Topic: Treasure

Isabelle Jackson

Date: 2017-06-18 10:12 EST
Egypt was beautiful, in Isabelle Jackson's eyes. She'd fallen in love with the country years ago, when she'd been invited to spend her first practical field experience in the Valley of the Kings. For a place that could seem so desolate, it was vibrant, rich in history and culture, wrapped about with time's threads that took an expert to unravel. In her years as an archaeologist, she'd earned the title of expert, but this time around, she was visiting Egypt as a freelancer, unattached to any particular dig, any particular organization. Her only company was her husband, himself something of a treasure-seeker, and they had wandered far from the beaten path, following hints that might turn out to be a real find, and a small team of trusted workers.

Finds from the time of Arsinoe IV were not as prolific as might be expected, but given the amount of attention that was focused on her contemporaries - the most infamous Ptolemy and Cleopatra - they were often overlooked. And following those hints, Izzy and Jax had found an abandoned tomb; not the pharoah's, but utterly untouched. Jax was no doubt bored out of his mind, but Izzy was fascinated, cross-legged on the sand floor of the tomb as she deciphered the hieroglyphs on the side of the stone sarcophagus.

"So, what?s it say, Izz?" he asked, as he crouched down beside her. He was capable of making out some of the hieroglyphs, more or less, but he was the brawn, not the brains of the pair. "Some warning about a curse or some other mumbo jumbo?" he guessed, feeling more than a little restless. He appreciated her sense of reverence for the place and her thirst for knowledge, but there didn't seem much point in being there, in his opinion, without a find of some small worth.

"It's just the basics so far," she said thoughtfully. "Cursed be he and all that ....Seems to be a pretty high ranking priest in here, though. There should be a few shiny things under the stone you can play with." She glanced up at her husband with a teasing smile. "Let me find this person's name, and then we can get the lid off. The mummy isn't likely to be in great shape, this place wasn't sealed too well."

The warning of a curse didn't worry him too much, as those things usually turned out to be nothing. What interested him was the fact that the tomb appeared to have never been broken into or looted prior to them discovering it. "There better be more than a few shiny things in there for all the trouble we've gone to to find it," he grumbled. He wasn't overly interested in the mummy itself as what he'd been buried with.

She chuckled at him impatience, heaving herself up onto her feet to bend over the lid of the stone sarcophagus. "Worst thing about non-royals is having to find their bloody names," she muttered to herself. The cartouche was reserved for royal names, unfortunately; without one, it could take hours to discover who they were looking at. "Oh! ....hmm. Mer ....mere ....ankh ....Meresankh." She frowned down at the sarcophagus. "First priestess of Isis. Wow."

"So not a dude, after all," Jax remarked with a grin, as he leaned over her shoulder to take a look. "Too pretty to be a dude," he mused aloud, though the face painted on the sarcophagus was likely to be stylized and more flattering of the person it was supposed to depict than realistic.

"King Tut was kind of pretty," she pointed out in amusement, gently touching her temple to his. "But then, his face mask was probably made for Nefertiti first, so that kind of punctures my argument." She straightened, tucking her brush back into her belt. "So how do you want to do this" Get the team in to do the heavy lifting?"

"King Tut was a kid," Jax reminded her, smiling in amusement at the affectionate way she leaned her head against his. He lifted his head to touch a kiss to her cheek. "Unless I changed my name to Superman recently, I'd say that's a plan," he quipped back at her, anxious to get a look at the shiny stuff.

"All right. You get a crew together, I'll finish up with the photographs and measurements, and we can crack this open and get a look at her." Izzy was never going to be a treasure hunter; the habits of an archaeologist were ingrained in her bones. Besides, she wanted them to get the credit for this find, and that meant meticulous records.

"Yes, ma'am!" he replied, moving to his feet to go gather a few extra hands to help with the heavy labor of removing the lid. They'd hired only men they'd worked with in the past and trusted, rather than risking being robbed.

About an hour later, the props were in place for the task of levering up the ancient stone lid with as much care as they could possibly manage. This excavation was only preliminary, but Izzy and Jax were determined to take the credit for it. Jax was probably going to be disappointed in his wife's insistence on giving the artifacts they found to the Cairo Museum, but at least they would get paid for it. The hiss of air rushing into a long dead vacuum brought with it the nauseating smell of stale air and long rotten flesh as the lid was finally lifted.

"Oh, good gods ..." Izzy murmured, going slightly pale at the fetid stink. "Not quite as well respected as we'd thought, then."

"Yeah, but look at that amulet!" Jax replied, tugging a scarf over his mouth and nose to block the stench as he leaned over to admire the piece of jewelry that adorned the mummy's neck, careful to look but not touch for now.

She laughed, busy helping to guide the priceless stone lid down onto the carefully prepared padding. That done, she took one look at the nauseated faces around her, and let their team go back into the outer chamber, to continue cataloguing the artifacts away from the stench of the badly embalmed mummy. "Now then ....let's see what we have here," she mused, covering her own mouth and nose with her scarf as she leaned over the mummy with Jax.

Jax had caught a glint of gold as the lid was slowly being moved away from the sarcophagus and could hardly wait to see more. While Izzy was examining the mummy for clues as to her identity and age, Jax was busy admiring the far more valuable additions to her tomb. "Are you sure this tomb hasn't already been looted?" he asked, noting the poor condition of the mummy - and yet, no one seemed to have touched that necklace. Or maybe the curse had scared them away. He shuddered involuntarily at that thought, but refused to acknowledge his fear.

Isabelle Jackson

Date: 2017-06-18 10:12 EST
"If grave robbers had been in here, there wouldn't be anything but the mummy to find," she pointed out in a distracted tone. "Sometimes there isn't even that. Victorians used to burn mummies in place of firewood. This is odd, though ....You'd assume that the first priestess of Isis would be revered, and yet her embalming was terribly done. She's more skeleton than mummy."

"That's what I mean!" Jax replied, wondering what she thought he'd meant. While he might not be a scholar, he knew enough about the process to know there was something very wrong about this mummy. "Maybe she wasn't revered. Maybe she did something wrong. What do her hieroglyphs say?"

"Hmm ..." Stepping back from the mummy, she crouched down to examine the lid more carefully, pulling a pen torch from her pocket to highlight the elaborate hieroglyphs. "First of the temple of Isis, Beloved of Ra ....Oh. First voice in the hierarchy of Arsinoe. Well, that explains that, then."

"Refresh my memory," Jax told her, knowing enough about his Ancient Egyptian to know that Arsinoe was the younger sister of Cleopatra, but forgetting why that might explain the lack of reverence for this particular priestess.

"Julius Caesar made Cleopatra and Ptolemy play nice and rule together, and he gave Cyprus to Arsinoe and their youngest brother," Izzy explained, rising once again. "Arsinoe joined up with Ptolemy to try and oust Cleopatra, and eventually, Arsinoe was exiled. As soon as Cleo had her hooks in Marc Anthony, he ordered Arsinoe's execution on the steps of the temple where she was imprisoned. So ...?" She raised her brows, waiting for him to put the pieces together.

"So, it stands to reason that if this priestess supported Arsinoe, she wouldn't have been given the usual amount of respect before or after her death," he surmised, with a frown. It also explained the lack of treasure.

"Temple politics at its finest," Izzy agreed. "That, and Egypt's autonomy was in definite decline in this period. The Roman and Greek gods were everywhere." She laid a hand on her hip, tilting her head as she looked into the sarcophagus. "There are some things in her hands, though ....beads on this side. Is that a mirror on the other side?"

Jax leaned a little closer to get a better look at what had been tucked into the mummy's sarcophagus with her after she'd been embalmed and set to rest. "Yeah, I think so." He sighed audibly through the scarf that covered his nose and mouth, obviously disappointed, though it hardly mattered, since they were being paid for the work, not the artifacts themselves. "Well, at least, there's some historical significance to the find."

Izzy's expression, insofar as it could be seen, was deeply amused with her husband's disappointment. "We'll go treasure-hunting next time," she promised him, willing to set aside her professional ethics to keep him happy from time to time. "It won't take more than a day to photograph and catalogue all this, anyway. We just have to deliver the location to the museum back in Cairo."

"And see someone to remove any curses we might have triggered by breaking in here," he murmured further. He only half-believed in that sort of thing, but it was better to be safe than sorry. "So, what do you need me to do?" he asked, needing to be of some use to her.

"Pick out a couple of the artifacts from the outer chamber," she suggested. "Something that represents the quality and time period. We can use them as proof that the tomb is worth looking into with the scholars in Cairo." She smiled at him behind her scarf. "I'll pop your cork later to make up for it."

His brows rose, the corners of his eyes crinkling, hinting at the smile he wore behind the scarf. "I can't argue with that. You're the boss," he told her agreeably, as he backed away from the mummy. "Call me if you need me," he told her, yanking the scarf down as he started back toward the outer chamber.

"I always need you," she teased over her shoulder, turning her attention to recording the tomb as found. Though it did, as she had said, take her the rest of the day to do it, they finally laid the lid back onto the stone sarcophagus and re-sealed the tomb against any looters who might have been waiting for their chance before heading back to their camp. The next morning, they'd break and return to Cairo, their work finished.

It took most of the day to catalog the outer chamber, as well, and Jax took particular care to choose which objects to take back to Cairo with them. He didn't want to take anything too valuable, and yet, he needed to take something valuable enough that the authorities there would see the significance of their find.

Still, their camp that night was weary but happy. Even in the height of summer, nights in Egypt could drop to freezing temperatures, necessitating staying inside their tents as the temperature dropped. Which was why only Jax got to see the amulet Izzy had very carefully lifted from the mummy before everything was sealed up.

And only Izzy got to see Jax practically drooling over the thing. It wasn't so much the worth of the object that fascinated him, such much as its history, though he'd hardly admit it. "Makes you wonder what she was like as a person, doesn't it?" he pondered aloud, hardly expecting an answer.

"Formidable, probably," Izzy chuckled, letting him take over the gentle cleaning of the priceless object. As centuries of grime and tarnish came away, the amulet was revealed to be of solid gold, set with lapis lazuli and turquoise, bearing the face of Isis. "I'd love to know what the purpose of the amulet was. Was it to identify her, or was it a symbol of her goddess given to her when she reach high office?"

"Could be either or both," he remarked, as he finished up the polishing process. It really was a remarkable find and not one to risk leaving behind to possibly looters, even if they had left the tomb secured and guarded. "Maybe someone in Cairo will know."

"Hopefully someone will," she agreed with a nod, finishing up her descriptive notes on the piece as he worked on it. "I didn't want to leave it there. We've been shadowed ever since we left Cairo - looters are everywhere out here."

Jax frowned. He wasn't really surprised to hear that they'd been shadowed. He knew that already. What he didn't know was that she'd noticed it, too. "Probably a good thing they don't know we have this," he remarked, indicating the amulet he was currently working on polishing. Or did they' "This would fetch a good price on the black market." Good being a somewhat relative term.

Isabelle Jackson

Date: 2017-06-18 10:13 EST
"And be deeply missed by the people whose heritage it belongs to," she added, stretching out to lie back against her sleeping bag. "Oh, gods, my back hurts. I really need to work out how to do this job without spending eight hours a day bent in impossible positions."

"I didn't mean I was going to sell it," Jax pointed out, somewhat defensively. There had been a time when he might have done such a thing, for the right price, but those days were over - at least, for now. He'd promised Izzy to abide by the law, and he was doing his best to keep that promise. "Need a massage?" he asked, as he set his prize - no, their prize - aside and turned toward her.

"I'd like a new spine," she muttered, flicking her eyes to his with a warm smile. "A massage would be lovely, though. But what about you? You haven't exactly had an easy day of it yourself."

He shrugged, making sure he had his pistol nearby, just in case someone decided to break into their tent sometime in the night and steal said prize. "All in a day's work, babe," he replied with a grin, before rubbing his hands together and blowing on them to warm them up. "Roll over."

She chuckled at his eagerness, shifting to pull off her overshirt before rolling onto her front. It had to be said that Izzy didn't often complain about her job; she loved every aspect of it, but today had been a hard slog of not moving enough to save her from back trouble.

To be fair, these massage sessions of his usually ended with him receiving a reward worthy of his efforts, but that wasn't his reason for offering. He had good hands, and he knew it, and she benefited from that fact. Twenty minutes or so later, and she was likely as relaxed as a wet noodle and ready for either sleep or something that might relax her further.

Sadly for him, tonight it was definitely sleep, but he knew she'd make it up to him when they were back in civilization. Somehow, in the course of his ministering, she'd ended up with her arms about his waist and her face in his lap, and given the genteel snores that were rising from his crotch, it was a safe bet that he had sent her off to dreamland happy.

He chuckled upon hearing her snores, wondering if he'd done his job a little too well. Carefully untangling himself from her, he settled down beside her, the amulet and pistol close at hand, and tucked her into the fold of his arms once again. "Night, sleepyhead," he whispered, touching a kiss to her temple before letting his eyelids droop closed. Tomorrow was another day, after all, and promised new adventures. Life was certainly never boring for this pair.