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A travel gallery: Mo'alla, Egypt: "Ankhtifi the Brave is dying."
posted 5 Aug 2009
© Noreen Doyle

Until very recently, to travel beyond the spacious confines of Luxor, you joined the enormous tourist convey of taxis, vans, and buses. Northward takes you to Abydos (a site especially sacred to Osiris, god of the dead) and Dendera, one of the principal places of worship of the cow-goddess Hathor. Southward, and you will find yourself in Ombos (home of the god of chaos, Set) or, even farther upriver, in Aswan, the "Trade Town" that marked the border with Nubia. Before departing, if traveling by taxi, you presented a site ticket to the tourist police: no ticket, no joining the convoy! (Things are, I believe, different now.) Hire a taxi, join up with the southbound convoy, and show the police a ticket for a town called, among other variations of the name, Mo'alla. They won't be altogether certain that the place even exists. But, if your driver is pursuasive and the site ticket sufficiently convincing, you will be off...

I was traveling in the company of Jane Akshar of Flats in Luxor. Ours was the only vehicle that broke off from the convoy at a particular intersection. None of the tourist trappings of Aswan and Ombos for us! No, we were were bound for  pharaonic Hefat, home and final resting place of a First Intermediate Period governer named Ankhtifi (c. 2065 BCE).

In 2004, my novelette "Ankhtifi the Brave is dying.," which was inspired by his "autobiography" and other texts in the tomb, was published in The First Heroes: New Tales of the Bronze Age. It is the story of an aging governor who has for many years been visited by King Neferkare in the form of a falcon, as Ankhtifi struggles against the king's rival, a would-be usurper who has set up court at Thebes.

When I wrote the story in 2001-02, I had to rely on a French publication of the site written by a man who did not perform the exploration. Entirely coincidentally, at that same time I discovered that the University of Liverpool, which I had just entered for graduate school, was going back to survey the site. It was not until more than four years later that I had the privilege of seeing, and standing on, the site where most of the story takes place.

This is some of what I saw.
"Anxti.fi nAxt, Ankhtifi the Brave"




ANKHTIFI THE BRAVE IS DYING.



Yet he is not an old man. He can hold his back straight. He does not lean so very much upon his long staff.


The track takes him from brown fields that crack like bread left too long in the oven to the the desert where life has forever been even sparser. A pyramid of a hill rises before him, quite apart from the enormous cliffs to the east: a pyramid built by the gods, Ankhtifi's way to heaven when his body is buried deep in the rock at its base and his ba at last flies away from this droughtened earth to the Field of Offerings, eternally moist, forever green.

Ankhtifi arrives at the entrance of his tomb at the end of an open-air hall, where, at Ankhtifi's signal the spearmen pound their piebald shields with the butts of their spears.



The tomb-chapel spreads wide before them, its floor swept clean of any trace of dirt. Thirty columns hold aloft its ceiling, some aglow in patchwork sunlight that streams through the unfinished roof to which will soon be added a few last blocks. None of the columns are quite alike, some with beveled corners, others round or onionlike, their forms chiseled out as best the earth permitted the masons, but regardless, they are all strong. They are Ankhtifi's.


Brightly colored scenes surround them, painted on plaster, newly finished, their figures bold and vigorous. The festival of the falcon-god Hemen of Hefat is celebrated in paddled boats. Fatted cattle are herded and butchered, fish harpooned and netted in abundance. Porters bring bag after bag after bag of grain on their shoulders to be emptied into the granaries. Once it was so. Idy and his three brothers accompany Ankhtifi. Once that, too, was so.

Every season the Red Land creeps a little nearer to the river. The withered roots of lentils and lettuce and weeds cannot hold it back. Only the river, rising from its bed like an army, can do so, and so there is a prayer within his tomb that is carved out like an offering-chapel before the pyramid-hill:  may Horus grant that the river will flood for his son Neferkare.  It has not done so very well, not for a very long time.


The falcon blinked his bright eye, then his brighter one. "Put my name into your tomb, just once, asking Horus to grant in my name what you most desire. There is power in that."


The falcon came to him that night for the first time, when the councilors had returned to their homes and his wife Nebi had gone to bed, as had his sons and his daughters.

That evening Ankhtifi laid a banquet for these people on the riverbank and another in his pillared hall, where he summoned his sons and his council. They ate choice cuts of beef, drank good beer, ate white bread, and spoke of what the potter had told them.

Ankhtifi steps away from the burial shaft in the spotless floor of his tomb.
© Noreen Doyle