Papyrus Summary
Rika Teferi, a former soldier in Eritrea’s war for independence, is working on her doctorate in the Cairo Museum when an accidental tea spill uncovers hidden writing on a papyrus written by Queen Tiye to her youngest son, Tutankhamun. Horrified at the spill but aching to read the entire secret text, Rika agrees to let a visiting remote-sensing specialist, David Chamberlain, smuggle the priceless papyrus out of the museum and scan it with instruments on his aircraft.
The results show Tiye to have been the power behind the thrones of her husband and sons. They also reveal that she was buried, not in Egypt, but in modern-day Sudan. Rika and David devise a risky plan to find Tiye’s tomb. But a major in the Secret Police misconstrues their covert activities as part of a fundamentalist plot to overthrow the Egyptian government and vows to kill them.
Reared in revolution, Rika feels a spiritual bond with Queen Tiye, a Nubian commoner who married Pharaoh and revolutionized Egyptian society by introducing a monotheistic religion that freed Egypt from the tyranny of the Amun priests. Rika’s quest to find Tiye’s tomb parallels chapters reliving the queen’s last journey up the Nile, three thousand years before, to achieve immortality by being buried alive in a coffin of oils. Throughout the story, Rika is torn between her passion for Tiye and her love of country. If she finds the queen’s tomb, should she take from it only knowledge, or should she pilfer the valuable artifacts and sell them to buy arms that could tip the balance in Eritrea’s continuing battle against genocide? In her growing love of David, she is also torn by the fear that he could never live in her culture, nor she in his. These quandaries plague her until the shocking end.
Papyrus reached the semi-finals (top 1%) of the 2009 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award competition.
