The Beadnet Dress

  The Beadnet Dress

  A Tale of Ancient Egypt

  Mark L. Gajewski

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  This book is a work of fiction. Its contents are wholly imagined.

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  Copyright @2018 by Mark L. Gajewski.

  Table of Contents

  2571 BC: 12th Regnal Year of Khnum–Khufu

  2570 BC: 13th Regnal Year of Khnum–Khufu

  2569 BC: 14th Regnal Year of Khnum–Khufu

  2568 BC: 15th Regnal Year of Khnum–Khufu

  2567 BC: 16th Regnal Year of Khnum–Khufu

  2567 to 2566 BC: 16th and 17th Regnal Years of Khnum–Khufu

  2571 BC: 12th Regnal Year of Khnum–Khufu

  Maetkra

  I entered a magnificent banquet hall, brightly lit by dozens of flickering lamps, its plastered walls colored with amazing images of the king and dozens of gods, its air fragrant with the scent of flowers and incense and perfume. Where else could the hall be but inside the king’s per’aa, his royal residence? Comely young serving girls in white skirts circulated among a host of men and women, bearing platters laden with mouth–watering foodstuffs and jars brimming with wine. The women were gorgeous, their dresses marvelous – blindingly white, sheer, clinging – their brows and throats and waists and wrists bedecked with jewelry of gold and turquoise and carnelian and crystal. Who could they be but the wives and daughters of the king and his favored courtiers? Just ahead of me a tall woman with long honey–colored hair paused in the doorway. She’d been noticed. By absolutely everyone. All conversation in the hall instantly ceased. Then came gasps. Women were staring at her, shocked, awed, whispering urgently to each other. Her dress was unlike any other woman’s in the hall – a fisherman’s net, except instead of rope the strands were made of thousands of glittering beads of faience and turquoise and carnelian and gold. I’d never seen any dress so exotic, so original, so daring.

  I awakened with a start. An hour before dawn and the heat was already stifling inside the small house Papa and I shared in the village King Khufu had erected for his pyramid workers on the floodplain at the base of the Giza plateau. I lay still for a moment, basking in the afterglow of the all–too familiar dream, replaying it in my mind. I still remembered the first night I’d had it, in the workers’ village at Dahshur, a year before Khufu succeeded his father Sneferu and Papa and I moved along with thousands of other skilled workers to Giza. The dream had visited me regularly thereafter and had never once varied in the slightest. I reached beside my bed and touched a leather pouch on the floor, crammed with images of the magnificent dresses I’d sketched on ostraca from memory, their linen sheer or opaque or finely pleated, softly hugging curves and indentations. I’d told Papa about my dream once. I’d never seen him so excited. According to him the falcon god – my family’s god from ancient times – had been sending similar dreams to my ancestors for thousands of years, dreams to guide their lives, and every one had come true. He’d told me my dream meant that someday I’d be one of the king’s courtiers and attend banquets in his per’aa. Papa’s claim was far–fetched, though he believed it with his whole heart. I was only a lowly seamstress, laboring like everyone else in the valley in service to King Khufu, helping create his mighty pyramid. But I fervently wished my dream would come true. I longed to escape the drudgery and anonymity of the pyramid village and improve my life. What better place to do that than in King Khufu’s household?

  I rose from my bed, a thick pad of linen filled with straw covering a low mud–brick bench abutting a wall. Papa stirred momentarily on the other side of the small room that served as both our living and sleeping quarters, then fell back asleep, breathing deeply. My two older cousins, Ak and Userbat, were lying on woven reed mats on the floor beside him, indistinct shapes in the dark, snoring. They’d arrived yesterday from Aunt Inhopy’s and Uncle Pedubast’s farm several days travel upriver near King Sneferu’s pyramid at Meidum, anticipating the beginning of the annual inundation that would soon flood the entire valley from plateau to plateau, making farming impossible. For three months they, and tens of thousands of other farmers, would work on King Khufu’s pyramid here at Giza, labor they owed the king to whom everything in the valley belonged. As usual, they’d arrived a few days earlier than the rest of the temporary workers so Papa, an assistant to an overseer in charge of receiving and unloading stone at the king’s harbor, could arrange jobs for them that didn’t involve dragging large blocks across the dusty desert plateau, the fate of every other farmer from their locale. As in years past, he’d assigned them to the work gang named “Khufu’s Docking Places are Magnificent.”

  Papa did it as a favor to his only sister; my cousins were both lazy and the overseer of their zau, or work group, had to monitor them all day long so they wouldn’t disappear. I dreaded the next three months. I’d spend every evening fending off their advances, for they stayed in my house instead of with the rest of the farmers in dormitories in one of the other workers’ villages or temporary camps that flanked the canal joining Giza’s harbor to the river. My cousins were both obsessed with me and had been ever since I’d become a woman five years ago. Userbat’s advances were understandable; he was twenty, three years older than me, anxious to marry. But Ak was twenty–four, with a wife and two daughters and a son. I was too embarrassed to tell Papa how much I hated being around them, and why. He seemed oblivious to their fixations.

  I pushed my cat off the linen skirt at the foot of my bed. I slipped into it, quietly tiptoed barefoot across the smooth dirt floor, rolled up the reed mat covering the doorway and tied it to the lintel. I stepped outside into our small courtyard edged by high walls of mud–brick. A band of stars shone like a river in the black sky and by its light I made my way to an open–air hearth in a corner of the yard.

  I placed straw and other tinder atop a few barely–glowing coals in the ashes of the cook fire and fanned the fuel to flame, then added larger acacia sticks. Soon light and shadow danced on the courtyard walls. I carefully set two conical earthenware bread molds, one inside the other, in the fire, then went back into the house. Pots filled with barley and emmer and beans and onions were clustered together on the floor in a corner atop a thick bed of ash I’d laid down to deter insects. I rummaged among them, then returned to the hearth laden with leftover soured pastry to use as starter, plus small containers of emmer and water and milk. Meals were prepared for the king’s workers during the day at massive cooking areas a little south and east of my village, but I always made the bread for Papa’s breakfast. I loosely braided my long dark hair to keep it out of the way, then knelt before a broad flat stone and, using a quern, laboriously ground the emmer into flour. Finished, I wiped sweat from my brow with my forearm, then mixed the starter and flour and water and a bit of milk and a few flavorful spices in a large earthenware container – I knew how to make thirty–five separate kinds of bread and today’s combination was Papa’s favorite. By the time the dough was ready the molds were sufficiently hot. I removed the inner mold and set its pointed end in a hole in the ground next to the hearth. Then I poured the dough into the mold. After that I set the second mold upside down atop the first and shoveled coals around them. That done, I prepared a gruel of grain and milk and flavoring in another earthenware pot, then placed it on the remaining coals in the hearth to cook.

  I climbed a steep narrow flight of mud–brick step
s to our star–lit roof, which was lined on all four sides by a knee–high wall. Vine–laden trellises greened the portion of the wall overlooking the courtyard, some bearing flowers, others fruit. I moved to the corner of the roof, in the angle formed by the north and west outer walls of the workers’ village, for my house was at the extreme edge of its half–mile long rectangle. I faced east, where a few scattered cookfires in several similar permanent workers’ villages and temporary camps much closer to the river were all that relieved the impenetrable darkness.

  I scanned the sky and spotted brilliant Sopdet making its brief expected appearance in this last hour before sunrise, outshining every other star. I rested my forearms on the wall and leaned over, wondering if it had been this hot seventeen summers ago in King Sneferu’s workers’ village at Dahshur when Mother died bringing me into the world. Today marked that anniversary, the beginning of Akhet, the flood season that annually renewed the narrow plains on both sides of the river the entire length of the valley and brought bounty to our land. That Mother had died and I’d been born at the very moment of the land’s rebirth had always seemed to me both magical and awful, as if both of us had a special connection to the great cycle that ordered the universe.

  The sheer dark rocky face of the escarpment that marked the eastern end of the Giza plateau, looming nearly ninety feet above the floodplain a few paces west of where I was standing, cut off my view in that direction. I knew that half a mile or so west of the escarpment’s edge a great pyramid, Akhet Khufu, “The Horizon of Khufu,” had been rising for the past ten years. The king had laid its cornerstone two years after he succeeded his father Sneferu. During the two years between coronation and cornerstone the king’s engineers had erected the workers’ villages and an administrative village they’d named Akhet Khufu after the pyramid, excavated a harbor in the floodplain and connected it to the river with a narrow canal, opened quarries, and precisely leveled the plateau’s hard stone where the pyramid would stand, just a couple of hundred feet from where the plateau’s northern edge abruptly dropped to the plain below. A ramp made of tafla clay and heavy lengths of wood laid perpendicularly across it at regular intervals angled up the pyramid’s south side now. Halfway up that face, the ramp swept to the pyramid’s west side and climbed even higher. Several thousand workers labored on that ramp each day, moving and setting in place three hundred forty very large blocks of stone. The pyramid was already two–thirds complete, towering almost three hundred feet above the plateau; finishing the final third was expected to take ten more years, for while significantly fewer blocks would be needed the structure would be less accessible, unable to accommodate as many workers as it had when the base was wide and low. The pyramid would ultimately be topped with a golden capstone to reflect sunlight for miles up and down the valley between dawn and sunset. The sides of the pyramid, clad with fine–grained white limestone quarried ten miles upriver at Tura, would gleam. I always looked upon that cladding stone with pride – Papa was responsible for unloading the king’s large cargo boats that transported it to Giza’s harbor, as well as the granite and other types of stone from quarries in the western desert and in the valley as far south as the cataract that was being used to construct the pyramid’s internal chambers and passageways.

  Akhet Khufu would be a miraculous structure when complete, the largest building on earth, half again the size of King Sneferu’s Red Pyramid at Dahshur. Until I was five years old that pyramid and its companion, the strange Bent Pyramid, had dominated the desert near my house in the workers’ village of my birth; Papa had worked on both. For years Papa had been telling me about Akhet Khufu when we gathered beside our fire in the courtyard or on the roof at night after dinner – the mysterious chamber carved deep into the limestone bedrock that pointed to the never–setting stars; the steep passageways inside the pyramid that climbed to a serdab chamber and burial chamber high up in the structure, their inner walls, ceilings and floors composed of smooth pink granite from near the cataract; the soaring grand gallery of polished limestone with a corbelled roof; the stacked chambers that distributed the pyramid’s internal weight; the decorated pink granite sarcophagus already in place awaiting the body of the king; the mysterious shafts with openings on the face of the pyramid that served purposes known only to priests. The king’s architects had drawn upon everything engineers had learned in the decades they’d experimented while constructing King Sneferu’s three pyramids, making Khufu’s perfect in every way. The effort at Giza was operating at peak efficiency, Papa said, drawing on resources from every section of the valley, utilizing the talents of a second and third generation of workers who’d labored on Sneferu’s pyramids and those of his predecessors, and overseers with both ability and experience.

  No matter how often I looked at the pyramid it never failed to awe and inspire me. Ever since the building of King Netjeryket’s Step Pyramid at Saqqara a century earlier, according to Papa, preparing for the royal burial had been the focus of the entire land. The nonstop activity on the Giza plateau was proof. The pyramid would lift King Khufu to the never–setting stars upon his death – or perhaps the sun. Belief in Re, the midday aspect of the sun god, had evolved from a local into a national phenomenon some two centuries ago, when King Raneb, second of a new line of rulers who’d taken the throne after Horus Narmer’s line died out, included the god’s name in his own. Worship of Re had expanded significantly during King Netjeryket’s reign and the following decades, though it hadn’t come close yet to overtaking belief in the older gods. According to Papa, the high priest of Re, Iryiry, had recently announced that King Khufu was the reincarnation of Re. Apparently that hadn’t pleased the Ptah priesthood, the land’s largest and wealthiest. King Khufu himself considered Khnum to be his protector–god, along with the god of the Giza plateau, and the goddess Hathor.

  Someday, after King Khufu died, this entire Giza plateau would be devoted to his cult, for the pyramid was just one component of his funerary complex. A limestone wall would surround the pyramid. A mortuary temple edging the eastern side of that wall would be connected to a valley temple abutting the harbor by a quarter–mile long roofed stone causeway – the Ceremonial Way. The harbor, currently being used for delivery of foodstuffs and materials and supplies, would remain when construction ended, filled to the brim by the river during the annual inundation, its level much lower the rest of the year. When the king died his body would be taken from his per’aa – either here at Giza or at Ineb–hedj, “White Walls,” if he moved his court back to the traditional capital a few miles to the south after his pyramid was completed – down the river to the valley temple on a royal barque. After the sacred ceremonies there his body would be carried up the Ceremonial Way to his mortuary temple for the Opening of the Mouth ceremony. King Khufu’s body would then be moved into the pyramid and laid in his sarcophagus inside the burial chamber, which would be sealed by heavy stone blocks. The barque would be disassembled and buried in a pit beside the pyramid for the king’s use in the next life, along with several others. Those of us who remained behind on the plateau to service his cult would make up a community of kas, or souls.

  The eastern horizon was beginning to lighten. Though I couldn’t see them because of the escarpment, I assumed fires were twinkling to life near the exit of the quarry at the southern end of the construction ramp. That quarry, curving in a long arc and so far excavated more than one hundred feet deep into bedrock, was the source of the stone that made up the interior of the pyramid. The fires daily heated vast amounts of gypsum, the mortar that workers poured into the spaces between the irregularly–sized blocks and debris that made up the pyramid’s core.

  I turned my attention to the east. From my vantage point I had an unobstructed view of the entire floodplain. The flat rooftops of my village were dotted with plants and trellises and a few solitary goats. Just beyond its eastern wall, abutting Ro–She Khufu – Giza’s waterway complex of harbor and canal – sprawled Akhet Khufu, the king’s administrative vill
age. The north end of Akhet Khufu edged the southwest corner of a large roughly–rectangular harbor that extended more than one thousand feet from north to south. The king’s valley temple was being constructed at its northwest corner. Someday the Ceremonial Way would link that temple to the pyramid itself. Looking north from my roof, I had a clear view of the partially–completed foundation that would raise the causeway from river–level to the top of the escarpment.

  The harbor was currently crammed with boats either anchored in its center or moored alongside numerous quays; at daylight those empty vessels would exit the harbor, bound for estates and quarries and supply depots the length of the valley to fetch materials and foodstuffs. More, fully laden, would enter and take their places, delivering the supplies that supported all of us who labored for the king. A canal cut by the king’s engineers connected the harbor to the great wide river, Iteru, that flowed from the Wadjet Wer – the sea – in the north to the cataract in the south, and beyond the cataract to lands unknown.

  Walled workers’ villages, consisting of both small houses and large dormitories of mud–brick, lay on both banks of the canal, making Giza, during the months of inundation when as many as forty thousand people labored here, the largest settlement in the entire world. Opposite the end of the canal, on the far side of the river, were stubble–covered fields dotted with small groves of palm and acacia trees, delimited by the face of the plateau that marked the beginning of endless desert.

  At the southern end of my village a narrow limestone outcrop jutted from the flats, marking the north side of a wadi that sliced upwards onto the plateau between the two great rock formations that met here at Giza, the Maadi and Mokkatam. Perhaps a tenth of mile south of the outcrop soared a long sweeping knoll; its crest afforded a marvelous view of the entire river valley and plateau. Its face had been partially quarried for smaller limestone blocks to construct fieldstone walls and ramps and embankments throughout the area. Nearly every day overseers occupied the knoll, observing and directing the activity at Giza. Sometimes the king himself sat atop that knoll, shaded from the hot sun by a linen pavilion.