The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [62]
But immortality—that is the central issue, and the basis for what I term “The Tomb Paradox,” which, I notice now, is as good a title for this book as any other. The Tomb Paradox: Atum-hadu, Ralph Trilipush, and the Solution to the Puzzle That Has Lasted Three Millennia.
On immortality and the Tomb Paradox: The ancient kings required a fair amount of luggage for a successful journey to the afterlife, and as much of that luggage appeared to the average man-on-the-Nile to be gold, jewellery, and luxury furnishings, the temporarily dead king was certain to attract unwanted visitors into his private tomb whilst he was in the awkward middle period between dying and rebirth. The honey of his trappings would draw enough ants to destroy his eternal picnic and perhaps even his corpse. (And potential tomb-robbers significantly outnumbered potential tomb residents, as not even ancient Egypt promised immortality to just any farmer or washerwoman.) Thus, the kings were torn between building, on the one hand, showy but impenetrable tombs and, on the other, completely hidden tombs.
The problem with the former: impenetrability over eternity does not exist. Even if the royal tomb architects outthought the wiliest tomb-robbers for 500 years . . . that is only 500 years, a drop in the ocean. The problem with the latter solution: even if the king swallows hard and accepts the humiliation of being buried in an unmarked tomb, far from the temples built to perform the rituals which would speed him into the underworld, even if he would surrender being seen as the sort of king who knows how to throw a funeral and stock a good-looking tomb, all in order to keep his tomb location a secret (surrendering one sort of immortality for another), he then faces a malignant question: just how secret is secret enough?
For, now, observe: your tomb architect certainly knows where your richly appointed temporary resting place is and how to enter it. He in turn will use a few hundred workers and slaves, at least, to build, decorate, and stock it. Well, we can solve that, you and I: use prisoners of war, and then, when the tomb is ready for occupancy, simply slaughter the men who made it. Of course now we have to bury them somewhere far from the tomb site: how to transport them there, dead or alive? Now who else knows, who told their cousins to expect them back from work late tonight, work in Deir el Bahari? And the men who, at your orders, slaughtered the prisoners—do they suspect why they did it? Did one squeal to a brother-in-law who needs money? Loose ends proliferate. As for the architect, the man who knows all your secrets: reward him! Shut his mouth with treasure, pleasure, and immortality of his own! Palaces and gold and a fine tomb just for him, to discourage him from emptying yours the day after you take up residence in it. You breathe easy, for a moment, and then you recall the plundered tombs of your ancestors, all of whom thought they had pulled the wool over the eyes of eternity. Their emptied pits are there for you to consider whenever you feel like taking a walk out from your capital in Thebes, to stroll the bluffs and valleys in the moonlight, to see just where their tombs were ransacked and the authorities, in a panic, dumped the remnants of their bodies and goods into hastily constructed caches, group sites where once powerful men and women