The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [47]
No great scholar and hopeless at hieroglyphs, Harriman now toiled all night trying to copy down the symbols he found in his fast-crumbling prize, transcribing what he did not understand and was destroying by his ignorance of preservation techniques. (All it would have taken was some damp cloth.)
It is a glorious image to conjure: the midnight return of King Atum-hadu to our world. Harriman bashfully admits in his memoir, Seven Lean Years, that the text’s prevalent references to certain acts made him stop frequently for cold baths and prayer as his hand was forced to copy, over and over again, my favourite of all the hieroglyphs. And when the overheated archaeo-missionary had finished, he had twenty-six verses or parts of verses, and Atum-hadu’s name in a cartouche (the oval drawn around any royal name, see frontispiece). The presence of this entirely new and strange royal name, while fascinating, was nevertheless inconclusive, as it was not clear that the text’s author and subject were one and the same. And there was still no other document that referred to this kingly name anywhere in Egyptology. But to give the idiot Harriman his due, he translated the verses (badly) and published them with an essay in which he rashly but correctly identified the author and the king as one and the same Atum-hadu, declaring Atum-hadu a real historical figure, a nervy assertion in 1858, based solely on his shred of scribbled papyrus. Unjustifiably right, but right.
Enter Jean-Michel Vassal, a French amateur off spending his family’s money in the sand and in the casbahs, who in 1898 pieced together several shards of limestone into a coherent larger tablet. This find, Fragment B, had been unearthed quite near the site of Fragment A, and it included fourteen of the same verses as well as eighteen “new” verses, but no explicit mention of Atum-hadu as an author, nor of any other author.
Finally, the now-legendary Fragment C, fully forty-eight verses, of which sixteen appeared in neither of the previous Fragments, ten appeared in A but not B, twelve in B but not A, and ten in all three. (Internal evidence implied that at least eighty had existed.) Fragment C more explicitly stated that these verses were written by “King Atum-hadu,” but still there simmered the historical puzzle: while the verses suggested a king reigning in the chaos that blurred the end of the Middle Kingdom, none of the standard chronicles contains any reference to “Atum-hadu,” although the first two characters of his five-character hieroglyphic name—the symbols forming the name of the god Atum or the first half of the name of the king Atum-hadu—do appear, beckoning, in one of the king lists, at the very end of a section, immediately before the edge of the papyrus unravels into an oblivion that may represent an inch or a foot.
The story of Fragment C’s discovery is one of great personal significance.
Early in 1915, Marlowe and I had requested and received simultaneous six-day passes to make a trip far to the south. Our true aim was to explore the relic-rich Theban west bank. Officially, though, we justified such a long leave with intended intelligence negotiations with some nomadic tribesmen. We never did manage to find them, so instead it was paradise: days of archaeology, pretending there was no War.
The morning of our third day, I cut the motorcycle’s engine and Marlowe vaulted