I came across the Stela of Paser in 1999 while wandering the corridors of the British Museum. On this particular afternoon, the British Museum was celebrating the bicentenary of the discovery of the Rosetta Stone with a special exhibition: “Cracking Codes: The Rosetta Stone and Decipherment.”  The remaining fragment of the Stela of Paser was just one of many objects on display, all of which presented particular problems of translation or decipherment.  Nearly all of them, like the Stela of Paser, normally remained out of sight and mind in the storage rooms of the museum basement.  I found it fascinating that these scripts had not been solved for several thousands of years, even when we are able to fully translate the Ancient Egyptian languages. 

I had little understanding of hieroglyphs at the time, but I immediately was drawn to the particular problem of the Stela of Paser: that these symbols placed in a grid could be read horizontally and vertically, giving different variations on the same hymn, and that a mysterious “third way,” as mentioned in the reading instructions, was yet to be discovered.  It seemed a preposterous task, and I immediately thought of what sort of person would dedicate their lives to such a thing? What would it be like to hover over this impenetrable text and extract meaning that has remained hidden for nearly three thousand years?  When the Stela of Paser was returned to storage after the exhibition was over, who would be there, huddled in the dark reaches of the basement, waiting for it? 

I returned to London several times, and in 2002 I was able to secure a job at the museum which allowed me access to the various nether regions, as well as to the staff and curators who worked with the actual objects.  One October day I arranged to see the Stela of Paser, back in storage, with an Egyptology curator.  We walked through rooms stacked high with statuary and pottery, an immense wealth of antiquities.  After a bit of searching we found the stela simply leaning against the rough stone wall, a small marker, E.A. 194 (E.A. = Egyptian Antiquities) designating the bin number.  My Egyptologist guide simply shrugged when I asked about the “third way” mentioned in the script.  I had already begun the novel by this time and it was just as I had hoped; it was still a mystery.