Page 55 of Tomb of the Sun King

“Then we inspired him to throw down his rod,” Mrs. Al-Ahmed recited quietly. “And it swallowed their illusions. It is in our book, too.”

A chill danced across Ellie’s skin that defied the warmth of the night, and she remembered black stone smooth as water and the scarred face of a ghost.

“I’ve seen…felt,” she corrected herself, “what an arcanum can do.” She raised her eyes to the rest of them. “I can’t let them find this one.”

“This is madness,” Neil announced, looking at them all with a dazed, shocked expression. “All of you are mad.”

“Where do we start?” Constance eagerly rubbed her hands together.

“How about with the ring?” Ellie looked pointedly at her brother.

Neil’s face was drawn, but his hand moved automatically to the pocket of his battered tweed waistcoat. He pulled out the electrum ring, and the others gathered around him—all but Adam, who remained by the window, and Mrs. Al-Ahmed, who watched in thoughtful silence from her chair.

“So these hieroglyphs spell the name Moseh,” Constance mused. “Which sounds an awful lot like Moses.”

“MosesisMoseh,” Neil grumbled. “It’s an Egyptian name—Moseh. We’re the ones who say it wrong.”

“To the Arabs, he is Musa,” Mr. Al-Ahmed offered. “For the Hebrews, Moshe.”

“It means ‘son of,’ and is generally preceded by the name of a patron deity,” Ellie added with a pointed look at her brother. “It’s an Egyptian nameelement,”

“Not when the rest of the name has been blanked out,” Mr. Al-Ahmed noted distractedly, studying the ring as Neil held it out in the lamplight.

“It’s been blanked out because it’s Atenist,” Neil declared.

He shoved himself off the sofa with a new energy, pacing the room with the ring in his hand. “I knew it! Iknewthe connection would be there! But of course, she would have had to downplay it—to pretend loyalty to the regime that was defacing Akhenaten’s image from the walls of every temple from here to Aswan. But how could we not find some evidence of her continued sympathy for the cult that had been of such vital interest to her beloved…”

Neil trailed off as he realized the rest of the room had gone silent. Ellie was fighting to suppress a smile.

Constance arched an eyebrow. “You realize your sister is possibly the only other person in the room who knows what you’re talking about,” she pointed out, and then caught herself. “And Mr. Al-Ahmed, I should imagine.”

Mr. Al-Ahmed had carefully removed the jewelry box from his tool case, unwrapping it from the white froth of Constance’s scarf. He flashed her an indulgent smile before peering down once more at the inscription.

Ellie waded into the breach, as Neil was rotten at providing simple explanations for his favorite historical topics.

“Throughout the history of Egypt, the Egyptians worshiped an extensive pantheon of deities,” she explained. “There were sun gods and moon gods, gods that oversaw childbirth, gods of vegetation and farming, gods of death—”

“Loads of gods,” Constance said, sitting up straight and looking the part of the eager student. “Got it.”

“Then midway through the Eighteenth Dynasty, along comes a pharaoh named Akhenaten,” Ellie started.

“Actually, at the time he was made co-regent, he was Amenhotep IV,” Neil interrupted her quickly. “It was only after his father, Amenhotep III, had passed to the Field of Reeds that—”

“Akhenaten,” Ellie continued deliberately, cutting him short, “worshiped only one god—the Aten. As I mentioned back in the tomb, the Aten had originally been a relatively obscure form of the god of the sun, represented by the solar disk. But when Akhenaten became the sole king, he made the Aten the preeminent god of all of Egypt. A few years later, he went even further. He ruled that the Aten wasn’t just the most important of all the gods—it was theonlygod.”

“What did he do—outlaw all the others?” Constance suggested.

“No,” Neil replied defensively. He caught himself, his tone shifting. “I mean—possibly. It’s not entirely clear. But whatisclear is that Akhenaten proclaimed the Aten not just as the chief among the gods, but as theonly true godin existence.”

“You have to understand how revolutionary this was,” Ellie jumped in to explain. “This was thousands of years before the emergence of Judaism. The people who would later become the Israelites weren’t monotheists at this point in history. Their Yahweh was a tribal god—one that they thought was superior to all others, but his rivals were no less real than he was. It was only much later that the likes of Baal and Asherah came to be thought of as demons instead of deities. Akhenaten was the first person that we know of in history to say that there was onlyone.”

“‘Oh sole god, like whom there is no other,’” Neil recited, “‘you created the world according to your desire, while you were alone.’”

A shiver flashed over Ellie’s skin at the sound of Neil’s solemn words.

“What’s that from?” Adam pressed, frowning. “Psalms?”

“Ha!” Neil declared triumphantly. “One might think so, but it’s from The Hymn to the Aten, written by Akhenaten himself!”

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