Author: Stephen

I created Tegla Books to bring my stories to readers everywhere, and to honour my great-grandfather E. Tegla Davies, a beloved children’s author in Wales. Visiting his old haunts in Llandegla, Bangor, and Tregarth recently gave me a fresh appreciation for his life and his stories, which were full of humour and mischief.

The Tegla Books logo, a letter T woven with a traditional Welsh knot, celebrates that heritage. It’s about connection, continuity, and discovering something rooted in the past that still feels alive today.

The first novel under the Tegla Books imprint is HOW TO STEAL THE ROSETTA STONE, a Young Adult heist adventure published on 9 October 2025. Set in London, it follows a group of clever, resourceful teens from an international school in Egypt as they attempt to repatriate the famous Rosetta Stone to its land of origin. As a lifelong fan of the heist genre, I loved writing this book, and I’m really hoping it will be well received.

Tegla Books is where stories with heart, heritage, and suspense come together, and I can’t wait for you to experience them.

Thank you to Big Picture Press for giving permission for this story to be available for free download (for now, at least).

The Death of Balder is just one of the myths in this book. There are five other myths as well, plus lots of fully-illustrated spreads about Norse life and beliefs.

Buy NORSE MYTHS, MONSTERS AND VIKING VOYAGES (links to Waterstones, Foyles, Bookshop.org, Amazon and WH Smiths)

Padiamenet was a doorkeeper to a temple, and also a barber. We know this from the hieroglyphic inscriptions on his mummy case.

The largest scene on the coffin shows Padiamenet dressed in a long, white robe, adoring the god Osiris.

Padiamenet had very decayed teeth. He must have suffered with terrible toothache.

“Mummies were real people with real lives. They are not monsters. They are not ghosts. They are the preserved bodies of Egyptian people who lived thousands of years ago. People who laughed, sang, hung out with their families and looked after their pet cats. People like us, in many ways.”

Here is one of the mummies currently in the British Museum. The varnish on the case turned black over time, but the museum has cleaned the black coating off the case’s face and hands, and also cleaned a strip down the front to reveal the mummy’s name: Tjayasetimu.

Although the case is adult-sized, the occupant is a little girl no more than eight or nine years old.  She lived more than three thousand years ago and she was a singer in the royal choir.

Tjayasetimu used to sing in a beautiful temple beside the river Nile. When she died, her parents paid for her body to be mummified. They thought that if they preserved her body carefully, she would be able to use it in the afterlife. The embalming priests removed her organs and packed her body with a special kind of salt to dry it out. Then they filled the body with sand and sawdust and wrapped it in painted bandages.

In Victorian times, people opened mummy cases and unwrapped the mummies inside, often as an act of public theatre. These pre-YouTube unboxing extravaganzas may have been exciting, but they were also ghoulish and tasteless, as well as completely destroying the mummy.

The curators at the British Museum have not opened Tjayasetimu’s mummy case. Instead they took the case to a hospital and put it in a powerful scanning machine. This way, we can see Tjayasetimu without disturbing her.

Her face has delicate lips, a pointy chin and shoulder-length hair. Some of her adult teeth were coming through, but not many.

Children hardly ever got into the royal choir, which means that Tjayasetimu must have had a truly angelic voice. She was a genuine child star.

Read more about Tjayasetimu here on the British Museum’s website.

The coffin of Naktankh plays an important role in my book The Ancient Egypt Sleepover. It is not always on display in the British Museum, but you can see lots of similar Old Kingdom coffins with the painted eyes facing east.

My book contains a simplified hieroglyphic version of the name Naktankh, but the coffin has a more complicated version (above). Can you spot this version of his name on the coffin itself?

The message in hieroglyphs along the top of the coffin is called the ‘offering formula’. You can see it on most Old Kingdom coffins.

Transliteration and translation

ḥtp-dı͗-nsw

An offering given by the king

3sir nb ḏḏw ḫnt(y) – ı͗mntw

(to) Osiris, the lord of Djedu, Khentyimentu,

ntr ʿ3 nb 3bḏw

the great god, the lord of Abydos,

dı͗=f ḫt nb(t) nfrt wʿbt

That he may give everything good and pure:

ḫʿ m t ḥnḳt

thousand of bread and beer,

k3 3pd šs mnḫt

oxen, birds, alabaster, clothing,

ʿnḫt nṯr ı͗m

upon which a god lives,

n k3 ı͗m3ḫ(y)

For the ka of the revered,

nḫt-ʿnḫ m3ʿ-ḫrw

Nakhtankh, True of Voice.

Finally, Nebamun himself! This is the most famous of the Nebamun murals and shows him hunting in the marshes. He is standing up in a papyrus boat, spearing fish and throwing sticks at birds. Again, Nebamun’s life is shown to be utterly perfect. The weather is glorious. His adoring wife and daughter are with him. He is catching fish and fowl left right and centre.

Look how skilful the artwork is. I love the expression on the face of this fish.

The eye of Nebamun’s ginger cat was decorated with a splodge of real gold. Lean in close and you can still it glinting.