“I don’t think you quite understand,” Thomson said.

“I should say I don’t,” replied Manderley. “You’re waving a piece of ancient paper with mucky-muck scribbles on it and somehow expecting this layman to intuit what it is that’s got you hot and bothered”

Thomson sighed. “This is hieroglyphic script, roughly contemporaneous with the Narmer Palette.” Seeing the blank look on Manderley’s face, he quickly added “The oldest hieroglyphics we know of.”

“Sound like it might be valuable,” Manderley conceded. “Sell it and see that I get my cut as financier.”

“No, no!” Thomson cried. “Narmer was the first pharaoh, who united upper and lower Egypt and transformed a loose confederation of tribes into a nation-state. Most of his cities remain lost to us, including the military outpost at Ut and Narmer’s capitol at Thinis.”

“I’m still leaning toward selling it,” said Manderley. “I think I could sniff out a buyer that could keep us fully funded for a year–more if it’s private and not a museum.”

“Then you’d be about as savvy as the people in Twain’s story that burned mummies for locomotive fuel. This papyrus was located in a dig that appears to be the ruins of the Ut outpost. It contains an exact map to the location of Thinis.”