The Moses Legacy - Adam Palmer [48]
They walked on a bit until they arrived at the entrance.
‘This is the tomb of Ay, son of Yuya. He was the father of Nefertiti, who became one of the wives of Akhenaten. He was also the brother of Tiya, the wife of Amenhotep the Third. Tiya and Amenhotep were the parents of Akhenaten. Therefore Ay, although not of royal blood himself, was a closely related in-law to the royal family of the Eighteenth Dynasty.’
Daniel realized from the way in which both Mansoor and Gabrielle were staring at him that his face must be showing the awestruck feelings that he harboured on the inside. This was one of the great tombs that he had always wanted to see. But Mansoor wasn’t a mind reader, and he was not the sort of man to indulge Daniel’s wishes for the sake of it. Mansoor had an agenda. And everything that he had shown Daniel so far had something to do with this project.
‘Would I be jumping the gun if I were to ask where this tomb fits into the big picture?’ Daniel asked, looking from Gabrielle to Mansoor, wondering which one of them was going to speak first.
It was Mansoor. ‘They found, in this tomb, a papyrus written in Proto-Sinaitic script. It is kept in the museum archives in Cairo.’
‘Then why bring me here?’
‘I wanted you to see this tomb first, to get some sense of the importance of it all.’
‘And then you want me to translate the papyrus?’
‘Yes, although we don’t need to go to the museum. I have a copy in my office at the SCA. But we have more to see here first.’
He led them down a long staircase, through an entrance passage with unfinished walls. In the middle of the chamber floor stood Ay’s red quartzite sarcophagus. Daniel walked up to it for a closer look and then, gripped by an intense curiosity, proceeded to walk round it, admiring its engraved decorations: winged females, wrapping their wings around the corners.
‘It used to be at the antiquities museum,’ Mansoor explained, ‘but it was returned here a few years ago, after some intensive restoration work.’
‘These corners…’ Daniel trailed off.
‘Goddesses,’ Mansoor replied. ‘Protecting Ay on his journey into the afterlife. Isis, Neith, Nephtys and Selket.’
Daniel looked up and noticed a decorated doorway leading off the main chamber. Above it was a painted illustration of four figures with animal heads, wearing crowns sitting at a table. But these figures were clearly male.
‘The four sons of Horus,’ said Mansoor, again reading Daniel’s mind.
In response to an encouraging nod from Mansoor, Daniel walked into the side chamber, but found it strangely disappointing. Its walls were unadorned and it did not even contain the Canopic jars with Ay’s internal organs. Noticing that neither Gabrielle nor Mansoor had followed him, he returned to the main chamber and looked at the painted walls. Before him was a scene showing Ay in a swamp with twelve wild birds, probably ducks, rising out of it. Ay appeared to be hunting and his wife was also present in the scene. Ay’s image had been defaced, apparently delicately.
Once again, Mansoor provided the commentary to Daniel’s thoughts. ‘It is widely believed that this tomb was actually built for Tutankhamen, but that Ay appropriated it and had King Tut buried instead in the small tomb that Howard Carter found. At any rate, there are similarities between the paintings here and those in Tutankhamen’s tomb. They were probably the work of the same hand.’
Towards the top of one of the walls were two illustrations of boats. Daniel looked around at some of the other wall paintings and noticed that parts of the image – presumably Ay himself – had been erased. This was not in itself a surprise to Daniel. He knew that there had been a power struggle between Ay and his successor Horemheb and that the latter had launched a campaign of damnatio memorae against several of his predecessors. The ‘cartouches’ – or royal symbols – had been targeted particularly vigorously as had the image