It makes the heart to tremble when you open an undiscovered tomb. - Zahi Hawass
When I was fourteen years old, I fell in love for the first time.
Looking back, there were so many reasons it was never going to work. He came from a pretty important family, for one thing. The distance between us was also a problem; I hailed from a small college town in northern California, and he lived roughly 3,600 years ago in Upper Egypt. The age gap probably would have been an issue too. But none of that mattered. I was young and in love, and for one glorious summer, Akhenhotep II was my world.
My sister Jane remembers it as the summer Boyz Not Bombz broke up, and for my best friend Charlotte it was when she got her first tattoo (purple dolphin, left ankle, obtained for the sole purpose of pissing off her mother). But for me, it was the summer that an intact tomb of a seventeenth dynasty pharaoh was opened for the first time in over three millennia. It might as well have been a unicorn for how rare that is. But for all that, I might have passed those summer months without giving dear Akhenhotep a second thought, had it not been for an old colleague of my father who was overseeing the dig. He invited my father to come check out the find, and Dad brought me along.
Archaeological excavations look nothing like the movies make them out to be. There were hardly any death traps, for example, and a surprising shortage of murderous reanimated corpses. The work was hot, exhausting, and tedious, and I loved every minute of it. My fellow excavators, most of them college students, nearly all of them volunteers, shared my enthusiasm. We were light and cheerful in defiance of the tyrannical Egyptian sun. By day we worked, at night there was music and beer (root beer for me). I learned how to catalogue artifacts and how to hot wire a Jeep. In the midst of people half a decade older than myself, I was more of an equal than I had ever been among my own classmates back home. At the tomb of a long-dead Egyptian prince, I wasn't the "weird kid" anymore. I had become a valuable member of an unstoppable team.
But best of all was the work itself. To hold in my hands the treasures of a teenage king who lived and ruled and died while my ancestors were still drowning people in bogs, to hold that window into the distant past, that was magic. If I could learn to look at a jasper scarab or an alabaster jar and see that ancient boy monarch, learn the secrets of his world... well, I could bring him back from the dead. This was a power worth having.
Eventually the summer had to end. My boy king and I parted ways; he to the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities in Cairo, and I back home to Longbourn, California. Nevertheless, in the two months we spent together, Akhenhotep had helped me find my calling. But even as the years passed, and my initial infatuation deepened into a steady commitment, I never forgot the magic of that first summer. After all, there's nothing like first love. It would be another ten years before another prince-
But here I am getting ahead of myself. Best start at the beginning. This is the story of how I fell in love for the second time. And it all started with a death, a handful of coins, and an unexpected journey.
Oh, and alcohol. But what great story ever started with root beer?
