Who are you Sint Ayt Ess?

On Saturday afternoon I treated myself to a taste of Vancouver's cultural scene: I watched "Adrift on the Nile" a modern theatrical adaptation of "Tharthara fawq al Nile" by Egyptian Nobel prize-winner Naguib Mahfouz.

The lead actor asked the audience about the first thing that came to their minds when they thought of Egypt. Most replies were predicatable: pyramids, sphinx, sand, smart people, Nile, camels, and blue skies. Of course, the number one favourite choice was mummies. I smiled, thinkng of home, of steaming plates of koshari and kabab, of my grandmother's smile as she rose to pray at dawn.

But indeed, last night a report announced the discovery of coffins dating 5,000 years back to the Middle Kingdom period. One of the intricately painted wooden sarcophagi was designed for a woman named Sint Ayt Ess. The artifact is important because few discoveries have yielded objects from the Middle Kingdom.

Sint Ayt Ess.

The woman's name continued to ring in my head. Who was she, this ancient guide to the Middle Kingdom? Was she a priestess or a weaver? A wife or a widower? What life did she lead and how did she die?

She may not have been as famous or glamorous as Queen Hatshepsut, but I connected with her nonetheless, this unknown ancient woman. She managed to spend a deathtime hidden from tomb robbers, from the grabbing hands of foreign diggers, from x-ray tests in a neon-lit lab, from the gawking sight of an easily distracted world, and a paragraph in international media. But now probing tools have undug her death. Even in the tomb there is no rest.

Sint Ayt Ess.