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1.
Karnak Temple
The attack began with a chisel blow.
In the heat-shimmer of the Egyptian day, a ghostly figure
of a man in a skullcap lifted a bronze chisel to a wall, reaching for the carved
face of the god Ptah.
The blade’s shadow fell on the god’s lips like a sacred
adze used in the ceremony of the Opening of the Mouth to animate the dead.
Yet this was no awakening.
The ghostly worker struck the chisel with an archaic wooden
mallet. The edge bit.
The mouth of the god spewed out grit and stone chips. Now
the blade attacked the nose, smashing it away, then the eye threw a spark as it
sprayed into oblivion.
Ptah, an ancient creator god, had survived for thousands
of years carved on a wall at the Temple of Karnak, his image embedded in sunken
relief of a man wearing a skullcap, his body stiffly wrapped in a mummy shroud,
his unbound hands coming out to grasp a sceptre topped with composite symbols
of life, power and stability.
The relentless edge chipped away at the rest of the face,
blow after blow, a violent yet surgical process of removal.
A moment earlier only the sun’s shadows bit deeply around the
carved image.
Now gouges pitted the god’s face.
The desecrator moved on to hieroglyphic text that ran
alongside the damaged form.
His hammer struck again, the chisel biting into
hieroglyphs that signified the god’s name, the word that originated the name of
Egypt itself: ‘Hikuptah,
The Temple for the
Ka of Ptah’ which
the Greeks translated as Aegyptus.
The letter P disintegrated, then the rounded bread symbol,
the lamp wick H and the image of the god himself with his beard and sceptre.
Blows rang out in the hot Egyptian air.
Now he stopped and listened.
More percussions arose, like a growing horde of insects
taking up the racketing calls of the night, hammers and chisels ringing and
tinkling on stone near and far, outside and inside the shrines, in every corner
of the largest temple complex on earth.
The worker turned away from the wall.
His eyes were ghostly moons strewn with clouds.
He shimmered and disappeared into the haze...
