by Adam Palmer
But not even he could override security considerations or the wishes of the Egyptian military, and he had been forced to engage in a certain amount of horse-trading as he gingerly tiptoed around the objections and won over the key decision-makers in the political and military hierarchy.
And now with the job of brokering the deal accomplished, he stayed away from the site and let the enthusiastic kids rise to the challenge of ‘painting the fence’ – with his young, attractive protégée playing the role of Tom Sawyer. Of course, if they found anything exciting, he would lose no time in going out there to make the official announcement in front of the cameras.
The volunteer who had just emptied his bucket into the sieve screen that Joel was operating didn’t wait to see the results, he simply returned to his digging. The screen consisted of a four-sided wooden box with a quarter-inch metal mesh ‘floor’ and a pair of handles that could be used to shake it.
Joel shook the screen now to begin the separation process, and as the sand fell away through the mesh, a large number of stone fragments remained. Normally the residue proved to be nothing but desert pebbles, but this time something caught his eye. Mindful of Gabrielle’s instruction to observe the residue before bagging it up, he looked more closely, blinked and then looked again.
It wasn’t that the stones were of any radically different material – quite the contrary: they were typical of the local stone – nor were they any larger than usual. And they certainly didn’t have the glint of noble metals or the crystalline glow of precious stones. No, it was just that these stones, or rather fragments of stone, seemed to have markings on them.
Joel picked one up and held it closer to get a better look. Turning it this way and that, he noticed that on one side it seemed to have some engraved shapes. The shapes were too simple to be hieroglyphics and they looked too unfamiliar to be any alphabet that he knew. But they did look like writing, not merely random markings.
He picked up another and looked at it, then another and then yet another. He noticed some repetition of the symbols, which confirmed his suspicion that there was nothing random about these engravings. They had been made purposively, by a human hand. And that made this a find!
He could just bag it up and mark it, leaving the others to figure out its significance in due course, but something about this discovery appealed to his ego. He wanted some small share of the kudos, even if someone else had dug it up, and someone more knowledgeable than himself would interpret it. And in any case, if it was something important, they would surely want to know about it now.
Joel realized that he had been daydreaming and Jane had noticed that something was up.
‘What?’ she asked, in that ever cheerful way of hers.
He held out one of the stone fragments and let her look at it, making sure that she didn’t actually get her hands on it.
‘Oh… my… God!’ she blurted out.
Fearing that others people would hear and start gathering round before he had had a chance to claim his glory, he threw the fragments into a plastic bag and raced over to Professor Gusack, suppressing the urge to cry out aloud like Archimedes on his homeward sprint from the public bath house.
While Joel was racing off to claim his share of the glory, Jane felt her breath constricting. Unlike Joel, she understood the full significance of what she had just seen. And she had to do something about it.
Mumbling some excuse about a stomach bug, she raced off to the latrines, which were little more than holes in the ground with individual booths around each drop. She closed and bolted the door behind her and whipped out her slender mobile phone from the pocket of her combat trousers. She was supposed to have handed it in to the security people at the entrance to the camp, but she had been forewarned of this in advance, so she had made sure she had two mobiles. The large flashy one she had handed over meekly with a look of disappointment. But this small thin one with its limited features, she had retained. She knew that the male soldiers wouldn’t frisk a woman, and they had no female soldiers at hand to do the job. So her secret was safe.
Safely ensconced in the latrine, she frantically keyed in a message and hit the ‘Send’ button. A minute later her message appeared on another phone six thousand miles away. It said: They found the stones.
Chapter 2
‘I got the message at two in the morning,’ said Arthur Morris.
They were seated round an oval cherrywood table in a small meeting room; two men in their fifties and a woman in her early forties. Morris was practically bald, except for two small, neatly combed patches on either side of the crown that were silver, but with some slight remnant of the brown that it had once been. His eyes were also brown and held just a hint of menace, warning friend and foe alike that he was a man not to be denied his wishes.
Behind him, a 555-foot obelisk glinted in the morning sun, forming a backdrop to their tense gathering.
‘Would they have had time to figure it out yet?’ asked the second man.
He was slightly older than Morris, with a short, neatly-trimmed beard. He was also taller and thinner. But the main contrast between them was the informality of his attire. A pair of light summer trousers and a beige sweater with the word ‘Georgetown’ written across it. Arthur Morris, on the other hand, was impeccably clad in a dark-blue suit. He favoured blue over grey and solid over pinstripe because he had read somewhere that they were signs of political conservatism.
‘She had to be brief in her text message, Professor. But the fact that she sent the message with no qualifications or reservations suggests that they probably did. And even if they didn’t, it won’t take them long. They’re not stupid and we must assume that things will start moving quickly from here on in.’
‘I don’t know how you can use Jane like that,’ said the woman uneasily. ‘She’s just a child.’
Morris thought for a moment before answering slowly and deliberately. ‘She doesn’t need to understand the whys and wherefores.’
‘But if she doesn’t even understand our cause, then how can she support it?’
The woman – Audrey Milne – had once been a trophy wife. Though she had long ceased to be the spring chicken who had once attracted her husband via his libido, she had retained her position in his heart and home by good grooming, a rigorous fitness regime, an adroit and skilful manner in the salon, and most important of all, a readiness to accept her husband’s serial infidelity with stoic equanimity.
Her husband had always known that she would never embarrass him professionally or personally and she knew how to host a dinner party and say the right things to the right people at the right time. With those social skills and her selective blindness to her husband’s extra-curricular activities, there was no need for him to cut her loose. And for her part, she had no reason to break loose. In their relationship, the whole was greater than the sum of the parts.
She was, however, no longer a trophy wife. She was now a trophy widow.
‘Jane understands family loyalty,’ said Morris. ‘That means she’s loyal to me. That’s all that matters.’
‘Carmichael might be a problem,’ said the professor. ‘Once the shit hits the fan.’
‘Why?’ asked Audrey Milne defensively. ‘A befuddled old man suffering from dementia…’
The professor looked at her irritably. He had never really liked her and the only reason she was even at this meeting was because she had inherited proprietorship of a chain of fifteen newspapers from her husband. He had served the cause well, but had died towards the end of the previous year. So now, if their work was to continue unhindered, they needed his widow on-board, or at least access to her newspapers.
The Internet was fine for creating publicity, but what it couldn’t do was create credibility. A prestigious newspaper, on the other hand, lent the imprimatur of its authority to any story that went out under its masthead. That made Audrey Milne a powerful ally in their cause.
‘He’s already getting agitated over the fact that his pa
per still hasn’t been published.’
‘But the journal is only published once a year.’
‘He knows that, Audrey. But he’s angry that we missed the deadline for the last edition.’
‘So tell him that it took a few months to do a proper peer review. He’s an academic. He’ll understand.’
‘I did that!’ the professor snapped. ‘But he’s still upset about it. At one point he even threatened to pull the plug and send it to another journal.’
Ignoring their bickering, Arthur Morris played with the handle of his walking stick. It was an elaborate, overly ornate affair made of lacquered mahogany topped with a bronze snake head.
‘But if they’ve found the stone fragments,’ said Audrey, ‘then doesn’t that make it irrelevant what Carmichael does?’
Morris looked at Audrey as if trying to weigh up the subtext to what she was saying.
‘Whatever comes out of Egypt, we can control. It may even lead us to solve the questions posed by Carmichael’s research. But Carmichael himself is a problem. He isn’t one of us and he would resent any attempt to recruit him.’
‘He probably wouldn’t even understand it,’ said Audrey, ‘in his mental state.’
‘We can’t take a chance,’ said the professor.
‘I agree.’ This was Morris. And his word on the issue was final.
‘So what are you going to do?’ asked Audrey.
‘We need to send someone to deal with the problem.’
Morris’s mobile beeped. He took it out and cast a quick glance at the message.
Foreign Aid Bill vote 20 mins.
‘Sorry,’ said Senator Morris, ‘we’ll have to cut this short.’
‘Who are you going to send?’ asked Audrey hesitantly.
‘Someone whose loyalty is unwavering and whose talent for doing the work is unequalled.’
Audrey closed her eyes as she uttered the next word. ‘Goliath?’
Chapter 3
‘It’s a pity you didn’t find the rest,’ said Akil Mansoor in a quiet monotone.
‘Assuming there is a “rest”,’ Gabrielle replied.
‘Of course there’s a rest!’
They were in the lab at the University of Cairo that the Supreme Council of Antiquities used for examining ancient Egyptian artefacts. Mansoor was somewhat shorter than Gabrielle and was showing signs of a middle-aged paunch. But his white hair gave him a kind of patrician gravitas that made others around him instantly recognize his academic authority.
‘We branched out radially from the square where it was found,’ Gabrielle explained, ‘stopping at forty-nine square metres.’
The air conditioning had failed again and so Mansoor left three buttons undone on his check shirt and used a handkerchief to wipe the area between his chin and neck. The assembled fragments of stone looked like an incomplete jigsaw puzzle. Mansoor moved to his left, as if to get a better view of the engraved characters on the surface, brushing against Gabrielle in the process. She didn’t say anything, but moved away quietly to the other side of the workbench to give him room to view the stone fragments.
Temporarily distracted from the arrangement of stones, he watched her athletic body, more with a sense of curiosity than outright lust. He remembered that she had been a competitive swimmer, winning a silver medal for Austria in the European Student Games. Even now, in her tight-fitting T-shirt and dark blue jeans, she cut a striking figure.
‘The distribution of fragments was like a V formation from the main group.’ Her words snapped him out of his thoughts. ‘That would suggest that the stones had been dropped or thrown from a certain position and smashed outwardly in the same direction. So working outward radially any further made no sense.’
‘You could have excavated another line of squares on the far side, to follow up your V distribution theory.’ His tone was impatient.
‘We did. And we found another two pieces. But they were both quite small, without any engravings. The only reason we think it might have formed part of the stone or stones is because of the shape. One of the students on the dig is a physics graduate and he said they looked like break lines. He also told us that lighter pieces travel further when they bounce.’
‘And?’ Mansoor prompted.
‘Well, he also said that with stone lighter means smaller, and that meant that if we found any more fragments, they’d be too small to physically handle to put them together.’
Mansoor shook his head. ‘We’ve got people who can do that with tweezers and glue. Besides, nowadays we scan them in 3-D and then examine them on a computer screen. I’m surprised your physics student didn’t tell you that.’
There was more than a hint of mockery in his tone.
‘I thought it was more important to bring back what we already found.’
‘I figured as much when you phoned me on your mad dash to Sharm el-Sheikh Airport.’
‘Well, it’s not as if the remaining stones are going to get up and walk away.’
Mansoor frowned at Gabrielle’s levity. She should have remembered that he was an utterly humourless man, and proud of the fact.
‘We can carry on today. I put the team on standby, waiting for your decision. I’d already pulled them off their regular duties to concentrate on this find. I didn’t want to put them back on the areas they were digging because they’re all too excited about—’
‘You told them your theory?’ he blurted out in a mixture of shock and fear.
‘I didn’t tell them,’ replied Gabrielle. Then after a few seconds she added, ‘But it must have been fairly obvious.’
‘To an overenthusiastic kid, perhaps. Not to a serious scholar.’
‘I think a credible case can be made out.’ Her tone was defensive. She knew that Mansoor was always sceptical about Big Theories.
‘Let’s keep some sense of proportion. So far all we can say is that we have fragments of two stone tablets with an old, somewhat simple linear script with repeated characters engraved on them.’
‘But it is definitely two stones?’ she asked cautiously.
‘We have seven corner pieces. That suggests at least two separate stones.’
‘What’s your assessment of the writing?’
Mansoor peered at it carefully. ‘Well, the style is a bit like hieroglyphics, but only the simplest hieroglyphics. In fact, some of the symbols are quite recognizable – if we can find the right light to view them in.’
‘So it can’t be a diplomatic document or treaty.’
‘If it was, it would be written in Akkadian cuneiform.’
‘And that also rules out Hittite and Sumerian.’
‘Exactly,’ Mansoor confirmed.
‘I’m wondering if this could be our Knossos.’
‘This isn’t Mycenaean or Minoan, Professor Gusack; I can assure you of that!’
‘I didn’t mean that,’ replied Gabrielle irritably. ‘I mean another syllable alphabet, like Linear A or Linear B.’
‘And I suppose you were hoping to be the next Michael Ventris.’
‘Well, it would be nice to follow in the footsteps of the man who rewrote ancient Greek history.’
‘Nice, perhaps. Likely, no.’
‘What makes you so sure?’
Mansoor’s voice took on a dour tone. ‘Well, as far as I can tell, there aren’t enough unique characters for a syllable alphabet.’
‘So it’s… what? A phonetic alphabet?’
‘Precisely. More specifically, an abjad. No vowels – just consonants.’
‘Aramaic? Phoenician?’ She didn’t bother to include Hebrew or Arabic in her question, because both were familiar to her and she could tell immediately that it wasn’t either.
‘It doesn’t look all that much like Aramaic. It might bear some vague comparison to Phoenician.’
‘Vague comparison?’ Gabrielle echoed.
‘It’s hard to tell until we can look at them under the right lighting conditions. I’ll get one of the photo experts to take some pict
ures and play around with the contrast then we’ll take another look.’
‘But what’s your gut instinct?’
Mansoor looked at Gabrielle with mild irritation. She was being pushy. He decided nevertheless to hazard a preliminary speculation.
‘It reminds me of the Serabit el-Khadim inscriptions.’
‘Proto-Sinaitic?’
‘Yes.’
Proto-Sinaitic was one of the oldest phonetic alphabets ever used – if not the oldest – dating back nearly 4,000 years. The name was derived from the Greek ‘proto’ meaning first and the place where the writings in the alphabet were initially discovered: Sinai. Some thirty engravings of the script had been found in Sinai at the turquoise mines at Serabit el-Khadim, once used as a penal colony by ancient Egypt.
‘Can you translate it?’
Mansoor was amused by Gabrielle’s eagerness.
‘Well, assuming I’m right, we know how it sounds, but not what it means.’
The letters of the Proto-Sinaitic alphabet had been matched to their equivalent letters in all the other main consonant alphabets – like Hebrew and Arabic – so the pronunciation was reasonably certain. But the underlying language was unknown. Was it an ancient form of Hebrew even older than the Bible itself? Some generic Semitic language that later split up into several different languages? Or was the same alphabet used for a whole variety of languages that were already different, and spoken all around the Middle East?
‘Maybe this could be our Rosetta Stone.’
The Rosetta Stone; written in three languages – hieroglyphs, Egyptian demotic script and ancient Greek – had facilitated the deciphering of hieroglyphics by enabling scholars to compare the Greek, which was already understood, to the unknown hieroglyphics and demotics.
