In the ancient days of the New Kingdom, during the long and prosperous reign of a Pharaoh who was beloved by the gods, the Egyptian Empire reached the zenith of its prestige. The King, often identified in later traditions as a Ramesside monarch, sat upon the throne of Thebes, a city of a hundred gates where the Nile flowed wide and deep. His reach was so great that even the princes of distant lands, territories far beyond the cataracts of the south or the cedar forests of the north, sought his favor and protection.
Among these distant lands was the remote kingdom of Bakhtan, a place of rugged mountains and ancient traditions located at the edge of the known world, known in later ages as Bactria. The Prince of Bakhtan had once sent his eldest daughter to the Egyptian court as a token of peace and alliance, but it was his younger daughter, the beautiful Princess Bentresh, who would become the center of a miraculous event that linked the two nations in the annals of mythology.\n\nThe trouble began when Princess Bentresh was suddenly struck by an illness that no physician in Bakhtan could diagnose or cure. She was not merely sick in body; she was gripped by a strange and terrible force.
She would fall into long silences, only to be interrupted by outbursts of speech in languages she had never learned, or she would recoil from the light as if it were a physical blow. The Prince of Bakhtan was devastated. He consulted his wisest sages and his most powerful sorcerers, but all were helpless against the spirit that had taken residence within the girl.
Desperate, he sent a messenger on a journey that lasted many months, crossing the vast deserts and the great rivers, until the emissary finally arrived at the magnificent court of the Pharaoh in Thebes. The messenger bowed low before the King, presenting gifts of lapis lazuli and gold, and pleaded for the assistance of an Egyptian healer, for the reputation of Egypt’s wisdom was legendary throughout the world.\n\nThe Pharaoh, moved by the Prince’s plight, first sent a learned scribe named Thoth-em-heb. This scribe was a man of great intellect and a master of the medical papyri, but when he arrived in Bakhtan and looked upon Bentresh, he realized that this was no ordinary fever.
He found himself face to face with a spirit—an 'akh'—of immense power. Despite his charms and his incantations, the spirit mocked him, and the scribe returned to Egypt defeated, admitting that only a god could battle such an entity. Years passed, and the princess remained in her tormented state.
The Prince of Bakhtan, refusing to give up hope, sent a second embassy to the Pharaoh, this time begging not for a man, but for a god. He asked that one of the divine statues of Thebes be sent to Bakhtan to personally intervene.\n\nPharaoh went to the great Temple of Khonsu in Thebes. Khonsu was the god of the moon, a traveler of the night sky, and a renowned healer known as 'The Determiner of Destiny.' The King approached the primary statue of the god, Khonsu-in-Thebes Nefer-hotep, and asked for permission to send a manifestation of the god, Khonsu-pa-ir-sekher-em-Waset, to the land of Bakhtan.
In the dim, incense-filled sanctuary, the god gave his consent through a divine sign, nodding his head in the presence of the high priests. A great caravan was prepared. This was no simple journey; it was a sacred procession carrying the physical vessel of a god across thousands of miles.
The idol, fashioned from precious metals and adorned with the lunar disk and the sidelock of youth, was placed in a golden bark and shielded from the eyes of the profane. For seventeen months, the procession moved through the dust of the Levant and the rugged terrain of the East, protected by a phalanx of soldiers and tended to by a retinue of priests who performed the daily rituals of washing, clothing, and feeding the god even in the middle of the wilderness.\n\nWhen the caravan finally reached the borders of Bakhtan, the Prince himself came out to meet it. He did not approach as a sovereign, but as a supplicant, prostrating himself before the golden shrine.
As the idol of Khonsu was carried into the palace of the Prince and brought into the chamber where Princess Bentresh lay, a remarkable change occurred in the atmosphere. The air, which had been heavy and cold, suddenly grew bright and warm. The spirit inhabiting the princess, which had fought off every human effort with violence, fell silent.