Of all the ancient civilizations none seems to hold more fascination for us than that of Egypt. So much was recorded at the time about their everyday life that the people seem just like any one of us, with the same problems and worries. And yet there remain such mysteries as the Pyramids, the Sphinx, the Exodus and the Plagues of Egypt and, of course, the Curse of the Pharaohs, that we continue to look upon them with awe and fascination.
And then there is the sheer immensity of time! The predynastic period dates from over 7,500 years ago. The earliest known kings ruled about 5,000 years ago and the first pyramids were built over 4,500 years ago. The Egyptian civilizations rose and fell and rose and fell again and again, yet there was a continuity stretching for some three thousand years, three times longer than England has existed and fifteen times longer than there has been a United States of America.
The Egyptian civilization had laws and rules like ours, rules that were just as easily broken and had to be enforced. The worst crime of all was that of tomb-robbing, which was deemed even more serious than murder. Theft was not an especially common crime – there were apparently few muggers or highwaymen. Tax evasion or non-payment of a debt was far more common, so some things have stayed the same. At the time of the New Kingdom the law was enforced by a group of mercenary soldiers known as the Medjay, but there had been a police force for centuries before, charged with guarding the mines and quarries and cemeteries.
This anthology takes us through the ages, and features whodunnits from the dawn of civilization, at the time of the first pyramids, through all the well-known rulers down to the time of Cleopatra. It also includes a few stories set during the early days of Egyptology from the Napoleonic period to the years just before the First World War, all of which draw upon the magic and mystery of ancient Egypt.
All of the major writers of Egyptian mysteries have contributed new material, from Elizabeth Peters to Lynda Robinson, and from Lauren Haney to Anton Gill and Michael Pearce.
The fascination with the magic of Egypt isn’t a recent phenomenon. It goes back at least as far as the ancient Greeks, whose historian Herodotus (who appears in one of the stories in this book) described the mysteries of Egypt in his travels and, in so doing, also described one of the world’s oldest mystery stories. The modern interest began in Napoleonic times with the growth of archaeology and the emergence of the science of Egyptology. The rediscovery of ancient Egypt began to fuel fiction, such as the work of Théophile Gautier in France, and mummy’s and Egyptian curses soon became a staple of horror fiction and macabre mysteries. The fascination in fiction really took off with the success of H. Rider Haggard’s books which evoked a mystique of lost times and other days.
Although I have encountered a few early short stories set in ancient Egypt involving a crime or a mystery, I don’t know of a genuine ‘whodunnit’ set wholly in ancient Egypt earlier than Agatha Christie’s Death Comes as the End, published in 1944. The story is set in around 2000 BC, though in fact reads every bit as cozy as a traditional country-house murder. Christie was married to the archeologist Max Mallowan and joined him on several archeological digs in the Middle East. Several of her stories are set in Egypt or involve an Egyptian theme, most notably “The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb” (1924) and the novel Death on the Nile (1937).
Despite setting a novel entirely in ancient Egypt, Christie’s work did not in itself set a trend for such works. In fact it was not until the current fascination for historical mysteries, in the wake of the Cadfael books by Ellis Peters, that several authors began series set in the Land of the Nile. These include Lynda Robinson’s novels set at the time of Tutankhamun and featuring the pharaoh’s inquiry agent, Lord Meren; Lauren Haney’s series featuring Lieutenant Bak of the Medjay Police during the reign of Queen Hatshepsut and Paul Doherty’s novels featuring Egypt’s principal judge, Amerotke, in the reign of Tuthmosis. All of these characters feature in new stories in this anthology.
All of the authors have endeavoured to make the stories fit into the known historical period. This occasionally means using special words and terms but, have no fear, they are all explained in each story.
The word you will encounter most is ma’at. Ma’at (with a capital M) was the goddess of truth and justice and represented harmony in the universe. She was the goddess in whose name the king ruled. If ma’at (small “m”) means order then the opposite, chaos, was represented by isfet, which also represents sin or violence. Then, as now, society was the constant tussle between ma’at and isfet.
Egypt was divided into a number of provinces. In later years these were called nomes, though that is a Greek word and the original Egyptian was sepat. There were 42 provinces, each governed by a nomarch. For a couple of hundred years (from the sixth to the twelfth dynasties) the nomarchs became hereditary rulers, but were eventually stripped of their power (see Keith Taylor’s story).
The ultimate rule of law was vested in the king, but it was delegated to a vizier, the equivalent of a modern day prime minister. Cases could be heard by a vizier but for all practical purposes each town had its own magistrate, the kenbet. The royal palace, which was the basis of all administration, was called the per-aa (or “great house”) and in later years the Greeks corrupted that word into pharaoh, the name we all associate with the king. The proper Egyptian word for king was suten.
The ancient Egyptians never called their country Egypt, of course. Their name for their land was Kemet, which means “black land”, because of the silt from the Nile which spread over the land during the annual inundation. The northern part of Egypt, around the Nile delta, is called Lower Egypt. This is where most of early kings ruled and where the main pyramid complexes were built, at Saqqara, Giza and Memphis. The southern part of Egypt is called Upper Egypt. This was the main home of the pharaohs in the Middle Kingdom and is the site of Thebes (also called Luxor) and the Valley of the Kings. If you continue further south along the Nile, you reach the first cataract at Aswan, which was the old boundary of Upper Egypt. Beyond that was Nubia, or the Land of Kush, also known as Wawat, roughly equal to modern Sudan.
And that’s about all you need to know. Now it’s my pleasure to hand over to Elizabeth Peters to declare this anthology open.
Mike Ashley