[Newspoetry] ancient evenings in history news

[DL Emerick]

The story of King Tut is not over yet.
See Washington Post (May 11 2005, A12):
A New Look at King Tut 
Egyptian Pharaoh's Androgynous Features Noted by Teams Involved in Reconstruction
http://letters.washingtonpost.com/W4RH04D9C04F12BCBE17F3CE5A6140


Unlike almost all of the great figures of the Bible,
the real King Tut existed.  He wasn't some construct of quacking religious leaders, who needed lionized figures, and snaky villains, to form the proto-morality plays that the Bible collected, anagraphically.

Tutankhamen, pharaoh of Egypt's 18th dynasty, died around 1323 B.C. after a short and not particularly noteworthy career <<estimated age of 19 at death>>. His body was buried in a small tomb in Egypt's Valley of the Kings, near Luxor.

The real life King Tut, in short, was virtually unknown, even in his own country.  Today, everyone all around the world thinks of him as this exemplary king, because we see all the gold and treasures that the ancient Egyptians dumped on even the worst and the least of their leaders.

"My judgment of the skull at first was that it was female," Anderson said in a telephone interview. "It's amazing how feminine he looks."  (Only the masculine jaw persuades us the body is male... every other facial feature is female...  but the label on the box says King, so King it is...))

Sounds to me, non-expert that I am, as if someone in the mummy room swapped in a corpse for a king.  So, who is the woman who is buried in King Tut's coffin, and what did they do with the king?  What I mean is, how do they know the rest of the body is not female, down to its very last molecule?  (If, that is, molecules have a sex.)

******************


Before a pyramid crouched a lion
or what looked like a nosy lion,
paws splayed forward in rest,
a turbaned headpiece on brow,
carved in stone, and recarved
by generations of labor units,
who called themselves the people
of the underworld and its river.

They began to build, further south,
their first heaps of stone shapes,
but those collapsed, caving in,
settling down, squashing ghods.

Their engineers got higher degrees,
surveyed the wrecks and learned
how massive a civil engineering
needed to be to serve a ghod
who must live out eternity.

Everything must be better planned,
all of society must be transformed,
so that the shallowness of life
shall build the deepest of graves.

A mountain of stone shall rise here,
before this crouching guarding lion,
and we shall work some narrow caves,
as corridors through these stones,
as we stack them, block by block,
layer by layer ever higher, higher,
so Ayn Rand's Atlas will soon laugh,
how high and mighty a man can be,
when he is lofted over all others,
on the high top of walls of stones.

This crushing would be excruciating
to later generations of Christians,
who raped and robbed the many tombs,
sacked and desecrated ghodly graves,
effacing from history their names,
their faces, their languages lived.

But, the little known much ignored,
the insignificant Tut him(her)self
now stepped forth to save the glory
of all those grandeur greater kings.

Oh, Muses of history, tell us no lies
if no truth is ever to be said,
the greatest are great when dead,
and greater you become when he dies,
the last man on earth who may know,
it was all and only ever a show.