“Well, yeah, I guess I can accept that,” Jerry said, getting out his tobacco again.

TJ gave him a brisk double-tap on the shoulder. “Good of you, old chap. So, Gideon, aside from that, is there anything special about him?”

“Give me a minute and we’ll see,” Gideon said.

Using the usual criteria on the skull and pelvis, he had already established that it was a “him,” and probably middle-aged. There was some arthritic lipping on the vertebrae, but not much, which meant that he’d probably made it into his forties, but not out of his sixties. The sutures on the skull, not the most reliable of indicators, were mostly sealed, but parts of the later-closing ones-the sphenotemporal, the parietomastoid, the squamous-were still open, suggesting an age in the forties, maybe the fifties. Except for the oddly worn-down incisors (what in the world had this guy been gnawing on?), tooth wear was about right for a man in his middle years too. Taken all together, he estimated the age at forty to sixty-five.

Anything finer than that was difficult because the ends of the long bones had been pretty well chewed away, and so had the pubic symphyses. Those were where the best indicators of age were to be found, but, unfortunately, they were also the softest bone, and the scavengers went for them first and most thoroughly.

The excavation records were no help at all. The yellowing card titled 4360 said Male, probably tall. No distinguishing characteristics. That was all. Such brevity was par for the course in 1920s Egyptology, especially for an excavation headed by a rich amateur, at a run-of-the-mill site at which there had surely been no trained physical anthropologist. There wasn’t even a list of the individual bones, which meant that there was no way of knowing if animals had carried anything off while they were lying in the enclosure.