June 21, 2008

It’s been hectic, but I’ve been in Cairo for three days after managing to collect the research and materials we needed to start working on the new site. The Cult of the Phoenix book has been most informative. Burton, for all his eccentricities (such as the footnotes dominating every page so that the text becomes miniscule), knew what he was talking about. I took his advice and used a muggle Total Station Transit after the standard magical scope blew up on day one. Yes, blew up. It was extremely embarrassing. However, no one was injured- all it did was disturb a little sand. Apparently the magical energies of the site conflicted with the scope that would normally be used to make a map of the area. No wonder the muggles who stumbled on the place had to go to the Imhotep Insitute of Healing. I may have to write to the head healer there and ask what exactly happened to them.

It took much longer to get an accurate map with the muggle tool, but we finally achieved success after a few days. The dials on that thing are the most frustrating

I will be taking Burton’s notes much more seriously from now on. It’s a shame he didn’t live long enough to finish his studies on the first Cult of the Phoenix site.

June 23, 2008

Excavation is slow. The magical tools I brought continue to go haywire. We have had to resort to using simple charms that just aren’t made to do the same thing. One of the crew members, Michelle, gave me such a look when I asked her to pick up a shovel and do it the muggle way (her charms were endangering everyone in the vicinity). I told her she needed to adjust or go home. This hadn’t been easy for me, either, and I’ve already received an owl from the Project Manager asking me why I haven’t uncovered anything yet. There’s only so long that I can explain about the layers of magic on this place before he starts questioning my qualifications.

June 30, 2008

We’re finally getting somewhere. With crude wandwork, shovels, trowels, and something called a bucket augur (used for deeply buried deposits), we have an entrance to one of the tombs. Everyone was so excited, I let the crew off work one hour early so they could go out drinking. They’re young, some fresh out of school, so I really can’t blame them. As for myself, the celebrations will have to wait. These strange hieroglyphics that circle around the opening- it looks like Burton was correct on another fact- the cult definitely thrived in the first intermediate period. It was a very unstable time, when pharaohs fought for rule, economy dwindled, and famine was a huge concern. Many turned to Osiris, taking comfort in their belief of resurrection. The Phoenix cult did the same, but used their own pantheon of gods. They, however, cut themselves off from the rest of the Egyptian world and managed to find wealth and prosperity… who did they trade with, I wonder? What spells did they use to make the soil so fertile? Did phoenixes really fill the fountains with their tears, or was that just a popular motif on tomb walls?

I need to decipher the hieroglyphics before we venture further into the tomb. It will be a long night.

July 2, 2008

It’s lucky that I deciphered the hieroglyphs. The warning was obvious:

Let those who disturb this tomb suffer a slow and painful life. May all their wounds fester, their blood congeal, and their faces grow lined and ugly with age. May they never reach the afterlife or be reborn. May the Great Phoenix in the sky forsake them.

Cheery, no? Even cheerier: there were curses embedded within the ideograms. Curses that would make a person break out in boils, suffer internal bleeding, or be plagued by flesh-eating scarabs. I managed to cast nullifying spells over the existing ones, but I have to reinforce the spells every few days or so. It’s a temporary solution, obviously.

Burton has said that he’s had to manually re-carve and repaint some hieroglyphs to render them harmless, but… I hesitate to go that far. I want to preserve what’s there. I also don’t want to deal with researchers sending me howlers, hoping to discredit me and steal my the site.

July 3, 2008

Cave-in today, right at the entrance of an unusual side chamber. Two badly injured. Morale low. I told everyone to take a few days off. I have to focus and figure out what’s causing such instability in an otherwise solid structure.

I hope it's not   I don't want it to be...


(More hastily scribbled out thoughts below)

July 8, 2008

I'm afraid the curses caused the cave-in, but the two crew members are on the road to recovery and I've replaced them (for now) with a few eager local researchers. I've also finally found a way to completely nullify the spells at the tomb's entrance. Not surprisingly, I had to figure out how the cult casted all the layers of spells first to be able to undo them... it was like unraveling a complicated knot or erasing layers of an oil painting to find the initial colors used. Took me days, even with the help of respected Egyptologists.

More good news: We've cleared away the debris of the cave-in and opened one of the side chambers. It holds five mummified servants, presumably to serve the pharaoh in the afterlife. Paintings on the wall showed the five servants in various scenes from daily life: delivering food, assisting with transport, listening in on meetings. What an entourage. In this chamber there is also evidence of foodstuffs and materials the servants used everyday.

Like many typical paintings from this period, the servants were identified only by inscriptions because they all look very much the same and they're all depicted as young and healthy. In comparison to the Pharaoh, they are very small in scale and look more natural, less stiff. Heads in profile, one eye drawn in full, body in front, etc.

In one scene the Pharaoh has the head of a heron. This is rare, but I'm curious if we'll find more examples. I should note that Egyptian phoenixes look different from the popular depiction today. They were almost like an extinct form of large herons, with a grey, purple, blue or white body. Sometimes phoenixes were called Bennu birds, as well.


From a Papyrus scroll:

July 12, 2008

Found a very small chamber holding one mummy in a sarcophagus. No other artifacts are in the room besides the embalming jars. The studies we've done show that this man was close to 200 years old- an exceptionally long life for an ancient Egyptian wizard. However, unlike the other mummies, he appears aged with numerous health problems and diseases. There are no medicine vials, no sign of nutritious food.

The first painting on the tomb wall shows a scene of judgment, where the heart is weighed against a single feather (represents Ma'at, or the idea of truth, justice). The scales lean to one side and show that the heart is heavier than the feather. This means the heart was impure, unfit for the afterlife. Indeed, in the next scene the demon Ammit devours the heart in a most gruesome fashion. Because the heart was believed to be the organ of thought and emotion (not the brain, which was removed and discarded), the man did not get an afterlife. When he died, he simply ceased to exist. A grim fate. In both scenes, a phoenix is depicted hovering in the sky, watching over the judgment.

I wonder if this is their idea of punishment. A long life plagued by disease, and then a death with no afterlife.

I wish there was a scene showing what he did to deserve this. Unfortunately, there are just a lot of angry inscriptions, like "May the man's flesh rot, his eyeballs be eaten, fingers broken"... more cheeriness. This cult was full of cheer, no?

The phoenix watching over the Judgment scenes:

July 15, 2008

As we get deeper into the tomb and uncover more chambers, I've had to deal with plenty of creative curses and traps. I'm glad I hired a cursebreaker to help out, because I'm really much better at identifying and translating, not so good at the dispelling.

Still, there have been a few close calls, and the crew is starting to get nervous. Even worse, there's some kind of food poisoning going around, causing three people on my team to be sent to the hospital. The healers haven't been able to figure it out yet. Any food they eat just... sits in their stomachs. The digestive process has slowed down so much. It's awful. I'm losing valuable people and I have to admit I'm worried.

On a more positive note, the two workers caught in the cave-in have made a full recovery. One of them has headed home, deciding that this isn't for him, while the other has decided to get back to work. This is a relief, at least.

We found a chamber with a large sundial in the middle. It makes sense, because the Cult of the Phoenix was connected with the sun, the sun god Ra, and cycles of time. They also made use of lunar calendars and celpsydras (water clocks). Celypsdras, however, only measure short predetermined amounts of time, like the span of an hour, instead of what time of day it was. Sundials could tell the time of day by measuring the positions of shadows cast by the sun. Even older examples include obelisks, large vertical columns which cast shadows depending on where the sun is in the sky.

Some examples:


And an obelisk.

The scenes on the walls show the life cycle of the phoenix. First, it is shown flying out of a burning holy tree in the temple of Ra, representing the sun god's soul. Next, it's seen going through various tasks and responsibilities. The phoenix accompanies Ra during his passage on the sun boat each night, defeating Apep and bringing the sunrise each morning. He is shown flying over the Nile river, causing it to rise, so that the lands are fertile. When the phoenix cries, the tears are collected in special fountains for royalty. The second to last scene shows the phoenix watching over Osiris and the judgment that takes place at the end of each life. And finally, the phoenix builds its nest and burns to ashes, from which a new phoenix is born. This new phoenix embalms the ashes into an egg of myrrh and then flies to a city to deposit it. I suspect that the city refers to Heliopolis, or the city of the sun.

Burton has noted that in other paintings and carvings, the phoenix form is sometimes combined with the sun god Ra and the god of the afterlife, Osiris. At a later point the phoenix encompassed all these concepts: creation, growth, and death/the afterlife.

July 20, 2008

We've uncovered the Pharaoh's chamber.

I should be happier about our accomplishments, yet there's this... feeling I get. A hunch that something is wrong. The very air we breathe in the tomb is thick and cloying with dark magic. It's making our hearts heavy, makes it hard to even smile. Fights and arguments break out more often. Sometimes I think the crew resents me. I don't know why. I've been as careful as I can about every chamber, every warning and curse, every artifact we've come across. Even with pressure from news reporters and my project manager, I've proceeded carefully and kept the integrity of the site and its discoveries.

I don't know what I'm doing wrong.

The three crew members in Imhotep's Institute have become sicker. One has slipped into a coma. In addition, the person that I thought had recovered completely from the cave-in has been acting strange, irrational. Almost like he's possessed. The other one involved in the cave-in, the one who went home, has recently been arrested for attempted murder. How is this all a coincidence? It can't be. There must be something I'm missing.

The Pharaoh's chamber is everything I could have hoped it would be. There are sculptures, jewelry, elaborate chests, a throne, and representations of phoenixes in every form. The mummy inside the sarcophagus is the best preserved I've ever seen: dark hair covers his head, teeth are intact, face structure strong, solid bone mass. He holds a crude wand in his hand, which is still being analyzed.

Animals, as well, have been embalmed in this chamber: an ibis, crocodile, cat, falcon, and baboon. Even phoenix feathers have been preserved. It's very rare to find evidence of the phoenixes themselves, and yet, the feathers are proof.

A brightly colored painting on the wall depicts the the pharaoh as the god Ra, journeying on the sun boat with the phoenix to bring the sunrise in the morning:

July 31, 2008

An Egyptologist approached me today with something of interest: a small, pyramid shaped stone with hieroglyphs and phoenixes carved on the sides. He says its the Phoenix Cult's version of the Benben stone from the solar temple of Heliopolis.

The Benben stone:

They do look remarkably similar. In Egyptian mythology, the Benben was a mound created from the Nu waters, where the god Atum settled, turning it into a small pyramid. It's where the sun's rays first fell and where the phoenix makes its home. Some scholars believe that obelisks and the capstones of pyramids were based on the design of the Benben stone.

He's offering it to me for very little money, considering what it is. I told him I needed to think about it, check in with other scholars, and get back to him. He said he would be gone in two days, so I suppose that's my deadline.

A second crew member at the hospital has slipped into a coma. The healers are baffled.

August 1, 2008

I have decided to purchase the Phoenix stone. The few scholars I've consulted with today have told me that it seems genuine. If it is, this is an amazing find. If not, I didn't pay all that much for it anyway.

The Egyptologist was thrilled when I took it off his hands. Strange fellow...

August 5, 2008

Everything happened so fast. Jeremy (the crew member from the cave-in) attacked his bunkmate last night, nearly killing him. Sabine, the worker who first slipped into a coma, has died. Two minutes. These incidents happened two minutes apart from each other.

Funding has been cut off. I have to go home. Got the letter from the project manager this morning. It's only with a fair amount of manipulation and bribes that I've convinced the research center to take some artifacts with me for further study.

There's not much time but here's a-





Merlin, I'm being escorted off of the site. Like some criminal! Will finish la-

August 6, 2008

The list of artifacts I've taken with me:

• 1 sundial. Locked compartment inside.
• 1 bust of the Pharaoh.
• The Pharaoh's wand.
• 2 jars- 1 embalmed cat, 1 falcon.
• 9 papyrus scrolls.
• 1 ceremonial dagger.
• 1 phoenix stone, purchased.
• 1 elixir.
• 2 vials of unidentified potions.