Morning work on a report while listening to the radio set me off remembering, I was carried like dust on an old schoolbus window to the Ulster Museum in the late 1960s, when a trip to Belfast felt like crossing into another world when you are 10 and a feral child.
A tide of P6 and P7 pupils were folded into two blue Ulsterbuses with several harassed teachers and parent and we zipped past the hedgerows of Mid-Ulster as we rattled toward the city. Our teachers called it a “Special Treat,” and maybe it was; it certainly felt like a brief lifting of the classroom walls, a breath of something larger than sums and spelling test, which it has to be said I regularly failed.
I remember little of the museum’s interior as it was then i do have fragments. The dark bulks of linen machines, iron skeletons from Belfast’s industrial past. A sense of being small, and watching the grown-up world loom overhead.
But then we turned a corner into a dim, heavy room, panelled in dark wood, curtained against the day and I met Takabuti for the first time.
A mummy. A real mummy!
Not a picture in my father’s books, not the gold-lit splendour of Tutankhamun’s tomb, but a woman who had once breathed desert air and walked beneath a sky I had only seen in illustrations.
Her skin was dark as polished boots, her coffin lid set aside like the hull of a small forgotten ship. The card beside her told us she was 2,700 years old, that she had died at twenty-five, that there were wounds upon her body no one could quite explain.
I felt a thrill then, the strange, forbidden shiver of standing before someone who had been murdered long before Belfast was ever dreamed of.
Only later did I learn the speculation: a battle-axe strike, perhaps; Assyrian shadows on the horizon of her fleeing steps. She lived and died centuries before Alexander reached Egypt, an odd disappointment to my young mind, which wanted all of history to fit neatly into one story.
But what stays with me is not the scholarship.
It is the hush of that room.
The way the air felt thick with distance.
How a boy from the north coast could stand only inches from a woman who had lived her whole life in another world, another age, another dawn entirely.
Takabuti lay and lies there still quiet as a held breath, waiting for children to file past and try to understand time….
… not for the first time I felt the truth that history is not the old pages of a textbook, but the echo of real lives. That the past is full of people who were young once, who were frightened once, who ran, who loved, who died.
A boy from Coleraine and a girl from ancient Thebes in the same room.
Across 27 centuries, our paths crossed for a single moment.
And it has never quite left me.