‘Tom,’ I said on the phone, ‘could you meet me this evening, at 6 pm at the BM? Joy needs a cosmologist’s advice.’ Joy was a curator of Egyptology at the British Museum and an extremely attractive young woman, a tall Chinese girl (her family came from the Northern province of Jilin) with the waist of a wasp and a regal stance.
Tom knew at once that something serious was afoot. Given his well-known proclivities, I had always tried to keep him away from Joy. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘tell me what’s the problem.’ ‘Do you remember,’ I said, ‘the stelae we brought back from the Temple of Karnak? One of them has an inscription that no one, not even Joy, can understand.’
While we were waiting for Joy at the BM’s Information Desk, I had to update Tom’s rather vague knowledge – after all, he was a dyed-in-the-wool scientist and when we had visited Karnak, this was part of a number of other visits and he was not very clear about what we had seen. Karnak, I reminded him, was a temple built during the short reign, less than seventeen years, of the heretic Pharaoh Akhenaten, about thirteen centuries before CE.
Tom remembered that Akhenaten had eliminated all the deities from the Egyptian Pantheon, except one, the Sun, Aten, thus creating an amazing and unprecedented monotheistic cult, that, alas, was short-lived. His son, Tutankaten, not only returned to the old and familiar deities but even changed his name to Tutankamen, to rub out any reference to Aten and to go back to the old Egyptian god, Amen.
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