The dog’s name was clearly marked over his back: the hieroglyph for “life”—ankh—and the quail chick that represented the letteru. “Ankhu,” I murmured, smiling. “Do you have a dog?”
“It was my brother’s.”
“He didn’t share?”
“He didn’t have to,” Wyatt said, cryptic. He sat back, dropping his Sharpie and massaging his hand. “You know what Ankhu means?”
“Living one.”
“Yes. But it has the same root as the word for concubine:ankhet.”
“Is that all you think about?” I said. “Sex?”
“Looks like it’s all our boy Djehutyhotep thought about.” He pointed to the left of the image, where the image of Djehutyhotep had been hacked out or eroded, leaving only a general large blank spot with a remnant of a painted kilt. Facing him was a female figure—his wife, Hathorhotep. Then came a parade of eleven women—some who were labeled and some who weren’t.
“We know this is his wife because of the inscription above her,” Wyatt said, pointing all the way to the left. “And this is likely his mother, Sat-kheper-ka. There’s a sprinkling of daughters, a sister or two…but these three were his concubines, nestled for eternity right between his wife and children. How cozy.”
“You can’t know that for sure.”
He grabbed a book from his knapsack—Newberry’s publication of the tomb from 1895, and scrolled to a page. “There’s a block in the Cairo museum that’s been attributed to this tomb by Fraser.”
I leaned over his shoulder, listening to him translate a column of hieroglyphs. “TheAnkhet,his beloved one…who wins his praise…daily,” Wyatt read.
I stared at the signs in the book, then took the Sharpie from his hand. With the cap on, I drew in the dirt floor of the tomb.
“You’re saying this meanscourtesan,” I said, redrawing the hieroglyphs forAnkhet:the ankh, thenof water, thekhof placenta, thetof the bread loaf.
“But we know for sure these hieroglyphs aren’t always crystal clear.” I held out my hands as scales. “Alephvulture?” I offered as an example. “Ortiwbuzzard?” I bent down to the dirt again. “So let’s say that Newberry made a tiny error transcribing the sign in 1895.”
I wiped away the third sign, replacing the thirdhwith the very similarniwt,the sign for city.
“If you make one little artistic correction, the whole meaning changes,” I said. “It’s a female citizen now. A married woman who has a town council position. The opposite of a concubine, basically.”
Wyatt looked at me, nonplussed. Then he burst out laughing. “Well done, Olive. If only the status of women today could be elevated due to a grammatical error.”
In the distance we could hear the muffled loudspeaker of the midday call to prayer, vying for dominance over the Coptic church bells. He rolled to his feet, extending a hand to pull me up. “Come on. We’re going to miss all the gourmet offerings.”
The moment we stepped out of the tomb, the light and heat shrank around us like a second skin. I wrapped my scarf around my head as we picked our way down the necropolis to thegaffir’s hut. Hasib had packed a field lunch of bread, peppers, and tomatoes, and some of the other grad students already sat with Dumphries. “Thought we’d lost you in there,” he said, as I sat down cross-legged. I took a pita and began to mash a Laughing Cow cheese onto it as Dumphries passed me his coveted personal stash of Asian five-spice. My first bite was full of sand, as usual.
I watched Wyatt spread peanut butter on a pita. “Professor Dumphries,” I asked, “what’s the word for a group of lemurs?”
“Why do you—oh, hell, I don’t care,” he said. “It’s called a conspiracy.”
Wyatt looked up at me and grinned.
—
ON THE WAYback to the Dig House is the Rameses Café, a little open-air hut set like an oasis in the middle of the desert, with picnic tables beneath a thatched, patchy roof. There is a cat yowling on the elbow of the road in front of the restaurant, faded framed advertisements for Egyptian beer on the corrugated metal wall, and absolutely no customers. Wyatt suggests we stop for lunch, and then laughs when he sees my face. “It’s fine,” he insists. “I’ve eaten here many times on my way back from Minya, and I’m still standing.”
I sit across from him at one of the tables, resting my elbows on the sticky red-and-white checked plastic tablecloth. Wyatt takes off his hat and sets it beside a roll of paper towels and a basket of cutlery, then squints up at the thatch. “Once,” he says, “I was here with Dumphries, and there was a cat on the roof with diarrhea.”
“I donotwant to know how that story ends,” I say.
“Neither did Dumphries,” Wyatt replies.
“I once read that he taught his dog how to read Middle Egyptian.”
“That’s true. But only the twenty-four uniliteral signs,” Wyatt says. “And yes, she was a basenji. She always messed upkandt.”
