Read Online In the Valley of the Kings by Daniel Meyerson - Free Book Online

the sites or off. Photos often show him putting on the Ritz in his homburg and three-piece suit, a silver-topped walking stick under his arm, even while mounted on a donkey. Which was how he was dressed now, minus the silver-topped stick. He looked more like a young English lord than a raw youth setting out to rough it in tombs and burial shafts.
    Upon arriving at Minya by train, the seventeen-year-old Carter and a colleague took donkeys the last lap of the journey to Beni Hasan’s rock-cut tombs.
    “With our luggage and various impedimenta strapped upon donkeys,” he recorded in his unpublished memoirs, “we rode through the cultivated fields to the river, crossed over to the east bank in an antiquated ferry-boat, and in the dusk we climbed up the slope of the desert escarpment to the terrace where the rock tombs are situated. And there, as the twilight fell swiftly and silently upon those dun coloured cliffs, my first experience was an aspect of dreary desolation which, I must admit, filled me with distrustful phantoms that sometimes haunt the mind on the eve of an adventure.”
    It was too dark and he was too weary to examine the tombs he would be working in. But the light of the rising sun provided a revelation as he climbed the high, windswept cliffs to the tombs of the princes and nobles of the first intermediate period ( 2181-2040 BC ).
    The light was caught by mirrors placed at the tombs’ doorways and reflected into other mirrors set farther back in the dark, cavernous chambers. Here the world of the living was also mirrored in scenes painted on the tombs’ walls: Soldiers march out to war, brewers make the strong Egyptian beer, crocodiles laze in the sun, launderers wash clothes, and squatting women give birth.
    Birds, animals, and flowers abound. If harvesters gather olives, apes sit in the trees above them, watching. Here a bald-headed old priest sports with naked girls. There a swineherd, milk on his tongue, weans a piglet. Fishermen cast their nets, pottery makers turn their wheels, weavers ply their trade, while nearby idle gamesters play at draughts, mora, thimble ring, and sennet. Bakers and harpists are lit up by the rising sun, as are cooks and singers, wine makers and acrobats, hunters, dancers, butchers, and lovers.
    There may have been no treasure in the tombs here, and there may have been no depictions of gods among the scenes. But there were wrestlers—rows of loincloth-clad men covered the east wall of tomb #15. More than a hundred pairs were laid out on a grid like the frames of a film strip. While the men themselves were identical, thetwisting, turning arms, legs, and torsos were all drawn in unique positions (like the modern wrestlers photographed in sequence by the French artist Eadweard Muybridge in 1887). The observer’s eye swept across the tomb wall from “frame” to “frame,” taking in the motion and struggle captured on the thin layer of plaster nearly four millennia ago.
    In places, wasps’ nests (hard as rock) had damaged the friezes or cracks had appeared from the shifting limestone. In some tombs, early Christians had scrawled crosses over scenes, while in others walls had been blackened by squatters’ fires. All kinds of accidents reminded one of the murals’ vulnerability. From early morning until late at night (when weak candlelight replaced the mirrored sun), Carter remained “entombed,” slaving away like some ancient harried painter with only seventy days to finish his work. 1*
    If he was happy with the assignment, he was dissatisfied—“horrified,” to use his expression—by the expedition’s copying methods. They were deadening and mechanical, he protested, though he was low man on the totem pole (only a seventeen-year-old assistant archaeological artist, his official title).
    “The modus operandi in force [at Beni Hasan],” he wrote, “was to hang large sheets of tracing paper upon the walls, and with a soft pencil trace the scenes upon them…. These