—

THE NEXT MORNING, I was the first one in the small seminar room where Ian Dumphries, the head of Egyptology at Yale, had invited all of this year’s graduate students to kick off the academic year. I’d already met him during interviews when I was applying to the doctorate program. Unlike many other Egyptologists, he didn’t focus only on one narrow facet of the discipline, such as mud brick architecture or the battle of Kadesh or Egyptian grammar. He published widely about all sorts of topics: the Book of Two Ways, Middle Kingdom archaeology, the history of Egyptian religion, and even an occasional demotic ostracon. Given what I hoped to write for my dissertation, I wanted a mentor who was open-minded. I found Dumphries utterly brilliant and equally terrifying, so I was surprised when he greeted me by name. “McDowell,” he said. “Welcome to Yale.”

The biggest reason I had come to this university was because I knew that here I would get to work at Deir el-Bersha. Back in the 1890s, the necropolis had been the domain of a British Egyptologist, Percy E. Newberry, who worked with Howard Carter (of later Tutankhamun fame). The oversight of it had changed hands many times before 1998, when Yale acquired the concession, which was supervised by Professor Dumphries.

Five more graduate students entered, tangled in a messy knot of conversation. There were only seven of us in the entire department at Yale, which had been another selling point for me. They sat down at the seminar table, chatting with an easy familiarity. I was the only new doctoral candidate this year.

“Good to see you’ve all survived another summer,” Dumphries said. “I’d like to introduce our newest sacrifice, Dawn McDowell. We’ve poached her from Chicago. Why don’t you all give her a thumbnail introduction of who you are and how you got here?”

The roots of my curiosity absorbed the schools they’d studied at, their dissertation topics. Just as the last student was wrapping up, the door burst open. Wyatt Armstrong strode in, balancing a box of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and another of Munchkins. “Sorry I’m late. It’s a long and sordid story involving a cement mixer, a crying infant, and a Komodo dragon, but instead of boring you with all that I come bearing conciliatory pastries and mediocre coffee.”

I stared, my heart pounding, calculating the odds. In a school with 7500 graduate students, how could I possibly wind up in a tiny department with the one person I’d hoped to never see again?

I wondered how Dumphries, starched and buttoned up as he was, would react, but he just shook his head and smiled slightly. “Sit down, Wyatt,” he said, in the tone an exasperated parent saves for the child who drives him crazy, but whom he secretly loves beyond reason. “You’re just in time to tell Ms. McDowell who you are and why I keep you around.”

Wyatt slid into the empty chair next to mine. If he was surprised when he saw my face, he didn’t show it. “Well, hello, Olive,” he drawled.

“It’s Dawn.”

He raised a brow. “Is it,” he murmured. “I studied Egyptology at Cambridge and came here three years ago. I’m a linguistics wonk so I TA in all the undergrad classes on hieroglyphs, hieratic, and demotic. My thesis title is ‘Ritual Speech and Interlocutory Verbal Patterns in the Coffin Texts.’ I spent six months coming up with something that sexy, so don’t go stealing it.”

“The Coffin Texts?” I repeated.

“Dawn plans to study the Book of Two Ways,” Dumphries interjected.

Wyatt pinned his gaze on me. “Guess you and I are going to be all up in each other’s business.”

“I’m not a philologist,” I qualified. “I’m just trying to fill in a gap in the research.” I turned to the other grad students, offering context. “Pierre Lacau published the text from the Book of Two Ways coffins in Cairo in 1904 and 1906, but most of the coffins have never been published as coffins.” Now that I was warming up to my favorite subject, my words came faster. “I want to write about the iconography. You can’t just look at the map of the Book of Two Ways without thinking of the coffin as a microcosm of the universe. Imagine the front side of the coffin is the eastern horizon. The back side is the western horizon. The floor is the Netherworld, with its map. The lid is Nut, the sky goddess, and going into the coffin is like going back into her womb—getting reborn from the coffin to the afterlife. The mummy fills all the space between heaven and earth.”

Dumphries nods. “So Wyatt’s thesis will be a new translation of the Book of Two Ways. And Dawn’s thesis will collect all the illustrated representations of the Book of Two Ways for the first time.”

One of the other students smirked. “You guys should publish as a matched set.”

“Funny you should mention that,” Dumphries said. “Dawn’s too humble to tell you herself, but she already published a chapter of her dissertation in the Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt.”

I blushed. It was nearly unheard of for an undergrad’s work to be accepted by a journal of Egyptology; I knew that was in part why Yale had wanted me. I was fiercely proud of it. “It was called ‘The Corpse Makes the Coffin Whole,’?” I added.

Feeling the heat of Wyatt’s gaze, I turned. “That was yours?” he said.

“You read it?”

He jerked his head, a tight nod. He glanced at Dumphries—so effusive in his praise for me—his lock on teacher’s pet suddenly less solid. Something shuttered in Wyatt Armstrong at that moment, armor sliding into place.

* * *

—

FOR THE NEXT month, Wyatt and I did an excellent job of avoiding each other unless we were forced to interact, which happened Mondays and Wednesdays at 9:15 when we both TA’d sixteen undergrads in Dumphries’s course Gods of Ancient Egypt. Even then, we sat on opposite sides of the seminar table. Then, in October, we were told that we would be accompanying Dumphries and the class on a field trip to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts to see the new exhibit on the Book of Two Ways.

I had only seen the map of the Netherworld in books. Nothing was going to spoil the excitement I felt at being so close to an image of the Book of Two Ways. Not even Wyatt.

The day of the trip, Dumphries stood in the front of a classroom in the museum, clicking through a series of excavation slides from Deir el-Bersha. “Imagine it’s 1915,” he began, “and you’re an Egyptologist who’s found a thirty-foot burial shaft under a pile of boulders in a necropolis from the Middle Kingdom. You’ve cleared the debris, and you’ve just crawled into Tomb 10A for the first time. You let your eyes adjust to the darkness and what do you see? A coffin, with the decapitated head of a mummy sitting on top of it.”

A student in front of me shook his head. “Fucking Indiana Jones shit, man.”

Beside me, Wyatt snorted.

“Tomb 10A belonged to a nomarch named Djehutynakht, and his wife, also named Djehutynakht.”

Wyatt leaned toward me. “Imagine how confusing sorting the post must have been,” he murmured.

“They lived around 2000 B.C.E., in the Middle Kingdom, and ruled one of the provinces of Upper Egypt. Sometime in the four thousand years between their death and the early twentieth century, grave robbers broke into the tomb, stole the gold and the jewels and all the valuables, and threw the headless mummy into the corner. Then they set fire to the chamber, so they didn’t leave any evidence behind. But some of the material in the tomb survived and was brought to the MFA by Harvard Egyptologists in 1921. This is the first time it’s been exhibited.”

I stared at the slide on the screen: the mummy head, wrapped in its frayed linen, brown with ancient resin. It had hand-painted eyebrows and slightly bulging eye sockets. Its mouth turned down, as if it were mildly disappointed.

An undergrad raised her hand. “Where’s the rest of him?”

“Egypt,” Dumphries replied. “But is it the rest of him? Or her? Amazing to think that we’ve had four thousand years to figure this out, and we still don’t have all the answers.” He flipped to the next slide. “The evolution of the Coffin Texts and the Book of Two Ways was more about changing tastes in funerary decoration than it was about more people having access to the blessed afterlife. As coffins became more common in the Middle Kingdom, those spells that used to be on precious papyri could now be painted on the wood of the coffin.”

He clicked again, and the slide became the familiar image of the Book of Two Ways, its snaking blue and black lines and the red lake of fire that kept them from crossing.

    PHOTOGRAPH ? 2020 MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON