The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [185]
The great king decided to make use of the Master for all eternity. The Master would make his apologies to Atum-hadu for one million years.
Atum-hadu had seen the Overseers of the Secrets at work. Though he knew their magic, Atum-hadu did not have the required seventy days. He was pursued by the Hyksos, who knew that he had escaped them. He was pursued by enemies of all sorts. He did not have time. He proceeded with haste, but according to the laws and practices.
He suffered greatly.
When his task was complete, he drew upon the linen the face of a man repentant, servile, and restrained.
Analysis: The horrific (albeit still amateurish) paintings attending this remarkable text are astonishing, showing as they do the king sickened by his task. It is worth clarifying just what the king meant by his enigmatic words.
Having killed the Master, defending himself from the fierce attack described on Wall Panel K, the king apparently came to several conclusions in quick order. At that instant he must have decided on all the actions he carried out in the next dozen days. Rather than destroy all trace of the Master and his body (“preventing him from winning immortality”), the king realised that his treacherous Master of Largesse would provide companionship and financing for the king’s journey, his mere mute presence sufficient to represent vast wealth.
The Overseers of the Secrets were those priests trained in mummifying bodies, which means that Atum-hadu knew enough (or thought he did) about mummification to perform the ritual himself. The process, as we understand it, is not pleasant, and one must imagine with sympathy a man—even a man hardened by war and suffering—performing this procedure on a member of his own family—even a hated member.
The nude torso is slit along the left side and emptied of its contents. Four organs are preserved in a chemical whose exact nature is still unknown to us. They are then wrapped in linen and placed in the canopic jars, decorated with intricate sculptures of the heads of the four sons of Horus: intestines with the falcon-headed Qebehsenuf, stomach with the jackal-headed Duamutef, lungs with the baboon-headed Hapy, and liver with the human-headed Imsety. That said, it is interesting to note that there are no canopic jars in the Chamber of the Master of Largesse, an aberration that will be explained later in this preliminary summary of our findings.
The brains—irrelevant in Egyptian anatomy and religion—were generally removed from the skull by a hook or a straw and discarded. In the case of the Master, the wall illustrations would imply that his skull had been crushed in his death, and cephalectomy was therefore both speedier and less tidy.
The body was washed and filled with some sort of chemical preservative. And the mystery of this substance, which puzzles us to this day, is not explicated by Atum-hadu’s tomb. At the end of seventy days, the body was deemed ready for wrapping. Now, observe: if the mummy of the Master of Largesse is not in precisely the same condition as others found under the sands, let us be clear: Atum-hadu did not have enough time to do the job properly, and had never performed this complex and mysterious ritual before, except on his cat. Further, he was the only man on the task, ill, wounded, despairing, and hunted. He had limited tools and perhaps only an amateur’s best guess at the chemicals needed for the terrible undertaking. And so, if the Master’s mummy looks slightly unorthodox, or has decayed along a different path, well, that is only further evidence of the unique nature of this find.
The hole in the body was sewn up. It is strange, considering what the tragic king had already gone through for this process, but it would appear from the wall paintings that this is the task which most profoundly affected Atum-hadu’s delicate stomach. One group of the narrative illustrations