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"A Bio of the 'Real Life' Sementawy Horemheb"...Courtesy of Professor Ren Ming "Chairman" Mao; Chandler Archaeological Trust, Australia, 2003. (Written while half drunk and under duress and translated from Mandarin, with apologies to both Terry Pratchett and Robert Louis Stevenson).
Velikovsky and Rohl would have been proud! Sementawy depends for her operation on the balance of eight forces which the universe has identified as scotch, cigarettes, cold fury, Champagne, charm, persuasion, certainty... and bloody-mindedness. She is the sort of person who stands on craggy mountain tops during thunderstorms wearing wet copper armour, pointing a fist to the sky and shouting "All Gods are bastards!" An Australian citizen, born to Irish/French Norman parents, she retains strong family connections to Ireland's County Kerry's Sleive Mish Mountains and to Bayeux, France, despite being "dragged up" in Australia and remaining thoroughly Aussie. Despite all this, Sementawy dreams of Ieper, Belgium... which by no means explains her persona but does go a long way to explaining what she is most passionate about in real life. She and her husband Fenton Brigantes have recently moved house from Belfast("which sucks big time"), Northern Ireland to Melbourne, Australia, where she shares her life with a belligerent pc, an unkindness of ravens, the ghost of an outrageous Persian cat named Koshka (who was really the Anti-Christ), a black Bombay kitten named Rashid el din 'Sinan' - the ultimate assassin and a thuggish black Oriental kitten named Jaiya Surya who has a perchant for shredding toilet paper. Both cats are water babies and flood the house on a regular basis.
An unknown "connection" to ancient Egypt asserted itself when she was 4 years old. Having seen a movie on the subject, she astonished her parents by, not only by announcing that she could tell them everything the General Pharaoh Horemheb and proving it, but by being able to read the 'funny word pictures.' She says candidly that she was probably once possessed by the evil spirit of E.A. Wallis Budge and hence, the majority of her translations are buggered, as a result. Her perchant for mummifying and burying her sister's Barbie Dolls was indulged until, aged 15, she traveled to Egypt on a 'school work experience' trip to indulge her passions on a dig in El Aksur. Manifest destiny led her to complete a Phd in Egyptian Archaeology at The Petrie Institute of Egyptian Archaeology, University College London; her thesis being on Horemheb, naturally... a work which she plans to, 'one day' turn into a novel. Her minor was in Russian history, which she says defies explanation, but probably lies in a fondness for ice cold Stolichnaya vodka and Faberge eggs. Upon completion, she returned to Egypt for some years to perfect
the 'art' of baksheesh and her pyramid climbing techniques, which have involved (but are not limited to) vodka, golf clubs and bribes. An accident on The Wall of Crows... "bloody tourists - climbing where they bloody shouldn't" (Giza Plateau) took her back Australia where she settled down to do some real archaeological work (even though pyramids aren't exactly thick on the ground down under, despite Australia being 70% desert).
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Her favourite things are... AUSTRALIA - "beautiful one day and perfect the next," The Lion D'Or - Bayeux - France, a place in Flanders called Passcheneadale, the thoroughly charming Irishman named Fenton Brigantes, the General Pharaoh Horemheb, ravens, heraldry, jackals, Mozart, Trans Global Underground and Linkin Park and Midnight Oil (go figure!), her friends, archery, all Scorpios, QAF, cooking Indian curries, the Aussie beach, sushi, beating almost everyone... (including her pc and Omar Sharif) at backgammon, Egyptian and Mameluke antiques, the Ottoman's, the memory of her cat Koshka (the most sublimely beautiful creature ever created)... and expensive but awfully pretty shoes. She sometimes plays "shot chess" in which the chess pieces are all shot glasses, usually filled with butternut schnapps and Bailey's. She claims not to be a wine snob but would throw this out the window if it came to being offered Penfolds Grange Hermitage, a glass of which, she'd probably crawl through broken glass for.
Sementawy tends to become sick if she does not manage to purchase at least 5 new books every week and believes... that "if your morals make you dreary, trust in it... they are wrong." The things that 'trip her trigger'... you really truly don't wish to know about!
"They see me as a repository, a living mausoleum, a rescource (as they term it). Why should I do them any favours? As far as I'm concerned, they're scavengers, hyena's the lot of them! Jackal's on the scent of carrion. Raven's hunting for road-kill. Corpse flies. They want to pick through me as if I'm a bone heap, looking for scrap metal and broken pottery; for shards of cuneiform and scraps of papyrus. For curio's, lost toys, gold teeth. If they ever suspect what I've got stashed away here, they'd jimmy the locks. They'd break and enter, knock me over the head and make off with the baubles... and feel more than justified."
Excerpt taken from... The Blind Assassin. Margaret Atwood, ©:2000.
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