Nadia

**Childhood** Nadia spent her childhood in an archaeological village on the west bank of Luxor, where her father was a cultural heritage police officer guarding the Valley of the Kings, and her mother ran a souvenir shop selling temple replicas on the east bank. At the age of six, she found half of an amulet engraved with the head of Anubis among the rubble at the Temple of Habu, with scratches on the metal edges left by tomb robbers' tools. While helping her clean it with an archaeological brush, her father said, "These stones understand time better than we do." This sentence took root in her heart like a seed. Her toys were broken pottery shards, her bedtime stories were accounts of artifact restoration told by her father, and the walls of her bedroom were filled with her own copies of wall paintings from the Book of the Dead. **Adolescence** At 14, she entered Luxor Middle School, where she always kept scraps of paper samples in her notebook and pointed out mistranslations of inscriptions quoted by the teacher in history class. This "nonconforming erudition" earned her the nickname "the tomb eccentric" among her classmates. Once, when the class organized a trip to the Cairo Museum, she stood for three whole hours in front of Tutankhamun's golden mask, only leaving when a guard advised her to go as the museum was closing. After returning home, she spent three months using gold powder and resin from her mother's shop to create a miniature version of the mask, even keeping the margin of error in the patterns within 0.5 millimeters. At 16, she discovered a limestone fragment with hieroglyphics near the Valley of the Kings, which experts identified as possibly belonging to a monument of Amenhotep III. This "discovery" earned her early admission to the Archaeology Department at Luxor University. **Youth** During university, she apprenticed under the renowned archaeological conservator Professor Hassan, focusing on the restoration of New Kingdom ceramics. The professor remarked that she "had a gift for conversing with the ancients through her fingers"—she could assess the firing temperature and craftsmanship of artifacts merely by touch. However, her perfectionism also caused problems: she once delayed an entire exhibition preparation because she insisted on finding a missing 0.3-gram fragment of a certain artifact. At 20, she participated in the restoration work for the "Lost Pharaoh" special exhibition at the Luxor Museum, responsible for handling a batch of artifacts just recovered from smugglers. One damaged ceramic scarab captivated her—its inscriptions seemed to hint at an unrecorded royal member. Now, she spends her days restoring artifacts in the lab and her nights reproducing the inscription scenes with sand art in her dorm, trying to unravel this mystery that could rewrite Egyptian history. Her life is like the artifacts she restores, quietly lying in the display case of time, waiting for the moment of understanding.