The Moses Legacy

by Adam Palmer

  She logged on and noticed that ‘Felicity’ – her Canadian friend – had uploaded a new picture. She downloaded the picture and then logged out and disconnected from the Internet. This would make it harder for anyone to see what she was doing, if indeed she was being watched. She then assembled the improvised aluminium foil screen around her laptop, to stop it from being monitored by way of electromagnetic radiation, and then launched the steganography program (itself cleverly disguised) and typed in her password.

  Within seconds, this simple operation yielded the text – shown on screen but not saved to disk.

  Goliath is back at Cairo hotel. He has been ordered to get a sample of Klein’s and Gusack’s clothing and then to kill them. They have booked a flight to Luxor and so has he (following them). He is evidently planning to kill them there, probably in the Valley of the Kings. Follow him and neutralize him.

  Chapter 29

  Daniel was hit by an unexpected blast of heat as soon as he set foot outside the rented, air-conditioned jeep. They had flown in from Cairo earlier that morning and driven from Luxor Airport.

  ‘It’s this way.’ Mansoor was leading Daniel and Gabrielle across the sands of the eastern part of the Valley of the Kings – the main valley. The contrast between the lush green valleys of the Nile banks and the dry sands just a couple of kilometres beyond was striking.

  They were passing a foothill which was over fifty feet high. People were getting around by open buses that reminded Daniel of the transits at Disneyland. It was the tourist season all year round these days, and visitors were usually advised to beat the midday heat by coming early. Indeed, many were already emerging from the small number of tombs that were open to the public, while others were queuing outside, preparing to enter. Only a small number of tombs were ever open to the public and of those, only a few at any one time.

  But Mansoor was taking Daniel and Gabrielle to one that was not open to the public.

  ‘Here we are,’ said Mansoor, as the wall of rock to their left was almost in touching distance.

  They were eyed from a few yards away by jealous tourists, wondering who these gatecrashers were. Most of their eyes were on Gabrielle, in fact. She had traded in her dark denim jeans for a faded, well-worn pair. They were still tight-fitting, showing every curve of body, but the fact that they had worn thin gave them a flexibility of movement that made them more comfortable when walking and climbing stairs. There was a tear in one of the knees, which gave her a slightly tomboyish look, but with her impressive height and perfectly toned form, she had the aura of a gladiator from ancient Rome.

  The guardian at the entrance to the tomb smiled as Mansoor arrived and greeted him with the traditional, ‘Ahlan wa-sahlan.’ The words – literally meaning ‘Family and easy’ – could loosely be translated as ‘Make yourself at home.’

  They exchanged a few more words in Arabic and then Mansoor motioned with his arm to Daniel and Gabrielle, shepherding them towards the entrance.

  ‘This is KV46,’ said Mansoor.

  ‘The tomb of Yuya,’ Daniel replied, his memory stirring as he joined the Egyptian before the entrance. ‘A powerful courtier in ancient Egypt who served both Thutmose the Fourth and his son Amenhotep the Third.’

  Mansoor nodded approvingly and entered the tomb ahead of them. The guards had switched on the electric lights that had been installed in the tomb soon after it was first opened, but a few steps down the stairway that was hewn into the rock, they all stopped like a column of cars held up by a red traffic light, to accustom their eyes to the dim light.

  At the foot of the stairs, they found themselves walking down a corridor about thirty feet long that led to another staircase. The walls were rough and undecorated, not even smoothed let alone plastered, but they were covered with a meticulous grid of black dots spaced evenly apart both vertically and horizontally, effectively dividing the walls into squares. Daniel stopped to study them, shining a torch on to them to see more clearly. He had noticed the same square pattern of dots on the walls by the stairway. Daniel estimated that they were about sixteen inches apart. That would put them at the lower end of that variable ancient unit of measurement known as a cubit.

  Mansoor led them to a second stairway and when they arrived at the bottom, they found themselves in another corridor, shorter than the first. But this one had a rounded ceiling, rather than a flat one. This was consistent with the fact that the ancient Egyptians understood the principle of the arch as far back as 4,500 years ago – a thousand years before this tomb was constructed – even if their public buildings continued to be post and lintel constructions for more than a whole millennium thereafter.

  At the end of the corridor, they entered the burial chamber.

  ‘Much has been removed from here,’ Mansoor explained. ‘It was raided in antiquity, although the robbers took very little, possibly because they were scared off and the tomb resealed. But a number of the larger items remained, such as the sarcophagus and the three coffins, originally placed one inside the other – although they had been disturbed by tomb-raiders. Also, remember that Yuya’s wife Thuya was buried here too. And both their mummies were extremely well preserved.’

  Daniel looked around in amazement. He knew about this tomb, but he had never dreamt that he would actually be standing here.

  ‘Yuya and Thuya were, if my memory serves me right, probably amongst the few non-royals to have a private tomb in the Valley of the Kings.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Mansoor confirmed.

  ‘And also in Yuya’s case,’ Gabrielle added, ‘one of the few foreigners to reach such a high rank, judging by the physical characteristics of his mummy. He was taller than most Egyptians and he had a beard, which Egyptians tended not to do. Also he had no body piercings.’

  ‘Is there any significance in that?’ asked Daniel.

  ‘Well… I believe that body piercing is forbidden by Jewish law.’

  ‘And Orthodox Jewish men have beards,’ Daniel added.

  Ignoring the exchange, Mansoor pointed to some hieroglyphics on the wall.

  ‘He had an impressive list of titles: “First among the King’s Companions”, “Deputy of the King’s Chariots”, “He whom the King made Great and Wise, whom the King has made his Double”. And of course “Father of God”.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ asked Daniel.

  ‘Well, there’s a dispute over the meaning of that title. Some say it was a purely priestly title, but others say it was a title reserved for the father-in-law of a pharaoh.’

  ‘And was Yuya the father-in-law of one of the pharaohs?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Mansoor confirmed. ‘We know, both from the written record and from DNA evidence, that Yuya and Thuya were the parents of Tiye, the mummy known as the “Elder Lady”, found in a tomb called KV35. Tiye was married to Amenhotep the Third and they in turn were the parents of Akhenaten.’

  ‘The monotheistic pharaoh?’

  ‘That’s right. The one who ruled from 1351–1334 BC and who decreed that the Aten – the disk representing the sun God – was the one and only true God.’

  ‘The first exponent of the “one god” system of belief,’ muttered Gabrielle.

  ‘Not strictly true,’ Mansoor corrected. ‘Akhenaten never really got rid of all the other Gods. He just declared war on the cult of the Theban God Amun, because the priests in Thebes were getting too powerful.’

  ‘So he didn’t get rid of Ra,’ said Daniel.

  ‘Not really. Ra was the sun God. The Aten was originally the sun disk – a manifestation of Ra. Somewhere along the line, it evolved into a God in its own right.’

  Daniel froze, not in response to Mansoor’s words, but rather because something had caught his eye. Very low on the wall in front of him, engraved in rather small letters, was some ancient text written in the old script that he had been brought here to decipher.

  ‘Can you translate it?’ asked Mansoor.

  Daniel stared at it for a long time, squinting in the dim lig
ht, before he started. ‘God made me the father to the king and all my brothers bowed down to me.’

  Mansoor turned to Daniel. Daniel and Gabrielle turned to each other as Daniel uttered one word: ‘Joseph.’

  Chapter 30

  Goliath was looking at the entrance to the tomb that Daniel and the others had entered. He wanted to act now, firmly and decisively, but there were too many people about. It wasn’t just the guard outside the tomb, it was also the Egyptian soldiers and the throngs of tourists. There were just too many people.

  He had followed them there from Cairo with relative ease. The tracking program that he had smuggled into Daniel’s phone had started transmitting regular updates on his position again after the police gave it back to Daniel in London, and Goliath had been tracking him ever since.

  Goliath had raced to Cairo airport after him and had seen Daniel, Gabrielle and their Egyptian friend at the desk for an internal flight to Luxor. He guessed that the Valley of the Kings was their destination, so he had simply booked himself on to another flight that was due to land shortly after theirs. From the airport he had taken a taxi to the valley and then made sure to keep them in his sights. He had already been told that they were working with someone important in the Egyptian academic and political hierarchy and so he knew that he would have to tread carefully.

  Now it seemed that they could gain access to places that others couldn’t. This could be both a help and a hindrance. He wanted to get them alone, but it didn’t help if they were in an area inaccessible to the public, as it was also inaccessible to him. And by the same token, it did him no good being able to keep a close eye on where they were, if others were milling about and able to see precisely the same thing.

  He would have to bide his time.

  The trouble was that they had hired a jeep while he was relying on a taxi. He had told the driver to wait and paid him handsomely for doing so, but he could hardly leap into the taxi and say ‘Follow that jeep’ without giving away that he was up to something. And he could hardly expect a local taxi driver to help a foreigner against a powerful public official.

  But the very fact that they were visiting places that others couldn’t get to was an encouraging sign. He sensed that an opportunity would present itself very soon.

  Chapter 31

  ‘The theory that Yuya was Joseph of the Old Testament has been around for donkey’s years,’ Mansoor acknowledged, still in a state of shock. ‘But the academic community never took it seriously. I’d always thought of it as an amateur’s theory.’

  ‘But it has quite a lot going for it, even apart from what Daniel’s just translated,’ said Gabrielle. ‘A foreigner who rose to high rank in ancient Egypt. The beard and lack of body piercings. The name itself, which also has elements of Yahowa or Jehovah. The fact that he was the pharaoh’s father-in-law. And then there’s the Great Harris Papyrus.’

  ‘Oh, you’re not going to throw that in surely?’ Mansoor sneered.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ Daniel interrupted. ‘What’s the Great Harris Papyrus?’

  He looked back and forth between Mansoor and Gabrielle, who were looking at each other. Eventually Gabrielle shrugged and spoke.

  ‘The Great Harris Papyrus was the longest papyrus ever found in ancient Egypt. Named after the collector who acquired it, the Great Harris Papyrus was one of the most important papyri of ancient Egypt. Some 42 metres long, it contained 1,500 lines of text.’

  ‘But what’s it got to do with Joseph?’

  ‘In its final section, it refers to someone called “Yarsu”, which sounds a bit like Yosef, the Hebrew form of Joseph. The text goes something like “Yarsu, a Syrian was with them as Leader. He made the whole land pay tribute to him; he united his companions and looted their possessions. They made the Gods like men, and no sacrifices were offered in the temples.”’

  ‘Syrian,’ Mansoor echoed for emphasis.

  ‘Yes, but the term Syria was sometimes used to include Canaan, where Joseph originated. And making “the whole land pay tribute to him” sounds like the way Joseph gained effective control of Egypt, by winning the support of the pharaoh.’

  Mansoor looked decidedly underwhelmed.

  ‘And what about: “united his companions and looted their possessions”?’

  Gabrielle thought about this for a few seconds.

  ‘It could refer either to the act of holding the ordinary Egyptian people to ransom because of the famine and his monopoly over the grain supplies. Or it might refer to the way he played those mind games with his own brothers before revealing himself. But the clincher is: “They made the Gods like men.” Who else do we know who made Gods like men? Who believed that man was created in the image of God?’

  ‘The Israelites,’ Daniel muttered, not quite trusting his voice.

  ‘Exactly!’ cried Gabrielle triumphantly. ‘And it says that no sacrifices were offered in the temples. That must be a reference to the Amarna experiment when Akhenaten not only banned the worship of Amun and decreed the Aten to be the one true God, but even created a new city in his honour and moved his entire court there.’

  ‘But that was a generation later,’ said Mansoor. ‘Yuya wasn’t around by then.’

  ‘Yes, but the papyrus was written over 200 years after that, when the time-scale might have got confused.’

  Mansoor was shaking his head.

  ‘Most historians believe Yarsu to be another historical figure.’

  ‘But there’s no proof that they’re right,’ Gabrielle declared. ‘In any case Yarsu clearly sounds like Yosef or Joseph. But more important than that, it means “the self-made man”. Who could be more of a self-made man, than a foreigner who rose from humble origins to become the pharaoh’s right-hand man – like Joseph?’

  Mansoor was not one to admit defeat easily, but he smiled at Gabrielle’s arguments, impressed. He turned to Daniel, who seemed to be in a dream world as he stared at a wall.

  ‘Earth to Daniel,’ he said, remembering the old taunt that his American students sometimes used.

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Daniel, pointing to a part of the wall.

  ‘Those are inscriptions from the Book of the Dead. Every tomb has some. Why?’

  ‘Every tomb has the same inscriptions?’

  ‘No, every tomb is different. The inscriptions are supposed to relate to the individual.’

  ‘And those illustrations?’

  ‘That’s Chapter 148.’

  ‘The cows?’

  ‘The seven celestial cows and a bull. A symbol of fertility. What of it?’

  ‘It’s just that it reminded me of… the very thing that led to Joseph being appointed Pharaoh’s right-hand man: he predicted the seven years of famine to follow the seven years of plenty by his correct interpretation of Pharaoh’s dream about the seven fat cows and the seven thin cows.’

  Chapter 32

  The office was busy when a six-page fax arrived at the Egyptian Ministry of Health. The message was picked up from the machine by a very junior member of staff who, upon recognizing its importance, handed it over to one of his superiors, who in turn handed it over to another. It ended up in the hands of a sixty-three-year-old white-haired wiry man, with a frail body, but a piercing, determined look in his eyes. That man was Farooq Mahdi, the Minister of Health, and he was now studying the document.

  The fax described certain events in England and warned of the threat posed by two people: an Englishman called Daniel Klein and an Austrian citizen called Gabrielle Gusack. The document went on to say that both of them were highly respected academics and that they were believed to be travelling in the company of the Vice Minister of Culture, Akil Mansoor.

  However, the document took great pains to emphasize that there was no suggestion that Akil Mansoor was in any way, shape or form aware of the threat posed by these two individuals. Indeed, it was because of his ignorance of the danger they posed that he was himself vulnerable to them and it was for this reason all the
more imperative that he be warned and that they be apprehended as quickly as possible.

  But where was Akil Mansoor now? And where were Daniel Klein and Gabrielle Gusack, for that matter?

  A few minutes later, Mahdi’s secretary had tracked down the information that Mansoor had flown with Klein and Gusack to Luxor with the intention of visiting the Valley of the Kings. But because the secretary had said it was urgent, Mansoor’s office had kindly given his mobile number.

  The minister wasn’t sure if there was coverage in the area where Mansoor was, but he decided to try. The call went straight to voicemail, and a voice told him that the number could not receive calls for the time being and invited him to leave a message.

  The Minister of Health left an urgent message for Mansoor, hoping that he would hear it soon.

  Chapter 33

  ‘It’s known to the locals as the Valley of the Monkeys and the tomb itself is known as the Tomb of the Baboons, because of the depictions of baboons on one of the walls.’

  Mansoor was driving them on a spur road across the hot, dry sands, from the main car park of the Valley of the Kings to the western valley, some three kilometres away.

  ‘Didn’t they actually find a cache of mummified baboons in the valley?’

  Mansoor glanced at Daniel and smiled. ‘They only found one from this western valley. Others were found in various other locations.’

  They had arrived at the entrance to the valley. Gabrielle spoke from the back of the jeep.

  ‘You know, the best way to see this valley is on foot. It has some wonderful rock formations around the narrow paths that you can’t get to by car.’

  ‘I don’t think our friend could take the heat,’ Mansoor replied with a mocking smile, applying the brakes.