The Historically Most Important Hotel in all the World From the very time of its opening in the December of 1877, the Old Luxor Hotel has shaped the lives of all who have ever stayed in its rooms and whose walls have absorbed the momentous events of the Pharaonic civilisation on which it stands. All of the characters in this my book were real people, who actually lived the events described. And who even spoke the very same words written in its pages; which together have made the Old Luxor Hotel the most historically important of any in the world.

This hotel the earliest in Luxor and the first to be built for the pioneering tour operator Thomas Cook & Son; now lies in peaceful solitude, ensconced amid its once Elysian gardens; itself soon to become a ruin like the three-thousand-year-old Pharaonic Temple it overlooks; or even worse a modern reincarnation, subjected to the worst kind of historic interpretation, becoming everything it never was.

The Papyrus of Ani “Now, among the houses that were sealed and guarded was a small one that abutted on the wall of the garden of the old Luxor Hotel. This house was a source of considerable anxiety to me, for in it I had stored the tins containing the papyri... It appears incredible, but the whole of the digging was carried out without the knowledge of the watchmen on the roof of the house and the sentries outside it...It was in this way that we saved the Papyrus of Ani and all the rest of my acquisitions from the officials of the Service of Antiquities, and all Luxor rejoiced .” Ernest Alfred Thompson Wallis-Budge - By Nile & Tigris.

The Papyrus of Ani is the name given to the most famous and best-preserved example of an ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead. It is believed have been written around 1250 BC, in the 19th Dynasty during the reign of Pharaoh Ramesses II, for the Royal Scribe Ani – ‘registrar of the offerings of all the Gods, overseer of the granaries of the Lords of Abydos, and scribe of the offerings of the Lords of Thebes’. It was acquired by the archaeologist Sir Ernest Alfred Thompson Wallis-Budge from an unknown tomb in the Valley of the Nobles in 1888, smuggled out of the Old Luxor Hotel and sent back to the British Museum; where it can still be seen today (although not all of the papyrus is on view). See Chapter 5 of my book ‘The Field of Reeds’ for the full story – read all about it!

The Jesus Papyrus Sir, – As many of your readers have wintered on the Nile and worshipped at the little English Church at Luxor, we feel that the publication of this appeal will be as welcome to them as appreciated by us…The late chaplain was so well known and so highly esteemed by English visitors to Luxor that the opportunity of contributing to such a memorial will doubtless be welcomed by them. Subscriptions will be received and acknowledged by Messrs. Thomas Cook & Son, Ludgate Circus. Yours etc. A. H. SAYCE (Professor of Assyriology, Oxford)”. A. W. GROSS M.A. (Chaplain, English Church, Luxor): F. H. COOK (Chairman, Luxor Hospital Committee)

It was at Luxor that the Rev. Charles Bousfield Huleatt, chaplain of the English Church, which once stood in the garden of the Old Luxor Hotel, discovered three fragments of a Codex which contained text from the New Testament Gospel of St. Matthew. Now known as the Jesus Papyrus these three fragments are from a late second century codex of the Gospel (Chapter 26:23 and 31), that the Rev. Huleatt sent to his mother, which is now in the archives of Magdalen College, his old Oxford University College. But, you my readers of ‘The Field of Reeds’, will hear the true story of the earliest Christian Gospel written in the time when a rebel Jew, named Jesus preached in Palestine; and whose disciples spread his word throughout a realm that became Christendom.

The Forgotten Pharaoh - Tutankhamun “…on the night before Mr. Howard Carter opened the tomb, his pet canary was killed by a cobra which form the natives say Tutankhamen’s spirit adopted to show his resentment at disturbing his privacy, the cobra being the emblem of royalty among the Pharaohs… ‘You may attach what significance to it you like.’ said Mr Carter laughingly ‘Personally, in view of the results which followed, I do not see that it should not have been an omen of great fortune. Perhaps my little canary was a god of evil and the cobra was really doing me a good turn!’…” Sunderland Daily Echo, 7th February 1923

‘The Field of Reeds’ tells of a meeting in the garden of the Old Luxor Hotel, between a playboy English Aristocrat and a disgraced Archaeologist, whose portraits once hung in its salon; who together would find the tomb of the boy Pharaoh Tutankhamen, that only they believed existed; and of the curse, created by the powerful Cobra Goddess Meretseger, which prophesised ‘That death shall come on swift wings to him who disturbs the peace of the King’. Out of this curse was born the legend of Tutankhamun.