When little Dorothy Louise Eady fell down the stairs at home, remaining inert, her parents believed in horror that she had died and placed her body gently on a bed. But, to her surprise and joy, the girl was alive and she regained consciousness shortly after.
The really curious thing came later, because Dorothy began to manifest abnormal behavior:speaking with a foreign accent, she asked to be returned to her home and ended up assuring that she was the reincarnation of an Egyptian priestess named Bentreshyt, having nightly encounters with Pharaoh Seti I .
All of this may seem like the synthesis of a Victoria Holt novel, but Dorothy not only really existed but also became a famous Egyptologist who worked on the excavations at Abydos and who maintained until the end of her life the conviction that what she told It was true. She was born in 1904 in Blachtheath, a neighborhood in south-east London, into a lower-middle-class Irish family, her father being a tailor named Reuben Ernest Eady and her mother Caroline Mary Frost; she was an only child and soon she was going to suffer the accident that would mark her existence.
It was the year 1907 when little Ella woke up in that bed and soon the anomalies spread to other areas; the school, for example, where her teacher asked the family not to take her anymore because she manifested a certain hostility to Christianity, insisting on comparing it with the religion of Ancient Egypt. She was sent to a girls' school in Dulwich, where she too was expelled for refusing to sing a religious hymn that invoked Yahweh to punish the Egyptians who persecuted Moses. Instead, she liked to attend Catholic masses, whose ceremonial development she reminded her of, she said, "the old religion «.
That caused her concerned parents to consult with priests. But the solution to the mystery did not come from them but from a visit the family made to the British Museum. They were in the Egyptian section when the girl got excited shouting that this was her home, although she missed the trees among so much sand that reflected the photos of her. They were images from the temple of Seti I and she, Dorothy, enjoyed that day as she had never done before, running among the statues and sarcophagi. She so much that she would return on many more occasions because she personally met Ernst Wallis Budge there.
Budge had been an Egyptologist and Orientalist at the museum since 1883 and had undoubted prestige for having translated the so-called Papyrus of Ani, the best-known version of the Book of the Dead , apart from being the author of another hundred and a half works and having participated in several archaeological campaigns in Egypt and Sudan; Many of the pieces that make up the Egyptian collections of the British Museum were found by him or acquired (he also removed some illegally, it must be said).
Anyway, Budge had a reputation for personally caring for young people who visited the museum and Dorothy was one of her lucky ones because he personally taught her to read hieroglyphs, encouraging her to study Egyptology when she was older. The girl did not want to wait and she began to document herself at the public library in Eastbourne, the town in Sussex where her grandmother lived, to whose house she was sent to take her away from London due to the outbreak of the First War. World.
The war ended in 1918 and it was the following year that Dorothy took a step forward in her Egyptian fantasy, telling that one night she had been visited by none other than Pharaoh Seti I, something that was repeated on different occasions. Concerned about her mental health, her parents admitted her to a psychiatric center, from which she would enter and leave several times without anyone being able to give a specific diagnosis, since those dreams of hers did not prevent her from having a normal life. in the rest.
And while she was leaving her adolescence behind, this peculiar young woman continued to visit museums and archaeological excavations on British soil, enrolling in the Plymouth School of Art and beginning to buy Egyptian antiquities as far as her finances allowed. She even joined a Portsmouth theater group that put on a play based on the myth of Isis and Osiris, assuming the role of the goddess herself; she probably enjoyed it like never before.
When she turned twenty-seven she got a job at a magazine for which she wrote articles and drew political cartoons. It was about an Egyptian post where she met a student named Eman Abdel Megid who was also Egyptian and, although he returned to her country, he corresponded with her. In 1931, after he got a job teaching English in Cairo, she wrote him a letter asking him to marry her, which she, as you might imagine, accepted without a second thought. That same year she met him; They say that she kissed the land of the Nile as soon as she arrived because it was her return to her home.
Her husband's family gave him the nickname Bulbul, which means nightingale. She was not her only original name because when she was born her first child was baptized, of course, Seti, from which she became popularly known as Omm Seti (Mother of Seti). In fact, she kept having dreams in which she was visited by that pharaoh, who no longer appeared in the form of a mummy, as at first, but with her human appearance (more specifically, already middle-aged); yes, she was now married and in order not to offend her spouse, she reduced the intensity of such visits to mere conversations.
In them, he revealed things to her that, if verified empirically, would have given Egyptology a new twist:that his tomb in the Osirion of Abydos was not such but had been built more recently and that the sphinx of Giza was not a portrait of Khafre and was built by the god Horus long before the official date attributed to it. Unfortunately, the current auxiliary techniques of archeology have refuted the pharaoh, who, by the way, was not the only one to appear; so did his heir, Ramses II, once.
Seti's fault or not, Dorothy's marriage was in crisis. In fact, her in-laws did not like that extemporaneous behavior that she insisted on maintaining and that was aggravated when she made a visit to the monumental complex of Sakkara and entered the pyramid of Unas previously taking off her shoes and making an offering. She was the product of having struck up a friendship with the secretary of George Andrew Reisner, the prestigious American archaeologist who had found the tomb of Queen Hetepheres I (Snefro's wife and Kéops's mother) and drawn up a list of viceroys of Kush.
Convinced by her new friend that she had the power to charm snakes, she claimed that the list of nocturnal visitors had been extended to a character named Hor-Ra, who dictated a story to her that she wrote in cursive hieroglyphic script. It was the story of an Egyptian peasant girl, Bentreshyt (translatable as "Harp of joy"), daughter of a soldier and a shopkeeper, who lived during the reign of Seti I (from 1290 BC to 1279 BC). . about). Her mother died when she was three years old and her father, unable to take care of her, sent her to the temple of Kom el-Sultán, a religious complex located in Abydos (it was originally dedicated to Khenti-Amentiu, a primitive divinity later syncretized with Osiris).
Bentreshyt was educated as a priestess of Isis, a rank to which she rose when she was twelve years old. She then continued learning the secrets of the Osiriac cult in depth, until one day her life intersected with that of the pharaoh and he, in love with her, made her his lover. As dictated by Hor-Ra, they both ate raw goose, an expression equivalent to eating the forbidden fruit today, as a result of which she Bentreshyt became pregnant. Since she had been consecrated to Isis as a virgin, that was blasphemy punishable by death and, in order not to involve Seti in a scandal, she took her own life.
The best thing about this story was that, according to Hor-Ra, the unfortunate priestess had been reincarnated as Dorothy. That was the straw that broke the camel's back for her husband, who in 1953 went to work in Iraq in what constituted a de facto separation. She stayed in Egypt with her son, settling in Nazlat al-Samman, a Cairo neighborhood at the foot of the Giza plateau. That allowed him to meet Selim Hassan, an important Egyptologist famous for having promoted the departure of Egyptian students to European universities - he himself had worked at the Sorbonne - and excavated hundreds of tombs.
Hassan hired Dorothy as a secretary and draftsman, commissioning her to translate her work into English and make drawings of the ruins and pieces at a time when photography still had limitations. The Egyptian was always grateful for her help and even quoted her in her magnum opus, Excavations at Giza ,whose ten volumes included her magnificent illustrations. Thus, that self-taught woman was able to write her own articles and rub shoulders with the cream of the crop of archaeology. In fact, when Hassan died in 1961, she was immediately hired by Ahmed Fakhry, another eminent Egyptologist who took her with him to the Dashur excavations.
During all this time, Dorothy further refined her knowledge, becoming a bona fide Egyptologist without a degree. In parallel, she continued with her usual fantasy, whether it was making offerings to Horus, spending the night in the Great Pyramid, or recapturing the intimate intensity of her nightly encounters with Seti I, now that she no longer had a husband to bother. To a large extent, she was able to continue with it thanks to the fact that she respected the beliefs of others, both Muslim and Christian, because she considered that they all had a common integrating element:the Nile.
In 1956, Fakhry finished his study on the pyramid of Dashur and so that his employee would not be unemployed, he offered her two possibilities:to be a civil servant in the administration or to go to Abydos as a draftsman. Of course, she chose the second, even though she would be paid considerably less, because that was the temple where Bentreshyt had professed. She was fifty-two years old when she settled at the foot of the Pega el-Gap mountain, considered sacred in Ancient Egypt, officially adopting the nickname of Omm Seti as her name.
For two years she worked cataloging and drawing the pieces found by the archaeologist Edourard Ghazouli, whom she helped locate some gardens that were suspected to be to the southwest of the temple; easy thing for someone who had lived there two millennia before Christ. The latter confirmed the reputation she had earned when the chief inspector of the Department of Antiquities half-jokingly challenged her to move around the temple in the dark and identify some hieroglyphics on the walls, on the grounds that having been there in another life was to remember the path; to everyone's surprise, she did so without difficulty. But that place was her private oasis.
In fact, she installed her office in one of her rooms and spent a good part of the day there, sometimes working, sometimes praying to the gods, sometimes playing with a cobra she adopted, to the horror of the guards. Something to which she added her abstinence as her personal sacrifice, since she was determined to erase the stain of her time as a priestess. That eccentric lady She, as people knew her, was involved in social aid projects, caring for families without resources, providing them with ancient Egyptian medical remedies to solve problems of impotence, sterility, contraception, etc. Although largely based on the Pyramid Texts and other magical rituals of more than doubtful efficacy, those that endured in memory were the successful cases.
She attributed it to the fact that modern Egyptians had inherited a cultural legacy from their ancestors that, with the inevitable adaptations that the passage of time brought, essentially remained in force, both in mentality and in uses and customs. These observations of an anthropological nature were put into writing in a series of articles that he wrote between 1969 and 1975, which three decades later, in 2008, were compiled and published in the form of an anthology by the American-Egyptian Egyptologist Nicole B. Hansen under the title Omm Sety's living Egypt. Surviving folkways from pharaonic times .
Dorothy herself undertook this literary activity when she retired, although she continued to work as a consultant and tourist guide for the Department of Antiquities. In 1972, after suffering a heart attack, she sold her house and moved first to a humble zareba (reed hut) and then to an adobe one built for her by the son of the temple's guardian. She there she continued to receive visits from Seti I and even one from Set himself, the murderous god of Osiris. She was prepared to leave this world and since she could not be buried in normal cemeteries, since she was a pagan, she had her own tomb built, with a false door and everything to facilitate the passage of the Ka and a ushebti inside it as a masterful detail.
In the spring of 1981, indeed, he became seriously ill and, aware that the end was near, he gave away his two cats, enrolled in the Community of Isis (an international religious organization for the worship of that goddess) and on April 21 expired. Unfortunately for her, the authorities did not allow her to be buried in her grave and she ended up in an unmarked grave next to the Coptic graveyard. Exactly what was going on in Dorothy's mind is not known; some psychiatrist has suggested that in her fall down the stairs she must have received a blow to the head, resulting in damage to the locus ceruleus (a part of the brain stem) and generating a neuropsychiatric disorder.
In any case, a new existence would begin for her, presenting herself before Osiris so that he could pronounce sentence on her ultraterrestrial destiny. After Anubis weighed her heart with Maat's Pen of Truth, Thoth would record her result on a tablet and, if successful, Horus would guide her to the fields of Yaru. Would her beloved Seti I of her wait for her there?