Shabti Robots and Hieroglyphic Spells: Rick Riordan’s Egyptians

Abstract

Young people in the UK often first encounter ancient Egypt in primary school, where they are typically fascinated by the mummification process, delighting in visceral details such as the draining out of brain matter through a dead body’s nose. Fantastical images of mummies and other mysterious ancient artefacts, the strangeness of hieroglyphic writing and magical stories about Egyptian afterlife rituals all hold rich potential for children’s literature. Popular images of ancient Egypt appear in a number of science fiction texts produced for children, which often capitalise on the supernatural and fantastic potential of the material. One example of this appropriation is Star Ka’at by André Norton and Dorothy Madlee (1976), in which domestic cats turn out to be distantly related to a race of extra-terrestrial super-cats—Ka’ats—whose ancestors were respected in ancient Egypt, and even worshipped as the goddess Bast.1 Star Ka’at contains only scattered, and sometimes slightly covert, references to Egypt, since the Ka’ats work through their own powers of telepathy and telekinesis, rather than any inherited powers from their Egyptian ancestors. Other authors have more recently made more extensive use of ancient Egypt in work for young people, such as Julia Jarman’s The Time Travelling Cat and the Egyptian Goddess (1992) and Dugald Steer’s Egyptology: Search for the Tomb of Osiris (2004). Crucially, these texts also show evidence of some engagement with Egyptological scholarship.