Word: ays
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...opportunity and motive. Using these criteria, "we initially looked at the entire Egyptian empire," Cooper says. "But we quickly narrowed the focus to Tut's inner circle." Eventually, they winnowed the field to just four suspects: Maya, Tut's chief treasurer; Horemheb, his military commander; Ankhesenamen, his wife; and Ay, his Prime Minister. (Warning: plot spoiler ahead...
This leaves Ay. The Prime Minister, who served in the same role under Tut's father, had been de facto King while advising the young Tut and had won the boy's trust. (Tut became Pharaoh when he was 9.) Ay may have coveted the throne himself--a position he in fact assumed after Tut's death. Wall paintings in Tut's tomb show Ay performing the Opening of the Mouth ceremony at Tut's funeral, which is reserved for the heir apparent...
...widow may also provide evidence against Ay. A cuneiform document reports that a letter was sent from an unnamed widowed Egyptian Queen to the Hittite King in what is now Turkey, pleading that one of his sons be sent south to marry her. The writer's fear was that she would otherwise be forced to wed one of her "servants." Ankhesenamen, as onetime Queen, would surely have seen Ay as a servant. Some people, including Cooper and King, believe that an ancient ring bearing her and Ay's names indicates that the two were in fact married, a move that...
Additionally, it has never been proved that Ankhesenamen wrote the letter to the Hittite King; some scholars believe the author was not Tut's widow but his father's. Similarly, the ring bearing Ay's and Ankhesenamen's names may indicate little, since in ancient Egypt there were no such things as wedding rings. "The ring merely shows an affiliation," says Eaton-Krauss...
Some people hate Adrian Tomine's work. All they see are cute girls and angsty-guys in short, enigmatic portraits of the West Coast's slowly-aging Generation X. But they don't get it. Eleven years ago Tomine (pronounced TOE-mean-ay) began self-publishing his comic, "Optic Nerve" when he was just sixteen, stunning the comixcenti with his mature style. It was soon picked up by the classy Canadian publisher Drawn and Quarterly, and the company has just collected the last four issues into a gorgeous hardcover, "Summer Blonde" (132 pp.; $24.95). The dust jacket, with...