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| The British Museum |
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| Prince Khaemwaset, seeker of forbidden knowledge? |
‘A MUSEUM is a dangerous place.’
Sir Flinders Petrie, pioneer British
Egyptologist, first said those words, but today Anson was thinking them.
A man had followed him to the British
Museum.
Who was he?
Petrie had been thinking about another kind
of danger when he’d made his famous remark about the dangers of museums. The
founder of modern scientific Egyptology had been alluding to the manner in
which the early Cairo museum had dealt with a royal mummy fragment found at
Abydos, a single, bandaged arm, covered in jewels, the only remains of First
Dynasty king Zer.
The curators took the jewels and tossed the
arm way, the earliest royal mummy remains ever to come to light. It was a mummy
horror story to eclipse any devised by the most febrile imagination, Anson had
always thought, but right at that moment his mind was on the other worry.
Anson went up the steps and between the
Ionic-style columns into the building. He passed through a crowded reception
hall to arrive in the Great Court beyond.
Above the court, a tessellated glass and
steel roof spread out overhead like a vast, glowing net, catching clouds, blue
sky and a spirit of illumination, while the round, central building swelled
like an ivory tower of learning. He crossed the clean bright space before
heading left to the door of the Egyptian section.
Inside the dimmer light of the hall, a group
of school children crowded around the Rosetta Stone in its glass display case.
Two little black girls peered inside, their heads close together as they
examined the stone, their hair braided in cornrows. An African look, he
thought. It linked his thoughts to Africa’s greatest river, the Nile, and to
Egypt’s irrigated fields that bounded it and made Egypt the breadbasket of the
ancient world.
He made for the sculpture gallery.
Egypt, both divinely monumental and
naturalistic, surrounded him. Two statues of Pharaoh Amenhotep III, powerfully
formed in dark granodiorite, flanked the entranceway to a hall, granting
admittance, and inside, as stone slid by, other familiar sights came into view,
a red granite lion with charmingly crossed forepaws, and further on, the statue
of the Chief Steward Senenmut tenderly holding the daughter of Queen Hatshepsut,
the little princess Neferure, on his lap - the child wrapped within his cloak
and her face peeping out - then a soaring, crowned head of Pharaoh Amenhotep in
the background. And people everywhere, creating a sound of buzzing like voices
in a cathedral at prayer time.
But he barely saw or heard them. He paused
at a figure standing on a pedestal near a wall on the right hand side, almost
overshadowed by a colossal granite torso of Rameses the Great in the centre of
the hall.
Khaemwaset, the priest-prince and magician.
Anson confronted the figure. The sculpture
depicted the prince in a pleated kilt, stepping forward while holding a pair of
emblematic staves at his sides. The conglomerate stone must have presented a
technical challenge to the sculptor as it was shot through with multi-coloured
pebbles. It made Khaemwaset look as if galaxies were exploding out of his
chest.
A museum label said:
Red breccia standing figure... one of the
favourite sons of Rameses II, the legendary Khaemwese…
The label used a variant spelling of the
name Khaemwaset.
He looked up at the face. Intelligent,
sensitive features, faintly saddened. An air as haunted as the face of the
sphinx.
Anson silently interrogated the statue.
Open up, Khaemwaset. As one renegade to
another, what do you really know? As a seeker of forbidden power, did you open
the sanctuary of Hathor, provoking fiery destruction, plagues and pestilence on
your father Rameses and his kingdom? Legend tells that you found the magical
Book of Thoth, so why not the disc of Ra, too?
Egyptologists agreed on one thing. Prince
Khaemwaset was a kindred spirit. ‘The world’s first Egyptologist’ they called
him, as a result of the prince’s peculiar antiquarian interests. Khaemwaset
lived a few thousand years before his time and had a fondness for digging up
and restoring ancient tombs and monuments in the Memphis and Saqqara areas,
some already more than a thousand years old at the time of his attentions. He
did this he said, because of his ‘love of the ancient days and the noble ones
who dwelt in antiquity and the perfection of everything they made’.
But another reason was his love and pursuit
of secret, forbidden power. This led to his being venerated by future
generations as a great magician and remembered in a cycle of stories.
Khaemwaset, seeker of illumination, put a good official complexion on his
activities by dedicating the exploration and conservation work to the honour of
his vainglorious father, Rameses, yet he did not shy away from leaving his own
name recorded on the monuments.
“I did not expect to see an alternative
theorist looking up to the figure of an Egyptologist with such respect,” a
voice said, interrupting his contemplation.
A man joined him and shared his inspection
of Khaemwaset.
He was a Middle Eastern man with tight,
curly hair and a widow’s peak and he had a whiff of tobacco smoke on his
leather jacket.
He was the man who had shadowed him to the
museum.
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