So back when I was much younger and much newer, I took a class at UChicago on ancient Egypt. This was so exciting for me, especially because UChicago has an extensive collection of artifacts from the ancient Near East – which meant that we got to learn using actual artifacts.
It wasn’t that unusual for us to be sent off to the Oriental Institute to translate something as homework, and one of the things I remember vividly was this (partially restored) fragment of a tomb wall.
In ancient Egypt, names were important, and so was memory. The continued existence of the soul was associated with the continued existence and memory of a person’s name, which is one reason why we have all of these beautiful carved monuments to this day. They wanted to write their names down. They wanted to be remembered. They knew that they could live forever as long as they lived in one person’s memory.
But tombs are expensive. They take a lot of time, a lot of resources, a lot of work. It’s a lot easier to just scratch out one person’s name and replace it with your own. A lot of memorials were repurposed in this way, sometimes because they were actively trying to erase one person’s memory and sometimes simply in an effort to maintain their own. So there was a very real anxiety about tomb desecration and name erasure that comes up again and again and again.
That was what we’d learned about in class that day, but I didn’t know why this wall fragment was our homework until I finished translating it.
I remember sitting there, huddled over my notebook as I crouched on the floor of the OI, sixteen years old and just beginning to learn the world. I remember painstakingly copying the inscription and then translating it to the best of my ability. And then I remember giggling as quietly as I could, not wanting to bother the other guests, when I realized it basically said, “HAHA, I MADE IT SO YOU CAN’T ERASE THIS.”
You see, he’d invented a technique that involved filling the carvings with a certain kind of colored paste. It was very, very difficult to completely remove – and he was right. No one had managed to do it.
I remember sitting there on the floor and laughing and thinking to myself that humans don’t change, not really. We don’t ever, ever change. Our beliefs might and our goals might, but people? Our souls can traverse millennia.
Because over four thousand years had passed but I still felt this odd connection to a man whose pride in his own ingenuity had made me laugh.
This all happened around fifteen years ago and I no longer remember how to read this wall. But you know what I do remember? His name.
I remember you, Nefermaat.
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