Читать книгу The Lost Diary Of Tutankhamun’s Mummy - Clive Dickinson - Страница 4

In January 1878 a tall block of carved stone weighing 186 tons and standing nearly twenty metres tall arrived in wet, cold London. For over 3000 years this obelisk had been standing and then lying in the much nicer climate of Egypt. Originally it had been planned to put Cleopatra’s Needle, as the obelisk became known, in front of the Houses of Parliament. When it turned out to be too heavy to go there it was erected beside the River Thames, where it can still be seen today.

Workmen putting the obelisk on the Embankment, found what looked like a battered old mat stuck to the bottom. During a lunch-break they pulled this off and found it was actually a bundle of papyrus paper covered in ancient Egyptian writing and pictures.

One of the men who found it decided it would make a useful mat for his lunch and for over a hundred years it lay in his lunchbox. This same lunchbox eventually turned up in a junk shop and was bought by Clive Dickinson, when digging around for a bargain. When he opened the lunch box, the ancient papers were found again.

Careful study by the Egyptian experts Dr Sandy Slippers and Dr Haventa Klue revealed that what the Victorian workman had used to lay his lunch on was in fact the work of one of the most amazing people living in the ancient times. She was a queen and seemed to have been mother of the best known Egyptian king – Tutankhamun. The bundle of papers was nothing less than the lost holiday diary of Nefertidy, Tutankhamun’s mummy. Inside the diary were several postcards, apparently never sent. Extracts from the diary and the postcards that remained intact are published here for the very first time. They give a unique view of life in Ancient Egypt through Nefertidy’s eyes as she cruised down the river Nile.