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[b]Dier el-Bahari, January 12 1847[/b]

Sand and debris were being cleared out of the old necropolis, a site of the Ancient Egyptian civilization long forgotten by the current inhabitants of the land, who didn’t even claim to be its heirs. An old Coptic monastery, abandoned for at least several decades, had also been demolished in order to unearth ‘pagan’ artifacts on his orders, pagan artifacts that to a scion of the Enlightenment like him, were worth more than ‘current’ superstitions. 

Who was he, by the way? Well, the great Jean-Agustin Pierrot, friend of the new Sultan of Egypt and unofficial head of the ‘Egyptologist’ community which lived in this new country, providing specialist knowledge and intellectual credibility to the current regime in exchange for being allowed to sate their passion for the very distant past, for the ancient civilizations which were [i]more fascinating[/i] than the current mundane ones.

Pierrot was different even from the others, though, in that he was believed to regard his own civilization as boring. Superior to others, certainly, but still boring. And what was surprising was that these allegations were completely true - His Egyptomania had advanced to the point where he genuinely believed the ancients to possess greater wisdom and greater happiness than the people of today, so burdened by their cares and their focus on worldly wealth. 

Not that he’d voice it out loud, though.

Anyway, why was he clearing out this old necropolis, and the magnificent ancient pagan temple which showed signs of being defaced even in the ancient past? Well, he had a hypothesis - The defacements, which occurred in the time of Thutmose III, who, to the surprise of people who still thought that ‘Scripture’ was an accurate source of history, had [i]occupied Palestine[/i] when the Israelites were supposed to have been -

His heresy was interrupted by a messenger, a soldier from the contingent of troops Sultan Sa’id had dispatched to guard the archeological dig site from the surge of malcontents which regarded all Westerners as ‘Kaffir’. As the somewhat portly, balding Frenchman turned to the soldier - A callow youth barely out of boyhood, by his reckoning, and asked in halting Arabic, “What is it?”, he waited for bad news.

Thankfully, it was nothing of the sort… If one were actually attached to the mundane world of politics. For the youth’s message, given in Turkish (which Pierrot understood better than Arabic) was:

“You are being asked to attend a feast with the Sultan in Alexandria; the British and French Ambassadors are also invited and so will those of the Dutch and Austrians and the Americans. They all want to hear about your hypothesis about a… Female Pharaoh?” said the youth.

For this was Pierrot’s intended contribution to Egyptology, to prove that the builder of the temple he was unearthing belonged to a [i]Female King[/i], one who was so offensive to her successor that he had her name cut out from her own temple. There were even proofs in the very interior of the building, of the name [i]’Hatshepsut’[/i] being placed in cartouches - The symbol of a Pharaoh's special status - in chambers where no eye was intended to see and which thus were spared the vandalism.

“What game is your new Sultan playing?” he asked, “Shouldn’t he be sending an ambassador to Austria right now or playing soldier to quell rebels?”

The soldier revealed himself to be slightly more intelligent than expected when he said, “He has already sent [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rifa%27a_al-Tahtawi]Rifa’a al-Tahtawi[/url] as his ambassador to the Austrians, with instructions to convey Egypt’s peaceful intentions towards everybody, its commercial affinity with Britain, and its desire to emulate France’s [i]culture[/i]... Or so I heard from my superiors.”

[i]How pert,[/i] Pierrot thought. [i]So this is what the new initiative to educate soldiers produces.[/i]

His next words were, “How could I refuse? Tell the Sultan I will begin packing up. In the meantime, I ask for more soldiers to be sent to protect this place - I heard that rebel activity is picking up even here…”

[i]Typical, I am being used for a public relations exercise…[/i]

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