The Golden Hour by Kate Lord Brown

Reviewed by Stephanie Williams

I must have been about thirteen when my imagination was first captured by Akhenaten, the legendary pharaoh who brought the revolutionary idea of one god to Egypt in the fourteenth century BCE.   His wife, rumoured to be his sister, was even more romantic:  the beautiful, powerful and mysterious Nefertiti.  

 

Bust of Nefertiti, Nofretete Neues Museum

My source was a wonderful historical novel by someone like Mary Renault, who I was devouring at the time — but it wasn’t … whatever the book was, it is long gone, leaving me with an enduring fascination with Egypt.  Last year, I was lucky enough to float down the Nile to see the Valley of the Kings and the temple of Karnak at Luxor — where, in the days when it was ancient Thebes, Nefertiti may once have walked.

‘Fair of face, great of charm,’ Nefertiti represented the female element of creation, while her husband was a living god — their source, the sun, worshipped by holding up a disc to the sun.  Through your prayers to them, you would have access to the true god. Together Akhenaten and Nefertiti overhauled the state’s religion, based on a pantheon of gods and their henchmen.  The king’s feet never touched the earth, their whole life, from daily worship, to the marital bed was a religious act. 

A house altar showing Akhenaten, Nefertiti and three of their daughters. 18th dynasty, reign of Akhenaten

After 17 years, Akhenaten died. What happened to Nefertiti afterwards is a matter of dispute.  Did Nefertiti rule briefly as a female pharaoh? Oversee the kingdom as regent? Akenhaten’s son – DNA testing suggest Nefertiti was not his mother -- was the legendary child pharaoh, Tutankhamun, whose golden sarcophagus has entranced millions around the globe.  He repudiated his father’s sun worship, and reinstated the old gods.  

 

When did she die?  One thing is certain, despite generations of strenuous efforts, her tomb has never been found.  

 

The quest to find Nefertiti’s tomb is the inspiration behind Kate Lord Brown’s new novel, The Golden Hour. 

Archaeologist Dr Lucie Fitzgerald has travelled to the Lebanon in March 1975, to visit her dying mother, Polly.  Beirut is emptying; it is the eve of the civil war. Polly, whose life has been consumed breeding Arabian horses on a farm west of Cairo, and after the war, outside Beirut, knows that it is time to tell her daughter the truth about her close friendship with Lucie’s godmother, Juno Munro.

 

The narrative weaves back and forth between 1975 Beirut and 1939 Cairo and the Valley of the Kings where Juno, an archaeologist, is part of a team searching for the tomb of Nefertiti.  Juno has a particular gift for recording hieroglyphs and scenes from the walls of the tombs they uncover. Disaster intervenes, war descends on Egypt, the dig is closed.  Thirty-five years later, Lucie too is on the track of Nefertiti’s tomb. Professor Brandt, who oversaw Juno’s dig, turns up at Lucie’s lecture on the myth of Osiris in London on the eve of her departure for Cairo.  And we wonder...

 

But the centre of the action is Egypt, and the louche life of the European communities in Cairo at the outbreak of the Second World War.  It is a period which Olivia Manning brought so vividly to life in The Levant Trilogy, later turned into The Fortunes of War, a BBC series from 1987, starring Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson – still out there on DVD.

 

Manning, of course, had lived what she wrote.  Kate Lord Brown has absorbed Egypt. The details of how you run a dig.  That as a pre-war archaeologist you draw, not trace hieroglyphs.  The scent of rosewater, sandalwood, men smoking shisha, coloured glass, carab rings, the golden light at sunset.  Dust. She’s good on horses, the backstreets of Cairo, the old clubs and the Mena House and the vanished quarter of Ezbekiyya.  But I wished for more of a sense of war-time tension. 

 

This is a quick fun read, full of romance, the friendship of women, mysteries and tragedies.  Love and desire:  Polly and Fitz, Juno and Max, Lucie and her handsome Australian, David.  At its heart is the secret on which Lucie’s life turns.    

 

Take it on holiday and enjoy.

 

Stephanie Williams is the author of Olga’s Story,  and Running the Show, The extraordinary stories of the men who governed the British Empire.  Her latest book, The Education of Girls, will be published in the US on 23 May and in the UK later this year.  For more see www.stephanie-williams.com and https://stephaniewilliamswrites.substack.com/

 

Ancient Egyptian Gallery - Joan Lennon

This month marks the 200th anniversary of the National Museum of Scotland (then the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland*) acquiring its very first ancient Egyptian artefact.**  So it is fitting that they are opening the new Ancient Egyptian Gallery ...

... and it is fabulous!  Every cabinet and display has something riveting.  From Nubian horses -

c1550-1295 BCE

c1390-1186

to a long-kilted wealthy man -

c1855-1650 BCE

to a tiny bewigged woman -

c1550-1295 BCE

But perhaps, as many of us are writers, I should share the headless scribe with the lovely ripply belly, with these words on the information board:

"In an ancient Egyptian poem, a father advises his son to become a scribe to avoid hard physical labour, declaring, 'I will make you love writing more than your mother!'"

c1479-1425 BCE

Says it all.

The next time you are in Edinburgh, give it a visit if you possibly can.  If that isn't likely to be anytime soon, the links below offer a taste of what's on offer, and also some more in-depth information about individual objects.

Explore Our Collections: Ancient Egyptian Collection
Things to See and Do:  New Ancient Egyptian, East Asia and Ceramics Galleries


* Founded 1780.
** The Egyptian collection now contains around 6,000 objects.

Joan Lennon's website.
Joan Lennon's blog.
Silver Skin.

Cabinet of Curiosities - A Cat's Got In! - by Charlotte Wightwick

The last few weeks for me have been all about one thing. No, not Brexit.

February and March have, for me, been the months of The Cat. Within days of my Feline Overlord arriving, I was fully under the paw, accepting as standard the fact that I will be woken up every day at 5am by a barrage of yowls, followed by a large furry creature sitting on my head, attempting to lick my face and demanding I get up to feed it. Not to mention all the 'help' I get whenever I sit down to write anything.

Stevie the Cat, helping. Source: C. Wightwick

The joys of cat ‘ownership’ have made me wonder what feline artefact should be placed in the Cabinet of Curiosities to celebrate the thousands of years that humans have been domesticated by cats.

The obvious place to start is of course ancient Egypt, where cats were famously worshipped as gods and millions of cat mummies have been found. Personally, I’ve never quite got over the horror/ fascination of seeing kitten mummies at the British Museum as a small child: somehow the idea disturbed me more than the idea of embalmed people. I’m not sure what this says about me – nothing good, I fear. 

Ancient Egyptian cat mummies

Source: Wikipedia Commons

One of my favourite ‘real life’ historical cats is Pangur Ban, the subject of a ninth-century Irish poem, who spends his time hunting mice while his master, the monk and author of the poem, styles himself as a hunter of words. As a lover of medieval history, there’s something about this poem that really appeals to me: it gives me an incredibly vivid image of a tonsured and robed monk, writing long into the night with only his white cat, chasing mice through the library, for company.

The next candidate for the Cabinet of Curiosities has to be the suit of feline armour recently doing the rounds on Twitter, reportedly made for Henry VIII’s cat Dagobert. I suspect I wasn’t alone spending a few confused minutes wondering how on earth one persuaded a cat to wear said armour (presumably a LOT of whatever the sixteenth century equivalent of Dreamies were) before finding out that Dagobert probably never existed, and the armour is modern, created by Canadian artist Jeff de Boer. A disappointment.

I saw my final option on Twitter too, but this one is attested by the good folks (and specifically Mark Forsyth, author of A Short History of Drunkenness) at History Extra. And it’s a good one: the ‘Puss and Mew Machine’: a mechanical cat-shaped gin dispenser. The machine was a way of illegal gin-sellers avoiding the swingeing taxes that the government had imposed in an effort to ban drinking among the lower classes in the eighteenth century. You can find out more at https://www.historyextra.com/period/georgian/gin-craze-panic-18th-century-london-when-came-england-alcohol-drinking-history/. I knew there was something missing from my life, and now I know what it is.

So, which feline delight shall go into the Cabinet? A mummified kitten, a ninth-century monk’s companion, some impossible feline armour or a mechanical gin-dispensing cat? Its tricky. But as a ‘word hunter’ myself, I think it will have to be the memory of a small white cat, over a thousand years old but immortalised forever:

I and Pangur Bán, my cat
'Tis a like task we are at;
Hunting mice is his delight

Hunting words I sit all night.

Written by an unknown Irish monk, 9th century. Trans Robin Flower. 

The page of the Reichenau Primer on which the Pangur Ban 

poem is preserved. Source: Wikimedia Commons

'The Immortal Fly' by Karen Maitland

'Lord of the Flies'

Artist: Louis Le Breton (1818-186

As part of the research for my medieval thriller, A Gathering of Ghosts, I spent time delving into the many legends attached to holy wells all over Britain. One of the strangest tales I found was recorded in The Statistical Account of Scotland 1794 and concerns the healing well of St Michael’s, Kirkmichael, which the writer notes earlier centuries was thought to be protected by a spirit in form of an immortal fly.

“Near the kirk of this parish there is a fountain, once highly celebrated and anciently, dedicated to St Michael. Many a patient have its waters restored to health, and many more have attested the efficacy of their virtues. But, as the presiding power is sometimes capricious, and apt to desert his charge, it now lies neglected, choked with weeds, unhonoured and unfrequented. In better days, it was not so, for the winged guardian, under the semblance of a fly, was never absent from his duty. If the sober matron wished to know the issue of her husband's ailment, or the love-sick nymph that of her languishing swain, they visited the well of St Michael. Every movement of the sympathetic fly was regarded in silent awe, and as he appeared cheerful or dejected, the anxious votaries drew their presages and their breasts vibrated with correspondent emotions.”

I am still wondering how you can tell when a fly is cheerful or dejected.

But the idea of an immortal fly was not confined to the Middle Ages. Pliny in his Natural History, said that although flies often drown, they can be brought back to life by sprinkling them with ashes and warming them in the sun. Other writers claimed this proved that, like humans, they had an immortal soul, which could re-enter and reanimate the body. There is some suggestion that the ancient Egyptians thought that the souls of ancestors could return in the form of a fly, and fly amulets are frequently found in tombs.

Egyptian Fly Amulet c1550-1295 BCE. Hippo ivory

Metropolitan Museum of Art

In Viking mythology, Loki, the Norse deity of air was able to transform into a fly to create mischief. And right up until the 19th century in Iceland, Scandinavian and Northern European there was a wide-spread belief in a ‘sending’ which took the form of a fly. They believed a person could send out a malicious spirit or curse in the shape of a fly against someone they wanted to harm. This fly, which could not be killed, could travel hundreds of miles in pursuit of its prey and as it approached, the victim would gradually fall into a sleep from which they’d never wake. The victims supposedly killed by these ‘sendings’, were often found in cottages with earth floors or had camped in low-lying ground, so their mysterious deaths were probably caused by marsh-gases or fumes from cess-pits.

Flies, of course, with their attraction to decaying food, excrement and corpses were widely associated with death and decay, and plague of flies descending on a person or town was regarded as a divine punishment. Saints often displayed their holiness by driving them out. In 1121, when St Bernard of Clairvaux was preaching in Foigny, a swarm of flies had the temerity to disrupt his sermon by tormenting his congregation. He excommunicated the flies. The monks entering the church the next day found the inserts all dead and in such large numbers they had to shovel them away.

Madonna and child gazing at a fly

Carlo Crivelli (c1435-1495)

Since, Beelzebub, Lord of the Flies was another name for Satan. It follows that demons were said to take the form of flies and during the 16th and 17th century witch persecutions, women were often accused of having a 'familiar' in the form of a fly, which they could send to spy on their neighbours. Since flies were so common in poor households it was almost impossible to refute. A young girl, Deborah Pacey, testifying at a witchcraft trial in Bury St. Edmunds in 1664 claimed to be tormented by evil spirits in the form of flies that forced her to swallow and regurgitate pins.

In the ancient world, the fly was admired for its courage in attacking foes vastly bigger than itself and for its persistence in returning even when repeatedly driven off. In Egypt, those who displayed such daring in the face of the enemy were rewarded with gold or silver flies. Ahmose-pen-Nekhbet c 1570-1550 BCE boasts that the Pharaoh Thutmose bestowed six such flies on him.

Egyptian String of gold flies c.1600-1070 BCE

Metropolitan Museum of Art

But even in medieval Europe, flies were sometimes thought of as heroes especially, when they were plaguing your enemies rather than you. In 1285, when attackers in Catalonia tried to desecrated the tomb of the Girona’s patron Saint, St Narcissus, a cloud of huge flies rose up from the tomb driving the marauders away. An event which is celebrated now with chocolate flies, called mosques de Girona.

Flies even once achieved celestial recognition. In the late 17th Century there was a separate constellation of stars called first Musca, the fly, and then later Musca Borealis, the northern fly, to distinguish it from the Musca constellation in the Southern hemisphere. But this group of stars is now included in the constellation of Aries.

The Constellations of Aries and Musca Borealis 

The Ram and the Northern Fly

Sidney Hall (1788-1831)

And in England, the Christmas fly, the last fly that was found in the house at the end of December, was never killed. Like a stranger coming to the door at that season, a lone fly appearing then, was said to bring a blessing to the household and it was even thought to help with the housework.

St Narcissus of Girona blessing the flies

A History of Periods, Politics and Emoji Pants by Fay Bound Alberti

On a bitter cold day in January 2018, a woman died in Nepal after she was forced to live in a menstruating hut. She had been banished to the unheated hut for the duration of her period, a still-common practice in Nepal, despite the fact that the weather often falls below zero degrees celsius in the winter. The woman died from smoke inhalation after she lit a fire to try to get warm. 

A menstruating hut in Nepal

This sad story was announced soon after the publication of an article on the politics of periods that I wrote for a new online literary magazine called  Boundless. Dedicated to long-form writing and edited by the incomparable Arifa Akbar, former Independent literary editor, it's a fantastic resource, and one that I urge readers to check out. 

My article considered why periods are so shameful when they are such a natural part of human existence. Most major belief systems, including Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism, place restrictions on menstruating women. Leviticus 15:19 and 24 states: ‘if a woman has an emission, and her emission in her flesh is blood, she shall be seven days in her [menstrual] separation, and anyone who touches her shall be tamei…[ritually unclean] until evening.’ Followers of the Qur'an regard menstruation as ‘an impurity’, often banning menstruating women from religious and social practices. In the Christian tradition, menstruation and pain in childbirth was God’s punishment when Eve tempted Adam. This is the origin of the 'curse', a term still used for menstruation.

The creation of Eve (Wellcome Images)

Menstruation has not been considered 'proper history' in the past. That is, before the 1970s and women's history, family history and medical history found new ways of redressing the gender and class imbalance of traditional history and exploring new sources. There remains a limit to what we know about menstruation in the ancient world, however, since records of the time were taken by men. They therefore didn't record women's cycles, or consider what 'normal' might have been. Ancient Egyptian women are said to have used cloths on sticks to stem the flow, or wedges of papyrus, a plant-based material also used to make paper. Classical books talked about 'wombfuls' of blood, but were not specific about how much blood a woman might have lost. 

In keeping with religious concerns about menstruation,we do know that classical writers worried about women's association with witchcraft, the natural world and spiritualism. Pliny the Elder, a Roman author and philosopher, believed that menstruating women could prevent hailstorms and protect crops. Period blood was not always depicted as revolting; ancient Egyptians may have included menstrual blood in medical recipes. 

Pliny the Elder, killed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, AD 79

What did women do without Tampax? The same as they do in most of the world today. Ragged cloths that were washed seems the likely option, especially in medieval times, and this explains the modern term 'on the rag' to describe a menstruating woman. It is likely that poor women with little access to hot water had little option but to use and reuse the same rag, or to bleed on their clothes. By the nineteenth century there was more concern about hygiene, and more 'scientific' language by which the female body and menstruation was understood. 

Sanitary belts were created by the end of the nineteenth century, and washable pads could be attached to the belt. By the 1980s, adhesive strips on sanitary towels and tampons were more popular. But this did not mean that the shame around women's bodies and menstruation was reduced. In the modern West, menstruation remains shrouded in disgust and shame, even where scientific explanations show it to be a natural biomedical process rather than related to magic or divinity.

Early 20th-century newspaper advert for a sanitary belt

Consider European popular culture, which has many slang words for periods, few of them positive. English examples are Aunt Flo, Bloody Mary, Code Red, The Blob and Shark Week; while the French included La semaine Ketchup (ketchup week), VHS (vaginalement hors service), Les chutes du Niagra (Niagra Falls). And in German:  Die rote pest (the red pest) and Besuchvon Tante Rosa (a visit from Aunt Rose). 

It's not just periods, but women who are on their periods that are the subject of disempowering language. Menstruating women are ‘PMS-ing’, ‘On the Blob’ or ‘Out of Service’. Jokes about menstruation depict periods as a disruptive force that lessens women’s intellectual capacities, and reduces them to their biological function. 

In schools, children are taught a basic biomedical model: each month the uterine lining thickens and becomes vascularized in case an egg is fertilised. If it is not, the unused blood is released as a period. Boys and girls (and boys are usually excluded from the classroom) are not taught the psychological, social or cultural contexts of menstruation, of the constituents of period blood, of the different cycles girls might experience, or how cycles can differ between girls. Menstruation simply marks girls and women apart as different and, in some contexts inferior, like the poor girl who died in Nepal, or the thousands of women from developing countries who cannot attend school because they do not have sanitary supplies. 'Period poverty' is also a problem in the UK. 

It's striking how little we have progressed from nineteenth-century ideas about menstruation, which is where much of our language of the body comes from. Victorian medics were convinced that menstruation weakened women, providing evidence of their biological and spiritual inferiority. Women were already regarded as hysterical because of their ‘wandering wombs’ that caused havoc with women’s mental and physical health. Walter Heape, the anti-suffragist and Cambridge zoologist, drew attention to the terrifying spectacle of menstruation, that left behind ‘a ragged wreck of tissue, torn glands, ruptured vessels, jagged edges of stroma, and masses of blood corpuscles.’ Menstruating women couldn’t possibly tackle work, education or intellectual concerns, argued prominent Victorian writers, which women like Mary Wollstonecraft did much to tackle.

Discussions of periods used economic languages of production in the industrial age, with women’s bodies as baby-making factories: profitable or unprofitable, depending on their ability to produce. If conception was the proper result of the menstrual cycle, menstruation was failed production. The tissue lost during menstruation was ‘debris’ and waste. Early pregnancy failure was a ‘blighted ovum’, a womb that opened up too soon, an 'incompetent cervix'. 

Scientific medicine still talks about menstruation in these terms. The social meaning of menstruation also takes on different emphases throughout a woman’s life, highlighting the demand for youth in the modern West – at least for women. For an individual, menopause, or the literal stopping of the menses, might bring all kinds of exciting new opportunities into a woman's life. Yet in narrowly biomedical terms, it signals her lack of reproductive competence, and her social and sexual irrelevance. Menopausal women have a tendency to become invisible. 

In all kinds of areas, 21^st century women campaign for more social visibility, and equity with regard to their bodies, including around menstruation. In the digital age, new opportunities arise for us to talk about periods and how they are framed in society. For example, isn’t it extraordinary, given the fact that the average woman menstruates for 3,000 days, that there is no symbol for menstruation? There are, after all, emojis for everything from crystal balls to sushi, from faeces to tears. This is why the charity Plan International UK has been campaigning for a period emoji to allow people to communicate more openly. Nearly 55,000 people voted. The winner? A pair of white pants, decorated with two drops of blood.

The world's first period emoji, courtesy of Plan International 

Finding spaces to talk about menstruation in its own right and not as linked to fertility is important – and not only to avoid biological reductionism. The presumption that menstruation equals fertility and womanhood excludes women born without wombs as well transgender woman. It excludes women who choose not to have children, or are unable to have children. 

Reframing how we talk about the body, and rejecting historical ideas that are outmoded or reductive, is not new. Since the 1970s, the shaming and silencing of menstruation has been subverted. Feminist artists initially made periods visible. Judy Chicago’s ‘Menstruation Bathroom’ (1972), showcased a bin filled with used sanitary towels. In the 1990s, Tracy Emin casually disposed of used tampons in ‘My Bed’ (1998), described as ‘a violent mess of sex and death’. In 2015 Kiran Ghandi ran the London marathon while menstruating, and without using tampons or pads, to highlight menstrual stigma. And in 2017 the #BloodNormal campaign won the right to use red rather than blue fluid in menstrual product advertising. This important step demystifies the idea and image of period blood, and marks a shift towards normalizing menstruation. 

Periods are political, as their history shows. Which is why we need more education about what is 'normal' or abnormal, more discussion about the differences between women, and better metaphors for women's bodies that aren't based on outdated ideas of the factory. When it comes to the history and experience of menstruation we need less shaming, and more talking. Period.

 

Joel Filipe, on Unsplash.com

My website: www.fayboundalberti.com
Twitter: @fboundalberti