Adventure Seed: The Rosetta Stone Murders.

Blame this.

The Rosetta Stone Murders

The Rosetta Stone. It was the key to our understanding of Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, a shining symbol in the history of linguistics – and it’s killed at least three men that we know of, and probably more.  Turns out that a secret doesn’t have to be new to be deadly, particularly when there are immortals involved.

It all goes back to what the Rosetta Stone was actually used for, back in the day: it was a fairly standard embodiment of the ongoing deal made between the Ptolemaic foreign dynasty ruling Egypt, and the native priesthoods.  The king supported the temples, and the temples supported the king. The Rosetta Stone reviews the details of one such deal: grain and silver shipments, diversion of excess water from a particularly good flooding, allowing the priests a greater share of byssus cloth, legal protections for Alexandrian boatmen… actually, back up a bit.

Ah, yes, byssus cloth. Depending on who you ask, it’s either: an exceptionally rare textile derivative of a particular mollusk; or a particular type of fine linen that’s used in mummification.  The esoteric reality, of course, is that it’s an exceptionally rare mollusk derivative that is absolutely vital for a successful Egyptian-style mummification.  We’re defining ‘successful’ as ‘can successfully transition to an Undead state,’ mind you.  At any rate, the stuff is valuable; and the struggle over control of it was sometimes pretty fierce.

So, let’s fast-forward to the 19th century. When the English and the French showed up in Egypt, naturally the mummies still existing at that point took sides and started playing political games.  They’ve done it for millennia, and will be doing it for millennia more.  Some of the mummies involved had also been involved in the dodgy deals behind the Rosetta Stone’s proclamation.  Said mummies were not particularly happy about the fact that, suddenly, mortals were on the verge of learning how to read Ancient Egyptian. Sure, everybody knew that it was going to happen eventually. But… mortals using this particular stele might prove to be rather awkward.

It was not really the intent of the mummy – ‘community?’ ‘Hierarchy?’ ‘Conspiracy?’ – to let anybody get killed over this.  Indeed, there was some discussion as to whether the Englishman Thomas Young and the Frenchman Jean-François Champollion might actually be worth… preserving, as it were.  Unfortunately, a particularly unscrupulous mummy of the lowest rank (one that only got to be mummified because of the sudden availability of the aforementioned byssus cloth) panicked at the thought of his more powerful brethren belatedly realizing that shenanigans had been going on, two thousand years earlier; he killed Young and Champollion to delay the translation process, and then compounded his error by murdering Champollion’s assistant Francesco Salvolini when it became clear that Salvolini had gotten hold of Champollion’s private papers and was busily plagiarizing from them.

It was at this point that the larger mummy population realized what happened, detained their criminal colleague, and carried out their standard punishment: to wit, they locked him in a coffin for a century or two, in order to contemplate his stupidity and bad manners.  Unfortunately, the mummies that were tasked with letting him out after a century or so failed to survive the World Wars.  And when somebody finally noticed that, they discovered that the mummy in question had eventually figured out how to get himself out of the coffin and back into the world.  Based on the scrawled and scratched messages found in his prison, the mummy is not exactly feeling well-disposed towards… well, anybody and anything, really.  But he particularly hates Egyptologists now.

And, hey, that’s where your team comes in!  On the bright side, at least they’ll be working for employers who aren’t exactly stingy with resources. And who will happily pay well to get in on the ground floor of particularly valuable long-term investments. Immortality does tend to encourage the thoughtful…