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By Root 1125 0

or facility with the language or a hand at drawing the ’glyphs: Marlowe had a manner of mastery that one sees in the élite field men, at a deep sepulchral place, far beneath their control or even their consciousness. Even if you draw their attention to their power, such men do not believe it, they do not understand what you mean, they do not seem even to care. For the others, the strivers, there is—no matter how much trivia or technique they scrape together—something missing. They lack and can never acquire, no matter how hard they exert themselves, a certain ability to sniff out likelihood, a certain unconscious grace, a lack of doubt or worry, a complete and thoughtless fulfilment of the role. You see lesser men, even acclaimed, accomplished journeymen, shake their heads in admiring frustration when the true masters are at work.

During our time at Oxford, Marlowe and I (under the influence of Clement “I Doubt It” Wexler’s trademark scepticism) were still agnostic as to Atum-hadu’s existence. It was undeniable that the two Atum-haduan Fragments—Fragment A, translated and published by F. Wright Harriman as Athens on the Nile, and Fragment B, translated and published by Jean-Michel Vassal as Le Roi Amant—were discovered separately but overlapped in content, copies of the same source text. And it was tempting to agree with Harriman and Vassal that the “king” mentioned in some of these verses, the narrator-poet-protagonist “Atum-hadu,” was in fact an historical figure rather than a literary figment. But we were not yet Atum-hadu zealots, Marlowe and I. We were open to either possibility—that Atum-hadu had been real, or that he was a vengeful fiction, a creation of the dispossessed of the Second Intermediate Period, the folkloric hero of exiles or slaves or dissidents or nostalgics who dreamt that once there had been, if not a conqueror, at least a man who fought and died for Lost Glory, as Sir Thomas Malory imagined King Arthur. And he had his appeal, this Atum-hadu, an intoxicating appeal: he was self-aggrandising, sexually omnivorous, doomed, bold, violent, beloved, feared, and proud most of all of his ability to create the world in his image and control it according to his deific will. The extraordinary, amusing name (Atum-hadu!) and the potent final determinative-hieroglyph necessary to produce such a name (see frontispiece) certainly captured Marlowe’s and my imaginations, but neither of us was (as a limp critic of Desire and Deceit in Ancient Egypt later aroused himself by calling me) “a wishful thinker, a dreamer of unspeakable dreams, a distraction to scholars, and a corrupter of amateurs.”

The pale and unravelling scrap of papyrus now known as Atum-hadu Admonitions Fragment A came to light in the lily-white hands of F. Wright Harriman in 1856. A bachelor Scotsman of incomplete religious training who explored Egypt with his mother in tow, Harriman is invariably portrayed from the waist up, a delicate handling of his dwarfish stature and the remarkably proportioned posterior that won him so many unflattering nicknames in Arabic.

Harriman is—as many men are who strain to achieve immortality—embraced by posterity for something other than what he had intended. He had dedicated his career to hunting for evidence of Mary, Joseph, and Jesus’ fugitive sojourn in Egypt. And when at home in Glasgow, he wrote a little verse himself, rugged nuggets of fierce Scotch religion, tinted with a dull pewter irony:

Atheism, too, I suppose, is an act of faith

That demands of its practitioners a sort of devotion.

For they slouch through this world, grey as a wraith

And traipse off to Hell with so little commotion!

But instead Harriman was immortalised by uppity serendipity: chasing the baby Jesus, he stumbled into a lost Sadist, omnisexualist, brutal warrior, symbol of loss and immortality, King Atum-hadu.

When at the site, Harriman insisted that all of his native workers attend Christian education sessions. One afternoon, while he was irritating his dozing Mohammedans with the fish and the loaves, one of his men—having apparently