Arthur Phillips search for meaning in life. The novel was well received commercially and critically, winning Phillips the 2003 Los Angeles Times/Art Seidenbaum Award for Best First Fiction, as well as other honors. "The Egyptologist" is structured as journals, letters, telegrams, and drawings, from several different points of view. The main story is set in 1922 and follows a hopeful explorer who, working near Howard Carter (the man who discovered the tomb of King Tutankhamun), risks more and more of his life and savings on an apparently quixotic effort to find the tomb of an apocryphal Egyptian king. The book was an
History of primitive, ancient Western and non-Western trumpets used on the battlefield both to encourage (and possibly also to direct) the Pharaoh's troops and to intimidate the enemy. In some murals from the Eighteenth Dynasty, the "sheneb" appears to be accompanying dancers; if this is the case, it is possibly the earliest depiction of a trumpet in a truly "musical" setting. Egyptian trumpeters are often, though not always, shown in pairs. The oldest surviving examples of metallic trumpets are the two instruments that were discovered in the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922. One of these is long and is made of silver; it has a conical tube in