Itaweret, High Priestess of Mut from the Kemetian colony of Per-Pehu, takes a rest from her quest on some rocks in the Achaean countryside.
For those of you who have not met her yet, Itaweret is the heroine of my novel Priestess of the Lost Colony, which takes place in an alternate timeline wherein the people of Kemet (aka ancient Egypt) colonized the coast of Achaea (Greece) during the Bronze Age. When the Achaean warlord Scylax of Mycenae sacks the colony and enslaves its citizens, it is up to Itaweret and her younger brother Bek, guided by the goddess Mut, to liberate what remains of their people.
Itaweret’s story draws inspiration from a couple of ancient Greek legends about Egyptians settling on their shores. One comes from the writings of Herodotus, who claims that a pair of “black doves” (priestesses) from Egypt founded the Oracle of Dodona, whereas another tells of an Egyptian king’s fifty nieces fleeing to the Greek city of Argos. One scholar, Martin Bernal, has even suggested that these legends reflect an actual Egyptian colonization of Greece in his three-volume work Black Athena, although his hypothesis remains unsupported among archaeologists. Nonetheless, I thought the premise was fair game for an alternate-history story.