faith, it turned out, predisposed them to deeper appreciation of the all-pervasive religious outlook of Najdi society. And far from being irritated by relaxed attitudes to schedules, they relished the contrast with their own time-tyrannized lives at home. On the way to Riyadh, George reflected on the tenor of travel in Saudi Arabia, calling it “a strange liberation from the servitudes of European life. … The only fixed points in time are sunrise and sunset and the hours of prayer.”
The group’s halts for prayer en route “won our increasing respect,” he wrote in his memoir, going on to note that many of the Arabs he’d met expressed favor toward those of other faiths over those with none.
In Riyadh the Rendels were received warmly by the crown prince, whom they knew from his visit to London in 1935. As aficionados of traditional architecture, they were thrilled to be accommodated in the height of Najdi style, in the New Palace at al-Badi‘ah, in the nearby Wadi Hanifah. “What a luxury this was after four days with only G.’s small shaving mirror and my own handglass in a dark tent,” wrote Geraldine.
The king himself was away, on the coast in Jiddah, as the pilgrimage season was in full swing at the nearby holy cities of Makkah and Madinah. The meetings the Rendels had with Crown Prince Saud proved both formal and informal. At a private dinner on the last evening, Geraldine was even able to dispense with her veil. The Rendels left Riyadh for Jiddah on March 12 for what was essentially a sightseeing jaunt southwest across the rest of Saudi Arabia. The scenic route took them first past al-Dir‘iyyah, the ancestral home of the Al Sa’ud on the outskirts of Riyadh, and their photographs provide an especially valuable record. This impressive and ruined city was capital of the first Saudi state, from 1744 to 1818, and it is now a restored unesco World Heritage Site and a showcase of new museums and venues for public events.
They continued along the timeworn Hijaz Road, passing through places including al-‘Uyaynah, Marat, Duwadmi, Dafinah and Muwayh, en route to ‘Ashayrah, a wooded area in the Hijaz borderlands used for caravan stops. Next came the highlight: a southward leg to the scenic highland town of Taif and the 2,130-meter Shafa escarpment. There they exchanged cars for horses and donkeys, and—when the sun set before they reached the top—overnighted in a primitive and spectacular escarpment village.
“I couldn’t help wondering what would have happened in an English village in, say, the Lake District, if a train of twenty donkeys, six horses and some forty souls had arrived out of the blue at sundown and proposed to spend the night,” Geraldine wrote. “I am afraid English hospitality would not have stood the test. These folk took it quite as a matter of course … and prepared to kill and roast sheep to feed us all.”
Not only that, but “the best house in the village was placed at our disposal” and “a singsong” staged to honor the couple, with poets riffing to the beat of drums. “Several of [the verses] were about our unexpected arrival in the village. They boasted that they always had bread and coffee for all who might come.”
On March 17 they reached Jiddah, and by then they had traveled some 2,175 kilometers from al-‘Uqayr. As Saudi Arabia’s leading western port, Jiddah was home also to most resident British, American and other foreign representatives. They met nearly all of them, and George discussed political business with King Abdulaziz and Prince (later King) Faisal, the foreign minister.
With them also in Jiddah was a trio working for Standard Oil Company of California (Socal) that had followed the Rendels across Saudi Arabia in two light Ford cars: Max Thornburg, Fred Davies and Lloyd Hamilton. They proved genial, despite George pouring cold water on their hopes of making a major oil strike in the al-Hasa region where Socal had outbid British rivals in 1933 to win a royal concession to explore for oil. “It is doubtful,” he told them, “whether oil will be found in Hasa in commercial quantities.” He declared the future of Socal’s Saudi subsidiary, the California Arabian Standard Oil Company, “uncertain.” (Less than a year later drillers would make exactly the discovery George had ruled out, changing Saudi Arabia—and the world—forever.)
A high point for Geraldine came when the finance minister, Shaykh Abdullah al-Sulayman, arranged a tea party to introduce her to King Abdul-aziz. She sat next to the monarch—the first occasion on which he had received any European woman in public. Like almost all foreigners who met him, Geraldine was impressed by his charm and charisma:
Presently a stir in the vestibule outside announced the arrival of the King … [who] shook hands with us [and] seated himself on the throne. … From his photographs I had expected someone grim and stern. What I found was a combination of sweetness and strength, for which I was wholly unprepared. I understood how he might be loved as well as feared by his subjects. The large scale of his mind and outlook is at once apparent as he talks. … Like other large-minded men, he seems to bring fresh air into any discussion, to brush away trivialities… [H]e is a man of simple habits; moderate in state, puritan in dress, frugal in food.
When the king “expressed the hope that I had not found the journey too tiring,” Geraldine replied she “had found it of absorbing interest. He answered that he feared it was a poor country, ill-repaying a visit. To this I replied that I should look back on my Arabian journey with the keenest pleasure all my life.”
She went on to visit to the royal harem in the Queens’ Palace. Here, with Prince Faisal and Dr. Midhat Shaykh al-Ard, physician to the royal family, in attendance, she met two of the king’s wives. Um Mansur (mother of Mansur) she described as the king’s “favourite wife,” who “seemed to float rather than walk … with her draperies trailing about her like a figure in a dream.”
The younger Um Talal followed, wearing “a black gold-embroidered deraya. … On their feet they had black patent leather slippers of the English variety known as pumps.” By then Geraldine had made an effort to master some Arabic, but she still needed the two men to interpret. “I expressed my pleasure at meeting,” she recounted, “saying how sadly I had missed the society of my own sex whilst crossing Arabia. At this they laughed, the ice was broken and we talked freely.”
She closes her travelog with reflections on the position of women. While critiquing practices of seclusion and restriction, she also conceded:
Yet they appear happy and give one a real feeling of peace and content. What is more, a sense of dignity; a feeling that they are right with their world and suffer from no sense of inferiority. It was I who felt at times at a disadvantage and conscious of being somewhat blatant and out of place. … There are points as well as drawbacks to every system.
The Rendels left Jiddah on March 22 by sea “with great reluctance” for “our pedestrian life” in London. The poignancy of departure infuses her brief account: “When I gave [butler] Mukhtar a small present as a souvenir of our common experience I think we both had a lump in our throats.”
Like the best tourists, Geraldine felt enlarged by “three weeks of unique experience which had more than justified my most exaggerated hopes.” She signed off her narrative, “My Arabian holiday was over. … As I leaned over the taffrail and looked back across the water to the fast-fading mainland I thought of the widened horizons of time and space and mentally registered a determination—inshallah—to return.”
She never visited the kingdom again. The following year, George was appointed Minister to Bulgaria and, from there, a multitude of increasingly prestigious assignments followed. World War ii broke out in 1939, precluding almost all travel to the kingdom, and Geraldine kept busy in London as the wife of a high-ranking diplomat, deeply active in charitable work as well. She lived to age 81; George to age 90, and her account as “Saudi Arabia’s first tourist,” lives on.
Full disclosure: You might call me a coffin. I was made of wood more than 2,000 years ago. I come from Kemet, the land you know as Egypt. I exist for one purpose, timeless and sacred: to protect my precious cargo from ravages of death in all its forms.
You probably refer to my consignment as a mummy, but where I came from, we called a body blessed with the rites that prepared it for the afterlife by the title sah. Your modern word, I must point out, comes from a medieval misunderstanding of the Arabic word mumiyah, a kind of bitumen that was used at that time in preparing bodies for burial. Calling my charge “a mummy” is like calling the remains of your uncle “an ointment.” It’s just not proper. But I suppose it is too late to correct the error. Mummy it must be, though please, use that term with respect.
In my time everyone in Kemet aspired to be a so-called mummy, with the five essential attributes of a living person: Ren, or birth name; Ib, or heart/soul; Sheut, or shadow; Ba, or personality; and Ka, or life force. Today, many of you tend to think of yourselves less fully—as just a body and a soul, of which only the latter endures. For my makers, having no body made somebody “nobody” in the truest sense. Thus they placed great care in preserving a person’s physical being for perpetual use by entrusting the body to the hands of priestly embalmers whose work might make you squeamish. But they were not the ghouls of your Hollywood films. No, their ministrations were necessary to sustain a life to be lived again.
It’s important to know what they did, because I was made to safeguard their work. They started with an obsidian blade to slit the left abdominal flank of the deceased to remove and cleanse the viscera. Reciting sacred incantations, they temporarily packed the body with aromatic agents and began the essential process of desiccation using natron, a natural preservative akin to a mixture of salt and baking soda. The liquids the body requires for one stage of life turn out to be anathema to the next.
The heart held special significance because it seemed to be the wellspring of intelligence and emotion. It—not the brain—mirrored the moods of a person, beating rapidly if aroused or agitated and slowly when calm. This is why the embalmers normally left the heart in place so it might guide the deceased. Since the heart embodied the behavior of a person, it also had to be weighed in the afterlife to determine its worthiness. This ritual judgment figures prominently in the Book of the Dead, a funerary text compiled around 1550 bce. In it, the jackal-headed god of embalming, Anubis, places the heart on a scale opposite a feather of the deity Ma`at, symbolizing truth and justice. In the presence of Osiris, the god of resurrection and the underworld, any heart heavy with evil fell into the maw of Ammit the Devourer—a frightening composite of crocodile, hippopotamus, leopard and lion—whose meal rendered the deceased a lost, tormented nonentity. For the righteous, whose hearts are light, the akh, or resurrected self, found welcome in the great Hall of Osiris.
You might be surprised at the one item that failed to travel along with the akh to eternity: the brain. It was considered nonessential baggage because the embalmers could not find a way to extract it intact. It also decomposed too rapidly to save. During the embalming process, priests usually inserted a hooked probe through the ethmoid bone, in the nasal cavity, that could whisk the brain into a slurry, thus draining it out through the nostrils. They partially filled the cleansed cranium with a perfumed resin that often solidified into a dark glassy mass.
Always rushed by the hot sun, embalmers fought back not only with natron but incense and unguents, too, including palm wine, juniper oil, myrrh, cedar oil, cinnamon and beeswax. Toward the end of the 10-week ritual, the hollowed abdomen received a fresh packing of resin-soaked linen. Embalmers then wrapped the body in clean linen bandages and adorned it with panels of painted cartonnage, a pliable material that resembles your modern papier-mâché. The vibrant decorations on the body consigned to my care included a gilded pectoral with the kneeling figure of Nut, the winged goddess of the sky, and a colorful apron draped over the legs.
The skills of these embalmers, however, were not enough. My own makers were essential too. Protective magic that rallies benevolent gods against evil forces must always surround the charges in our care. That is why I am much more than a mere “coffin” or burial box: I, too, am as alive as the man inside me. That is why I take my shape with an idealized human face, framed by a painted black wig that drapes behind my ears and down over my chest. This matches the black ceremonial beard that gives me a mature and virile aspect. Painted on my thin layer of plaster are expressive dark eyes, ever wide and watchful. A broad floral collar in sweeping bands of color and intricate design ornament my body. Representing the god Horus, paintings of a head of a falcon wearing a sun disk top each side of the collar. As the devoted son of Osiris and enemy of Seth, Horus played an important role in the rituals of mummification. At either side of my painted collar appear figures of Isis, mother of Horus, and Nephthys, his aunt. These goddesses, sisters of Osiris and Seth, caress a totem of Osiris. In another vignette below the pairs, Anubis makes an offering.
Beneath my collar, as on the cartonnage, the goddess Nut spreads her protective wings across me. Her hands hold aloft two feathers of Ma`at. Under each wing stretch panels depicting the four sons of Horus, guardians of the internal organs removed from the body in my care: Imsety for the liver; Qubehsenuf for the intestines; Hapi for the lungs; and Duamutef for the stomach. Beneath them kneel more figures of Isis and Nephthys. At my feet two facing jackals lie in their shrines. Along both of my upper flanks, lined up behind images of the watchful lion-god Aker, 11 seated protectors wield knives against any approaching danger. On my base a large, painted shen ring signifies eternity. My bottom half is shallower than the lid, to which it connects securely using eight mortise-and-tenon joints with locking pegs. Long, scaly serpents slither along white bands on each of my sides. All of these are not just decorations. They are what stand between my charge and utter destruction.
No small part of my job is to preserve also his name: Ankh-Hap it was, and it appears in the upper left register of the prominent hieroglyphic prayer painted on my lid. He was born of his mother, Ma`at Djehuty, and his name means “the Apis bull lives.” Beautiful to say, is it not? It is a name redolent of piety, much as you might name someone Theodore or Abdullah. Apis was an oracular god who was incarnate in the body of a black-and-white bull tended by priests in Memphis. Throughout much of pharaonic history, Apis bulls were venerated in a long succession of chosen calves, each of whose remains were mummified at the end of its reign.
In my hieroglyphic text, I call upon many gods to sustain my charge with essential provisions including bread, beer, meat, wine, milk, incense, linen and oil. Unlike your ideas about the futility of wordly gains, the Egyptians believed that one could—indeed, must—take all of it to the next world, or have it delivered by agreeable gods.
I only wish that I could have done my job better. I admit I have not always kept Ankh-Hap safely inside me. Try as I may, I have not always marshalled effectively all the protective deities mentioned or pictured on my lid. May Osiris, Isis and Aker take pity on my scars of battle. I have lost my ceremonial beard to the greedy hand of some human thief. The tip of my nose has broken away. I have suffered from water damage, one of the two greatest dreads of the Egyptian burial industry—the other being fire—and yes, I bear evidence of smoke damage as well. I have been stabbed with modern metal tacks, stood up in classrooms, stored in strange places, and I have been stuffed with indignities like wads of a modern papyrus called newspaper.
But poor Ankh-Hap suffered far more. This is what happened.
“Going west” with the setting sun used to be an Egyptian way of describing death, but Ankh-Hap journeyed across an ocean we did not fully comprehend to a “Wild West” we could not have imagined: The us during your 19th century. We were not alone. He and I were among at least 1,000 others who endured a veritable mummy migration. Ours was a diaspora fraught with its own dangers: Many of us were opened, our charges unwrapped and even dissected for public entertainment. Others were ground into medicine, and jars of mumiya crowded the shelves of apothecaries, marketed to cure everything from coughing, cramps, nausea and diarrhea to paralysis and poisoning.
Others pulverized mummies into paints for artists, particularly to produce a once-fashionable pigment called Mummy Brown. You can see the remains of many ground-up Egyptians brushed onto canvases that hang today in the world’s finest art galleries.
What you might admire, I mourn. Every one of those paintings frames an indictment of some coffin that failed its duty. Many of us do fail, of course. That is why you find more empty coffins than mummies in modern museums. At my present home, the Houston Museum of Natural Science, for example, I am surrounded by the envy of coffins bereft of their purpose. But I have a secret they do not know: They assume I protect Ankh-Hap inside me, but my story is not that simple.
I confessed this to a tribunal called the Houston Mummy Research Program that began investigating my case some 32 years ago. Its members practice rituals they call research and conservation, which I despised at first when they took my charge away and seemed to rebury him nearby in a new kind of coffin at the University of Houston. It turned out it was only for a few days, yet I felt upstaged by this futuristic casket called a computerized tomography (ct) scanner. It tapped into energies at least as mystical as mine. At the time only a few other mummies had ever been entombed in one of these contraptions, which have the unearthly ability to peer into all that lies hidden within the bandages and bones. This omniscience disclosed that the person I carried had died in his late 30s or early 40s; he stood at 163 centimeters, with signs of moderate arthritic degeneration. As a child he had suffered from anemia. On the embalming slab, after his brain had been removed through his nostrils, his head had tilted slightly to the left as the resin hardened inside it.
Then came some truly shocking revelations as this ct coffin exposed my failures. I shuddered when the tribunal learned that much of the skeleton of the body I was protecting was missing or displaced within his own wrappings. Except for a lone piece of pelvis and some toes, the lower part of his body appeared intact. Everything else, from the lower thoracic vertebrae upward, was a mangled mess. Only a severed spine, a few separately wrapped ribs, a piece of a scapula, a left humerus and only the right ulna and radius remained. He had two fake hands fashioned from cloth, but also parts of both real hands. Within the cranium, the scan revealed the horrific breach of my security that I spoke of earlier: adobe-style nests built years earlier in his skull by mud wasps.
The scan also revealed seven wooden slats, cut from a tree in the spruce family, that were internally buttressing the body. These braces run down the arms and legs and along what is left of the spine. This discovery stunned the tribunal. Were they looking at the victim of an ancient crocodile attack? Had tomb raiders in search of amulets defiled and ripped apart this body before someone else rewrapped and reburied him? Alternatively, was this evidence of a more recent crime perpetrated by profiteers who literally spruced him up for show and sale?
To help the tribunal solve the mystery, I volunteered small samples from one of the wooden poles connecting the head to the body, from the cloth that separately wrapped some of the displaced bones, and from a small sliver of my wooden flesh. (I refused them any samples from the body itself.) The sacrificed bits of wood and cloth then participated in a ceremony called radiocarbon dating. As a result, the tribunal found that I was constructed, at least in part, from wood that had been felled sometime between 1210 and 890 bce—many centuries before the demise of my charge!
The cloth wrapped around a few detached ribs proved to be younger, about 60 ce to 580 ce. The wooden brace turned out to be recent, sawn between 1560 and 1840 ce. The tribunal determined that the original burial of Ankh-Hap, based on my design, probably took place between 300 and 30 bce, during the Ptolemaic period and using very old, recycled wood for my construction. Ankh-Hap’s body may have been vandalized and restored in Roman times, or perhaps displaced by an unknown usurper, but that is a secret I choose not yet to share. I cannot hide the fact, however, that the body of Ankh-Hap—or his replacement—fell upon harder times when it was internally rigged with wooden braces just a few centuries ago.
When separating the remains of my charge from me for the ct ritual, members of the tribunal uncovered more of my secrets. A recent dossier had lain hidden for nearly a century beneath the body. This included an American Express mailing label dated May 12, 1914, addressed to Ward’s Natural Scientific Establishment in Rochester, New York. Crumpled newspapers were also found, all dated between March 25 and May 29, 1914, most of them issues of the Rochester Herald. This evidence placed me at Ward’s on the eve of World War i. The tribunal wondered what I was doing there.
That I will tell you. Henry Augustus Ward founded Ward’s Natural Scientific Establishment in 1862 as a supplier of minerals and artifacts to schools and museums. He personally collected specimens from Egyptian tombs, including “thousands of crocodile-mummies, of all sizes,” he exported “to fill museums and other institutions,” wrote Elbert Eli Farman, an American consul general to Egypt, in his memoirs.
Ward was there in the land of the pharaohs, in fact, collecting materials to sell at a time when mummies were like money waiting to be withdrawn from the banks of the Nile. They appeared in circus sideshows, society fêtes and storefront windows. Some were bought outright, some were rented by the day, and others were cobbled together into “Franken-mummies.” A speculator could possess a passable mummy by spending $78 (about $1,872 today) for body parts at Ward’s plus twice that amount for a coffin like me.
The tribunal knew that Mark Francis, a professor of veterinary medicine at Texas A&M University, was a customer of Ward’s and that Francis had acquired me early in the 20th century. He propped me at the back of his lecture hall and let locals imagine all manner of nonsense: We were alleged to have emigrated in 1891 from the celebrated Valley of the Kings in Upper Egypt, where royals of the New Kingdom period were buried; my charge was erroneously labeled a tax collector for Ramses ii.
In 1921 the sci-fi–sounding name ANH-HR-H3CPJ was attached to my charge, whereupon freshmen were required to recite it whenever asked, “Who is the oldest man on campus?” Souvenir hunters chipped at me and plucked at the mummy until 1937, when we both were moved into a university museum. I thought we were safe inside a glass case, but then someone removed us and committed us to our most humiliating quarters: the men’s restroom in an old storage building. When we finally emerged, my charge’s jaw was already gone and his toes displaced. It was there that a hole in his face had allowed the mud wasps access to his dry, shady cranium.
In 1970 Texas A&M took pity on us and shipped our tattered remains to a properly curated home in the Houston Museum of Natural Science. Now, crowds of respectful well-wishers come to watch my silent vigil over the remains of somebody—or some bodies—still inside my wooden fortress. I suppose it really should not matter if I harbor Ankh-Hap or not, so long as I keep doing my best to protect some vestige of my beloved Kemet. Afterlife is good here. May Osiris, Isis and Aker bless my task eternal.