The Forgotten Pharaoh

The Forgotten Pharaoh - Chapter 1

The time is almost up. Lately, that was Miss Lilliana Robinson's first thought every morning.

Being an Egyptologist had its downfalls. Time, being one of them. It's been 2 years and 10 months Mr. Browning had been sponsoring their search for a lost tomb. And he had drawn the line at 3 years. Almost a year ago, Lilliana visited him in London to beg for more time, a little more time, which meant, of course, more money. She knew Mr. Browning trusted her and her team, but after two years of intensive work and expense, nothing was found and it had taken its toll on him. And on her, if she was being completly honest. Even more on her group. Even so, after hours of convincing and her passionately talking about her research: she was so sure the tomb was there, she would find something, he'd agreed to give her team one more year, and that was it.

That had happened 10 months ago, and nothing changed. It was so strange to think that they had more success in the first month, finding little rocks that were certainly from the right period and seemed to be part of a construction, but since that, nothing else. Now, the time was almost up and she was so close to have to throw away all her life's research, all the sponsor's money without a single artifact to present. Not only her biggest major life research would end up in nothing, but also she would never get any sponsors again. And she couldn't blame them.

It's been 8 years. 8 years of intense research about what they translated as "The Lost Pharaoh." It has started once she visited the archives of a museum with Mr. Parker. She was still a high school student. While he was looking for a document from many years ago, an old scroll caught her attention. It wasn't as beautiful as the ones you'd see exposed in museums, probably the reason why it was forgotten down there. She wasn't as fluent reading hieroglyphics at that time, so Mr. Parker read to her. It told a story. A legend. She wondered how whoever had found it, didn't find it curious enough in the first place. But most artifacts like that would be left behind in benefit of studying mummies and gold objects.

The scroll narrated the story of a "Forgotten Pharaoh", or "the hidden one". His name was Sethkhemkare, he was of an older dynasty of the First Intermediate Period and, for what they could decipher, from a very rich reign. Even so, he ruled for around 9 or 10 years only. He was depicted as a bastard son of his predecessor. What made him not very popular. Despite it, the story mentioned his beauty, his wealth, and the jealousy that surrounded him.

The construction of a tomb started usually as soon as the pharaoh rouse to power, so did his. His tomb was described as the richest there was. The golden tomb. It had so much gold, it could found a new empire on the other side. All the objects that were usually in wood or other materials were in pure gold, even the walls. It was said the pharaoh committed a crime, or a treason. And so he was cursed. Then his family, his successor and his people decided to hide the tomb and erase all mention of him, so the curse would die with him, buried in his gold prison at 30 years old.

The problem is that hiding history is not as easy as it seems. People talk. People can't keep secrets. And as soon as Lily heard the story, many clues started to pop in front of her eyes, like magic. She found it all very intriguing, so she started researching his dynasty. It was very common to have gaps between reigns in which the ruler was unknown, or even pharaohs that they couldn't tell exactly the date of reign. But in this case, she found a lot of contradictory data around the dates of two particular reigns in that dynasty, which could mean the "forgotten pharaoh" reign was in between them. She also found scripts about his supposed successor's tomb. He had said to the constructors that he wanted a tomb as grandiose as his predecessor's which while studying it Lilly found wasn't grandiose at all. So he could, actually, be speaking of his true predecessor: "the forgotten pharaoh".

Lilly then took her research to Mr. Parker and explained it to him. He told her it was an unusual line of studies, but he gave her permission to go on with it. At that time, he probably thought it was just the crazy aspirations of teenager. Lilliana was 18 years old and had just started studying Egyptology at Cairo University. It took her five more years to gather information enough in order to reach a ground breaking discovery: the position of the tomb. She found mentions of star positions regarding the tomb and together with astronomers could pint point the location inside a square mile.