Archeology hits different.
After deciding to settle permanently in Italy, Atem has to do something he has never done before: build a normal life.
He has nothing usable in the modern world: no formal education, no registered identity.
With Seto’s help, he manages to obtain forged documents — but that is not enough.
To pay rent and maintain his independence, Atem is forced to accept menial work. This is how his job career at McDonald’s begins, the only place where no one is really interested in the details of your résumé and no specific qualifications are required.
He discovers the weight of long shifts and the narrow margin he has each month just to get by, the complete opposite of his former life as a pharaoh.
It is a necessary passage, not a fall: a time in which he observes, learns how this world works, and above all decides what his purpose in the modern world is.
Seeing Martina go to university every day makes him reflect.
He understands that the only way to give meaning to his existence is to study.
Political science would have been the most obvious choice for him: power, structures, administration — a language he knows better than any other.
But Atem does not want to return to ruling, neither directly nor symbolically.
His “mission” now is very different: he represents the only direct connection to antiquity, and therefore his task is to bring to humanity the knowledge of his time — the real one.
His duty is to preserve, understand, and intervene in Egyptological knowledge, and to give the world notions that no person born in the year 2000 could ever access.
That is why he chooses to enroll in Cultural Heritage at the University of Pisa, following the curriculum in Egyptology and the Ancient Near East, which hosts the oldest Egyptology chair worldwide, with a program unique within the Italian academic landscape and recognized internationally.
Atem naturally speaks Ancient Egyptian; he can read both hieroglyphs and hieratic. He has lived the life of the Bronze Age firsthand. The New Kingdom is his “home”, and he knows it better than anyone else in the world. It could only be his destiny.
However, there are also aspects of his world that he does not know.
Even for him, concepts such as the Naqada Culture, the Predynastic Period, the Old and Middle Kingdoms, or figures like Ramesses II, Psammetichus I, or the Ptolemies are unfamiliar.
Studying becomes a way to fill in what he was never able to know, and to rediscover himself directly.
His academic path also includes the Greek, Roman, and medieval worlds, as well as prehistory — because an archaeologist never works in isolation, and the past is never compartmentalized.
Living in Lunigiana, Atem begins to take an interest in the territory around him.
He wants to understand the land he now lives in, one of the oldest inhabited regions in Italy.
Thus, in his second year (in 2027), while preparing for his elective course in Prehistoric Archaeology, he comes into contact with the Statue Stele of Lunigiana and the Copper Age cults at the Museum of Statue Stele in Pontremoli.
And this is where this scene takes place.
Atem is genuinely involved because, for the first time, a university exam touches something sacred for him: solar cults — not from his own time, but from the Copper Age — outside Egypt and outside his personal history.
Anthropomorphic figures carved five thousand years ago, bearing clear symbolic, cosmic, and — in some cases — solar references, created by populations that had no writing systems, no kingdoms, no pharaohs.
And yet, they had already developed a complex form of sacrality, rooted in the body, in stone, and in the cycle of the sun, very similar to that of the New Kingdom.
Martina’s remark about Atenism is meant precisely to provoke him, because it is evident that next to the Statue Stele he feels at ease, almost legitimized.
The chronological detail emerges: 3rd millennium BC.
Those statues precede Atem’s birth by almost two thousand years.
The remark works on two levels: it reminds him that structured cultures already existed outside Egypt, and at the same time confronts Atem with something that is older even than himself.
And it is here that his thoughts automatically slip toward his father.
The sun — Aten — always leads Atem there.
His father, Akhenaten, certainly did not ignore the existence of earlier solar cults, but no one had ever pushed them to such an absolute, obsessive, and political level as he did.
It is a bitter observation, delivered lightly: Atem recognizes how rigid and fanatical his father was, and how much softer, more intimate, and more human his own relationship with Aten is.
