The Tale of Prince Setna

At a Glance

• Central figures: Prince Setna Khaemwaset, son of Pharaoh Ramesses II and a renowned sorcerer-scholar; Naneferkaptah, a dead prince and magician whose tomb holds the Book of Thoth; and Taboubu, a spirit sent to test Setna.
• Setting: Ancient Egypt, centered on Memphis and the sealed tomb of Naneferkaptah; the story belongs to the cycle of Setna tales preserved in Demotic papyri.
• The turn: Setna descends into Naneferkaptah’s tomb, ignores warnings about the curse, and uses his own magic to seize the Book of Thoth - only to be drawn into a deadly game of senet with the dead prince.
• The outcome: Setna escapes with his life but loses the book; he is later humiliated by the spirit Taboubu, returns to the tomb in genuine remorse, and reunites Naneferkaptah’s scattered family in death.
• The legacy: The bodies of Naneferkaptah’s wife and son, long buried apart from him, are gathered and laid to rest together - restoring to the dead prince the family the gods had taken from him.

The Book of Thoth was not kept in a library. It lay in a sealed tomb beneath the earth, wrapped in layers of iron and bronze and silver and gold, surrounded by the bodies of serpents and scorpions and every creature that bites, inside the sarcophagus of a prince who had paid for it with everything he loved. Naneferkaptah had obtained it through cunning and sacrifice - bribing a priest of Ptah with silver and fine linen, casting the prescribed spells over the Nile with his own mouth - and the gods answered his cleverness by drowning his wife and son. The book went into the tomb with him. The warning was inscribed in the very fact of his burial.

Setna Khaemwaset read the warning and went looking anyway.

The Scholar Who Wanted the Book of Thoth

Setna was Ramesses II’s son - a prince of Egypt, a scholar of the old texts, a man who could read what other priests could not. He knew the names of things. He knew where power was buried. His reputation as a sorcerer rested on genuine ability, and genuine ability made him certain he could hold what Naneferkaptah had failed to hold.

The Book of Thoth, written by the god of scribes and wisdom himself, was said to grant the reader mastery over the gods and the elements, dominion over the heavens and the underworld both. That Naneferkaptah had been ruined by it did not dissuade Setna. He told himself that Naneferkaptah had obtained it wrongly, approached it without sufficient skill. Setna approached everything with sufficient skill. He descended into the tomb.

Into the Tomb of Naneferkaptah

The tomb was not empty. In the burial chamber, surrounded by the faint blue light that sometimes clings to the dead, sat the spirit of Naneferkaptah himself - and beside him, dimmer, the spirits of his wife Ahwere and his son Merib, though their bodies lay elsewhere, drowned in the Nile. The book rested among them, still sealed, still wrapped in its nested casings of metal.

Naneferkaptah spoke first. He told Setna what had happened: how he had found the book, how he had read the two spells it contained, how reading them had given him exactly what was promised - the language of birds, the sight of the sun beneath the waters - and how the god Thoth had gone to Ra and demanded punishment. His wife had drowned. His son had drowned. He himself had followed them, unable to live with what his ambition had cost.

Setna listened. Then he reached for the book.

The Game of Senet

Naneferkaptah did not let him take it without contest. He proposed a game of senet - the board game played by both the living and the dead - and named the stakes: if Setna won, the book was his; if Setna lost, Naneferkaptah would take his life and pull him down into the Duat, the underworld, as forfeit.

Setna agreed. He was confident. He sat across the board from a dead man and began to play.

He lost the first game. As the pieces were swept from the board, Setna felt himself sink into the stone floor up to his ankles. He lost the second game and sank to his waist. He lost the third and the earth was at his chin, the weight of the tomb pressing in from every side, the air thinning, the light of Naneferkaptah’s dead eyes the only thing left to see by. He shouted for his brother to go above ground and find the amulets of Ptah, and his brother ran.

The amulets were brought down and laid on Setna’s head, and they were strong enough - barely - to pull him free. He scrambled out with the book clutched in his arms, leaving Naneferkaptah behind in the dark.

Taboubu in the Streets of Memphis

He had escaped. He told himself he had won. He walked through Memphis with the Book of Thoth and waited for the power to settle into him the way he had imagined it would.

Then he saw Taboubu.

She was standing in the street, beautiful in a way that stopped his thinking. Setna turned toward her the same focused hunger he had aimed at the book. She allowed his pursuit. She agreed to meet him, agreed to receive him - but she named a price first. She would be with him only if he signed over to her every possession and every piece of wealth he owned. His houses. His children’s inheritance. Everything.

He signed.

When he reached her and put out his hand, the vision struck him: his wife and children lying in the dirt, weeping over a body. His body. He saw himself stripped of everything, naked and ruined in the road. He understood in the moment of understanding that Taboubu was not a woman. She was a spirit, sent to demonstrate exactly what Setna’s appetites looked like from outside - insatiable, heedless, already destroying what he had not yet lost.

He woke lying in the street. No book. No Taboubu. The ground was warm under him and people were walking past and he was naked in the dust of Memphis.

The Return to the Tomb

Pharaoh Ramesses found him and told him plainly what the vision had meant. Setna went back to the tomb - not to take anything, this time, but to return the Book of Thoth to Naneferkaptah’s hands and ask what amends could be made.

Naneferkaptah’s spirit received him. The remorse was visible enough that Naneferkaptah spoke without malice. He told Setna what he wanted: to have his wife and son brought to lie beside him. Ahwere and Merib were buried far away, in Koptos, where they had drowned. They had been apart from him since the beginning.

Setna went south. He found their burial place through the clues Naneferkaptah gave him - a winding road, a jar of sand, a rod of kher-eb used to search the ground. He dug until he found them. He carried their bodies back to Memphis, down into the tomb, and laid them beside Naneferkaptah in the chamber where the book still rested. The tomb was sealed again over all three of them.

The family had been divided by what Naneferkaptah had done - by his desire for a power that did not belong to him. What Setna did at the end was smaller than either of their ambitions. He simply put the dead back together and walked away.