Artefact #3 – Ancient Egyptian Stela
I have actually been doing a little work on this one already. Essentially it will be a version of a typical funerary offering stela, featuring some figures in one register and hieroglyphs of the offering formula in another register. Usually the offerings made to the god Osiris, who is the god of the dead and the afterlife, however I’m going to swap him out for Cthulhu instead. I will also replace the usual god’s epithets, typically things like ‘the good god’, with more appropriate ones befitting a malevolent destroyer of worlds.
I spent a while trying to decide which king should be making the offering. I did contemplate making it HPL himself and then ultimately thought about using the ‘Black pharaoh’ Nephren-Ka from The Haunter of the Dark story. Unfortunately Nepheren-Ka isn’t quite right as an ancient Egyptian name, the ph wasn’t in their language and is more a Greek construct. For example the city former capital city normally referred to as Memphis; whose New Kingdom period Egyptian name was Men-nefer, which turned into Menfe when it was represented in Coptic and then Memphis was the Greek adaptation. However you can get close to this with Neferenka [nfr n k3]. That also literally translates to ‘beautiful water spirit’, which I think fits nicely and is reminiscent of Cthulthu (ancient Egyptian kings often named themselves after their favourite gods).
I had thought about making this as a painted wooden stela, however wood was exclusively used for female stelae and so a king’s stela would be made from carved stone. As much as I’d like to learn stone carving, this isn’t the right project to be a vehicle for that and so I’m cheating and making this out of polymer clay over wood which I will then mould and cast in a limestone analogue (tinted cement probably). I have a few plans for the casts too, but I am going to keep them under my hat for now
The Haunter of the Dark said that ‘Prof. Enoch Bowen [returned] home from Egypt May 1844’, assumedly with the Shining Trapezohedron and in my narrative he’s also found this stela and donated it to the Miskatonic Museum a couple of months after he got back in the US. Following my previous scheme for accessioning an object into the museum; I’ve given this an accession number of AE.1844,0616.6391 (I picked the 16th of June because that was actually when the first roller coaster opened in the US), the sequential number is the original publication date of The Haunter of the Dark in reverse (forward was too similar to my cuneiform tablet and as it’s half way through the year it felt more likely that a lot of artefacts would have been accessioned).
I’ve been studying relief carved limestone stelae in museums to look at the chisel marks left by the original craftsman. I’m hoping to be able to replicate something very similar in my clayed version. Here are a couple of nice examples from the British Museum’s collection (I can’t remember their accession numbers but if anyone cares ask me and I’ll look when I’m next there):
Here’s a page from my journal showing my adapted version of the standard ‘hotep di nesu’ offering formula:
In English that’s:
An offering which the king gives to Khfulkhu, lord of R’Lyeh, the great god, revered one, lord of water, given life, like Ra, forever, the bringer of darkness, the mighty one, destroyer of all, so that he may have a voice offering in bread, beer, ox, fowl, alabaster and linen, everything good and pure on which a god lives, for the ka of the revered one Neferenka.