The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [183]
We will understand why there were no seals or inscriptions on the doors.
We will understand the bodies and their placement, the bloody footprints.
We will understand the amateurish illustrations and the expert text.
We will understand how a man alone achieved his immortality, filled and hid his tomb from everyone.
To reiterate, then, we have Figure 1—The Tomb of Atum-hadu, detail excluded:
The thinness and lightness of camouflaged Door A are now explained. Even a man of Atum-hadu’s prowess cannot be expected to have lifted a heavy stone door into place, sealed it on his own. So let us speculate that he built this subtle but sufficient screen himself, stone-disguised wood, plastered it shut behind him when he had everything he needed inside. With the door closed behind him, he set to work in something that must have resembled peace.
FIGURE 2—THE CHAMBER OF ATUM-HADU’S WOMEN
Rebirth into the underworld required reconsummation, which required stimulation of the mummy. This chamber contained all that was symbolically necessary for the act. The beaded slippers of some beloved concubine, the scattered, multi-coloured gossamer veils of favourite dancing girls, and the extraordinary paintings covering the walls: all conceivable shape and variety of women, in activities and positions the Admonitions have so eloquently described as Atum-haduan preferences. At the instant of Atum-hadu’s death, these garments would be suddenly filled by the lovely associates the king had kept all his life. The paintings on the walls would swell to three plump dimensions, then leap to the floor, giggles and sighs echoing through the supernaturally glowing chambers of Atum-hadu’s voyaging apartments.
Who painted these figures? Why, observe: the same hand that had decorated over previous days the History Chamber. Sealed in his own tomb while still quite alive, he created with his own Atumic hand his own escorts to the underworld, relied on his own untrained talent to decorate the unforgiving walls, paint staining his fingers and face and robes. He would frolic in this first chamber, just as soon as he had completed the business of shedding his life and, with the ladies’ touch to help him re-create himself, be reborn as his own child.
And who, more than any other, dominates these walls? Examine the small, excellently preserved figurine situated between and behind the crumbling slippers. This beautiful woman draped only in a robe, her eyes sparkling even in sculpture, her smile-sneer an invitation and a revolt—she is reproduced all over this chamber made holy by her presence, her delicate hand, each long, slender finger articulated into the graceful arch of riverside narcissi, in her drowsy languor, lounging in all manner of posture: full portraits done from the sobbing king’s memory, profiles, hurried sketches, and details worried over for hours as he strained to capture on a wall all that he loved: her bursts of energy and wit, her spells of sorrow and fatigue, the angry flash in her eye when her whim was denied her, the satisfaction she took, at the beginning, merely from being with her king and knowing that he loved her. Wherever she had escaped to spend her remaining mortal years, she would spend eternity at his side.
FIGURE 3—THE CHAMBER OF THE ANSWERER
The bloody footprints and the beautiful, plain rectangular pedestal are the centrepieces of the Chamber of the Answerer. Here the shawabti, or “answerer,” held his post. The small figurine, done in Atum-hadu’s likeness, with his unmistakable mischievous grin, stands directly in the centre of the long, heavy stone pedestal, and answered for the king on his voyage to the underworld, fought battles on his behalf (with the assistance of the blood-covered soldiers standing symbolically in ranks, represented by bloody