The story so far: to celebrate my novel PAINTER OF THE DEAD being on sale, I decided to set myself a challenge to make something I’ve always wanted to try. Namely, I was going to make an ancient Egyptian Old Kingdom pleated dress … in less than a week … while working a full-time job. Look, I’m enthusiastic, not smart.
And now, as the last hours of the sale tick away, I’m proud to say that I did it! I pushed through the week and completed my dress project. Is it perfect? Absolutely not. But I wouldn’t have finished it if it weren’t for the challenge, and I learned a lot in the experience. So I’m calling this one a big win!
Let’s take a look at how it went … and how it occasionally went wrong.
PAINTER OF THE DEAD is on sale through July 29th! To celebrate and share the love of ancient Egypt, I decided to … give up all my free time for a whole week. It made sense at the time.
In my last post, I talked about how I’ll be spending the week making my ancient Egyptian dream dress. This is a project I’ve been wanting to do for years. I’ll be following the basic pattern laid out in this paper by Jana Jones.
Imagine descending into a damp, echoing black tunnel. Your only light is from a flashlight. Figures of death, and night crawl across the walls, seeming to move as the light flickers across them.
You are descending into the Osireion, the legendary Tomb of Osiris at Abydos. Let’s explore.
An ancient temple was more than a house for the gods. It was a treasury, holding vast stocks of precious stones and metals. It was the center of the local economy, as people made their living supplying it. Its priests were local authorities, judges, and respected sages. Its size and grandeur awed visitors and projected the power of the country.
And if you needed to spread a story, chiseling it on the temple walls was a great place to start.
The pharaohs understood this. In fact, it was helped by the nature of the Egyptian religion itself. Religious practices prized images and the importance of language and art: when people painted things on their tomb walls, those things would become real for them in the next life. And when 99% of your population can’t read anyway, putting an image fifty feet high on a temple wall would spread the message like nothing else.
Maybe, if you repeated the lie in images often enough, it would become true.
Come with me to explore two ancient Egyptian temples. First, the Cenotaph Temple of Ramesses II at Abydos – one of many, many places where he depicted a triumph that wasn’t actually a triumph. Then, to the Temple of Dendera, where we see a different kind of trickery: attempts to blend foreign rulers into Egyptian culture through the magic of images.
As you may have guessed by now, I love learning about ancient Egypt! One of the things that’s always fascinated me is how pop culture constructed this bizarre idea of the cursed mummy — the walking ancient Egyptian undead who brings death and bad luck wherever he goes.
When the wonderful folks at Shepherd gave me an opportunity to do a book recommendation list, I knew that was the topic I had to pick. So here it is, in all its nerdy glory:
How cool is that? It was a real challenge — a fun challenge — to go through my collection and find the books that would help people understand the history of the curse myth. “Red Land, Black Land” is a great introduction to ancient Egypt, and the Sobekmose Book of the Dead is honestly one of the best I’ve ever read.
(Yes, I have a tier list for my favorite Books of the Dead. Because of course I do.)
If you’re interested in book recs from all kinds of authors, check out Shepherd’s other lists! Of course, I had to paw through their ancient Egypt tag. There’s some solid stuff in there — can’t go wrong with the Tale of Sinuhe, of course, and Toby Wilkinson’s “The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt” is a great all-in-one history for people interested in Kemet.
I’m also watching the development of their medicine tag. Medical history is another (slightly less intense) passion of mine, and I was thrilled to see that Jennifer Evans contributed a list called “The best books on early modern medicine“! I have a book of hers, “Medicine & Maladies,” and it was a big help in writing one of my manuscripts.
High up on the cliffside, a row of tombs tells a story. It’s an old story, the real Tale as Old as Time. “The king is dead. Long live the king.”
The Middle Kingdom era (2030-1650 BCE) of ancient Egypt was a time of technological and artistic innovation, but it came at a price. When the Old Kingdom collapsed in ruins, burdened by debt and a stagnant central government, the country split into pieces. As usual in human history, war forced things to change.
The remains of the day give us a hint about the chaos.
Pharaoh Sneferu had bad luck with pyramids. One collapsed, and one ended up bent and misshapen. “Third time’s the charm!” is supposed to apply to things like souffles and art projects, not two-hundred-foot structures.
But nobody says no to the god-king. And whether he realized it or not, Sneferu’s persistence—his quest for the perfect tomb—created some of the grandest archaeological wonders of human history. All it took was three million blocks of limestone, each a paltry two tons … and maybe twenty or thirty thousand laborers working for decades. It’s good to be the boss.
Today, I’m going to take you into the depths of two pyramids. They’re older than Christianity; older than the Roman Empire; older even than the Great Pyramid of Giza. They are the O.G., the Original Geometry.
First, though, let’s take a look at how this madness started.
Something Americans lose track of is just how much history fills the old world. The land you stand on was not only claimed or used by someone once, but by many someones, over and over again. Densely compacted layers of archaeological fill: break through a medieval floor to end up in an Anglo-Saxon wine cellar, which sits on top of a Roman road, which was built over the mass grave of a Catuvellaunian tribe that once looked at Julius Caesar in a funny way.
In Egypt, history isn’t just locked up in museums or set aside in out-of-the-way places. It’s in your face, demanding your attention.
The site we call Saqqara doesn’t feel densely packed when you arrive on the edges. The dominant colors are yellow sand and blue cloudless sky, occasionally broken up by a few palm trees. Here and there, irregular squarish shapes poke up out of the yellow against the blue. Remnants of stone structures.
In February 2022, I was given the opportunity of a lifetime. I joined a small tour group sponsored by the Archaeological Institute of America and spent two weeks in Lower and Central Egypt.
It. Was. Incredible.
We visited sites in Cairo and Luxor, as well as special or restricted areas in Al Minya, Abydos, and the Faiyum region. I climbed pyramids, (poorly) translated hieroglyph inscriptions, found ancient pottery littering the site of the Heretic Pharaoh’s lost city, and came face-to-face with mysterious shades in the tunnels of the Osireion. I learned a lot … and took a thousand-plus photographs.
Over the next few weeks, I’m going to share some of the amazing things I was privileged to see on that trip. Some of these sites are not open to regular tourists; others are newly discovered or newly reopened, as preservation technology improves. So come with me as we explore tombs and temples of ancient Egypt!
The Tomb of Wah-Ti (5th Dynasty) — 12/29/22
The Bent Pyramid and the Red Pyramid of Sneferu (4th Dynasty) — 1/5/23
The Tombs of Beni Hasan (10th and 11th Dynasties) — 1/12/23
The Temple of Dendera (18th Dynasty to Late Era) — 1/19/23
The Osireion, or Tomb of Osiris (19th Dynasty) — 1/26/23
With additional stops at the Colossi of Memnon, the Ramesseum, Amarna, and any other pyramids I happened across. Because once I’d got into one pyramid, it was hard to get me out of them.
The Great Pyramid of Giza looms over Cairo, February 2022
A Murder of Prose 