Tuesday, August 30, 2016

Prince Khamwaset, legendary son of Rameses... priest, first egyptologist, magician...( Louvre)

This enigmatic prince is at the heart of my modern day thriller THE IBIS APOCALYPSE


Louvre, Department of Egyptian Antiquities: The New Kingdom (circa 1550 to circa 1069 BC)

Bas-relief of Prince Khaemwaset

This bas relief depicts a high priest of Ptah. The side braid and the necklace featuring a dog with raised paws are characteristic emblems of this rank. An inscription identifies the figure as Khaemwaset, fourth son of Rameses II, who restored many old monuments. He became known as a scholar and magician for this work, a reputation that lasted more than 1,000 years after his death. A treasure in his name, discovered at the Serapeum of Memphis, is exhibited in the same showcase.

A high priest of Ptah

This bas-relief is a fragment of a wall painting, not a stele. It is sculpted in sunken relief. The man has a short curly wig; a thick braid on his right side curls up at the tip. He is wearing a robe with shoulder straps, the top of which is visible just under his raised right arm. He also has a necklace; on the shoulder is a dog with two raised paws, a sign of adoration. The braid and the necklace are distinctive emblems representing the function of the high priest of Ptah. This immediately situates the monument in the region of Memphis, the capital city whose primary god was Ptah, "beautiful of face," according to Egyptian texts.

The most famous son of Ramesses II

An incomplete hieroglyphic inscription behind the priest provides this information: "... Khaemwaset, who made this so that ..." Linking the name of Khaemwaset to the rank of the high priest of Ptah immediately identifies the individual as Prince Khaemwaset, fourth son of Rameses II, by far the most famous of all the royal progeny. He was both high priest of Ptah and governor of Memphis, and would have become king in turn except for the extraordinary longevity of his father. He distinguished himself through his efforts to restore ancient monuments as well as by his remarkable scholarship, as reflected in his commemorative inscriptions. Objectively, it is impossible to separate his own personality from the program imposed by Ramesses II or his advisors, yet his actions earned him tremendous prestige, probably even during his lifetime. Over time, this reputation was burnished even further, and this prince was later considered to be both a scholar and a magician. Indeed, Khaemwaset was depicted as such in several stories dating from the Greek-Roman period - in other words, more than 1,000 years after his death.

An unknown monument

The prince's raised arm indicates that he is participating in the cult, either by consecrating offerings or by pouring a libation for a deity. Auguste Mariette, who discovered this relief sculpture, left no information concerning its provenance. We therefore cannot determine whether it came from Memphis or Saqqara, the large cemetery where the prince left so many examples of his activity. We can merely note that the wording of the inscription is similar to that of a form concerning the restorations of of a monument

http://www.louvre.fr/en/oeuvre-notices/bas-relief-prince-khaemwaset

Friday, August 26, 2016

7 Egypt Thrillers in 7 Sentences - The Anson Hunter series

All on Amazon Kindle (some in paperback)

An 11th Egypt Plague Threatens Then and NOW

A race against a pestilence - across time. Amazon Kindle
"Roy Lester Pond joins my favourite Egypt authors like Christian Jacq." - Goodreads.

"A FURIOUS PACE KEEPS THE READER ENGROSSED."

Monday, August 22, 2016

Welcome to ANCIENT EGYPT FICTION and facts...

The author's blog of Roy Lester Pond

Historical Fiction > Mystery > Thriller & Suspense

Sunday, August 21, 2016

Intrigued by this mummy poster for AHS? Why not wrap yourself in an eerie female mummy thriller right now?


American Horror Story
If you enjoy the tingle of the unknown, wrap yourself up in a good read - on Amazon, paperback or Kindle - "THE EGYPTIAN MYTHOLOGY MURDERS"...

 (excerpt)

A female mummy from ancient Egypt lay outstretched inside a hospital scanning machine.

The British Museum had brought the mummy to St. Thomas’ Hospital for a non-invasive examination of the body beneath its wrappings.

“We’ll begin by doing the head and neck in two millimetre slices. I’m just relieved that nobody will have to give this patient the bad news that she’s terminal.”

The radiologist had made the joke to bridge the jarring disconnect between ancient death, wrapped up in magical spells, and the modern day machinery of medical imaging. 

The radiation scan - at a dose lethal for the living - blasted through the linen windings. It was like a penetration of sunlight warming the bones after the ache of the desert night.

The machine hummed. A spinning cylinder curved around the mummy’s head like a night sky arching over Egypt.

The sand-dry cells of the body, spread out in an undulating landscape on the CT tray, stirred in a sudden breath.

Life! Resurgent life! It eddied, thickened, mounted in force, blowing, gusting, then blasting through the mummy like a desert sand storm.

She opened one green eye to look out through a small gap in her wrappings.

“Shall we pipe in some comforting music for the patient?” a voice said outside the chamber.

A man laughed.

Her first thought was not a word, but a symbol, the glyph of union between a man and a woman.

That first thought, like the first sunbeam of clarity penetrating into the blackness of a temple sanctuary, pierced the inchoate state of her mind.

The radiation blasts and the flashing had aroused her from her sleep of centuries, but she needed more. She must have the generating fluid of life to begin to restore herself.

A man.

Only a man’s life force could magically start the flow of energy to rebuild the ruined temple of her being.

Am I lying here in the body of Mother Nut, the goddess who held up the sky and stars?

No.

A much harder, metallic place.

She found that she had been swallowed up in the round mouth of a vault-like chamber. Not Nut’s star-lined body, but a gullet, like that of the great serpent of outer darkness and evil, Apophis.

She stirred and the bandages, though finely wrapped, crackled like dry rushes around the length of her high-waisted and long-legged form.

“Vibrations on the screen. Is there construction work going on outside? She just twitched!”

“I certainly hope not!”

Where am I? There was no sweet chanting for her here, nor the soothing shimmer of the sistra rattled by her priestesses and no burning gum of incense from Punt to celebrate her divine aroma.

Instead the sharpness of hospital antiseptic flared her nostrils.

Her supranormal awareness told her that this was not Egypt. It was a green, island place, far from Egypt, across the expanse of the rolling Great Green.

That realisation brought a pang.

But it was nothing like the pang she felt as the first powerful emotion that she had experienced since her ‘night of ointment and bandages’ thousands of years earlier speared through her. She gave a low moan.

Osiris.

Lost to me!

Isis felt her chest rise in grief, but it felt like heaving dunes of sand and not warm flesh, and there was no moisture to rise to her eyes in tears, just a trickle of dust disturbed by her moving eyelashes.

“This is unusual. The skull shows no sign of being emptied and packed with linen…”

“She’s very early period. Her mummy case is simple and severe, the earliest typological style,” the voice of a young female Egyptologist explained. “She was obviously named in honour of the goddess Isis, an extremely ancient deity…”

A beeping alarm cut across her voice and the scanner machine plunged into darkness and so did the room.

“What’s happened?”

“Power outage.”

“Our own auxiliary generator will kick in.”

It did. Immediately. The light and the whirring resumed.

“Back on stream. But it might be wise to pause and continue this later to be safe. We’ll bring her out of here temporarily and resume when the glitch is over. If we’re quick, the tea will still be hot in the hospital cafeteria.”

She felt her body moving, being dragged out of the gullet along the sliding CT tray, vibrating under her back, and she came out through the round mouth of the scanner into a wider space.

Then the hospital’s back-up power died too and the room now swarmed with darkness again. As black as the tomb.

“Curses!” a voice said.

“Is that an imprecation or an explanation,” the CT operator said.

An uneasy chuckle.

“Anybody got a pencil light? Where’s a GP when you need one?”

“Come, this way, folks. Follow my voice. I can find the cafeteria in the dark.”

She heard footsteps retreating.





‘Osiris. I will begin a new journey for you.

I, Isis, Great of Magic, will rise and search for you – for your remains, your pieces, even the atoms of your dust - and through the power of my magic I will restore you.’

Isis renewed the vow of a new cycle, a cycle that the Egyptians believed took place every 5,000 years and that had now been re-activated by a blast of twenty-first century radiation.

But first, she must revive herself and that meant seeking the life force.

She gave a dusty croak and writhed like a serpent sloughing its skin, snapping the rotting bonds that held her limbs against her body and her legs together. She sat up, as slowly as the ancient ceremony of the raising of the Djed pillar.

She rocked and swung stiff legs over the side of the tray. The knees would not bend, so she slid the rest of the way stiffly to the floor.

The feet of Isis touched earth again.

Now walk.

The thin bones in her feet cracked like breaking tubes of glass. Gingerly she took one step and then another, shuffling out of the CT suite into the big city hospital, in darkness.

Isis walked the earth again...


AMAZON KINDLE - AND NOW PAPERBACK

TRILOGY

A new Egyptian exhibition, a string of mysterious deaths...NEW Egyptian thriller...

Now on Amazon Kindle

Saturday, August 20, 2016

She was brought to life in Melbourne, Australia, 2000 years after dying in ancient Egypt




An interesting read here.
A lovely young woman, she died at around 18 to 25... a reminder of the perils of living in an age before modern anaesthetic and antibiotics...

Thursday, August 18, 2016

"An Amazing Read That Grabs Your Attention Straight Away."

The book that started it all - Amazon KINDLE and paperback"A clash of superpowers - ancient Egypt and modern America."

Thursday, August 11, 2016

Have you discovered the mystery of ancient Egypt's CROCODILE QUEEN?



About Sobekneferu, the Crocodile Queen – ancient Egypt’s

‘Mother of Dragons’



Sobekneferu was a 12th Dynasty queen who worshipped the crocodile-headed god Sobek. Her name means ‘the beauty of Sobek’ and she rose to become Egypt’s first attested female pharaoh.

In an astonishing twist of history, though she is little known today, the influence of this one shadowy queen, out of all of Egypt’s many illustrious queens, has lived on through the royal houses of Europe in the form of an esoteric society, Societas Draconis. Sobekneferu is revered as Queen of The Dragon (Sacred Crocodile) Court, whose mystical rituals are still practiced to this day.

Some historians have also identified Sobekneferu as the adoptive mother of Moses. When Hebrew mothers wanted to spare their newborn males from pharaoh’s edict and the blades of his executioners, they turned to Mother Nile in their hour of desperation, just as Egyptian mothers of unwanted babies had done before. They set their babies loose on the river in baskets of reeds daubed with pitch to find their fate.

Many babies were taken by crocodiles.

One of them may have been taken by the Crocodile Queen-to-be, Princess Sobekneferu, who drew him from the reeds and named him Moses and brought him up as her son and a prince of the crocodile court.


Sobek, The Crocodile-headed god. Queen Sobekneferu was the first royal to have a name linked with this god

Discover her secret in "The EGYPTIAN CROCODILE CURSE" on AMAZON KINDLE 

When a new blockbuster ancient Egyptian exhibition arrives, mysterious events and a string of killings soon follow.
The investigative team of Jennefer, a curator, and Jon a police antiquities detective, must track down the shocking truth in a hidden underworld beneath the city - and discover a shocking secret from ancient Egypt, linked to a modern day conspiracy that takes its impetus from the ancient past.
In the unnerving footsteps of THE EGYPTIAN MYTHOLOGY MURDERS and THE OBELISK PROPHECY.

Kindle and paperback

“Rome alone has more ancient Egyptian obelisks than are left standing in Egypt,” Jon said. THE OBELISK PROPHECY



Was it code pointed at the heart of civilization?
They stretch into the skies of Egypt and internationally – in London, New York, The Vatican - seats of global financial, political and religious power, as well as in Rome, Florence, Paris, Instanbul…

Obelisks, petrified rays of the sun, stood as symbols of sun worship. They also symbolised the missing phallus of the Egyptian god Osiris, the most potent talisman in ancient mythology according to Freemasonry and esoteric teachings.
The devil god Seth, brother, enemy and murderer, cut the body of Osiris into fourteen pieces, throwing his phallus into the Nile and scattering the rest throughout Egypt. The loving consort of Osiris, Isis, went in search of them and recovered every part except one.



On Amazon Kindle

Wednesday, August 3, 2016

'HUNTING HATHOR' - a mythic novella..."particularly beautiful."


A Mythic Novella.

Author’s note: This story first appeared as a tale within a novel in the archaeological adventure thriller ‘The Smiting Texts’, but is released here in a separate edition for lovers of mythology and ancient romance.



“This tale of an ancient hunter's fate to recapture the goddess of devastation in order to save Egypt is particularly beautiful. Wonderfully clever and original.” THE TRUTH ABOUT BOOKS

“Great reading”  5 ***** stars, AMAZON US


Hathor-Sekhmet was the goddess with two faces, one, Hathor, the Sweet One, goddess of sexual love, joy, music and intoxication, the other, Hathor-Sekhmet, the terrible lioness of annihilation, sent by Ra to destroy humankind for their rebelliousness.

In her marauding stage they called her The Confused One in the Night.

Were there times when Hathor slipped from one state to another? One phase, goddess of love, shining in her beauty, and the next a wild and dreadful lioness of destruction? What would it have been like to come across Hathor, the young woman, and not know that she hid another side?

Tuesday, August 2, 2016

22 novels with an ancient Egyptian and archaeology theme for your next read


Are you attracted by numbers - and ancient Egypt?

An interesting social media tips blog points out that headlines with numbers attract more readers. (As an author, here's hoping.)

If you are attracted by numbers - and ancient Egypt - you may be interested to know that here is the most extensive choice of Egypt and archaeology-based fiction by a single author on Amazon - 22 titles and counting.

You can see some of my fiction collection here in the sidebar - or all 22 books at Amazon Kindle.



Gold, the flesh of Egypt's gods, meant she had already become a shining spirit...

Henutmehyt Gilded Outer Coffin - Thebes Egypt, around 1250 BC

British Museum
Another striking example - gilded cartonnage mask of the high-ranking lady Satdjehuty




Monday, August 1, 2016

Lucas Burrows, pandemics expert, is trapped in an ancient Egyptian age of pestilence



Set in the age of Amenhotep lll (The Ra Virus) and Akhenaten (The Aten Scourge)
An archaeology dig... a treacherous false doorway... a race against time... today and in ancient Egypt


"A furious pace keeps the reader engrossed." - Goodreads.