The gavel came down with a crack, which surprised me, because I thought that courts didn’t use real gavels anymore.  I thought gavels were symbols of office, for decoration only, like a captain’s sextant or a priest’s bible.  But there it was – a sharp stroke against the wooden desk that sounded in my head like a gunshot.  Bang.  My first criminal conviction.  I had a record.

Read the rest of this entry »

Egyptologists give one another special names. It’s one of those things we’ve always done. So John calls me Ikky (which is short for Ikhnaten) and I call him Akky (which is short for Akhenaten) and when people see the two of us together they say: “Hey! There goes Ikky and Akky.” When people find out we’re Egyptologists, they say things like: “So you guys are into all that King Tut shit, are ya?” We used to go into a long drawn out explanation about how we’re experts in the Late Egyptian period and handle a geographic region way south of Thebes and the Valley of the Kings almost on the border of the Sudan – 500 years later and 500 clicks upriver from King Tut. But nobody really cares, so now we smile and nod and say: “Ya, ya, the King Tut shit.”

Read the rest of this entry »