“Are you cutting the time they’re going to spend on your Middle Egyptian generative grammar paradigm?”

“That,” he said crisply, “was never scheduled to take more than two hours in the first place.”

“So they’re getting two hours of syntactic analysis that nobody has given a damn about since 1932,” Tiffany blurted, “but you’re not going to let them near our one and only working excavation?”

Now he was annoyed. “Excavation of what?” he said testily. “Tell us, just what is there to see up there? What is this wondrous WV-29 that consumes so much of our resources? The long-lost royal tomb of Queen Tiy? Of Akhenaten himself?” Damn it all, there she’d gone and made him lose his temper.

“No,” she said, her face settling into the irritating sulk that heralded one of her little lectures. “It’s not a long-lost royal anything. It was a common, everyday workers’ village with absolutely nothing in it of royal interest. Just ordinary, average people not worth bothering about.”

He eyed the Scotch bottle once more: Teacher’s Highland Cream, purchased at extortionate cost, but well worth it when compared to the barbaric Egyptian spirits. Perhaps under the circumstances he could allow himself the merest driblet more. He poured, sipped, and felt better for it.

“My dear Tiffany, I’m quite aware-”

“The purpose of modern Egyptological research,” she went on automatically-and why wouldn’t it be automatic, considering the regularity with which she trotted out this tiresome and misinformed harangue?-“isn’t to uncover more royal burials, more royal stelae, it’s to reconstruct the broader-”

“-the broader social and cultural institutions of ancient Egypt,” Dr. Haddon supplied. Tit for tat.

“-and-” Tiffany faltered momentarily, but only momentarily. “Yes, that’s right, but as long as we continue to pay more attention to interpreting, and re-interpreting, and re-re-interpreting the goddamn objects that come out of the ground than we do to the real knowledge that comes from careful stratigraphic excavation-”