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Aye yai yai, I have very mixed feelings about this page -- I love the first four panels on the top of the page, but hate the bottom four. I would have spent a lot longer tweaking it to get things to look right, but it was 4:00 AM and I decided to go ahead and throw in the towel. I hope it's at least acceptable quality for you guys!

In any case, we finally get to see what Asethotep is here for: she's trying to speak with a god. Instead of going to a temple or to a priest to have someone convene with the gods for her, Asethotep has been checking off a list of individual gods to personally convene with. This isn't an odd thing -- many people in ancient Egypt had household shrines to their patron gods, after all. The odd part is that she's come all the way out here and has holed herself up in a cave. What makes this an even stranger scene is that she's not appealing to any of the gods in the Theban triad -- Amun, Mut, or Khonsu. The statuette that Asethotep placed in her little makeshift shrine is a figure of Set.

As a member of the current royal family during this time period, the customary god for Asethotep to appeal to would be Amun-Ra (the fusion of Amun and Ra); he was viewed as the "chief god" during this time period, and his worship was especially emphasized after the end of the Amarna Period and Atenism (which, if you recall, ended only a few decades before this moment!). Mut would also be a fair candidate for Asethotep, seeing as she was the "mother goddess" (essentially viewed as the mother of all things in the world) as well as Amun's consort; Mut was actually one of the gods that the famous female pharaoh Hatshepsut identified with most frequently.

So, we're ultimately left with two questions: why is she out here, and why did she choose to appeal to Set?

Here's another interesting thing to note about this page: that's an incense burner on the right side of Ase's makeshift shrine! Incense was heavily associated with the presence of the gods -- the ancient Egyptians believed that there was literally a "divine smell" that identified the gods. The ancients loved their incense and employed all sorts of different scents to try and recreate this "divine smell," as they too wanted to capture the idea of perfection and beauty that came along with it. In fact, if a god were to ever take human or mortal form, it was said that the divine smell of incense would always be around them, and it would give away what they actually were. This will be important later, so remember it!

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