I nod, my face burning. Alberto rolls his eyes, making no move to lower his voice. “Santo cazzo Madre di Cristo,” he says, and I don’t need a translation.

Abdou, Mohammed Mahmoud, and Ahmed emerge from the annex where they live and begin to load up equipment, under the direction of Abdou, the reis—or head workman. I am wearing the same borrowed clothing I wore yesterday, the same borrowed hat. I stand awkwardly near the Land Rover, not sure what I should bring. Joe comes up beside me, handing me a pack filled with brushes, a ruler, a mirror, a flashlight, an iPad, and a portable charger. “You can use some of my stuff,” he says. He takes a military keffiyeh and drapes it around my neck. I wind it around my nose and mouth to block out the sand.

Wyatt walks out of the Dig House and swings into the Land Rover. Abdou is driving and the back is filled with equipment. Alberto, Joe, and I follow its tracks. The sun comes over the horizon, bloodying the desert, as if the moon was massacred overnight.

* * *

—

THE TOMBS IN the necropolis look like kernels of corn, evenly spaced and lined up in a row along the gebel. The tomb of Djehutynakht sits slightly below the rest due to the infrastructure of the hill itself. As we get closer, I see the split in the rock face near the new opening, which must have prevented the other tombs from being built on the same level. Instead, the later tombs—like Djehutyhotep II’s—were dug above it on an intact ridge of stone.

Seeing it now, I wonder how we never noticed it fifteen years ago. At the same time, I know exactly why: it was buried, because of all those later tombs. Their excavation hid the entrance of this earlier tomb from view.

As we get closer, we start climbing the stone steps that are washed with sand. I viscerally remember doing this when I was here as a grad student, and every time, it felt futuristic, as if I were the last human on earth, instead of peeling back years to be part of an ancient civilization. The Land Rover has already been parked and unpacked by the time I reach the tomb. Joe has told me that the main work of this season has been excavating the shaft and shoring it up so that Wyatt and the workers can descend safely. In addition to Harbi’s family from Luxor, there are Coptic and Muslim hired men clearing debris from the shaft in a bucket brigade, passing the material from rubber maqtaf to maqtaf. The sand they bring out of the tomb becomes part of a giant pile that two men shake through giant sifters, to make sure there’s nothing of note in the debris. “Have they found anything?” I ask Joe.

“A few barley seeds,” he says.

They’d be picked out with tweezers, and put in a Ziploc for later archaeobotanical analysis.

Wyatt calls to Joe from inside the tomb. “The boss beckons,” he says, and he flashes me an apologetic grin as he leaves me behind. I stop at the entrance to the tomb, suddenly close enough to see the hieroglyphs.

I touch my fingertips gently to the lintel, and stumble through the transliteration of the text.

Nomarch of the Hare nome, Djehutynakht.

The last datable hieroglyphic inscription was written by a Nubian priest visiting Philae in 394 B.C.E., because even when the Byzantine emperor closed all the temples, he still let the Nubians come worship Isis. Then the entire language was forgotten for fifteen hundred years—until the Rosetta stone was found in 1799. Written in demotic, hieroglyphs, and Greek, it’s an incredibly boring text about tax benefits and temple priests—but because it bore the same message in three languages, it provided the code needed to crack the meaning of Ancient Egyptian writing. In 1822, Jean-Fran?ois Champollion published the first translation of hieroglyphs.

What he must have felt, being able to step into history and understand what was being said four thousand years ago…well, it’s how it feels right now, to hold my hand up to carvings in stone, just like the artist who had set them there, wondering who would read them in the future.

The tomb is a hive of activity. I slip inside, staring around at the brightly painted walls. This is what people never understand about Egyptology—when a tomb is left untouched for thousands of years in a desert, it’s not found bleached and faded and crumbling. It can be just as vibrant as the day it was sealed, if it is preserved well. The blood reds, the aqua blues, the mustards, the creamy whites—it takes my breath away.

One full wall is a hunting scene. There are fish in a cobalt pond, and more in a delicately wrought net. Hippos frolic in the water and on the shore, a lion is eating a gazelle as two crocodiles mate. There are ibises in the bush and geese flying overhead. Djehutynakht and his wife are off to one side; he’s holding a throw stick—a boomerang-shaped piece of wood used for hunting. Turning, I step closer to another scene—this one with harpists and lute players, women clapping a beat, men dancing, and a dwarf spinning on his head to entertain them. Beside this are women spinning and weaving, picking and pressing grapes for wine, grinding grain between stones and baking bread in molds. To the far right are two donkeys rolling in dust, beside a yuyu dog, with its long tail and greyhound body. There’s another scene with fighting—soldiers with shields and arrows, vanquished dead enemies with blood pouring from their foreheads. There’s an elaborately painted false door for the ba soul to come and go.

The wall closest to the tomb shaft opening is a depiction of the offerings being carted in for Djehutynakht, and a scribe recording them on his scroll. The peret kheru—the offering formula—runs the length of the array of foods and gifts. Djehutynakht stands in all his glory in a garden of lotuses beneath a portico with faux painted granite pillars, with servants holding the nomarch’s sandals and his parasol. Beside him are his wife, three daughters, and two sons. One holds a fat basenji with a bell on its collar. Rusty, I try to make heads or tails of the hieroglyphs, murmuring to myself.

A noble and mayor…something…one whom the god loves, overseer of the eastern foreign lands, true of voice, Djehutynakht, son of Teti.

“smr-nswt,” I hear behind me. Wyatt is standing with his hands in his pockets, watching me stagger through the transliteration. “Friend of the king,” he deciphers. “It’s pretty amazing, right?”

I nod. “I remember seeing some of these themes before in other tombs at this necropolis.”

“Well, it’s like when you move to the suburbs and everyone has the same furniture because they’re all keeping up with the Joneses.”

“Or the Boston Djehutynakhts,” I suggest.

He laughs. “Ready to earn your keep?”

He’s already moving through the tomb, expecting me to follow. My eyes land on a hieroglyph beside Djehutynakht’s wife, Kem.

mry. Beloved.

“You’ll be making a paleography of the hieroglyphs near the burial shaft. They’ve been blocked by debris until now,” Wyatt tells me. He turns to Alberto, who is setting up his camera equipment. “She’s got Joe’s iPad; can you send her the photographs?”

“Already done,” Alberto says, his voice clipped.

I wonder again why he was so friendly when we first met, and now is formal and stiff.

Wyatt is already opening up the iPad and scrolling through photographs from different angles of the wall of the tomb in front of me. He unclips the Apple pencil and traces one of the hieroglyphs, just like he showed me yesterday in the Dig House. “After you finish, Alberto will digitally create a 3D model of the wall, with your drawings included. Don’t forget to save your work.”

Again, I’m amazed at how much has changed since I was last working in a tomb at Deir el-Bersha. In 2003, after we traced on Mylar, we would photocopy the drawing on a slightly reduced scale, and then correct all our mistakes by checking the black and white copy against the actual inscription. It took several seasons to finish a single inscription, and Wyatt and I had to compare notes to make sure our art was correct: What do you think might be in this damage? What do you think is the shape of this sign? To have the iPad, where a tracing can be immediately corrected, is a gift.

I wedge myself into a narrow space between the wall and Abdou, who is speaking in Arabic to a worker inside the tomb shaft who hefts one of the rubber baskets full of debris. “Any questions, ask Alberto,” Wyatt says.

I make a mental note to not have any questions.

Abdou edges past me to climb down the ladder into the shaft. A moment later, I hear him calling for the Mudir. “Duty calls,” Wyatt says. He sets a foot on the first rung of the ladder, turning back to me at the last minute. “Make sure you notate where each inscription is in the whole of the tomb,” he instructs, and he disappears into the tomb shaft.