The Statue

The statue had been due to arrive in Elgin for roughly three weeks. Elgin University had one of the largest museums in the state, and this statue, after a few months of careful study by experts in anthropology and archaeology, had made the cut for their next exhibit. It, along with several other objects would constitute the "Beauty Standards through the Ages" exhibition -- a modern look at historical perspectives on beauty across multiple societies.

The statue itself was separated into two pieces. The lower extremities being a deep, green and black Algorite, and the upper half formed from a pale alabaster. The eyes were inlaid with rubies, and gold jewelry had once adorned its neck and head. All that was left of the adornments were scratch marks from thieves. The jewels, however, were so deeply set as to be irremovable without the right tools. The division between the two was a diagonal slash near the navel, which the anthropologists suggested would have been used to hold a skirt. It stood roughly eight feet tall, its feet rested upon a block of dark Algorite.

On the block, there were three sets of inscriptions, one in Akkadian, one in an unknown language, and one in Elamite -- the archaeologists believed the statue was of Elamite origin. These read out:

"Praises onto you, mighty king Hitah. I, the priestess of Susa dedicate this statue to divine Gilira."

There were only two other statues of that Gilira, one in the Louvre, and one in a private collection. This one, however, was unique in its construction, and in how it had such a find on the base. The unknown language on the back of the statue didn't match the Akkadian or Elamite inscriptions, having significantly more glyphs on it than either of the two.

All this meant that the thing would do more to attract students and professors alike to the exhibit, and all the more to the museum and the university.

Hannah Bowing was a graduate student in Anthropology, and alongside another two students, were granted relatively loose reigns in making this exhibitions work -- all under the supervision of the curator. The statue had to be carefully placed in its climate-controlled box, and left there in perpetual isolation.

The statue was tall, with its hair drawn into an elaborate set of bows and shapes -- like a crown. The woman it represented was fatter than most of the other exhibitions, but wasn't obese by any means. It was unclothed, naturally. The hands were well-formed, the alabaster maintained the soft edges of the fingertips well through the ages. The eyes had a soft kindness in them, and the close-lipped smile maintained the welcoming look of the thing. Its legs were stiff and straight, held tightly together -- they were nearly a foot in diameter each. The ass and the waist were likewise plush, the hands which had carved it apparently took special care to polish and chisel out as much space for it as possible.

Hannah could still see a glimmer of her reflection in the legs, despite the millennia between her and its last cleaning.

Gilira was a fertility goddess, and the statues proportions fit its domain. The breasts were nearly the same size as its head, sans the hair. One hand was held forward into the air -- originally it would have held a cloth, which some archaeologists believed would be drenched in oil, and used in a purification ritual. Oil, water, or whatever fluid one chose, would be saturated into the cloth, than drained back out around the statue's palm, transferring the statue's purity into the liquid.

The other hand was held lower, just beside her right thigh, palm facing up. The symbolism of this hand was not known yet, but the team at Elgin worked tirelessly on it. Sooner or later, some connection would pop up, and it would become clear what the meaning was.

Hannah looked up at the woman before her. She wasn't so foreign at the end of the day. Hannah could almost imagine the life of someone looking up at this statue in that cave, three thousand years ago. What would they have said to it, what would the priests -- or rather priestesses -- said of it.

Her moment of introspection was interrupted by one of her two colleagues bumping into her. She tripped and nearly struck the statue where it stood.

"Davis!!" She yelled, "You need to be more careful. If I didn't move there, you would have knocked me into the statue!"

Davis looked up from his clipboard and began to profusely apologize, "Sorry sorry sorry!! I'll be more careful next time, I'm sorry I've just been so focused on this."

"Well, what's this 'this' that almost cost us this priceless artifact?" Hannah pulled herself from the ground.

Davis held up the clipboard, "We're opening in two months, and we still haven't completed our share of the placards. We need to, y'know. Write stuff. Like now."

Davis was soon flanked by the other member of the trio, one Jane Sorich. One student of gender studies, one student of anthropology, and one art student to make the exhibit truly shine.

"Oh, we'll be fine. I'm just amazed at this work here. All the others are replicas. To think that we've got our hands on something this rare, it's just... it's amazing!" Jane was interrupted by Hannah.

"And terrifying! One wrong move and this will crumble like dust."

"Oh, you don't give the alabaster credit. It's survived thousands of years of clumsy people before us, we'll be fine." Davis was tempted to tap the statue to prove his point, but decided it would be best not to.

"Regardless, Davis, you need to be careful. Maybe back then people paid attention more, no clipboards to focus on."

"Hannah, it's all fine. No one's hurt, and the statue's unharmed. I'm sure old Gilira here is very appreciative of your support though."

Hannah sighed in exacerbation, but decided that pushing this wasn't worth anyone's time. The other two left her to the exhibit, and she continued to peruse around the other statues and tapestries and paintings around the room.

"Beauty standards through the ages..." She murmured, "Just a lot of tits and asses and pretty faces, really." Some part of her was ashamed of all this. They had an archaeological find of the year, which was set to be part of a collection designed by mediocre grad students.

She had to stop herself. They weren't mediocre. Elgin was an excellent university, better than some Ivy League campuses. But she still had to shake that feeling of mediocrity. She wasn't mediocre. Would you call someone at Cornell, someone who got handed the reigns to a museum's newest exhibit, while they were still getting their PhD mediocre? No.

She looked around at the host of beautiful paintings and statues and felt, despite everything, still mediocre. It wasn't true, but some things go beyond what one knows. She felt mediocre, certainly in part due to the dozens of pretty faces staring down at her.

In this exhibition of beauty through the ages, she always felt like the sore thumb -- Jane wasn't exceptional, but certainly a looker, and Davis. Davis could turn heads.

Hannah would have these moments of self-doubt, moments of intense self-scrutiny, and it hurt the most when she ran out of real things to criticize. She couldn't criticize her resume, her placement at Elgin, her work here, so instead she criticized her looks. Something she ostensibly shouldn't care much about, something which didn't make her her.

"Hey, Hannah, are you alright?" The curator stepped behind her and tapped her shoulder. Hannah didn't realize how long she'd ben sitting there in thought, but it had been enough to alert the old man.

"You seem upset there miss. Is everything ok? Professor Harthen told me you were introspective, I just want to be sure nothing's up." Hannah turned to look at the grey old man.

"Oh, I'm fine..." Her tone was thoroughly unconvincing, so she repeated, "I'm fine! I'm fiiine."

"Hannah, Miss Bowing. I know that students now have few resources to share their concerns. If anything is wrong, please don't hesitate to talk with me. You know where I am, and if it's something serious I know who I can put you in contact with." He had read into the moment concerns that likely weren't there.

"Oh! No, it's nothing wrong sir, it's just," she sighed, "sometimes it's hard to believe I deserve all this, that I'm, I don't know, mediocre."

Curator Oka shook his head and said, "Ma'am. Do you think we let mediocrity into Elgin?"

"No I..."

"And where are you?"

"Elgin University."

"Good. Now, do you think you..."

"Please, Oka. I have my therapist for this. I appreciate it, but I prefer to be left alone on this."

Oka was saddened, but knew better than to push a boundary by insisting, "Of course, I'm sorry to have upset you any." He stepped away, and Hannah returned to her introspection.

Eventually, she knew she had office hours, but something caught her eye on the base of that statue. It was a square base, with no writing on the front side. The lighting from the exhibition, however, seemed to reveal a very faint scratch mark.

She nearly had a heart attack at the thought that it was hers, but the depth into the stone made that nearly impossible. Unless she'd somehow grown wolverine claws. But if there were glyphs buried in that stone, perhaps with more stone caked on after in the years it had been buried, then maybe she could turn this exhibit into a genuine discovery. More of Linear Elamite translated, or something like that. She had enough of a linguistics background to at least try...

She resolved to return to the exhibit at night, bringing her own supplies, and trying her darndest to figure everything she could before presenting anything to Davis, Jane, or the professor. She wanted credit for this, and didn't want to have to share it with anyone else. A linguistic discovery of this scale -- try calling that mediocre.

Office hours went by uneventfully, with only one student coming in to ask anything at all. The drive back to her apartment was quick, and the drive back, with a trunk full of equipment, was likewise swift.

The statue remained situated in its enclave at the center of the exhibit. She was reasonably concerned about the effects of her tools on the surface of it. Scratches would be noticed immediately, so she resolved to look first with different kinds of lighting to try and elicit some sort of difference from the material.

Bright fluorescent lamps and halogens didn't do much, however she gasped at the revelations of a simple blacklight.

Somehow, buried inside the stone, underneath a newer plaque, were phosphorescent inlays, of a script matching the glyphs on the back. They were difficult to make out, but the number and shape indicated that they matched the Akkadian and Elamite inscriptions on either side.

Somehow, the newer plaque -- also made of Algorite -- had been sealed over the old one, in a strange attempt to hide it. Before modern technology, it may well have worked. But now, she could try her hand at translating the inscriptions all around the artifact.

She knew though, that if she kept the black light on, the phosphorescence would keep the inner symbols bright for quite a bit longer. She snapped a photo of them, and shut the light off. Yet, something tempted her to stay here and keep at her work.

If she could somehow put in the work, get it all translated tonight -- or at least get a few attempts in -- then there would be no way for anyone else to take credit for this. She held the blacklight up to the statue again, letting it bathe the phosphorescent stones within.

She pulled a pen out of her satchel and began to copy the glyphs as best she could, however after a minute of intense scribbling, she realized that her gloves were making it difficult to write, so she tossed them aside and resumed her copying.

The symbols weren't anything like the schema of the Akkadian and Elamite they worked alongside, but given that they were apparently one-to-one with the others, she figured it may have just been some local isolate's script. Just like the Akkadian and Elamite, though, it was apparently logo-syllabic -- each glyph was something like a syllable or whole word.

"Downwards triangle indicates priestess. Triple dots indicate..." She muttered to herself while she tired away at the stone. The symbols were carved in much slower than the cuneiform on the other sides -- everything was rounded, curved, as though written on paper first. That thought sparked bigger questions -- if something like this were discovered, it would fundamentally upturn the archaeology of that era. Writing had always been known to have been on stone and clay first, then paper much later. A development of this kind was monumental. Beyond that, the fact that some ancient people were able to carve in such glyphs in crystal with such precision... her heart sank at the possibility that this would prove the statue to be some sort of elaborate fake.

Yet, the dating had already been done, and the proof was right in front of her very eyes. She kept at the transcription, and within a few minutes had the whole front side copied down. The rear, however, would take her far, far longer. The blacklight was unnecessary, however, so she shut it off -- yet the glyphs on the front seemed to glow much, much stronger than she would have expected. This was alarming, but not ultimately an issue -- they would dim over a few minutes.

She kept her nose down and copied down the entire back half of the statue, and set herself up at a table in the lobby to begin translation between the sides.

It didn't take more than a few minutes to realize that the two sides referenced much of the same subject matter -- between the nouns and verbs which were identical, it seemed that the back was a devotional to the priestess who constructed the statue, where the sides were a devotional to the king who commissioned it from her.

Hannah scratched her head and wondered if that was right... and pondered what circumstance this statue would have come from. She wrote out a story for the placard:

"Around 900 BCE, this statue was commissioned by King Hitah of Susa, from a local temple devoted to the deity Gilira. The inscriptions on the front three faces of the base state in three different languages a devotion to the King. However, there is an inscription on the back, written in a unique language isolate -- likely either a local dialect or a liturgical language utilized by the local priesthood -- issues a unique devotion to the priestess who oversaw the statue's carving..."

She looked back over her translation notes...

"And ideal for this exhibit, to the goddess itself, to the women who view this statue, and to the worshippers who are purified by it."

She didn't know where that came from -- perhaps it was synthesized from her notes on the ritual usage of cloth on the statue's outstretched palm. In either case, it was an interesting hypothesis, if unproven. But what a show that would make for the exhibit. An ancient example of a woman subverting the insistence of a thousands-year old tyrant.

She smiled and looked back over at the artifact, only to be alarmed that the phosphorescent lights, instead of dimming, had in fact grown brighter. She rushed over to examine the glyphs, and noticed that the things were warm -- so much so she could feel it from about a foot away.

Hannah began to panic at the thought that, in her discovery, she had potentially triggered some sort of cascade reaction that would destroy the base of the statue, and in doing so remove all the evidence of the script she had just started decoding.

"Shit!!" She raced around looking for some solution, "Shit Shit shit shit shit!!" She dropped to the ground and inched closer to the glyphs, hoping that something would show a method of slowing it down. If she poured water on it, perhaps that would slow the heating, but that could also crack the algorite if it was hot enough inside.

Perhaps it wasn't as warm as she thought -- she reached a hand out to the statue, thinking that she would just put her finger against it to test the warmth. Hannah stopped herself -- touching it would leave a fingerprint, and if this kept on heating up it would just be more evidence against her when they investigated all this. She got up and looked for a first aid kit -- that would have a napkin with rubbing alcohol, she'd touch it, remove the print, and be done.

In the corner by the lights, a small box was stuck to the wall -- first aid ready for use. She popped it open and snagged a handful of the wipes. Getting back to the statue, the lights were still growing brighter.

"Shit, please don't be too hot..." She reached a careful hand up to the base. Just as soon as her finger made contact, she felt a shock, a powerful rush of force into her body. The lights within the statue began to dim, and Hannah felt that she was pushed back from it. The energy was electric, potent, rejuvenating -- she had felt tired through the night's work, but this was something like getting a thousand cups of coffee injected right through her fingertips.

Hannah's mind raced as the language of the glyphs made sense in the chaos that raged within her. There was power within this statue, power beyond her comprehension -- power beyond explanation. And that power had just invigorated her, given her the strength to continue through the entire night. Yet, she could not remove her hand from the base, and as the energy flowed into her, it overflowed. She could feel her heartrate going far too fast to stay stable, and soon her vision began to fade. Every muscle tensed and began to spasm -- if her mind was in a more stable state, she would have realized her heart was arrhythmic. All Hannah knew though, was that the energy coursing through her body was too much for a human to handle, and with the last ounce of willpower she could manage, she pulled her hand back from the base of the statue, severing the link, and allowing her body to sink into a pitch black unconsciousness.

Minutes, or perhaps hours later, Hannah awoke in the same darkness. Everything, every inch of her body felt sore and bruised. She could barely stand, but knew that she needed to get out, maybe get herself to a hospital. The lights -- not just the phosphorescence in the statue, but the lights in the museum itself, had dimmed somehow. She could barely remember the power the statue channeled into her, but was sure that she had damaged it. She needed to get out, get home, and recover. As hastily as her sore form could manage, she stuffed all her notes, equipment, and everything back into her bag before sealing the statue back into its box and walking away.

Hannah limped out of the back door and barely managed to lift herself into the car. Her vision was hazy, even with her glasses on, and half the ride she was praying that no cops were around -- even she couldn't tell if she was swerving or not. Eventually, though, she made it back to her apartment, and collapsed onto the living room carpet. She was still awake, and slowly inched back to the bedroom, where she pulled herself up onto the mattress.

The window behind her was open, letting in a comforting cool breeze as she drifted off to sleep.

She was inside a small room now -- Hannah knew she was dreaming -- it looked familiar, not unlike the exhibition. Unlike the exhibition though, this place was compact, a deep sanctum. In front of her a different version of the statue stood, animated by dream logic. It was breathing in and out very slowly -- Hannah could feel the room moving with it, expanding and contracting. Behind her there was a small door, much smaller than the statue, which connected to a bright, open-air space.

The statue looked at her, words transmitted across the space between them:

"You found me. You were looking for me."

Hannah nodded, but didn't need to step forward to get closer. She simply moved -- the ground took her there, "This is a dream -- I translated what's on your base. I tried to."