“The Book of Two Ways is yet another confirmation of the unity between Re and Osiris,” Dumphries explained. “The main purpose of Re’s journey through the Netherworld is to unite with the corpse of Osiris. The roads through the Netherworld are for Re to travel to reach Osiris. The goal of the deceased is to become both Re and Osiris, in order to attain eternal life.”

He traced a finger over the wavy lines on the projected image. “Mind you, the Book of Two Ways doesn’t actually mention two ways. Just…ways. The black and blue roads are not labeled directly, but we can imagine them as a land and a water route to the Netherworld that lead to the same outcome.”

Dumphries glanced around the room, and I realized he was looking for me. “McDowell,” he said. “Tell us what the key to resurrection was, according to the Book of Two Ways.”

“Knowledge,” I said, straightening. “That’s why the texts were placed in the coffin. They’re spells the deceased has to have in order to pass all the obstacles en route to the shrine of Osiris.”

“Exactly. And frankly, who doesn’t need knowledge to survive tests in this world…or the next?” He faced the students. “Questions?”

A student raised his hand. “Will this be on the midterm?”

Dumphries flicked his eyes away, dismissive. “Next?”

“Did you have to be super rich to have the Book of Two Ways painted in your coffin?” another student asked.

“The ones we’ve found at Bersha have come from nobles of the Hare nome, but a good death wasn’t linked to economic status. Every Egyptian could become an akh—a transfigured soul.”

A third student raised her hand. “What about gender? Did women get the map, too?”

“Yes,” Dumphries said. “It’s been found in the tombs of noblewomen.”

Wyatt crossed his arms. “There are some Egyptologists who claim that women had to take on male characteristics to become an Osiris, much like a female pharaoh would wear the ritual false beard of the king.”

“I doubt it,” I said. “The word corpse in Ancient Egyptian is already feminine. And there’s a woman’s Middle Kingdom coffin where the spells have pronouns that were all changed from male to female, tailored to the deceased.”

Wyatt and I stared at each other, facing off, as Dumphries shut the projector. “If Mommy and Daddy are done arguing,” he said drily, “we’re going to turn you loose in the museum. Armstrong, McDowell, I pass you the torch.”

While Dumphries left with the museum curator to look at objects from Bersha that weren’t on display, Wyatt and I herded the undergrads through the MFA. He was the primary TA; even if I’d wanted that position I wasn’t as adept at teaching hieroglyphs. I had to admit, he was good at it.

Wyatt gathered the undergrads in a semicircle at the doorway of the new exhibit. The undergrads held packets with hieroglyphs that had been copied from the coffins they were about to see firsthand. The girls, and some of the guys, were gazing at Wyatt as if he had just created the cosmos. I knew that there were undergrads who signed up for Dumphries’s courses because of the British TA who, if you believed the gossip, was apparently Harrison Ford and the Second Coming all rolled into one.

“We tend to think of literacy in Ancient Egypt as black and white—either you could read or you couldn’t. In antiquity, it was actually a continuum. If you were a priest or a bureaucrat, you’d learn hieroglyphs. If you were training to be a scribe, you learned hieratic—the cursive form of hieroglyphics—for everyday use in contracts and wills and village documents. But even if you were in the public, you could still recognize basic symbols, the way we’d know a stop sign by its shape even if we couldn’t read the letters on it. All of you are going to hopefully achieve the reading level of a bureaucrat. Let’s get to it, then.”

The Ancient Egyptians can be credited with developing our alphabet. When early Semitic speakers traveled from what’s now Israel to Egypt, they didn’t have a writing system. They saw the Egyptians writing their names on rock and wanted to do it, too. So they picked hieroglyphs that represented common objects—water, an eye, a bull’s head—and used them to form the first letters of those words in their own language.

Wyatt walked into the exhibit, stopping in front of a case that had the exterior panel of Djehutynakht’s coffin. I scanned the columns of hieroglyphs painted on the ancient cedar, looking for the owner’s name.

The ibis stood for Djehuty—the ancient Egyptian name of the god Thoth. The squiggle was a line of water, the letter n. The stick beneath was khet. The circle with the horizontal lines were kh—repeating the sounds of the stick—and the loaf was t. When you translate hieroglyphs, you do it in two steps, the first of which renders the sounds of the hieroglyphs into a script that uses alphabetic signs. So the transliteration was —

“Djehutynakht’s coffin,” Wyatt announced. “What’s the first thing we need to figure out?”

“Which way the faces point in the signs,” a girl answered. “Because you read toward the faces.”

“Right. So in this case, the bird faces left, which means…?” He glanced at the girl.

“We’re reading the columns of text from left to right.”

“Exactly. Now, one of the reasons it took so long to decipher hieroglyphs is because they’re not purely phonetic or purely ideographic. It’s a mixture, with an additional sign type thrown in just to confuse you further—a determinative. Determinatives are like clues to give you information about the meanings of the words near them.”

The students crowded closer, squinting at the images on the exterior of Djehutynakht’s coffin. They were greenish blue, some standing out in stark relief against the strip of eggshell paint, others so faint they could barely be distinguished from the grain of the wood. “Who can find an ideogram?” Wyatt asked.

A kid beside him pointed to the thin canine figure perched on a pedestal. “The jackal.”

“Very good. The jackal is the god Anubis, or as an Ancient Egyptian would say, Inpu. The hieroglyph writes his name. But what comes before it?”

He underlined a series of signs with his fingertip on the glass.

It was one of the very first combinations of hieroglyphs I had ever learned, because it was so commonly seen.

“Hotep di nisu,” Wyatt read. “An offering the king gives on behalf of…?”

“Anubis,” said the boy who’d pointed to the jackal. “The god of embalming.”

“Right. He’s quite important for mummies,” Wyatt said, and then he grinned. “And daddies. What’s next? What are these four pots tied together?”

“The offerings are in them?” a student suggested.

“No, because it’s not an ideogram,” said another girl. “It’s a phonetic hieroglyph. The picture of the pots tied together writes the word khenet. It has nothing to do with pots. It’s just a cheat for writing three letters of the alphabet: khn-n-t.”

Wyatt’s eyebrows raised. “Well done.”

The girl’s cheeks flushed crimson. “That means so much coming from you!”

“Oh, dear God,” I said under my breath.

As he launched into another transliteration tutorial, I became transfixed by a model that had been found in Tomb 10A along with the coffins of the Djehutynakhts. Two weavers, carved of wood, were kneeling by a loom. The women in the front were spinning flax. Amazingly, after four thousand years, the threads of the flax and the loom were intact, the way they would have been the day they were set in the burial chamber, with the rest of the models and pottery and shabti statues.

“Time for a scavenger hunt,” Wyatt said, handing out a list of objects. “Pick a partner, you’ll be working in teams. The answers are somewhere in this exhibit. First pair to come back to me with pictures on their phone gets ten points on their next homework assignment. And…go!” He turned to me as the undergrads dispersed. “Was I that stupid once?”

“Do you really want me to answer that?” I said.

Wyatt wandered toward the coffins of the Djehutynakhts. “No,” he said. “But look at this.”

We both stood, hypnotized by the Book of Two Ways on the inner coffin of Governor Djehutynakht. There was the red rectangular door to the horizon. The blue water and black land routes through the Netherworld. The crimson line between them, a lake of fire. After so many years of studying this through pictures and drawings, I felt like I had reached the Holy Grail, only to find it locked inside a glass exhibit case.

“I wonder who first looked at that and thought it was a map,” Wyatt murmured.

“Well, the coffin wasn’t empty. It’s pretty clear that the deceased was meant to stand up and walk one of the two paths to reach the Field of Offerings.”

“Not to poke holes in your theory,” Wyatt said, “but this Book of Two Ways was on the wall of Djehutynakht’s coffin. So…that sort of disproves your point.”