Although he had intended to make a cursory examination of the pot and then return to the hotel, he’d ended up staying for several hours. His furious wife, suspicious of his skulduggery and abandonment of her, had even beaten him back to the hotel. When he finally did return, she’d laid into him mercilessly, claiming she could have been kidnapped. As Shawn reminisced about the incident, he realized how auspicious such a denouement would have been. It would have made the divorce proceedings a year later that much easier.

What had kept Shawn in the shop for so long was essentially a free lesson in traditional Egyptian hospitality. And what started out as an argument with the proprietor over the authenticity of the pot ended up becoming a captivating discussion of the widespread market of cleverly made fake Egyptian antiquities over many cups of tea. Although Rahul, the owner of the shop, insisted the pot was a true antiquity, he was willing to share all the tricks of the trade, including the thriving scarab market, when he learned Shawn was an archaeologist. Scarabs, the carved talismans of the ancient Egyptian dung beetle, were considered to have the power of spontaneous regeneration. Using an inexhaustible source of bone from ancient cemeteries in Upper Egypt, talented carvers re-created the scarabs, then fed them to various domestic animals to impart a convincing patina. It was Rahul’s contention that many of the pharaonic scarabs in the world’s top museums were such forgeries.

After the long conversation, Shawn had bought the pot as a way of thanking Rahul for his hospitality. After some friendly haggling, Shawn paid half of what Rahul initially asked. Even so, Shawn thought that two hundred Egyptian pounds was more than double what he should have paid, at least until he got back to New York. Taking the pot to his colleague Angela Ditmar, head of the Egyptology department, Shawn was in for a shock. Angela determined that the pot was not a fake but instead a genuine relic and definitely more than six thousand years old. Shawn ended up donating the piece of pottery to the Egyptian department to replace the restored pot on permanent display to assuage the guilt he felt for having unknowingly spirited the valuable object out of Egypt.

Shawn walked deeper into the true depths of the bazaar. Stretching across the narrow lanes between the buildings were carpets and awnings effectively blotting out the sunlight. Passing butcher shops with hung lamb carcasses complete with skulls, eyeballs, and flies, Shawn was enveloped in the pungent aroma of offal, soon replaced by the smell of spices and then roasting Arabic coffee. The souk was an assault on the senses, both good and bad.

In the midst of converging alleyways, Shawn paused, lost, as he’d been ten years ago. Stopping in a tailor shop, he asked directions from an elderly Egyptian in a white skullcap and brown djel laba. A few minutes later he walked into Antica Abdul. Shawn was not at all surprised the shop was still there. On his previous visit, Rahul had said that the establishment had been in his family for more than a hundred years.