Saturday, October 31, 2015

ANCIENT EGYPT'S QUEEN TIYE, if anyone doubted she was a formidable lady

Display, Neues Museum, Berlin.

THE HORROR of destroyed antiquities

This Egyptian Amarnan figure expresses that horror eloquently.
Neues Museum, Berlin. 

Not as bad as destroyed lives, but a nightmare all the same.

Friday, October 30, 2015

'THE RA VIRUS' vs an epidemiologist from today, trapped in the ancient past.

Neues Museum, Berlin


"Many of the great museums of the world were proof of it. In a bid to ward off a pandemic, Amenhotep, father of Akhenaten, had feverishly produced hundreds upon hundreds of statues of the lioness goddess Sekhmet, seen as the spreader of pestilence and the vengeful eye of Ra. He was attempting to placate her and ward off a terrible blight..." 
 

WARNING! ANCIENT GLOBAL THREAT… the impossible graffito message turns up in a newly found Egyptian tomb, along with a modern biohazard symbol.

Who sent it?

Is missing archaeology team member Lucas Burrows trapped in the ancient past during an age of terror?

What mysterious plague has hit the population of Egypt in the reign of Pharaoh Amenhotep III and his young co-regent Akhenaten? Why is it seen as a judgement by the angry sun god Ra?

Lucas, a physician and World Health Organisation expert on pandemics, must find its source and the antidote in time to save the ancient past and the future.

Especially when his lover, the lustrous Italian-born Egyptologist Giulietta, is exposed to the deadly contagion.

Egypt's Great Pyramid, Muhammad Ali, Stephen Hawking and the 'Theory of Everything'.

A mind that could grapple with the universe
Just watched the movie 'The Theory of Everything' and as I listened to Stephen Hawking’s theories on the universe, spoken with the droll asperity of his speech synthesizer, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of… anger….

Anger at?

The universe, God, something.

Maybe the unified theory of everything is not to be found in cosmology. Or religion.

Maybe it’s IRONY.

Semantics. Figures of speech, rather than numbers in mathematics. Philosophy rather than physics.

What force takes hold of a man who can grapple with the universe and crushes him down to a brilliant point of singularity in a motorized wheelchair?

Who could float like a butterfly...
What makes a Muhammad Ali, who danced like a butterfly and stung like a bee, become a shaking victim of Parkinsons?

Neat and deft, Marty McFly

And what force did the same thing to a neat and deft young Michael J. Fox - Marty McFly, of 'Back to the Future'?

From creating sublime music - to deafness

How is it that a sublime composer like Beethoven went deaf?

Khufu, a pathetic little image in ivory of the Great Pyramid pharaoh

How is it that the Egyptian Pharaoh Khufu, builder of the greatest stone structure on earth, the Great Pyramid, has left behind only one image, a minute ivory statue 7.5 cms high? 

The greatest irony of all?

And for believers, how is it that a loving saviour had to die cruelly and ignominiously on a cross?

Then there's the final irony of you and me; how is it that we are specks of sentience in an infinity beyond comprehension?

And so it goes…

Thursday, October 15, 2015

Love some of the Egypt imaginings on the Internet... this one's a computer game

Reminds me of mysterious shipboard invaders in my novel, The ANUBIS INTERVENTION.
(Actually a game, The Osiris Trials)

Amazon Kindle

"Few of us believe in remote killing," the Homeland Security man said. "But we all believe in remote listening..."

The book that started it all

The man in the big blue suit, who bulked up the small meeting table, and who sat flanked by young, careful-faced men, spoke up.

“Very few of us believe in remote killing, of the kind you’ve been describing, anyway, but we all believe in remote listening. We have intelligence that something ancient, called ‘the mother of revenge’ is being levelled against our country from the land of the Nile.”
 AMAZON KINDLE

Wednesday, October 7, 2015

"Will you be my eyes in Egypt?" the blind young woman said.



So there I was at The Old Cataract, the hotel where Agatha Christie penned her novel Death on the Nile. I entered the gardened swimming pool area, which sits below a wide veranda with its famous cliff-top view over the rock-strewn Nile at Aswan.

I found the blind young woman relaxing on a poolside lounger.

“Hello, I’m Anson Hunter,” I said, approaching her.

She turned up her blonde head and her reflective dark glasses sent flashes like empty mirrors.

“Thanks for coming to meet me, Anson. I know you’ve taken groups around Egypt in the past and I am wondering… will you allow me to hire you as my personal guide for a week or so? I want you to be my eyes in Egypt.”

“Are you sure you need me?” I said.

“You’re thinking a guide dog might be a better idea, perhaps Anubis, the dog god of the necropolis?” she said. “No, it’s you I want.”

It’s hard to believe now that even though I was standing right over her at the poolside, I was probably just an elongated smudge in her vision. Her female Egyptian assistant, who had emailed me, explained that Dr Constance Somers has degenerative retinitis pigmentosa and is now ninety percent blind. I think that’s being generous.

“Me show you Egypt?” I said, squinting against the southern Egyptian sunlight. “How does that work?”

She smiled. “How do you show Egypt to a blind person?”

“I wasn’t thinking that.”

“Then what? You’re wondering how you’d nursemaid a blind woman around Egypt? Don’t worry. As you know, I have an assistant, Saneya, to look after me when I really need help. She’s up there on the veranda trying to read a book, but watching me in case I get up and dive into the shallow end of the pool or something. Mostly I manage pretty well on my own with my cane, except when I’m walking in a crowded street in a city like Cairo and somebody bumps my shoulder and I’m spun around, then I don’t know which way I’m facing anymore and that can be interesting.”

“That’s not it, either,” I said, glancing at the long white cane lying on the grass beside her lounger. “At the risk of stating the obvious, you’re a trained Egyptologist as well as being the world’s leading space archaeologist.”

“And that’s your concern?”

“Yes. What could I possibly show you?”

“You’re different. You don’t see my condition, all you see are my qualifications.”

Well, that wasn’t exactly true, I thought. I saw other things about her.

I’ve been spending a lonely time at sites lately, poking around Aswan on the trail of one of the sons of Rameses, so I couldn’t help but notice the litheness of her figure revealed by the stretchy scraps of black spandex and imagine secret areas of humidity beneath. The tremor of tightness I felt in my stomach gave way to a twinge of guilt and I felt bad for looking.
This was like stealing from an unattended store.

There’s a voyeuristic aspect to staring at someone who doesn’t know it and the experience is further tainted by a sense of guilt when you’re looking at a person with a disability, albeit one as attractive as all hell...

The most famous ancient Egyptian fragment from a tomb painting?

 Tomb of Nebamun
What a family snapshot to take into eternity. A tomb owner in the prime of life. A wife dressed to kill. A little daughter squatting on the skiff, clinging endearingly to his leg. (Don't you love her little toes peeping out?) Nature swarming with beauty.

Peeping toes
Dressed to kill

Tuesday, October 6, 2015

POSTER "The Princess Who Lost Her Scroll of the Dead"

For young readers


Books of the Dead were magical scrolls that acted as passports to the other world. They were essential to the ancient Egyptians, a guide that allowed them to pass safely through the challenges of the gates and guardians of the underworld.
What happens when a young girl discovers she has been tricked by a greedy scribe, her costly scoll swapped for a blank one so the original can be sold again?

Now young Nefera must face the terrors of the underworld alone, clutching a worthless scroll.

Then a boy tomb robber Ipy and his pet monkey join her.

Can they help her find her way to the Fields of the Blessed?

What is the secret they are keeping from her?

They must hurry and reach the Judgement Hall before dawn or be lost forever...


"One terrific story..." -- N. Ignatowicz, Editor-at-Large, Children's Books, New York.

*****5 stars "Great Egyptian imagery"- Goodreads reader


AMAZON KINDLE (as Roy Pond)

EGYPT EYES A forbidden secret under Egypt's sands

"Be my eyes in Egypt," she said. Amazon Kindle and paperback

“Be my eyes in Egypt,” she says to him. The celebrated young Egyptologist and space archaeologist Dr Constance Somers had once explored ancient Egypt from space. But now she is legally blind. She hires controversial, alternative Egyptologist Anson Hunter to be her guide on a Nile cruise. ‘Show me the hidden Egypt of your imagination,’ she says. 

But does she have a darker purpose, planning to use his unique skills to help her penetrate a secret and dangerous site that she found? 

And why are agents of the US National Reconnaissance Office, a secret Intelligence agency in charge of satellites and overhead security, suddenly taking an interest in the work of the space archaeologist? Has she made a discovery in her satellite archaeology that has global security ramifications?
 

Anson must face unexpected enemies at every turn and use his skills to survive the dangers of a lost underground sanctuary as he tries to unlock its shattering secret.
 

‘Egypt Eyes’ is groundbreaking adventure and mystery fiction with an Egyptologist’s blogs and photos.

Friday, October 2, 2015

"The donkey had a bad press in ancient Egypt," she said.




“The donkey had a bad press in ancient Egypt,” she informed him. “Much maligned, generally inoffensive, occasionally perverse and abominated since ancient times - so hated that the temple scribes could not write its name without showing a knife stuck in its shoulder - yet the little African donkey is indefatigable. It goes like the devil. Which was exactly what the ancients thought it was. A devil. The donkey was an essentially evil entity in the creeds of the Egyptians, personified by the god Seth. The donkey was the magical scapegoat par excellence."


Take a walk on the mysterious side of ancient Egypt... and feel its power today

Mystery, mythology, conspiracy, crime. Roy Lester Pond on AMAZON KINDLE