Frank L. Holt

I’m from Kemet. You call it Egypt. Now I live in Texas. Crafted from wood and ritually painted nearly 2,000 years ago, my job in afterlife protection never ends. I haven’t always done it so well. 

I was carved to adorn a soldier's ring, but one day in the steamy bathhouse of the Second Legion Augusta, I came unglued, slipped my mooring, and then darkness–and plenty of rotten company–for nearly 2,000 years.

Royal trumpet of Pharaoh Tutankhamen, I was born to command armies, priests and whole populations. But my days with him were few. Layed to rest with my mouthpiece toward my 19-year-old pharaoh, I fell silent for 3,262 years. Then one of you tried to play me.

“You have marveled at me since beyond memory, at once dreading the flash of my blinding light and eager for my return. My brilliance was recorded and sung about; my rumbles of warnings, in pithy Latin on a North African stone inscribed—’FVLGVR CONDITV’--‘Lightening was buried here.’”

At first, you humans used us rocks for fighting and tool-making. Then I evolved, showing how we can actually mediate your incessant quarrels. In Akkadian cuneiform dictated by Hammurapi, my royal Babylonian collaborator, I formed of my stony flesh not weapons, but words; not tools, but rules.

We are about a thousand years old when we heard the brazen clash of the Trojan War – muffled by meters of earth above us – but when the Boss pulled us out of the ground in 1873, he made us say we'd been on the battleground. What a joker! The Boss was chasing fame, not truth, and we've been locked up ever since. So here we are to set the record straight, all 9000 of us, in your court of public opinion.