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In the detailed, realistic style of the ancient artist, Nefertiti’s grief looked raw. Tears coursed down her cheeks as she extended her arms in a gesture of despair.
The rays of the Aten spilled softly down onto her bowed back, tiny hands brushing the length of her spine.
The last image was unfinished. The woman it depicted was no longer Nefertiti but rather the pharaoh Neferneferuaten. She stood in royal proportions over the massed people of Egypt, who were depicted in hues from soft copper to midnight black. The pharaoh was kilted like a man with the double crown of Egypt on her brow and a false beard on her chin—but her face was still the same, with those elegant cheekbones and wide-set eyes.
To her left, she raised up a hand to the rays of the Aten. To her right, she reached down to the people crowded by her sandaled feet. An assemblage of otherworldly figures clustered in her palm—blue-faced Osiris and hawk-beaked Horus mingling with Hathor, Isis, and even Amun with his crown of soaring plumes.
Some of the people below the pharaoh reached out to accept the deities while others held up their hands to the greater god that rose over Neferneferuaten’s head.
“Why is she handing them those strange little dolls?” Constance asked.
“Those are the old gods of Egypt,” Ellie replied slowly as the significance of the image dawned. “I… think she’s giving them back.”
“Akhenaten didn’t strictly ban the worship of other gods, but he removed all royal patronage from their temples,” Neil explained. “And certainly no one who admitted allegiance to another cult would have been granted a position in his court.”
“She must have been trying to change that,” Ellie said, following a sense of intuition that tugged at her from the noble figure on the wall. “To show some grace to those of her subjects who found their solace in the other deities, even as she remained loyal to her own god.”
“But why is it only half painted?” Constance asked.
“I… think she must have died before it could be completed,” Ellie replied uneasily.
“From the plague?” Constance pressed.
Ellie found herself turning to look back at the other wall—at the stern face of the grand courtier Ay. Any man who would eventually rise to the position of pharaoh must have possessed a great deal of ambition. Just how far might Ay have gone to consolidate his own grip on power? Would he have eliminated his own adopted daughter if she stood in his way?
“Oh, but there’s one more!” Constance exclaimed, moving a little further along. “It’s very small, though.”
She leaned over a beautifully preserved model of the great solar barque—a long, narrow boat lined with dozens of tiny oars. It sat atop a carved wooden table painted and shaped like a roaring leopard.
A smaller carving marked the wall above the ship. Beside it, the plaster split in a dark, thin fracture like a lightning bolt that darted from the ceiling to disappear under the piled artifacts on the floor.
It certainly wasn’t unusual to see faults in the stone of a space that had rested in the earth for three thousand years, Ellie reminded herself—but she also couldn’t help but think of the bigger gap through which they had all climbed into the tomb to begin with.
A trail of unease crept through the back of her mind at the thought.
The image beside the crack was of a very different nature than the grand royal portraits Ellie had just been studying. Instead of an elegant bas relief, it looked like a rough caricature scraped into the virgin plaster with the tip of a dagger.
The style of the work was also entirely different from that of the other tomb art. The eyes of the roughly drawn figures were too large, their noses prominent and angled.
In fact, to Ellie’s eyes, it did not look Egyptian at all.
“This is clearly a later graffito,” Sayyid commented. “Something you might expect to find if the tomb had been looted.”
Despite the artistic differences, Ellie could pick out the figure meant to represent Neferneferuaten. A rough approximation of the double crown had been slashed into the plaster atop her head, and something about the noble lift of her chin reminded her of the other portraits she had seen.
In the graffito, the pharaoh held her hand out over a cluster of smaller figures who faced away from her, walking toward the rising disk of the Aten.
“Hold on!” Neil burst out. “There’s cuneiform here!”
Ellie had taken the marks he pointed to as natural defects in the plaster—but realized that he was right. She leaned further over the exquisitely formed oars and sails of the solar barque for a better look.
“Those phonemes sound outHapiru.” She pointed at a cluster of lines and wedges. “And this is…duraru. Hmm.”
She cast a questioning glance at Neil, who shrugged helplessly.
“Duraru… roaming?” she offered with a frown. “Converging? No, no—that’s not it. Freedom!” she concluded triumphantly. “Duraru is freedom.”
“What about this one?” Constance asked.
