The Linguist and the Emperor (9 page)

It is an ancient volume compiled by the ibis-headed god of writing himself: a book, we are told, which had once belonged to a kindred spirit of Khaemwaset’s, to a Prince Neferkaptah, to whom it had brought grief many generations earlier. Right away this plot thickens: The ancient story of Prince Khaemwaset’s search for knowledge throws us back into an even more remote time in a Kafkaesque search for a truth “at the bottom of a bottomless well.”

Where is Khaemwaset to find this book? Who was this Neferkaptah, also a prince and the book’s long-dead owner? In a fragment from one papyrus, a voice suddenly speaks to us from this remote past, the sister of Neferkaptah and the daughter of the pharaoh. She is frightened at the prospect of her brother being given another woman to wed and of another man being given to her as husband. It is incest—told so innocently that one is touched by the simplicity of this faraway voice describing the brother whom she loved:

In the time of my father . . . the Pharaoh grew old and had no children but my elder brother, Neferkaptah and I . . . Pharaoh wanted children from his children and made a feast, inviting the sons and daughters of the generals in order that Pharaoh might choose a husband for me and a wife for his son Neferkaptah . . .

A steward, an aged man told this to us and we became sad and very afraid, for we loved one another exceedingly . . . and I went to the steward and said: “Ask Pharaoh not to part us, for we love each other very much . . .” And Pharaoh became angry . . .

In another fragment, she speaks of herself as her brother’s wife—Pharaoh must have relented. She is now also the mother of a child,
Beloved Hear
t
:

My brother-husband Neferkaptah had no occupation but to study in the schools of the House of Life [among the scribes] and to walk in the cemetery of Memphis, reading the writing on the tombs and writing on other monuments and his zeal was great. But one day while he was walking behind a procession in honor of the god Ptah, he was reading the writing on the shrines and an old priest saw him and laughed.

“Why are you reading writings which have no importance? Come, I will show you what Thoth wrote with his own hand.”

And he brought him to a tomb where the book shed light, light as strong as the sun . . .

This is the magical book which the historical Khaemwaset seeks. If myth mingles with fact in its description, this is to emphasize the danger. For Solomon’s warning, “He who increases wisdom, increases sorrow” was a proverb in Egypt a thousand years before Solomon. And Egyptians did not need a Hebrew God to teach them that to taste of the fruit of the tree of knowledge was to taste of death.

Finally, in a scroll reused many times—perhaps one in which business accounts had been recorded and then washed away, so that here and there the old writing could still be seen, one layer on top of another with the new hieroglyphs barely readable in places—thus Khaemwaset, for all his immersion in the priestly archives, all his researches and restorations, gives himself up to lust.

It happened one day that Setne [the priestly title by which Khaemwaset refers to himself] was strolling in the forecourt of the temple of Ptah. Then he saw a woman who was very beautiful, there being no other woman like her in appearance. The moment Setne saw her, he did not know where he was. He called his man servant, saying: “Run to the place where this woman is, and find out who she is.”

The man servant ran to the place where the woman was. He called to the maid servant following her and asked: “What woman is this?”

She told him: “It is Tabeh, the daughter of the prophet of Bastet, mistress of Ankhtawi. She has come here to worship Ptah, the great god.”

When the man servant returned and related her words, Setne ordered: “Go, say, ‘It is Setne Khaemwaset, the son of Pharaoh Usermare, who has sent me to say: “I will give you gold—spend an hour with me. Or do you have a complaint of wrongdoing? I will have it settled for you.” ’ ”

The servant returned to the place where Tabeh was. He called her maid and told her. She cried out as if what he said was an insult. Tabeh said to the man servant: “Stop talking to this foolish girl. Come and speak with me.”

The servant told her Setne’s words and she answered: “Go, tell Setne, I am of priestly rank. I am not a low person. If you desire to do what you wish with me, you must come to Bubastis, to my house. There you shall do what you wish with me, without anyone on earth finding me.”

When Setne heard her words, he had a boat brought and hastened to Bubastis. When he came to the west of the city he found a lofty house with a wall around it, a garden on its north and a seat at its door. Setne went inside the wall and they announced him to Tabeh.

She came down, took Setne’s hand and said to him: “By the welfare of the house of the prophet of Bastet, mistress of Ankhtawi, which you have reached, it will please me greatly if you come up.”

Setne walked up the stairs of the house with Tabeh. He found the upper story adorned with lapis lazuli and turquoise. A gold cup was filled with wine and put into Setne’s hand. Setne said: “Let me do what I have come to do.”

She answered: “I am of priestly rank. I am not a low person. If you desire to do what you wish with me, you must write for me a deed for everything you own.”

He said: “Send for the scribe.”

He was brought at once. He made a deed of maintenance and of compensation in money for everything, all goods belonging to him.

Setne said: “Tabeh, let me do what I have come here for!”

She said to him: “If you desire to do what you wish with me, you must make your children sign the deed. Do not leave them to contend with my children over your property.”

He had his children brought and made them sign the deed.

Tabeh rose and put on a garment of royal linen. Setne saw all her limbs through it and his desire became even greater than it had been before. He said: “Let me do what I have come to do.”

Tabeh answered: “If you desire to do what you wish with me, you must have your children killed. Do not leave them to contend with my children over your property.”

Setne said: “Let the abomination be done.”

She had his children killed before him. She had them thrown down from the window to the dogs. They ate their flesh, and he heard them as he drank with Tabeh.

Setne said: “Let us do what we have come here for! All the things that you have said, I have done.”

She said: “Come now.”

He lay down on a couch of ivory and ebony, he stretched out his arms, and Tabeh lay down beside him. As he touched her, she opened her mouth wide in a loud cry. Setne awakened in a state of great heat, no clothes on him, his phallus hard.

This is the dream of desire and revulsion Khaemwaset sought in the old, old book—the book written by the god of writing and hidden in the ancient tomb of Neferkaptah: Khaemwaset steals it at his peril.

Opposed to his father Ramesses’ massive images of power and order, to the huge temples at Abu Simbel and Karnak, to the poem of Pentaur, which praises Ramesses’ military might, Khaemwaset’s dream is like the howling of the hyenas in the desert at night, or the desert sands which Khaemwaset contemplates as he prowls the ancient ruins of his ancestor’s tombs. It is like the god of the desert himself, Seth, engaged in deadly combat with his nephew Horus.

The prince’s dream represents chaos opposed to the great social order with its pyramids, both human and stone, from the top of which the dead pharaoh ascends to the heavens. It represents the complex human imagination, sensing something ancient and dangerous and
sacred
and forbidden at the beginning of time. Murderous or cannibalistic urges transformed, through ritual, into a tame echo of itself.

And thus Khaemwaset with his searching for the past, though he himself is near the beginnings of (dynastic, recorded, historical) time, is like a gravedigger using natal forceps to bury us, at birth, in modern angst and nihilistic woe.

IN FOURIER’S STUDY,
Jean François wanders among the ancient objects covered with writing. He sees a fragment from a young man’s coffin, late, from the Roman period. His portrait has been painted, in encaustic: the pigments burned into the wood, on a gilded mask meant to cover his mummy. The youth’s black hair is a thick tangle of rough curls falling over his forehead, the barbarian style fashionable in the first century
AD.
His eyes are large and staring. Sparse beginnings of a beard cover his downy cheeks.

Next to him is another Roman-period coffin, a complete one of lime wood with a young girl portrayed on the mask.

Her cheekbones are high, her skin a warm pinkish apricot. Her white mantle and her jewelry—three gold snake bracelets—have been carelessly painted. From the left, light falls on her young face with its melancholy expression. Thick, red lips, a half frown. Large dark eyes look sadly to a point beyond the viewer. A garland of rosebuds encircle dark hair pulled back with a severity more in keeping with an older face.

Around the sides of the coffin and on the sides of the headrest under the girl’s neck, spells have been painted in brilliant colors, hieroglyphs invoking the gods of Egypt. Soon, in two centuries, they too will undergo the oblivion of death, their altars covered with sand or usurped by monks living in the desert.

Running his hand over the writing, Jean François asks the prefect if anyone knows what it means. Fourier shakes his head. A stone has been found in the course of reinforcing an old fort at el-Rashid (Rosetta)—an ancient decree written in both hieroglyphs and Greek. But the meaning of the hieroglyphs is still as obscure as the spells painted on the young girl’s coffin.

“Then I will be the one!” Jean François declares with a fervor Fourier will never forget. “I will decipher the hieroglyphs . . .”

PART
II

Chapter Six

To the Strongest!

1799.

FROM A MILITARY
point of view, the first stages of the French campaign in Egypt—the taking of Alexandria and the other ports along the coast, Damietta and Rosetta—are not all that significant. The main battle, the so-called Battle of the Pyramids, will take place before Cairo. It is this encounter that will be decisive (or as decisive as anything may be said to be in Egypt!).

From another point of view, perhaps the point of view of eternity, the most important event occurs during the dog days of August in 1799, at Rosetta, a sleepy port where a branch of the Nile empties into the Mediterranean.

The town surrenders to the French without a battle. They have heard of the fall of Alexandria (some thirty miles to the west).

The French commander, General Menou, though suffering from wounds sustained at Alexandria, is active in surveying the military possibilities, choosing suitable bivouacs and requisitioning provisions and deciding, in the course of an inspection, to turn the ruined fort at the edge of town into a French stronghold. He gives orders for soldiers to begin work on its walls right away.

Then he changes his mind and puts it off, so for a while longer the abandoned fort remains undisturbed in the blazing sun by the sea, its mud-brick walls indistinguishable from any others.

And when the French soldiers finally do arrive with their pickaxes and shovels, they report that nomads have taken shelter here. Naked children and goats scamper in the rubble. Robust desert women sing wordless songs, old men snooze in the shade while young ones walk by the sea, planning their endless blood feuds.

Some parts of the wall are strong, but others must be cleared away. The soldiers’ axes rise and fall, hour after hour, day after day. The monotonous work continues as the children shout and run among them, a much-appreciated distraction for the lonely, toiling men. Just beneath the crumbling brick, an axe blow away is
the
stone. Made up of hard quartz-bearing rock and feldspar and mica, it will shimmer in the sun. Not yet black but dark gray with a delicate vein of pink, the Rosetta stone lies waiting to be discovered . . .

INSCRIBED WITH A
long-forgotten decree from a long-forgotten world, the stone found at Rosetta is as distant from Egypt’s glorious past as it is from the Frenchmen digging in the sun. By the time of the decree (196
BC
), the Egypt of the Old Kingdom pyramids has ended. The powerful Middle and New Kingdoms are over. Gone forever are the pharaohs whose every nod or frown made the kings of the east tremble and at whose command great temples rose, even in times of famine.

Now they lie together in a jumble like so many numbered corpses in a morgue—kings, queens, princes, great officials, and courtiers. In the dead of night, they are secretly carried from their splendid tombs by pious, grieving priests trying to save their desecrated bodies.

Their mummies are rewrapped in coarse strips of cloth. Robbers have destroyed their royal shrouds, cutting to the very bone in their search for gold and silver. Placed in simple wooden coffins—or coffinless, stacked against the wall of a cave hidden deep in the desert cliffs—they will lie there for two thousand years until, astonished and unbelieving, archaeologists stumble upon them in the late nineteenth century: princes in a pauper’s grave. It is a royal potter’s field, an ironic end for those who lavished all their wealth, all their subjects’ strength on their burials, but it is the most the priests can do.

For they no longer have the power to guard the splendidly carved and painted tombs that once housed these dead yet living gods. These priests risk their lives simply by performing this last humble act for the kings they still worship, pharaohs whose immortal
Ka—
soul, spirit, double—they still nourish with offerings of calves’ liver and honeyed bread and aged palm wine.

By 196
BC,
Egypt has become a shadow of itself, a land ruled by foreigners for so long that the Egyptian on the stone must be carved both in the half-forgotten hieroglyphs and demotic, a new, scrawled form of the language. There are carvings in Greek as well, for by this time, Egyptian by itself no longer suffices. The hapless Egyptian scribe who struggles to translate the Greek of the decree into hieroglyphs sometimes leaves out words, clumsily paraphrasing or completely changing turns of phrases difficult to write in Egyptian, phrases more natural in the foreign language of his Greek master—Ptolemy V, called Ptolemy
Epiphanes,
that is,
The Appearance of the God
in Greek—“who is exceedingly glorious, who has established Egypt firmly, who is beloved of men and gods, who—” etc.

And who, as the decree does not mention, in reality is a sad boy-king whose father, Ptolemy IV, spurred on by his whores and catamites, killed his mother. Her melancholy nature bored him! No older than thirteen, Ptolemy V is suddenly elevated to the throne by the death of his father. Whereupon eunuch-guardians corrupt the young Ptolemy, enslaving him to pleasure so that they may rule in his stead.

There is pathos in the story behind the decree, a pathos which, moreover, is useful in the decipherment of the stone on which it is written: for in decipherment,
all
decipherment—ancient decrees, modern military codes, even secret lovers’ notes—context plays as great a part as word-for-word evidence. The linguist must have some feeling for the world of the document, some knowledge of the circumstances surrounding the message he is trying to decipher.

When Young, Champollion’s British rival, works on the stone, he is primarily concerned with analyzing the number of times such and such a sign repeats itself. Champollion draws upon his imagination, his intuitive faculties as well as his analytic ones.

Unlike Young, a man of varied interests, Champollion has immersed himself in Egypt and he knows and knows and knows. A pillar inscribed in Greek near the Red Sea, a papyrus from a temple by the Nile, pieced together, describe this
Epiphanes,
this
Appearance of the God
in a hundred different moments, any one of which may—or may not!—help unlock an obscure sentence or a difficult phrase: the trembling Greek boy crowned Ptolemy in ancient incomprehensible Egyptian ceremonies; the adolescent King Ptolemy who hunts in the delta swamps for weeks at a time, neglecting affairs of state as he pursues the rhino and wild bird, obsessed with the chase—traveling far to the south to capture elephants and kill panthers and the gazelles that run in large herds in the wilderness; the arrogant young ruler Ptolemy who falls asleep as foreign ambassadors make their speeches and who, awakened by his former tutor, the aged Aristomenes, has the old man put to death.

There are many sources which bring to life not only Ptolemy V but the entire Greek Egypt of this epoch. There are many pictures of that violent, incestuous, intellectual, pleasure-loving dynasty, the Ptolemies, who by the time of the decree have degenerated. They are nothing like the hardy, practical Ptolemy I, the dynasty’s founder.

For by 196
BC,
it is late not only in Egyptian history but late even in the history of her Greek conquerors who—despite being born in Egypt for century after century—continue to speak only Greek and to be known by Greek, not Egyptian names—Ptolemy
Epiphanes, Eucharistos
(praised), Ptolemy
Euergetes
(performer of good deeds), Ptolemy
Philadelphus
(brother/sister loving)—and even by Greek nicknames—
Auletes
(flute player),
Physcon
(fatty),
Lathyrus
(chickpea), etc. Greek titles have replaced the ti-tles of the previous dynasty—which was also foreign—Persian—and which also used foreign languages on its inscriptions (Darius’ Nile–Red Sea canal, for example, is commemorated in quadralinguals: Persian, Elamite, Babylonian, the languages of the Persian empire,
and
Egyptian).

For the Greeks are not the first to conquer Egypt: by 196
BC,
defeat has followed defeat. The Persians had arrived first (in 525
BC
), humbling and oppressing the people, defiling the temples and mocking the gods whose gold and silver images they steal. They kill the sacred animals and desecrate the tombs: Unrolling the mummies of those pharaohs they can find, Herodotus reports, they crush their bones, burning what will burn and tossing the rest onto dung heaps. The all-important irrigation ditches are allowed to silt up, priests are degraded and starving people raise their hands at broken altars.

For a brief interval, the Egyptians rise up and drive out the foreigners (380
BC
), establishing the thirtieth dynasty, which struggles to revive the ancient glory.

That is soon over. By 343
BC
the Persians have returned in force. The last pharaoh of Egyptian blood, Nectanebo II, flees to the far reaches of the south where he lives in seclusion, devoting the rest of his life to magic and esoteric meditations. He can be seen on temple friezes, naked and bald, holding bowls of incense as he kneels before “the coffins of the unborn gods” and offering up unheard prayers for Egypt.

Or perhaps they are heard after all. Perhaps Egypt’s salvation paradoxically lies in its destruction. Like an overripe fruit, it must fall from the tree and burst open, its seed scattering to the winds, its wisdom taking new forms. To be sure, this is the Egypt that Alexander the Great conquers with his Greeks in 332
BC:
a fallen, pillaged land.

He is greeted as a liberator. Memphis opens its gates to him with joy, priests anoint him with the sacred oils and adorn him with the god Amun’s ram-horns (on coins, they can be seen beneath his thick Greek curls). He is declared pharaoh. But for the short time Alexander remains in Egypt, he is a
Greek
pharaoh—or rather, a Macedonian bearing Greek ideals: for he is from that rugged land just to the north of Greece. He is a Macedonian who has been formed by his tutor Aristotle and the epics of Homer.

Unlike the Persians before him, Alexander scrupulously honors Egypt’s gods. Yet at the same time he forcibly turns her center of being from the inward-looking life of the Nile valley to the shores of the Mediterranean where he founds Alexandria, a city that will not only become Egypt’s new capital but a cosmo-polis, a city of the world.

It is a city—no, more an
idea
than a city—that will astonish the ancient world. Here, while its power-mad kings and queens get caught up in endless, remorseless struggles, while royal blood flows in streams from the palace by the sea, Euclid will formulate the principles of geometry. The polymath Erastothenes (in 276
BC
),
assuming that the world is round,
and basing his calculations on nothing more than the angles of shadows cast by the sun, will determine the circumference of the earth accurate to within fifty miles.

The kings themselves—Ptolemy VIII, for example—will turn to intellectual speculation. At the end of a sixty-eight-year reign, Ptolemy VIII holds forth on natural history, of which he is a keen observer if the surviving fragments of his many-volumed work are any indication. He writes a treatise on political wisdom as well, of which he must have possessed an uncommon measure. For he was able to patch up his quarrel with his wife Cleopatra II (it had plunged the country into civil war). And though he had previously taken his revenge on her by murdering their son Memphites, his reign ends in peace and contentment, his two wives, Cleopatra II, the mother, and Cleopatra III, her daughter (from another brother), by his side.

Here at Alexandria, amid crime and cerebration, fires seem to scorch the skies: the seventy-foot-high Pharos—huge mirrors magnifying its light—will guide ships into the harbor for more than a thousand years, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world.

The greatest library that the world has ever known draws scholars and poets from the ends of the earth. Its Museum, home of the muses, attracts scientists and historians (and clever priests who study the principles of hydrostatics and the properties of magnets to create “miracles” in their temples: singing statues and gods who fly through the air).

Here, later, the Christian heretic Arius and the orthodox Athansius will struggle to define Christ’s nature,
hom
oi
ousian,
like
God’s; or
hom
oo
usian,
the same as
God’s; debating over the diphthong with a ferocious hatred and a violence, and a brilliance unsurpassed in Church history. They take turns fleeing to the desert to save their lives until Arius dies on the streets of the city during a prolonged epileptic fit.

All of this is yet to be: When Alexander first sees “the city” it is a spit of land jutting out into the sea and forming a double harbor. Envisioning its possibilities, the newly victorious conqueror comes ashore and strides east and west and north and south, marking boundaries, indicating where walls are to rise with such swift decision, such impetuosity, that his men can find nothing with which to mark the new city lines but a sack of barley they scatter in his Promethean footsteps.