Having survived the Flood, traversed the Neolithic and discovered Babel and Mesopotamia, Noam continues his exploration of the civilisations and wakes up in 1650 BC on the banks of the Nile. The immortal hero of Crossing Time (La Traversée des temps) leads readers into Ancient Egypt and Memphis, the capital of the two kingdoms. Noam gasps in wonder at the perfection of the pyramids, falls asleep between the stone paws of the enigmatic sphinx, learns about the mumification of bodies being prepared for the next world and entrusts an abandoned baby to Pharoah’s daughter. Combining his story-telling powers with his encyclopaedic knowledge, Schmitt introduces an array of characters who are both touching and instructive about the evolution of humanity. Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt has no equal for his ability to beguile readers while adding to their knowledge. His books are always enthralling and never didactic. What talent!

For the publication of Soleil sombre (The Sun Goes Down), Le Pèlerin accompanied the author to the land of Moses and the pharaohs. Your correspondent reports from Egypt on the trail of the immortal Noam.

“A unique interlude of 3,000 years, a historical and geographical oasis: no civilisation has ever lasted so long!” Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt exclaims, contemplating the majestic pyramid of Cheops, its peak vanishing into the white clouds of the sky. For the publication of Book III of Schmitt’s La Traversée des temps (Crossing Time) – Soleil sombre (The Sun Goes down), the book’s publisher Albin Michel invited journalists and the author to Egypt where the novel is set. Elated and charming, the author stood at the foot of the pyramids of Giza Plateau to explain his fascination with the land of the pharaohs and the book’s title.

“Egypt is an oxymoron: it brings together what would become divided, with Greek philosophy and Jewish thought. In Ancient Egypt, everything is connected: life and death – there’s the continuity of the physical being after death; humans and animals – the gods are half-men, half-beasts; male and female – the Nile is hermaphroditic, as strong as a man but life-giving like a woman!” The author is unstoppable. “The reason we get so excited about Egypt, when so little of its culture has come down to us, is that it has preserved its mystery. It’s anti-Cartesian, it defies categories!”

The novelist can hardly contain his delight at discovering the perfection of the pyramids on the religious Giza Plateau, south of Cairo: “This perfect shape suggests humankind’s unity and power”, or his awe at the infinite delicacy of the sculptures in The Museum of Cairo: gods, pharaohs and scribes in diorite, basalt, ivory, cedarwood and sycamore, but also brightly painted sarcophagi, the treasures of Tutankhamen and... mummies. Many of the items have been taken to the brand-new Grand Egyptian Museum next to the pyramids, scheduled to open in 2023, but two mummies, Yuya and Thuya, Tutankhamen’s grandparents, are still on view. And in such superb condition, their facial characteristics beautifully preserved, you feel as though you’re in their presence.

Basing his research on the latest discoveries, Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt has written at length about the ruses of the priests of Anubis and the rites and practices during mummification. “When archaeologists scanned the mummies, they discovered that the quality of embalmment varied considerably and that sometimes services that had been promised had not been kept. That gave me scope to sketch a vast human comedy!” laughs the author, who depicts the House of Eternity in Memphis with such realism that you feel you’re right beside Noam, watching the shenanigans of the priests of Anubis and the famous jackal-headed Master of Secrets. The author is passionate, too, about the medical remedies and practices already dealt with in his first two volumes, with Tibor, the medicine man. “As a child, I used to go to the faculty of medicine in Lyon where my father was head of the physiotherapy school. There was a room with mummies in it and a collection of medical instruments down the ages. If I hadn’t been a writer, I’d have been a doctor.”

It's impossible not to be impressed by the wealth of so much accumulated information deftly woven into the epic of Noam: this scribe and doctor with an interest in everything, isn’t he Schmitt’s alter ego? The author acknowledges there’s something in it but tempers the suggestion with: “That’s me at my best! Noam doesn’t judge, he adapts, he’s a humanist.” So, what is Schmitt’s secret? How did he bring it all together? “I start by creating a serious library on the subject with opposing opinions, and I zoom in on all the tiny details. My plan, the characters and the events are all stored in my memory. Then, I spend eight or nine months writing and getting what I’ve written checked by Egyptologists.”

In terms of the place, time and characters of this third volume, “I wanted to show ordinary people and especially women, to highlight the major role they played in that period. Egyptologists agree that they were less powerful than Christiane Desroche Noblecourt would have us believe, excellent though her work was, but they weren’t just relegated to the kitchen, they weren’t veiled.” Eric- Emmanuel Schmitt thus creates sassy female characters, like Féfi the perfumer or Méret the singer and harpist.

A sceptical Moses

“Memphis was important because it was the first capital of Egypt, and as there are few traces of it left, I was able to invent it,” he explains, surprised to discover in Memphis Museum a magnificent alabaster sphinx: a colossal Ramses II. After a photo shoot in front of the sphinx, Schmitt declares his choices. “I chose to set the action in about 1650 BC at the time of the volcanic eruption of Santorini in line with events that have come down to us: the arrival of the “darkness that can be felt” (Exodus 10:21) and plagues. In my book, Aaron, Moses’ companion, attributes these “plagues of Egypt” to the God of Moses, but my Moses is more circumspect!” Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt, a Christian, has no hesitation in allowing himself this freedom, because he thinks that history and humanity’s tendency to create meaning and myths is compatible with faith and Christ’s message. He uses this freedom to tell his historical tale as well as the myth of Isis and Osiris and to associate Noam, his immortal hero, with today’s transhumanists. “Transhumanism is the contemporary incarnation of the denial of physical death, just like the Egyptians!”

Monumental and beguiling, this saga covering millennia has been in the making in Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt’s mind since he was 25. “I’ve honed my abilities over the years by writing plays, stories, novellas and a handful of full-length novels and it’s all resulted in this series which is making me enormously happy! So, now I’m able to wallow in my love of encyclopaedias and novels and even footnotes. It’s like the antechamber to life: each new book fills me with energy...!”

In the land of Pharoah and Moses. The pyramids

Who has never dreamed of looking on these “forty centuries” of history, as Napoleon Bonaparte put it in 1798? For the community of journalists, to be able to follow Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt on Giza Plateau on the occasion of the publication of Book III in his series of historical novels, is an exceptional opportunity. The full glory of the ancient world is revealed to us by Cheops Pyramid. Here, men who believed in immortality built the most remarkable tombs in which their mummies would await the journey to the beyond. “I find it deeply moving, it connects me to our ancestors and to their mysterious concept of life and death,” the novelist confides.

Paradoxically, despite his solid silhouette, like that of his literary mentor Alexandre Dumas, Eric- Emmanuel Schmitt has a high regard for lightness. “The kind of grace you find in people who look forward to what the day will bring in the morning and look forward to what the night will bring in the evening. People who treat life like a party.” Describing himself as “equable and easy-going”, Schmitt admits that he can sometimes be subdued. For that reason, he needs “whimsical folk” like that around him. Their radiance and energy galvanise his own resources and stop him “shutting down”. People such as his friend Danielle Darrieux, whom he cast in Oscar and The Lady in Pink, a monologue for the stage, in 2003 when she was 85 at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées. “Danielle,” he asked her. “What is your definition of happiness?” An existential question if ever there was one! “Opening the shutters in the morning. Closing them at night,” was the delightful actor’s reply (she died in 2017).

Over a two-day escapade to Cairo organised by its publisher Albin Michel to mark the publication of Soleil sombre (The Sun Goes Down), Volume III in Schmitt’s eight-volume history of humanity (“600 pages each, 5,000 in total”, the author insists, starting in the Neolithic with Paradis perdus (Paradise Lost) in February 2021), Schmitt seems to embody this tendency, rare as it is these days, to enjoy every minute.

Squeezed into his seat on the night flight from Paris to Cairo, awkwardly straddling the hump of a camel, biding his time under a blazing sun before Cheops Pyramid in Giza, sinking into the floral cushions of an old felucca or tossed about in a tourist bus as it bowls along the gigantic highways that criss-cross the Egyptian capital, Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt never loses his good mood for an instant. Smiling and genial, generous and forthcoming and always a good listener, he goes out into the world with elegance and grace.

He's got good reason to be tired, mind you. The author of Monsieur Ibrahim and the Flowers of the Koran (2001) has just returned from a month in Israel where he was staying with Benedictine monks in Jerusalem at the invitation of the Vatican; on 14 November, he will meet Pope Francis in Rome; in the interim, he will have awarded the Prix Goncourt at Drouant’s restaurant in Paris; he’s the dynamic director of the Théâtre Rive Gauche (Paris); he’ll be clocking up round trips to Brussels, his adopted city these last 20 years; plus, he’s already hard at work on Book IV of La Traversée des temps (Crossing Time), this one set in Greece. Nevertheless, here he is for two days in the land of the Pharaohs.

Launching in

For, Soleil sombre (The Sun Goes Down) takes place in Memphis on the banks of the Nile in 1650 BC, a tipping point when Moses took a group of men out of Egypt “to live and think differently”. Like the previous two books in the saga, Noam, its immortal hero, leads us by way of his memoires through epochs, centuries and civilisations. “I’ve always been exercised by the question: how did we become what we are?” explains Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt in justification of his titanic literary enterprise to popularise history, which he’s been nurturing since the age of 25. “I was a young philosophy graduate from the Ecole Normale Supérieure and I’d just started teaching for the first time, and I wondered how we’d gone from being hunter-gatherers to this,” he says, with a sweeping gesture towards the endless sun-filled scene at our feet: the baking city of Cairo where the shadows are lengthening. “You know, this totally urbanised, populated world: the Anthropocene! What were the stages that got us here?”

And it was then that he had an idea for a character “who would travel through time and tell us his story, and in so doing, tell us our own”. Having found the plotline, he never left off developing the personality of his principal character. “I could see he was going to be a healer, a doctor; I grasped his relationship with the world and his endless curiosity; I could sense his troubles in love, and I knew he had sensitivity and integrity. Noam began to exist.” In fact, he is like Schmitt. Emotions, passions, moments of doubt. So, it seems odd that he waited so long before he began to write, when he could see the plan so precisely at the age of 25. Why did he start out as a playwright with La Nuit de Valognes (Don Juan on Trial, 1991), winning immediate success and opening the way to whatever he wanted to write? Why did he launch into a Protean career, producing plays, novels, short stories, non-fiction and novellas and racking up 53 titles before he ever got going on the series? “I wasn’t ready. When the idea came to me, I knew that I couldn’t yet bring it to fruition. I set myself a target: ‘One day, you’re going to know enough to outline the historical periods, you’ll have enough energy to write that kind of novel.’ It became a life’s project, an intellectual and artistic agenda. It guided my reading for 30 years and every book I wrote was used as a springboard to reach this future one. I tried to extend my repertoire.” But nothing came. “I hated myself for not managing it. Several times I tried, but it was artificial.” What happened? The answer is instantaneous: “My mother died.” Eric- Emmanuel Schmitt’s eyes cloud. I apologise and offer to change the subject. “No, no,” the writer insists. “I can talk about it now, and it’s why I talk about it. For years, there was a little boy in me thinking that his mother was immortal. Then, suddenly, she was gone, like that, at the age of 87. It was a good age to have reached, but it shook me to my core. I realised the clock was ticking and I thought: ‘You’ve had this grand plan in you and you’re not getting down to it!’ Basically, I began writing out of grief. I thought: ‘This is the most important book of my life and my mother will never read it.’ But it was part of the grieving process.” A rebirth? “Yes, she was dead and I had to create life.”

Inspired by the narrative techniques and drama of Alexandre Dumas – “anticipation, surprise, every sentence driving you compulsively on to the next” --, this historical and scientific novel explores the relationship between people and death. Memphis, the capital of the two Egyptian kingdoms and the setting of The Sun Goes Down, was the site of highly sophisticated funerary rites, a feature that allowed the writer to push back boundaries and dare to draw parallels with Silicon Valley-type transhumanism, “this obsession to big-up humankind the way mummies did for the Ancient Egyptians.” But tonight, “in the gentle air,” when night is falling on the remains of a vanished society, he is filled with nostalgia: nostalgia for an oxymoronic outlook that “connects instead of dividing”, nostalgia for Greek reason and monotheistic logic. An approach to the world that makes no distinction between the dead and the living, between animals and humans, and between women and men. In this “poetic blurring of boundaries”, Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt feels happy and at peace.

In the desert at the foot of the Giza pyramids, in Cairo’s bustling streets, or in the aisles of the Egyptian capital’s spectacular museum, dressed always in his immaculate blue suit, Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt is like a fish in the Nile. In his polished shoes and perfectly pressed jacket and shirt he never loses his smile, not even when he’s mobbed by mosquitoes in the searing heat. For, this is the land where the philosopher-novelist set Soleil sombre (The Sun Goes Down), Book III in the massive eight- part series of his history of humanity, La Traversée des temps (Crossing Time).

Noam, the saga’s immortal hero, lived through the Neolithic in Paradis perdus (Paradise Lost) then encountered the builders of Mesopotamia in La porte du ciel (Heaven’s Gate). Now in Book III, we catch up with him in Egypt, still outwardly 25 although actually 8,000 years’ old. As instructive and thrilling as its two predecessors, this literary journey lands us in Memphis on the banks of the Nile in 1650 BC, the heyday of the empire of the pharaohs.

“It informed my childhood”

As a child, Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt used to like going to his father’s office in the Lyon faculty of medicine where Schmitt père was head of the physiotherapy school. “My childhood was informed by Ancient Egypt. There was a collection of mummies that used to fascinate me and also a fabulous collection of medical instruments down the ages. The amazing thing is that I only very recently made the connection with my hero Noam, who’s a healer through time and a scribe in this third volume.”

Schmitt believes that the reason France has never lost its fascination with Egypt, even after Napoleon and Champollion, is that the ancient civilisation is “anti-Cartesian” and mysterious. “We need something to balance our obsession with rationality. Three-thousand-year-old Mesopotamia was a self-sufficient world in the middle of the desert. Then you’ve got the invention of the afterlife and eternity. When you visit the pyramids, you’re brought into the presence of death in life.”

Lesser-known Memphis: an obvious choice

He could have set the novel in Luxor, Karnak or Abu Simbel, whose magnificence means they need no introduction. Instead, he chose lesser-known Memphis. “It was an obvious choice,” says the author, during a trip to the archaeological site, standing between a majestic sphinx and a vast prone statue of Ramses II.

“Memphis was the first capital of the kingdom of Egypt and the oldest in the world. It was the seat of Egypt’s power and the place where all trade converged. Today, nothing remains of Memphis, which gave me free rein to describe it as I like. A novel is a powerful way of bringing vanished worlds back to life. A novel is the opposite of a ruin.”

The result is a book over 550 pages long, a real page-turner of a novel which, like the first two in the series, is bursting with information and anecdotes. Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt admits Volume III wasn’t the easiest to write in light of all the clichés peddled by the abundance of fact and fiction dealing with Ancient Egypt. He loves Mona Ozouf’s “instructive” sentence, which he took on board to write his humanist epic: “The historical novel is domesticated history.”

In Soleil sombre (The Sun Goes Down), Schmitt homes in on the lives of ordinary folk, although the sumptuous land of the pharaohs is never far away. We discover a society in which women held important positions, owned property and took young lovers. Isis, the great life-giving goddess, is omnipresent. “The role of women has declined throughout history. Women have lost their positions.

In images of sexual relations, women are on top of men,” explains the Ecole Normale Supérieure philosophy graduate, a self-proclaimed universalist feminist like his mother and Simone de Beauvoir.

Meticulous work

Schmitt’s favourite Egyptologist is Christiane Desroches Noblecourt (1913-2011), who helped save the monuments of Abu Simbel from the threat of a proposed dam. “She was an ardent defender of women... maybe too ardent, because some of her contemporaries thought she went too far. I had to play down the first version of the novel, which gave an even bigger role to the women,” he smiles, adding that, before handing the manuscript over to his editor, he gave it to two Egyptologists to check.

To stick as closely as possible to historical reality, Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt ratcheted up his work, which became astonishingly meticulous. “When I start out, I don’t always know what I’m looking for,” he laughs. “I draw up my bibliography, and I like reading contrasting accounts that don’t agree, to find the chinks and crevasses and to design my strategies... And to unearth bizarre anecdotes, like the one about Egyptian women urinating into a bag of barley seeds to see whether they were pregnant. If the seeds germinated, they were!”

Similarly, thanks to the most up-to-date research involving CT scans of mummies, he learned that some embalmers were crooks who didn’t provide the services they offered. “For a novelist, that’s fantastic. I incorporated those scams into my plot. It’s all part of the human comedy!”

The series is set to continue next year, with Noam discovering Athens. “That should be easier,” Schmitt admits, “because Greece was the culture of my apprenticeship. I’m still obsessed by it.”

Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt continues his monumental history of humanity. In Volume III, he lands readers in the cradle of Egyptian civilisation. We meet him in Memphis.

“Who’d have thought it? This is extraordinary! You think you know everything about the place where you set your novel, and then you find yourself in it!” Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt is standing in front of the colossal, monolithic sphinx of Memphis, a few kilometres to the south of Cairo and the capital of Ancient Egypt under the Hyksos pharaohs (1650 BC), where the author chose to set Volume III of his monumental project, La Traversée des temps (Crossing Time). “Of course, I knew the Saqqara necropolis a few kilometres from here, but this magnificent sphinx and this limestone colossus of a recumbent Ramses II behind it... no, I’m not familiar with them.” It’s quite something, revealing things to someone already so knowledgeable on the subject. “It’s like Yuval Noah Harai crossed with Alexandre Dumas,” as Albin Michel announced, when Book I of Schmitt’s epic history of humanity came out. Indeed, that’s exactly what it’s like: the scholarship of Harari combined with the fictional flair of Dumas. Schmitt is pursuing his insatiable, dual need to know and to tell stories.

Hedonism. Following on from the Neolithic and the riparian populations of Paradis perdus (Paradise Lost) then the builders of Mesopotamia in La Porte due ciel (Heaven’s Gate), Soleil sombre (The Sun Goes Down) opens with the immortal Noam waking up after a long sleep on the banks of the Nile before setting off to explore Memphis, the capital of the two kingdoms of Egypt. Who holds the wealth and power in this place, who pulls the strings? To deal with the enemy and find Noura, his sister spirit, he must get to the heart of Egypt, “where imagination combines with science, make- belief with rigour and where an extraordinary civilisation is in the making”. From brothels to the House of the Dead, from Hebrew districts to the pharaoh’s palace, by turn a scribe, a lover, an embalmer and a healer, Noam infiltrates Egyptian society and in the process, his author (or is it his double?) fleshes out vanished ages and brings them to life. Schmitt discovered Egypt as a child, not in books but with his father who was head of the physiotherapy school at the faculty of medicine in Lyon. “I often used to ask him to take me with him. They had a collection of mummies that fascinated me. And I came under the spell of their impressive display of medical instruments down the ages. That fascination stayed with me. Noam is passionate about plants, and in all the eras he lives through, he finds out how people are treated and healed. That gives me scope to research the literature of medicinal plants, and there’s nothing that pleases me more!”

Marvelling at the clear night sky over the ruins of Memphis, Schmitt stops in front of the monumental statue of Ramses II, a 10 m-long, prone limestone sculpture discovered intact in 1820 near the entrance to the Temple of Ptah by the Italian Giovanni Battista Caviglia. “I’m trying not to make a noise because it always seems wrong to disturb the dead, doesn’t it? It’s the same with mummies. I almost feel I shouldn’t stare, because the Egyptians never asked to have tourists filing through a museum all day. But hey, I’m only human and my curiosity got the better of me!” He gives a mischievous laugh, betraying his unquenchable hedonism. Like his character Noam, Schmitt is hungry for knowledge and the good things in life. Another Candide, perhaps? No, he knows full well that not everything is for the best. The contemporary Noam we meet in the book, in the passages that fast-forward to our own time, sounds the alarm beside Bretta, a Greta Thunberg lookalike: “Humankind’s occupation of Earth is turning out to be a disaster. Its industries spread pollution, its lifestyle is exhausting fossil energy sources, its carbon footprint is warming the atmosphere [...] and yet, nothing changes: as soon as the details have been observed, they’re put away to the back of everyone’s mind: a data resource that won’t disturb daily life, as if there’s a missing link between knowledge and behaviour.” But Schmitt is an eternal optimist. He has faith in technology the way

the priests of Memphis had faith in Osiris. Egypt invented eternity, Silicon Valley will invent transhumanism.

Dreams. Darkness has fallen on the ancient capital and suddenly, we’re talking about the meaning of the title, Soleil sombre (The Sun Goes Down). “Egypt is an oxymoron. Egyptian thought predated the distinctions and categories of Greek philosophy and Judeo-Christian thought. There was no boundary between humans and animals, gods and the mineral world, the natural and supernatural world, presence and absence, or between meaning and what was indecipherable. The Egyptians wanted to understand the incomprehensible, and their way of deciphering mystery consisted in telling stories”. Story-telling: something that’s always been an obsession for Schmitt. The little boy who used to visit the faculty of medicine in Lyon has grown up, but he has remained true to those early leanings. For, what is Crossing Time but a child’s dream, a child’s game that consists in imagining a bygone era and inventing a universe? But, like all games, you have to know when to stop. “Leaving Egypt” is the title of book’s closing chapter. Schmitt is already thinking of the next place, Greece, where readers will catch up with Noam before being whisked off to the Holy Land, where the Vatican has suggested Schmitt spend some time to produce a travel journal and personal diary of his odyssey. In a few days, he has an audience with the Pope – another child’s dream coming to fruition.

ERIC-EMMANUEL SCHMITT is a writer who cares a lot about history whatever the period. Time and again, his books have been testimony to that concern. Now, he is fulfilling a plan that has been “his driving force for 30 years” as his publisher explains, a plan to write a book about nothing less than the adventures of humanity told through key moments in its development, from the end of the Neolithic to the industrial age. In fact, the project involves eight books presented as novels but superbly well researched and produced at a rate of knots: two in 2021, Paradis perdus (Paradise Lost) and La porte du ciel (Heaven’s Gate) and now in 2022 Soleil Sombre (The Sun Goes Down), which takes us to the time of Ancient Egypt and the pharaohs.

We’re not just in the realm of the historical novel in this series, because the author has telescoped epochs. An interlude between episodes thus brings us back to our own worrying present: in Stockholm, survivalist terrorists decide to wipe out 15-year-old Britta Thorsen, the youthful face of international environmentalism. She is the daughter of Noura, a reincarnation of the Goddess Isis, and Sven, a local environmentalist. The series’ narrator is Noam, himself an avatar of Osiris, the brother and passionate lover of his sister Isis/Noura. Hit by a motorcyclist, Britta has fallen into a deep coma. Her family do everything they can to save her life.

The dark force behind all this is Derek, alias Seth, God of Evil and the brother and assassin of Osiris, who appears in the guise of a dog. Back in the time of the pharaohs, Noam lives in Memphis as the paid gigolo of Neferu, the lover of Mery-Ouser-Re, whom she must succeed after marrying his brother Souser (whom she hates). It is she who finds and raises the baby Moses, a Hebrew son. But there’s no summarising the vagaries of the two heroes, Noam and Noura, inside a pyramid...

The whole thing is a wonderfully tangled web, but it’s also brilliant and thoroughly researched. It’s worth reading the footnotes, too, in small print and sometimes pretty long, explaining a historical point or simply adding to the author’s ha’porth of tar. It turns out that, in a novel, you can do what you like. So, for example, the next volume, Book IV, takes us to Greece four centuries before the birth of Christ, who will turn up in Book V.

Born in the Mesolithic Age, Noam opens his eyes for a third 8me. Now, he’s in Memphis on the banks of the Nile, which he will discover and come to understand before sharing with us this stage of human history.

Curled up beside the Alabaster Sphinx (a symbol of strength, intelligence and gentleness) Noam recharges his baEeries, intrigued by a liEle girl and a cat, Tii. He learns about hieroglyphs, advances in medicine and burial rites, and, above all, he gets to know contemporary Egyp8ans.

Gentle Meret teaches him the meaning of infinite love as opposed to sensual love and pure pleasure. Meret helps him in his work as a healer and takes him to the needy Israelites. Together, they take Pharaoh’s daughter a baby: Moses.

Moses and Aron offer two visions of a single God: while Moses finds humility before His infinite love, Aron includes Him in his discourse.

Reunions with Derek are unexpected and touching. Noura con8nues to be the woman Noam is seeking and will con8nue to seek.

With Tibor, now Imotep, Noam learns about the existence of the soul. The rites and funerary prac8ces of Ancient Egypt are like an echo of 21st-century events, when Eternity Labs tries to save Noura’s daughter with methods sugges8ve of transhumanism.

The pyramid, like Egyp8an society, underpins a structure that benefits everyone in it, built to magnify the grandeur of one man through the toil of men and women who don’t exist, a monument which, like the 3,000 years of Egyp8an civilisa8on, has remained all but unchanged.

Expect an excursion to Egypt that stands out for its insights and scholarship: well worth the trip!