The bones of my kin were found in jars some 4,300 years old buried in a temple at Qal‘at al-Bahrain. I invite you to recall my noble role as Mucalinda, Buddha’s half-human, half-cobra Naga. Do not forget I am the rainbowed Aidophedo of the Ashanti of West Africa, the many-headed Shesha of Hinduism and the cosmic Quetzalcoatl of Meso-america, and that for centuries I gazed from the brows of the pharaohs as the sacred serpent-goddess Uraeus of Egypt. I was the wise Wadjet of the Nile Delta and the silent Meretseger, guardian of the dead at Thebes. I was the good serpent Mehen who fought off the evil Apophis every night when the sun god Ra sailed through the dangers of dark. I attended dear Isis and, so the Egyptians have said, fathered Alexander the Great. And still, I crawl accused of killing Egypt’s last great queen, Cleopatra vii.
As if it could not be worse, you cultivate this calumny early in the lives of your whelps. Toy Cleopatras come accessorized with plastic asps as do most Cleopatra Halloween costumes. Video games cast me in the vile role of venomous assassin of a voluptuous queen; misguided marketers launch ad campaigns for “Just Bitten” cosmetics featuring a stand-in Cleopatra with lips its wearers will “die for.” More dangerous are your cigarettes, sold in art deco boxes embellished with a bust of Cleopatra, who clutches me with more than a touch of defiance. At the risk of seeming a pompous asp, I call out all these hucksters for their slanders against my kind.
Your high culture, alas, is no better than your consumer culture. Canvases depicting poor Cleopatra’s demise, with me as the obvious villain, clutter your museums. Painters Andrea Solari and Peter Paul Rubens showed me long and writhing; Guido Reni and Giovanni Lanfranco painted me wormishly tiny. Claude Vignon and Augustin Hirschvogel gave me the head of a dragon, and Benedetto Gennariand Giovanni Francesco Barbieri brushed on red to show blood dripping from my fangs. But this is not the real me.
This staged demise of Cleopatra and her handmaidens is part of a larger plot to ruin me. Even Shakespeare’s stage directions stated for Antony and Cleopatra that Cleopatra “applies an asp,” as if I were some inanimate apparatus. I find these stage directions as demeaning as the dialog that calls me a “poor venomous fool.”
You see, I, the Egyptian asp, Naja haje, am the victim of overwrought imaginations. I did not kill Cleopatra. Not in Shakespeare’s way or any other.
Let’s examine the facts. Her Highness ruled Ptolemaic Egypt at a time when the Romans were just beginning to take over the eastern Mediterranean world. The mighty queen began as a humble pawn in this inexorable game of Roman imperialism, and civil war and forced her to take sides, first with Julius Caesar and then with his general Marc Antony. She even married Antony to secure the preservation of Egypt, if not as an independent nation, then at least as an equal partner. You may not realize how close she came to success. But in a single battle all was lost. Caesar’s adopted son Octavian, who would become later immortalized as Emperor Augustus, prevailed at the Battle of Actium in the Ionian Sea in 31 bce against the combined forces of Antony and Cleopatra, spelling the end of both the Hellenistic period and Ptolemaic Egypt. Upon losing, Antony committed suicide, whereas Cleopatra was captured and held as a prisoner of war by Octavian’s forces in Alexandria. It is somewhere in this part of their story I usually make my entrance.
According to the Greek geographer Strabo, who may have been in Egypt at the time, the queen killed herself secretly while in Octavian’s custody. Strabo reports that two versions of her suicide were circulated: one, that she suffered at my fangs, while the other claimed she poisoned herself. Strabo himself made no choice between these two theories. Then a few Latin poets, unhindered by facts, scribbled some lines on the subject. They all preferred the more sensational asp story, of course. Patriotic and well-paid by Octavian, these Romans maligned Cleopatra too, calling her regina meretrix, harlot queen, and dedecus Aegypti, shame of Egypt.
In the second century ce, the Greek writer Plutarch penned a detailed rendition of Cleopatra’s last days. Plutarch states that he consulted the published memoirs of Olympus, Cleopatra’s personal physician. Now this sounds promising, until you realize that this doctor was permitted to live—and write—only because he served Octavian. This is the testimony of a tainted witness who claimed that after the death of Antony, Cleopatra became as unhinged as a serpent’s jaw. As her captor, Octavian allegedly did everything in his power to keep the queen, whom Plutarch insists grew demented, from hurting herself. When she tried to starve herself, Octavian could find no other remedy than to threaten her children. This was powerful leverage: Cleopatra had a son with Julius Caesar and three younger kids with Antony.
Plutarch relates that these threats convinced Cleopatra to cooperate. A few days later, Octavian paid her a visit. He found her sickly, unkempt, and still a bit wild-eyed. Yet despite her condition, she hoped to sway Octavian with her beauty and charm. This naturally failed with a man as incorruptible as Octavian (I would wink here if I had an eyelid), so Cleopatra caved and claimed that everything was Antony’s fault. When Octavian countered her excuses, she next tried pity, prayers and promises. In the end she managed only to convince Octavian she wished to live. This made it easier to arrange her own death, having suddenly forgotten the threats against her children.
Octavian had no suspicions when Cleopatra asked whether she and her female attendants might offer a sacrifice at Antony’s tomb. Clutching the ash-urn of her beloved Antony (other sources say he was embalmed), Cleopatra supposedly confided to his cinders her trepidation at becoming a trophy in Octavian’s triumphal parade. She could not bear the humiliation of marching in chains through the streets of Rome. Here, at last, Plutarch gives us a motive for her suicide, thanks to a supposed confession heard by no one who lived to reveal it.
Next, we need means and opportunity. The crafty Cleopatra bathed, dined and then sent Octavian a suicide note while awaiting delivery of a little basket of figs for dessert. This request for room service provided the opportunity to smuggle past her derelict guards the means of her crime—me. Plutarch declares that Octavian’s sentinels checked the basket and did not notice me inside. Now look at me and pay heed to my sinuous swaying swagger and large, unblinking black eyes. We asps average a meter and a half in length. Our heads are large and our snouts broad. Not see me in a snack basket? Yet there I reportedly lay undetected, curled tightly at the bottom, waiting patiently to wipe out three adult women in a locked room? Does that make sense to anyone?
I could not have done it. Though large, we Naja haje do not store enough neurotoxin to kill three of you upright mammals in quick succession. Death could take hours, yet Cleopatra had only minutes before her suicide note brought Octavian running to the scene. Furthermore, Plutarch admits that no trace of me was ever found inside the sealed room—there were no smoking gums. The suggestion that I somehow crawled out a window and escaped along the beach toward the sea is ludicrous.
Even crazier are the specific reports of what Cleopatra said and did inside that closed room, where the only witnesses died with her. Who could have known that I was ever there, that the queen spoke to me before I bit her arm or that she had to provoke me with a golden spindle before I would lunge at her? No woman intent on suicide would entrust her death to me. I could bring nothing to the occasion but a hundred possible misadventures. And for what? She was already a deity; I could do nothing to render her more so.
No matter, my accusers could not push my writhing image out of their minds. When Octavian paraded an effigy of the queen in his triumphal parade, the crowds fixated on a copy of me clinging to her body. Onlookers assumed this to be an official reenactment of her demise, but it may simply have been an Isis snake bracelet. No wonder, after spinning this gossamer of lies Plutarch confesses, “Nobody really knows what happened.” He adds that a concealed poison may have actually done the deed.
A gossipy contemporary of his, a writer named Suetonius, introduced the bizarre anecdote of the Psylli (pronounced, appropriately, like your word “silly”). These were a North African Berber tribe of professional venom suckers who could be summoned to save snakebite victims. Though it was considered heroic work, the job training was brutal. Only men who as children had survived being tossed into a snake pit could take up this trade, so there never were many of them around. Suetonius says Octavian deployed the Psylli in a vain effort to revive Cleopatra.
A century later the Roman Cassius Dio embellished the story even more. He describes with increasing detail the queen’s efforts to seduce the ostensibly virtuous Octavian, who knew better than to look directly at his alluring captive. According to Cassius Dio, she shamelessly tried everything: provocative clothing, sweet looks, a lilting voice, some tender weeping and even old love letters from Caesar, Octavian’s adoptive father.
Spurned and fearing the ignominy of his triumphal parade, Dio’s Cleopatra plotted suicide as Octavian posted guards and a Psylli rescue squad to stop her. Now think about that. Having these venom-suckers on standby would mean that Octavian antici- pated not only me, but also my getting past his guards, who were therefore on alert for a smuggled snake. Since I alone could not have quickly killed all three women inside the chamber, several of us would have needed to slip past Rome’s equivalent of the Keystone Kops—coming and going. Yet Dio casually admits that no one could really know what happened to Cleopatra.
The medical writer Galen mentions the possibility that Cleopatra bit her own arm and then smeared the wound with smuggled venom. This way, I get blamed even in absentia for her death by self-fangulation. Galen must have liked the idea that Cleopatra never actually handled me, for he suggests that if I were there on the scene, I would have been a spitting cobra. What an imagination! The good doctor also claims to know that Cleopatra had her hair and nails done by two attendants, both of whom I spit to death before turning my wads on the queen.
One murder rap apparently deserves another and another. In the 10th century ce, the Baghdad-based historian al-Mas‘udi expanded my killing spree beyond Cleopatra and her female servants. At least he didn’t mutilate her character like the Romans. As with many scholars of the medieval Arab world, he does sing her praises, calling her a “princess versed in the sciences, given to the study of philosophy … [having] composed on medicine, charms and the particulars of other natural sciences.” But al-Mas‘udi cruelly paints me as a merciless savage, even claiming I murdered Octavian as well. That’s an especially interesting fantasy, a bit of alternative facts in which the familiar Western obsession with Octavian’s triumph and empire-building is cut short by yours truly. For you see, al-Mas‘udi alleges me to be a rare two-headed serpent from Hijaz (in western Saudi Arabia) that could spring so fast and so far that my victims never knew they had been bitten. So, after instantly dispatching the women in Cleopatra’s chamber, I hid among the ornamental plants until Octavian entered the room. My stealthy attack paralyzed his right side, giving him just enough time to dictate a Latin poem before his demise. The Romans always get the last word.
Well, not always. One of your poets, Ahmad Shawqi of Egypt, is one of the few who ever came to the queen’s defense. In 1927 he turned the tables—better late than never—charging the Romans of recording history “in a fictive style, in which the Caesars of Rome got all the glory … while the poor Egyptian queen, Cleopatra … got nothing but a heap of accusation, sins and curses.”
Here’s what I think really happened. Start from the fact: In August 30 bce Cleopatra died in the custody of Octavian, her enemy. I would not be surprised if he executed her and clumsily covered up the crime as a suicide-by-asp. Octavian controlled every source of information about Cleopatra’s fate. He shaped his official version with loyal assistance. He had no fear of contradiction or correction. All the Psylli stories about his efforts to save the psychotic queen masked his true intentions—he wanted her dead. Why? Quite simply because Ptolemaic queens were a dangerous commodity and very difficult to be rid of safely. She—the mistress of his father, the wife of his enemy and the mother of his last rival—must never tell her side of the story or be given the chance to charm a world that might be prone to forgiveness. Octavian’s alleged urge to display the captive Cleopatra in his parade was a ruse; he wanted no such thing. Just a few years earlier, Julius Caesar had held such an event in Rome. The spectacle, as anticipated, delighted the crowds—until they saw a Ptolemaic queen marching in chains among the prisoners. That was Arsinoe iv, Cleopatra’s half-sister, and the Romans reacted so vehemently against her humiliation that she had to be released to placate public sentiment. Could Octavian risk a similar outcome with Cleopatra? He had made his fortune fighting to save his world from her, and it would be devastating to his ambitions if she appeared in Rome as anything less than the evil, crazy, seductive monster of his propaganda. Letting her live was an indulgence he could not afford.
But killing Cleopatra had to be carefully arranged. Octavian had ample opportunity, means and motive to eliminate the queen of Egypt before she could arouse anyone’s sympathy. To launder his image, he had to sully hers. His plot achieved its purpose so well that even now, thousands of years later, your visions of Cleopatra—your stereotypes as you call them—voluptuous, vain, promiscuous, treacherous, manipulative, excessive and need I go on—were fostered by Octavian to advance history. His victory rested upon her villainy in the court of public opinion.
That is the same court that has been convicting me of murder over two millennia. Only a few experts, mostly new ones over the past decades, have come to my defense, declaring my innocence with almost unhuman fairness and reason. Still, not many of them are willing to point an accusing finger at Octavian as I would do if I had one. Murder is a hard charge to prove when a suspect owns or eliminates all the evidence. So be it. Believe what you want about Cleopatra’s last moments. Just leave the hiss out of history. Like you, I have my suspicions. And like you, I wasn’t there.
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.
I am, after all, a gemstone of red jasper from the Arabian Peninsula, something prized among your spiritualists as a healer and bringer of peace. I therefore made no complaint when someone carried me off to a workshop and into my mineral flesh carved a picture—quite a pretty one. I bore the intaglio image of a distinctive parrot perched on a leafy branch. Borrowing the Latin of theserviceman who later owned me, the winged creature is nowadays known as Psittacus torquatus, an alluring green squawker with a bright red neckband, a hooked beak and a long, plumed tail that curves jauntily upward. These exotic birds hailed from north India, but merchants hauled them west in fancy cages to eager buyers in the Levant and across the Mediterranean. One of them appears in a mosaic from the Pergamon acropolis in modern-day Turkey. Prized as companions, these parrots can be trained to chatter in many of your human languages. According to Pliny the Elder, patriotic Roman citizens taught them to screech “Ave Caesar,” but he added that these birds tended to fall forward onto their heavy beaks. For such creatures, Roman poets wrote elegies.
With such an image emblazoned across me, I guess it is no wonder that I can speak to you so well. My next adventure was to be trimmed around my edges, into an oval that measures about 14 millimeters wide. I was then set into a sturdy iron finger ring, where I became a personal signet. But about all who possessed me, I cannot tell. You see, a signet must pledge loyalty to its latest owner, forswearing all before. I still faithfully serve the Roman warrior who acquired me last, and none before him. He was a typical man of his times, muscled and mouthy. Against my nature, I occasionally had to punch those who angered him, leaving a little parakeet bruised into the offender’s jaw. Sometimes I was swung too slow, and it was my bearer who toppled, ironically, onto his own heavy beak.
At his bidding, I journeyed to lands far from Arabia and India. He served his master as I served mine. Roman soldiers lived most of their adult lives in the legions, taking up posts along the vast frontiers of their empire. Many of them wore rings like me, each set with a small but impressive treasure carved from jasper, cornelian, nicolo, amethyst, plasma or quartz. Every gemstone bore a specially chosen image. Some types you would naturally expect as adornments of fighting men: imperial eagles, heroes, horsemen, weaponry, and fierce deities such as Mars. Other stones betray their abiding concern for safety and prosperity with depictions of cornucopiae, money bags and deities of health and fortune. I suppose my parrot meant something personal to my ring bearer, perhaps an homage to a lost pet. Then, too, my owner may simply have liked the exotica of the East and the sense I conveyed of the wondrous world he watched over. To each his own.
Eventually, my bearer and I traveled about as far west as we could go, all the way to the frost-fringe of the known world, a region now called Wales. There he soldiered with me until the fateful day we parted company, the day my life went down the drain. I mean that literally, for I spent nearly 2,000 years clogging a drainpipe that emptied the baths of Rome’s Second Legion Augusta (ii Augusta) in the province of Britannia. Yes, I was lodged in that filthy prison by the swirling bathwater of thousands of soldiers and their dependents, the compatriots of my erstwhile ringbearer. I was hardly alone there, and I shared this unpleasant fate with many other inmates, including the soggy carcasses of frogs, rats, cows, sheep, pigs, fish, ducks, geese and other fowl things. Mostly there were table scraps dropped by bathers. I lay surrounded, too, by shattered glass, broken pots, nails, and a collection of human teeth. If you have ever felt revolted by the sight of a giant clog, imagine me, living in one, for centuries. I would have given the entire orbis terrarum to see the bright skies of Arabia again. It was all dark, damp and deeply depressing.
I know I should not blame the boys of ii Augusta for building the baths that became my prison; they meant well, all 5,000 of them and their families. The latter, of course, were something new by the time I reached Isca. Until the reign of Emperor Septimius Severus, Roman soldiers had to stay bachelors until their discharge after an enlistment of about 25 years. Once the Romans started building permanent garrisons like Isca, soldiers gradually became less mobile, making it possible to marry and more or less settle down. Legionary fortresses, like the three built in Britannia, slowly became cities as their bustling canabae (civilian suburbs) expanded around the original military camp. These areas included family housing, shops, taverns, temples, private clubs and so on.
Why enlist for such a long life in the legions? Well, besides a regular bath at the thermae, you got job training, medical care and money. I remember the smile on the face of my ringbearer, early in the third century ce when Severus’ son, Emperor Caracalla, announced a salary increase of about 50 percent. Not shabby at all, but then his smile dimmed with the news that Caracalla also debased the currency at the same time: Give a gift but take some back, I learned, was something of an imperial motto. The government was trying to stretch its silver while also keeping the legions happy. Times were tough with wars up north in Caledonia, now Scotland—where Severus died—and there were problems along the Danube frontier and big trouble brewing in Syria. Quite a few lads in the ii Augusta had to be temporarily redeployed to these hotspots. Their departures, called vexillationes, left the ranks awfully thin at Isca.
It was about this time that I slipped from my soldier’s hand and, worse, slid down the main drain beneath the baths. How sad I was to see those familiar surroundings gurgle out of sight above me! I remember fondly the palaestra, that colonnaded exercise yard and, in case of poor weather, the basilica, the vast indoor training facility; the natatio, or outdoor exercise pool, stretched alongside the baths holding 365,000 liters of water. Attached to the natatio used to be a beautiful nymphaeum, a fountain-house that cascaded a continuous supply of fresh, clean water into the pool below.
The baths themselves constituted a soaring edifice of brick and concrete faced with dressed stone. Tall glass windows towered overhead, framed by gaily painted walls beneath an amazing triple cross-vaulted ceiling accenting the thermae’s three main chambers. Mosaics decorated the waterproofed interior like an art gallery. Even though the Usk flowed nearby, bathers did not rely on river-water. Such a source could too easily be fouled, so spring-water was drawn down from the hills about eight kilometers away. That explains the coal-dust that afflicted me in the drainpipe, brought there as tiny traces from the coalfields located near the spring.
My memory, you see, is still keen, and at times it was all I had to keep my spirits up. So many times did I observe firsthand the rituals of my bearer and his countrymen bathing. After a bracing round of exercise, or simply to relax in the afternoon, they entered the baths and undressed in the heated apodyterium. There, bath attendants guarded (not always diligently, I heard) everybody’s clothes and other personal belongings. The first of three bathing rooms was the frigidarium because, obviously enough, it featured cold water.
The patron could take a dip in a cold plunge bath and perhaps oil down, scrape away dirt, dead skin and sweat along with a splash of the facility’s perfumed body oils. All of this slurry drained into the main pipe, either through subsidiary lines in the basins or through a large grate in the center of the room. Next, our bathers circulated into the tepidarium, which featured warm water and, finally, the caldarium, which was the hot room. The floors of these two chambers were raised on piers so that furnaces could deliver heat underneath them. This ingenious hypocaust created a steam system and fueled hot bathing pools. Hollow channels in the walls funneled this warmth upward, and in the bitter winters of Britannia, this felt like a miracle to the patrons. Thoroughly refreshed, the patrons wandered back through the building to the apodyterium to retrieve belongings, get dressed and leave.
Mind you, from what I observed, all of this activity at Isca sounded just as loud, and smelled just as strongly, as anything in the more famous imperial baths in Rome itself. If you haven’t had the pleasure, unroll a copy of Seneca’s epistles, and read for yourself. He describes the bellowing and grunting of the patrons, some of them wheezing while trying to lift weights, others crooning as if in love with their own voices, and arguments as hot as the caldarium when they came to discussing sports. You’re deafened by the slapping of expert hands during a massage. Oblivious blokes sing in the tubs or thrash around in the plunge baths, carelessly dousing water on everyone. Professional depilators make grown men cry as they pluck unwanted hairs from armpits and other places. Food vendors stroll the rooms, hawking sausages, cakes and other delights, some snacks, some whole repasts. Their aromas mingle with sweat and filth for a memorable experience. Imagine gym class, lunch and bathtime all rolled into one.
The by-products of this recreational activity usually got swept in my direction. Lead drainpipes linked together all the plunge-baths, tubs and pools of the entire complex, so whatever hit the floor or dropped into the basins would end up where I finally did. In the old days, that journey started in a brick-lined underground channel 60 centimeters wide and 70 centimeters high, sloped with a precise downward gradient. It ran below the building and, some 12 meters beyond the baths, made a sharp left turn in order to travel alongside, rather than beneath, the outdoor exercise pool. That abrupt bend was a mistake, for it disrupted the flow of water. Within a quarter-century the main drain became so congested that drastic measures had to be taken.
During the reign of Emperor Trajan in the second century ce, soldiers remodeled the thermae. They raised all its flooring, unroofed the drain and called on engineers and artifices plumbarii—you call them plumbers—to assess the problems. Their solution was to lay down over the debris a new base of stones and to heighten its walls—in essence building a larger drain on top of the older, clogged one. This new channel was 1.3 meters high, with gentler turns to improve the flow of water. For a while, it drained with the best of the empire’s conduits. Yet, a century later, there I got stuck, by then beyond the reach of even the finest artifex plumbarius in the land.
Like cellmates in the dark, those of us incarcerated in the clogged drainpipe shared miseries in whispers. Beneath me, in the older layer of trash, we heard muffled cries from the detritus of Isca’s beginnings. Those old-timers formed a distinctive group washed down when the aboveground bathers consumed only light snacks, mostly mutton chops, chicken legs, shellfish, eggs and pork ribs. The later legions acquired a taste for heartier fare, and we saw how they filled the upper part of the drainage channel with bones from bigger cuts of meat. In my day, bathers devoured whole meals while relaxing. I’d like to believe that the occasional rodent and frog that came down to join us had been an intruder dispatched in the baths, not something on the menu. I was never quite sure.
I, of course, was never the only gemstone in the clog—hardly. Our roll call eventually included 87 others: 32 in the older channel below and 55 up in the newer drain with me. Every time one of my fellow gemstones took the plunge and joined the clog, we could hear its desperate owner wail after it, with one eye squinting through the drain cover at the hopeless situation down below. I doubt they regretted the cost of the stone as much as its sentimental value.
That was the dilemma, you see. Patrons never liked to leave their talismans in the apodyterium, where they might be stolen. Besides, the soldiers needed their rings to protect them from evil forces that allegedly grew more potent when men were without their armors, leathers and weapons. Of course, gamblers among the lot simply had to wear their good-luck charms. These concerns convinced most Roman bathers to accept the well-known risks of losing gemstones in the thermae. Set into iron rings using bitumen or resin, the steamy, wet conditions easily loosed stones from their mounts, sending them slipping off down the drain and into the sludge that was my millennial home.
You might say that it was an artifex plumbarius of sorts who finally rescued me
in 1979. By then, the plumber had a new title—archeologist. A non-Roman, his name was David Zienkiewicz. The ii Augusta, and with it the empire it protected, were long gone when I emerged from the drain. Liberated at last from my prison, I enjoyed—with no loss of irony—what I had craved for centuries: a nice long bath. I and the other leavings of the lads and ladies have since found a refreshing, dry, well-lit home in the National Roman Legion Museum at Caerleon. Of all the engraved gemstones to gaze upon in these fine new barracks, I am surely the most impressive. After all, you might expect to see gods and goddesses, horses and chariots, soldiers and weapons. But I am the epitome of the Pax Romana that allowed a stone from Arabia to capture a charming little chatterbox from India and bring it to Wales perched on a Roman’s finger. Think about that the next time you sink into a nice warm, civilized bath.
Called a sheneb in the language of the pharaohs, I am a royal trumpet. I was invented to cut through useless noise and let it be known that something important should be heeded. In full-throated blare, I announced to his people the god-king’s arrival on state occasions; I summoned worshipers to religious observances; I even commanded armies on the battlefield. Whereas your modern trumpets play, we sheneb worked for our livings. Our mission was never to make idle toes tap, but to bring order to the world around pharaoh. We were the ultimate communication technology of our day—megaphones, microphones and mass media all in one.
Our usefulness made us the mainstays of war and religion throughout the Middle East. My ancestors spread across North Africa and then into Spain and far beyond. In many places, the sheneb-like nafir still trumpets during Ramadan, and some say your English word “fanfare” actually derives from al-nafir. Many diverse believers expect us to make the final sounds of this world on Judgment Day. This expectation reminds me of the Egyptian legend that it was Osiris, lord and judge of the underworld, who invented the very first sheneb.
Sadly, only two of my family members survive from the long age of the pharaohs. Both of us were buried together in the legendary tomb of Tutankhamun. For years, my brother and I had given voice to the boy-king’s every command. Our different pitches allowed the right people to respond appropriately to our distinct calls, much as you program your cell phones with personal ringtones. Do not doubt, however, that I commanded the greater respect, as established by my fancier uniform. I, glistening in silver and gold, am the general; my little brother is my adjutant. I stand 58.2 centimeters tall, whereas he is shorter and made of copper alloy. My shape resembles, quite deliberately, a tall lotus in bloom. In fact, the unmistakable design of Nymphae caerulea Savigny has been pressed indelibly into my bell. There, too, a pair of my pharaoh’s many names may be read, recorded in two sets of cartouches that spell out Nebkheperuretutankhamun, followed by one of his royal titles. These hieroglyphs have been oriented so as always to be read from the vantage point of the trumpeter, meaning that no matter who might sound me on his behalf, I am the voice of Tut himself.
As a sheneb, I lack the separate, cupped mouthpiece found on modern trumpets, nor do I have those three valves to vary my length and, thereby, my pitch. This means that I cannot hum a tune, not even something as simple as a bugle’s “Taps” or “Reveille.” My natural voice is limited to a single harsh note (Greek writer Plutarch later likened me to “a braying ass”), but in my day a sheneb’s bold intonation could not be ignored: “Heed Pharaoh, Lord of the two lands,” say I! My voice carried across the Nile Valley, resonated with conviction and communicated in limited pitch, but with long or staccato bursts, rather like your simple Morse code.
Producing this sound was hard on the trumpeter. The trumpeter gripped me tightly by the throat, usually with both hands, and with a firm kiss issued the requisite number of blasts to convey pharaoh’s bidding. This took skill and stamina; in fact, the Greeks later made trumpeting an Olympic sport.
Because I needed to be with Tut wherever he traveled, in peace and in war, I required a wooden insert to protect me from dents and other damage. This body double, called a core or stopper, preserved my shape during the busy nine years of my pharaoh’s reign, and for the 33 centuries since. Painted red, blue and green to appear also as a lotus, this core is removed only when I am called upon to speak for pharaoh. In some Egyptian artwork, the trumpeter can be seen cradling the stopper under his arm while blowing the horn itself. Given my long tubular construction, I am ironically a fragile thing of power—as one of your bumbling modern musicians can personally attest. You will soon learn that after what he did to me, I am lucky to be alive.
Many of you would shudder at all I have seen and signaled. Imagine pharaoh’s palace, filled with people, all answering to my every call. Picture grand processions marshaling under my orders. Contemplate the thunderous ranks of the god-king’s army as it wheeled at my whim. I sounded off at the center of it all, at a time when Egypt was the envy of the world. With me at his side, Tutankhamun restored to pre-eminence the ancestral gods of the Nile after the experiment of his predecessor Akhenaten, who had embraced monotheism. Egypt’s priests and generals found fresh hope in the reign of the boy-pharaoh whose potent voice I was. All seemed well.
Then, in a year now called 1323 BCE, I fell silent alongside my pharaoh. No one knows to this day exactly what illness or injury transformed Tut from living Horus to resurrected Osiris. The news that winter came as a terrible shock, since he had been idolized as the very image of youthful vitality in spite of his limp. Tutankhamun stood 1.7 meters tall, less than three times my own height, but he towered in the minds of his people. He smiled with unusually healthy teeth (a sheneb notices), and he enjoyed an adventurous if abbreviated life. Tut had a great fondness for chariots, and it is still rumored that a violent crash may have injured his left thigh and contributed to his death. No royal tomb was ready to receive him so young, thus attendants piled into a borrowed grave the treasures of this fallen teenager: six of his favorite chariots, eight fine shields, four swords and daggers, 50 bows and other weaponry. They also stacked boxes, beds and model boats. Clothing and cosmetics vied for space next to jewelry and jugs of wine. Even the two tiny mummies of Tut’s stillborn children were stowed inside the tomb. I, along with my brother, joined pharaoh in these cramped quarters—he in the antechamber, but I more prestigiously in the burial chamber, my mouthpiece oriented toward Tut.
Before taking my place beside the royal sarcophagus, I let skilled artists attire me for the occasion. They added to my gilded bell a design showing the triad of Egyptian deities: Amun-Ra, Ptah, and Ra-Horakhty. These particular gods embodied all the worthies of the vast Egyptian pantheon, perhaps as a final repudiation of Akhenaten’s heresy. They also represented three divisions of pharaoh’s army. Thus, the decoration that altered me from active sheneb to funerary offering had the added benefit of pleasing both the priests and the generals of Tutankhamun’s entourage. This must have been the brilliant idea of old Aye, who buried my pharaoh and soon became the next god-king of Egypt.
Do not imagine, in your modern way, that in that dark abyss I despaired. Along the Nile, the buried stay busy. Tut the eternal teenager lived on; I could hear his bird-like ba (soul/ personality) come and go as it pleased, its flight unhindered by the eight meters of rock above us. Sometimes, I sensed tremors as workmen nearby chiseled out more tombs, followed by the faint trudge of feet as funeral followed funeral in the Valley of the Kings. I now know that a tomb begun by Ramses v crossed directly over Tut’s and continued 116 meters into the rock, angling over the tomb of Horemheb (whom I knew as one of Tut’s generals) and eventually crashing into the tunnels of yet another grave! It was like a gigantic ant farm.
Yet, not every sound was welcomed. Three times impious tomb robbers disturbed the king and me. The first came early in Tut’s afterlife. Brutes broke through the outer doorways of the tomb and rifled through the pharaoh’s personal effects. Their unclean hands pawed at Tut’s jewelry, perfumes, oils, linens and even the chest that contained my copper brother in the antechamber. Thankfully, local authorities swooped in and restored order to the violated sepulcher. The heavy doors were resealed, only to be breached a short time later by more determined thieves. They prowled the entire tomb, passing right by me on their way to the so-called treasury.
Much was taken, but so were some of the robbers. I suppose these captives were tortured and then impaled according to custom. A great deal is known about the tomb robbers of ancient Thebes thanks to the survival of their case files. Papyrus records immortalize their misdeeds. I am ashamed to say that a sheneb player named Perpethewemōpe was among the worst of these thieves. He dared supplement his wages by plunder and even falsely accused a fellow trumpeter named Amenkhau, with whom he had a grudge.
In Tutankhamun’s tomb the mess was heartbreaking. The royal scribe Djehutymose inventoried the disheveled tomb and hastily repacked its contents, leaving me beside the king’s burial shrine, wrapped in reeds beneath a beautiful alabaster lamp. There I lay contented until the third— and worst—of the plunderings.
Knowing something of tomb robbery, I was not surprised by what transpired next. Late one night, three of the band—Carter, Carnarvon and Lady Evelyn—tunneled into the burial chamber looking for the body of Pharaoh. I bristled as they stepped past me, taking note of their faces in the pale but painful flicker of their candles. Light of any kind had long been banished from my world. I wanted to sound an alarm but could not myself remove the protective core inside my throat.
Muted, I watched the robbers creep away. They painstakingly concealed the breach they had made in the door as if to deceive the necropolis police. Many months would pass before two of them came back; the third had apparently died in the meantime from the infected bite of an insect, and his demise was immediately blamed on Tut, just as I would eventually be accused of killing Howard Carter—along with 60 million other of his fellow humans.
On February 16, 1923, Carter and his crew “officially” opened the burial chamber in the presence of a small audience seated comfortably in the antechamber. Few of these spectators knew anything about the secret intrusion made some weeks earlier, so the robbers feigned surprise at everything they found, including me. I was scooped from the floor and studied, as recorded in Carter’s notes. I was given an unpleasant cleansing in ammonia and water; my wooden core was treated with something called celluloid. In a letter he later wrote, Carter let slip another of his little secrets involving me: “Though I am no expert with such musical instruments, I managed to get a good blast out of it which broke the silence of the Valley.” Yet the alarm I finally sounded (in Tut’s name, you recall) brought no one—no necropolis police, no royal troops, no one at all. Where had they all gone? Incensed at such insubordination, I soon was posted to the Egyptian Museum at Cairo, 600 kilometers away from the crypt and king to whom I still belonged.
Six years later, I spoke up again, but in a strange new way. A radio pioneer named Rex Keating arranged for me to broadcast a message from the Cairo Museum that would be heard all around the world. Keating, of course, knew that I could only issue a single note, and this he deemed unworthy of the event. So, he allowed a military trumpeter stationed in Egypt to stuff a modern mouthpiece down my throat in order to play some sort of tune. During the second rehearsal, the strain was too much, and I cracked. Then and there, in the presence of a latter-day pharaoh named Farouk, I fell to pieces. The horrified king, trumpeter and museum staffers dropped to their knees and scrambled to recover my broken remains. All witnesses to this disaster were sworn to secrecy, lest the world be outraged at my mistreatment. While experts labored feverishly to restore me to life, much as Isis had done for Osiris, Keating searched for a more reliable musician. He chose a British bandsman named James Tappern, who treated me with greater respect according to my superior rank.
At the appointed hour on an April evening in 1939, Keating and Carter’s old associate Alfred Lucas introduced me to millions of rapt listeners. A BBC announcer with a sonorous voice intoned with all the gravity he could muster: “The Trumpets of Pharaoh Tutankhamun! Lord of the Crowns, King of the South and North, Son of Ra!” On cue, trumpeter Tappern, using a modern mouthpiece now held safely in place by cotton batting, teased from me notes I had never heard in my life. I was quite shrill, climbing in flourishes well above my native C, all to Keating’s great satisfaction. Tappern made me perform something called the “Post-horn Gallup,” a lively tune unknown to the sheneb of ancient Egypt. I suppose this exploit was therefore historic, if not quite historical. I am told that my performance can still be heard by anyone at any time simply by searching through a communications maze called Internet. On that day my adjutant brother played a little, too, but no one paid him much heed. I, on the other hand, apparently killed.
Many frightened listeners insisted that my voice unleashed a curse, one that murdered, at that very moment, my abductor, Howard Carter. This was nonsense, of course: He had already expired several weeks earlier. No less surprising, many people even claim that I caused the carnage you call the Second World War. My mighty voice allegedly summoned to battle a host of nations wielding weapons no pharaoh imagined. I vow I gave no such order! As I said, Tappern’s mouthpiece gave me a modern voice, not an authentic mandate from either my pharoah or ancient Egypt. Keating had apparently been warned that listeners might misunderstand me, especially given the infamous “Curse of King Tut’s Tomb” that allegedly began with the death of Lord Carnarvon. I must say such talk of murderous mummies reflects poorly on your civilization. Statistics actually show that Carter’s gang lived full lives that generally exceeded the norms of the time: Carnarvon died at 57, Carter at 65, Lucas at 78, and Lady Evelyn at 79.
I have only performed twice more since that day. In 1941 I sounded a few notes as part of an acoustic experiment conducted at the Cairo Museum. Later, in January 1975, I blared another brief solo. The trumpeter, famed musician Philip Jones, said of me: “Its sound was not exactly melodious ... but it was probably the most thrilling experience I shall have as a trumpet player.”
Probably? Can you think of anything grander than touching your lips to the sheneb of Tutankhamun? I am sure he spoke in jest—after all, I am the horn of Africa. Those present were among the last ever to hear a sound from an ancient civilization.
Now, given my advancing age and recent misadventures, I may never sound again, although, in the fashion of your civilization, I have been on tour for some time now. I have been traveling first class again, learning along the way that beyond my native Nile, many lands exist. Your towns are of course much harder to pronounce than my Tjeb-nut-jer, Hut-Tahery-Ibt, and Taya-Dja-yet. Go ahead, try to say them: Fort Lauderdale, Chicago, Dallas, London, Melbourne. I find the fan-frenzied exhibitions in these exotic places fascinating from my side of the glass. Children no older than Tut when he ruled an empire crowd around my case, their mouths blowing into their little fists as if to make me speak. Kids naturally appreciate anything meant to make a noise. They jostle and joke about mummies and curses, while their elders hum a trumpet-laden parody linked to a certain Steve Martin and his band, the “Toot Uncommons.” Apparently, Tut was once celebrated in a festival called Saturday Night Live. I watch these antics indulgently, mindful that you honor Nebkheperure Tutankhamun in your outlandish way even as I, still dressed for his funeral, cherish for eternity his memory in my traditional fashion.
An aged priest gathers bolts from the sky, And buries them deep within sacred ground. He intones the words that signifyHence, my more succinct formulation: FVLGVR CONDITV. I marked the burial of a lightning strike for all to heed out there in the hilly farmlands of North Africa, a task I per-formed until modern intruders moved me. Priests not of my religion, called “The White Fathers” because of their robes, came here as missionaries in the 19th century. They did, however, still speak my Latin language, and they understood my message. For this reason, they kept me at their headquarters in Djemaa Saharidj, where Algerian archeologist Pierre Salama eventually spotted me. Thanks to his efforts, I have been moderately famous for the past 50 years or so. Stones similar to me have been recovered from other regions of the Roman Empire, such as Britain and Gaul, but very rarely in Africa. No matter how you look at it, I am an extraordinary reminder of one speedy, spectacular moment in history.
The holiness of everything he found.
Then, he raises a gleaming knife
To sacrifice a magnificent steer
That willingly gives up its life
To consecrate what happened here.
You can’t identify the two figures carved on my face, and I seriously doubt that you can read a word of my ancient Akkadian. You probably arrived at the Louvre, like eight million others every year, more familiar with The Da Vinci Code than with the Code of Hammurapi. Well, c’est la vie, as they say around here. I can fix that—as I have fixed so much else for your struggling species. Now, try again: What should you know about me? Here’s a clue: Rock Rules!
I, Pillar of Justice, mark an evolutionary triumph in the long, long history of stone. Before my time, for hundreds of millions of years, my lithic ancestors managed little more than the shaping and shifting of continents. After several fits and starts, a single-continent Pangaea finally divided itself into the separate land masses of our planet’s present era. Along the way, my forebears learned to fashion themselves into mountains, valleys and vomiting volcanoes. Some made fossils, a magician’s trick of mineralization with no real purpose but to pass the time. Only when rocks perfected the second act—erosion—before an astonished audience—you humans—did our idle fossilizing find true meaning, first as myths about giant men and then as the means to study dinosaurs. Somewhere between Pangaea and paleontology, we cultivated a brief Stone Age during which, for about 2.5 million years, my progenitors taught your progenitors the technology of tools and weapons. Men trusted in stone to capture, kill and carve their prey; to divide and defend their lands with makeshift walls and to arbitrate every dispute with spears and slings.
Then, my kind evolved and changed everything forever. I, Pillar of Justice, Pillar of Strength, showed rock a bolder way to mediate human conflict. I formed of my stony flesh something new: words, not weapons; rules, not tools. Thus, of all the things that rock has become (tabletops, T-Rex, temples, tombs), it is I who am by far the most advanced. On other branches of my phylogenetic tree, you will find obelisks—beautiful but not brainy—striving to be me. I overshadow in mind if not mass both the pyramids and the Parthenon. Mosaics? Dainty little pictures, to be sure, but I have progressed beyond gravel, to gavel. I am, after all, the rock of sages, the world’s most famous code of law.
Near the end of Hammurapi’s reign, I made him more illustrious than ever. I, Pillar of Justice, crowned his achievements by publishing a set of laws to govern the lives of his quarrelsome subjects. I was not the first to try this, but my success speaks for itself. All prior attempts by lesser men, using such lesser materials as crumbly clay tablets, show my superiority. Thanks to me, the name of Hammurapi would henceforth and forever be linked with the rule of law—the saving grace of human society. Human, I say specifically, because if you look inside any comparable city built by bees or ants, you will never find a little stone pillar like me listing the rules that maintain insect order. No hive needs a Code of Hammurapi to prevent apiary anarchy. People, I’m afraid, are the problem.
To get everyone’s attention, I knew I had to make a strong impression. I let the king polish me into a freestanding pillar called a stele, the ultimate message board of ancient Mesopotamia. I stand 2.25 meters (over 7') tall, my rounded conical shape topped with an arresting bas-relief carved into my basaltic face. To awe my onlookers, this image projects both earthly and heavenly power. Enthroned on the right sits Shamash the sun-god, the “Incorruptible Judge” whose piercing light exposes crime. Menacing flames rise from his shoulders. Receiving the deity’s instruction, Hammurapi stands on the left. He raises his right hand to his mouth in a gesture of obeisance, just as all Babylonians did in turn when they encountered their king. This picture put people in the correct frame of mind to receive the extraordinary words cut into the remaining surfaces of my body, some 3800 lines of cuneiform covering me front and back.
As a lavish prologue, my first section pays homage to Hammurapi and his solicitude for gods and men. Some of what I say here about my partner has the ring of propaganda, I freely admit, but a certain amount of pomp was necessary at the time. This prologue enumerates at length the benefactions made by Hammurapi, “the exalted Prince of Babylon,” to the many deities worshiped in his polytheistic empire. I gush that he enriched temples and cities, increased the harvest, heaped up sacrificial offerings, smote bandits, pardoned enemies, protected slaves and, not least, established peace. I call him “the King of Righteousness” and “the Salvation-Bearing Shepherd” whose mission was “to destroy the wicked, punish evil-doers and ensure that the strong no longer harmed the weak.”
Next comes the important part: a collection of at least 282 legal rulings (di-nat sharim) that constitutes the literal bedrock of judicial history. This is our greatest gift to humankind since the Stone Age. Using mostly conditional “if–then” statements, I answer evil with punishment: “If anyone accuses another of a capital offense but fails to prove his case, then that accuser shall be put to death.” This judgment is among the first five in the code, all dealing right at the start with the serious problem of bearing false witness. After all, any legal system is only as good as the evidence it allows. That is why my fifth ruling fines and removes from the bench any judge whose incompetence leads to a wrongful decision. Following these safeguards for judicial probity, my text then turns to matters of theft, land tenure, leases, loans, wages, family disputes, inheritance, personal injury and professional misconduct. In other words, I tackle the myriad ills arising from the day-to-day drama of people interacting with people.
Some of what I decree you moderns will find quite familiar, such as my prohibition of incest, adultery, kidnapping and slander. What you might consider exotic, however, are my many rules governing aspects of life no longer commonplace in your world. For example, I have an inordinate amount to say about oxen. What should be done if a person rents an ox and then somehow harms the animal? I list specific judgments for each kind of injury to the beast’s neck, horns, eyes, tail or muzzle, as well as for those extreme cases where, say, the ox is eaten by a stray lion. Conversely, I cover disputes arising when the ox itself does the hurting. (Hint: The whole matter hinges on whether the owner knew his ox was dangerous and took appropriate measures to protect the public.) Dowries, debt slavery and sorcery require my attention, plus the occasional missing plow and defective irrigation ditch. On the subject of grain, I am a virtual encyclopedia.
My laws brim with decisions involving concubines, slaves and the rights of multiple wives within aggregate Mesopotamian families. I refuse to let a husband abandon an ill wife when he marries another, or let a husband sell a slave given to him by a wife once that servant has borne him children. I protect both husbands and wives from debts incurred by their mates before marriage. I put few obstacles in the way of divorce, except for grave concerns about the fair division of property and the welfare of any small children. Meanwhile, what must be done if a woman remarries while her husband is a prisoner of war? How many times must a father forgive a serious fault in his son? Can a prostitute bequeath her inheritance as she pleases? To be honest, I never imagined the amount of trouble humans could make for themselves—and thus for me.
My penalties for misconduct might sometimes astonish you, especially the recurring sentence of death. I execute thieves, liars, harborers of runaway slaves, tavern-keepers who do not arrest conspirators meeting in their establishments and neglectful wives. I must point out that Mesopotamian civilization organized itself into three distinct classes, and the punishments meted out differed accordingly. The awilum (upper class) fared better than the mushkenum (subordinate free class), who in turn enjoyed many obvious social and legal advantages over the wardum (slaves). Between Babylonians of equal rank, I followed the principle of retaliatory justice: An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life. But, if an awilum should blind the eye of a mushkenum, then the noble keeps his (more valuable) eye and instead pays a fine to his victim. Injuries to a wardum draw a fine payable to the slave-owner. I allow physicians to charge more for performing the same operation on an awilum than on patients of a lower class, but the consequences for malpractice are commensurately greater: Botch the medical procedure on an awilum and the doctor loses the incompetent hand that held the scalpel. In some rulings, my devotion to reciprocity may appear extreme. For example, when the builder’s shoddy work causes the death of a homeowner’s son, then I decree the death not of the builder but of the builder’s own son in return. Some offenses warrant impaling (for a cheating wife who murders her husband), drowning (for a father caught having sex with his son’s wife), burning at the stake (for incest with your mother), removal of the tongue (for a prostitute’s son impugning his foster parents) or court-ordered mastectomy (for a wet-nurse secretly swapping one child for another). My discipline may seem hard as stone, but I felt compelled to set stern examples at this critical early stage of your social development.