Chapter 2: Oxford - 2021

In the quiet of the Anstruther Museum’s laboratory, Angela Baxter, research assistant, was working on her post-graduate project. She was peering through a magnifying glass at a small figurine. She put it down carefully. It was a small mummy-shaped statuette, made of clay with a glassy pale-blue glaze, barely four inches long. On the front of the figure a set of inscribed characters testified to the figure’s ancient Egyptian origins.

Angela copied down the inscription carefully. She had handled hundreds of these shabtis, as they were called, in her research. The shabtis were found in tombs. They were placed there as workers, intended to care for the deceased in the afterlife. Even the simplest Egyptian burials had them. Higher status tombs usually had 400 – one worker for every day of the year and one supervisor for every ten workers; even the servants of the dead needed to be overseen. This shabti was from a late period, probably after the death of Cleopatra when Caesar Augustus had absorbed Egypt into the Roman Empire. Angela could see from the inscription that some of the characters weren’t even real hieroglyphs. The inscription made no sense. By the time the Romans had taken over in Egypt much of the knowledge of the old language had already been lost. They still made the figures but the inscriptions meant nothing.

The little blue figure seemed to be saying to Angela, “They put me to work for eternity but they didn’t really know what they wanted me to do.”

Angela knew how the shabti felt. She had been working on the inscriptions for several months and her research supervisor seemed to be less and less interested in her work the more that she did. Although he didn’t seem to be interested, for her it had become all absorbing. That had been the reason that her last boyfriend, Patrick, had moved out the week before, after a horrendous row between the two of them. He had claimed that the only way she was going to be interested in him was if he got himself tattooed with extracts from the Book of the Dead and laid out in a museum cabinet. She still felt guilty about the argument. She knew it wasn’t her fault, but even so, she blamed herself. Maybe his insult suggested that he had taken more interest in Angela’s work than she had given him credit for.

As far as the research project was going, she found herself with some sympathy with her supervisor’s concerns about whether there was much new to say about the shabtis. That was a problem Angela often had, she knew. She would see the other person’s point of view ahead of her own and end up doubting her own judgement. That fed through into her approach to her work and her private life. She would tell herself she needed to have greater faith in herself but somehow she found it difficult advice to take.

She picked up another figure. This one was earlier from the time of Ramses III. It was dedicated to a women called Tiye. Angela wondered if if might possibly be the Tiye who was one of Ramses’ lesser wives. She had conspired to assassinate the pharaoh and put her son on the throne instead of the rightful heir. There were plenty of women in Egyptian history like that; women that were ready to take the initiative and push through their own plans. Sobekneferu the first female pharaoh from a time when it was thought only men could rule. Hatshepsut, arguably one of the greatest Egyptian pharaohs who presided over a time of prosperity and discovery. Nefertiti, famed as queen and possibly pharaoh in her own right. And of course there was Cleopatra. None of them would put up with the way Angela felt she was treated at work and at home. Angela wondered why she couldn’t be more like them. She looked up at some carvings on the wall of the gallery she was working in. A woman in a long white robe was making an offering to the goddess Isis. She looked completely in control of her life, completely at ease with the world around her. Completely in tune with the way that things should be – Ma’at, the Egytians had called it. It couldn’t have been more different from how Angela felt about her own life.

She stared at the line of clay figures. They provided no reassurance. The more work she did on them the less she felt she was close to discovering anything new.

She said as much to her boss Hugh Carfax, the museum’s curator of Egyptian artefacts, hoping for some support. His response had been both unhelpful and worrying. “Probably just as well. I’m not sure how long we’re going to hang on to them. The museum governors want to free up some cash and some space. Those things just fill up cabinets. They’re just not the sort of thing that brings visitors in. They just sit in their rows staring out blankly. I mean, they’re not telling you much and you’re a specialist!”

“Surely the museum wouldn’t just sell them off? All right they aren’t unique, not even unusual, but it’s a good collection of the various types.”

“Oh no, not ‘sell them off’. What do you think we are? Some sort of eBay seller? No, I think ‘de-accession’ is the approved term. You and I both know that some of them are worth several thousand pounds. The collection would pay for an extended cafe and gift shop. And we wouldn’t have to store the dammed things; we haven’t got a tenth of them on display. And even those are going back in the stores next week.”

“That’s inconvenient! Why?”

“Making space for the new exhibition; “Tutankhamun Centenary”. Now, that will bring the punters in.”

That depressed Angela even more. There were three thousand years or more of history under the pharaohs but everyone seemed to focus on the boy king who only reigned for 10 of them. The treasures from his tomb were stunning, of course, but there was so much more to Egyptian history than King Tut. Popular exhibitions were fine, she felt, but she didn’t see why they should be allowed to interfere with her academic work, much less why less glamorous material should be sold off to fund what she saw as irrelevant additions to the museum.

“I thought you could work on some of the exhibits; come up with some exciting labels to make the most of what we’ve got. Sex the thing up a bit.”

Angela didn’t think much of that suggestion either. From what she’d seen of the stuff being assembled, it looked like the project was going to be making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. And, she thought ruefully, if anything needed sexing up at the moment, after Patrick had moved out, it was her own life. “I’d rather carry on with my research project, especially if the shabtis are going any time soon.”

“Sorry, Angela, I need you to do this.” Carfax passed her a folder with details of the plans for the event. “The museum governors have got high expectations of this exhibition.”

Angela was sceptical. She really didn’t understand why they should have any expectations at all. It just sounded like wishful thinking on their part. All right, it was certainly a reasonable thing to be celebrating 100 years since Howard Carter discovered the boy king’s tomb but the Museum didn’t have anything much of its own to show. It certainly wasn’t sufficiently famous internationally to have borrowed any of the objects that had actually been in the tomb. The term “band wagon” sprang to mind when she thought of the Trustees’ intentions.