By Stephen Richter | 1:32 a.m.
During the summer of 1985 a fifteen year old boy went to Egypt and Israel, when he returned he was a man. I first laid my eyes on the Treasures of King Tutankhamen at the Ciaro museum with my father. The golden death-mask crowned with a cobra and a vulture had the countenance of a boy. We spent a month traveling from Cairo and Giza in the north to Luxor and Karnak in the south. I fell in love with a French girl on a midnight train. We crossed the Sahara desert beneath a full moon, to the Valley of the Kings. As that summer past, I learned more about the turmoil and challenges Tutankhamen faced being thrown into such an arena of giants. The clever and politically ambitious leaders of the military, the church, his advisors and family members all wanted to subvert his throne. When one is surrounded by people who truly wish you were dead and your name erased from history, one has to find a way to keep up appearances, to trudge through and keep going. Maybe bring people together, to do the best they can with their kingdom, that’s all Tutankhamen could do. Even at fifteen I could sympathize.
“May your Ka, your life force live. May you spend millions of years, oh you who love Thebes.” The inscription encircles the rim of a chalice that once belonged to King Tutankhamen. To fear things that have an end is human. As I stood in front of that same chalice at the De Young museum in San Francisco last Thursday, it was the humanity that struck me the most. In a dark treasure room full of gold and the people who had come to see it, I stopped and sat down. I sat on a bench with my wife in the corner, next to Tutankhamen’s chest plate. For a half hour we stayed there and the events of the years since Cairo washed over me. The good, the bad, the triumphs and tribulations, and I was grateful to be there, there with my wife at that instant on the timeline.
“It’s almost too personal for me,” said my wife, “I mean, you just know, you can tell he loved these things. They were precious to him.” We left with plenty of memorabilia, since I’d lost many of the things I’d brought back from Ciaro over the years. It’s been an amazing life. I’d hate to see it end and that’s human. The Egyptian Book of the Dead says, when we speak the names of the dead we make them live again. Leaving the city, I decided to take highway 1 back to Santa Cruz instead of the freeway.
“Tutankhamen,” I said.
We turned left at Half Moon Bay and headed south.
