The Genesis Cypher (Warner & Lopez Book 6)

by Dean Crawford

  ‘Israel would do anything to keep something like this buried,’ Lopez pointed out. ‘The state’s existence is ultimately dependent on their historical capital of Jerusalem as described in the Bible.’

  ‘Which is not a true history of the region,’ Hellerman agreed. ‘Israel and western Christians make much of the discovery of things like the Dead Sea Scrolls and other ancient documents revealing the early history of Christianity, but far older material such as this reveals the lack of historicity behind those scrolls. The Ark of the Covenant was supposedly sent down to Moses by God and contained the tablets upon which were written the Ten Commandments, of which we already know there were actually forty–two and that they were Egyptian. Even Moses’ name is Egyptian, as in the Pharaohs Thutmoses and Ahmoses, and partially reveals from where the story of the Old Testament was derived: ancient Egypt.’

  ‘The whole thing?’ Lucy Morgan asked.

  ‘Every word,’ Hellerman confirmed. ‘All of the creation legends, the gods and so on were borrowed from ancient Egypt by the Israelites and Hebrews when they created the Torah, or Old Testament, rewriting history to suit their own needs. All of the greatest legends such as the parting of the seas, the Exodus, the triumphant battle victories and even David and Goliath all come from the myths of older and more established civilizations. Israel, for instance, never has had a capital in Jerusalem. Their only historical capital city ever was Megiddo itself.’

  Mitchell, who had remained ominously silent for now, spoke finally.

  ‘I’ll cancel my subscription to the God Channel when I get home.’

  ‘The whole thing is a myth, borrowed from other older myths,’ Hellerman confirmed, ‘but this tablet describes in the witness’s own hand the origin of those myths and the discovery, I think, of what we now know as the Ark of the Covenant.’

  ‘I thought that the Ark was just something in Hollywood movies.’

  ‘So do most people,’ Hellerman enthused, ‘and most people also assume that as per the Bible the Hebrews were sent the Ten Commandments by God, who then handed things over to Moses, who broke the tablets and put them into the Ark. From that moment on, the Ark supposedly represented the power of God Himself.’

  Lillian picked up as Hellerman left off.

  ‘The Bible describes the Ark as an object of unspeakable power that incinerates whole armies and lays waste to entire regions,’ she said. ‘The thing is, there’s no mention of the object outside of the Old Testament unless you look at the much older civilization of ancient Egypt.’

  ‘The Egyptians speak of it?’ Mitchell asked, his expression as somber as ever.

  ‘They do a lot more than that,’ Hellerman replied. ‘It exists in their texts, their art work and even their monuments long before the Hebrews had even borrowed the Phoenician script, which they used to write the Torah. Scholars have identified that the Ark was well known to the ancient Egyptians and you can see the Ark here in these hieroglyphs, which are especially interesting as they were found in the tomb of the world’s most famous pharaoh, Tutankhamun.’

  Ethan leaned closer and saw the famous icon of the two winged Cherubim facing each other, like angels, their wings touching at the tips.

  ‘And this, found actually inside the tomb with the pharaoh,’ Hellerman added as he switched to another image.

  To Ethan’s amazement, he saw the Ark itself in an old photograph taken of the tomb at the time it was first discovered in 1923. The Ark was sitting in Tutankhamun’s tomb, its rods ready to be lifted once again, and atop it sat a carving of the Egyptian God, Anubis.

  ‘Further images and engravings appear at the Egyptian temple at Medinet Habu,’ Hellerman added, ‘which was dedicated to the worship of the Ark. What’s even more interesting is that Tutankhamun’s father was Akhenaten.’

  Dr Lucy Morgan’s eyes widened.

  ‘The sun god pharaoh,’ she said, ‘the king with the elongated skull.’

  ‘The same,’ Hellerman replied. ‘Akhenaten abolished the old religions and introduced the worship of the sun itself, calling himself the son of the one true god and providing the foundations for the monotheistic religions of Christianity and, later, Islam. Ethan and Nicola have previously investigated Akhenaten as part of operations into the Incas in Peru, the connections to which I’ll let you find out for yourself, but it’s enough to say that Akhenaten was the most unusual of all the Pharaohs.’

  Lillian gestured to the images scattered across the table before them.

  ‘What brings us here now though is the fact that Egypt was the home of the Ark, and from what I’ve uncovered, that home was at the Giza plateau.’

  It didn’t take anybody long to figure out what Lillian meant.

  ‘The pyramids?’ Amber uttered. ‘You’re going out on a limb here, even after all we’ve seen.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Jarvis said, ‘but bear with Lillian here because this is stuff that even I wouldn’t have believed six months ago, and yet it’s all in plain sight for anybody to see. The Pyramids of Giza, despite all claims to the contrary, show no signs of having been built by the Pharaonic civilization with whom they are most normally associated.’

  Lucy Morgan shook her head.

  ‘That’s crap,’ she shot back at him. ‘We’ve found the tombs of the builders, the tools that they used, graffiti inside the pyramids made by the people who built the damned things!’

  Hellerman levelled her with a calm gaze.

  ‘We’ve found builder’s tombs,’ he agreed, ‘but they contain no imagery or hieroglyphics associated with the pyramids, which would have been normal procedure for the Egyptians. They celebrated their achievements in their art. We’ve found tools, none of which conform to the construction of those megastructures, and no art or texts describing their construction or the techniques used. The graffiti is compelling, but given that the arts of tomb raiders are well known it’s a bigger leap to assume they built the pyramids than to assume they were attempting to rob them. The words describe people, nothing more.’

  Lucy shook her head, clearly irked, but she did not reply as Lillian went on.

  ‘Egyptian scholars consider the great pyramids to be the work of their ancestors and they are proud of that heritage. Anything that suggests that the pyramids were built earlier than the Pharaonic era is rejected by them. Yet we have ample evidence that the Sphinx was already standing when the first Pharaoh’s ruled the region in the First Dynasty and that so were the foundations at least of the pyramids.’

  ‘What does all of that have to do with the Ark of the Covenant?’ Ethan asked.

  ‘We all know that there are pyramids all around the world,’ Hellerman said, ‘in almost every ancient culture. The word pyramid itself comes from the Greek “pyra”, meaning fire or light, and the Greek “midos” meaning measures. The Great Pyramid of Khufu, the largest in the world, stood nearly five hundred feet tall with its gold capstone and is built from two and a half million blocks of stone, some weighing as much as seventy tons. It is built with a precision that is truly unrivalled, and is orientated to the four cardinal points of the compass. The casing stones were placed with an accuracy of five one thousands of an inch. The mortar used is of an unknown origin and cannot be reproduced even with today’s technology. Worst of all for patriotic Egyptians, no hieroglyphics or writings have been found anywhere inside the pyramid that conform to its construction. And that is where the Ark comes in.’

  ‘It does?’ Lucy asked, feigning interest.

  Hellerman ignored her dismissive tone as he continued.

  ‘In what is called by Egyptologists “The King’s Chamber”, a red granite coffer was found. This is the only object found anywhere inside the pyramid. No Pharaoh’s body, mummies or treasure chamber has ever been found to match the coffer. It was too large to fit through the passages, so it must have been put in place while the pyramid was under construction. Analysis of the coffer revealed that it was made with some sort of drill that used hard jewel bits and a drilling force of an incred
ible two tons. It was cut out of one block of solid granite. What interests me here is that the cubic capacity of the coffer coincides with the measurements of the Biblical chest of Moses, the Ark of the Covenant.’

  Ethan felt a little twinge of excitement as he considered this.

  ‘You think that the Ark was kept inside the Great Pyramid.’

  Hellerman nodded.

  ‘I think that it was originally inside that coffer, that is now mistakenly assumed to be the unused tomb of a Pharaoh. I mean, c’mon, the largest and most impressive megastructure tomb of all human history and they forget to put the dead King in it when he finally keels over?’

  Lopez was smiling with intrigue. ‘Anything else that supports this little theory?’

  ‘Sure,’ Lillian said, warming to her theme, ‘the Biblical Book of Exodus records the Ark as being two and a half sacred cubits long by one and a half high and wide. The volume of the Ark in cubic inches matches the volume of the pyramid’s cubic inches, an important symbolic coincidence if nothing else. Then there’s the sheer size of the pyramid complex itself, designed as though to be visible even from space and with the three main pyramids originally cloaked in white stone with golden caps, in the sunlight they would shine as bright as stars on the surface of the earth, and especially so at dawn and dusk when the setting sun would light only the golden capstones.’

  ‘Which would match the stars of Orion’s belt if viewed from space,’ Ethan recalled.

  ‘The pyramids were built for a reason,’ Hellerman insisted. ‘Nobody would build something so immense without a good reason, and there is not a shred of evidence actually connecting them to the ancient Egyptians, other than the fact that they’re in a country that was later to become Egypt.’

  ‘And how does the Sphinx tie in with that?’ Lucy Morgan asked.

  ‘It’s age,’ Hellerman replied. ‘The weathering on the Sphinx suggests it withstood intense rainfall, something that had not occurred in the Nile Delta for many thousands of years before the Pharaonic dynasties began. Some of the larger limestone blocks show disproportional weathering to the others at Giza. The bottom few courses of Khafre’s pyramid are built of cyclopean blocks, and The Osireion at Abydos in ancient Greece also has unmarked cyclopean masonry and is associated with the earliest dynasties. But the clincher for me is that salt encrustations an inch thick were found inside the great pyramid when it was opened, and were found to be consistent with sea salt deposits common after floods.’

  Ethan thought back to the description of the Sphinx and intense weather erosion consistent with torrential rain.

  ‘That would make the pyramids at least as old as the Sphinx, right?’

  Hellerman shrugged. ‘No other way around it.’

  ‘But the pyramids have been consistently dated to around five thousand years ago,’ Lucy Morgan argued.

  ‘Again entirely true, but you cannot rely on carbon dating for stone,’ Hellerman pointed out. ‘It works well with many materials but not all.’

  ‘The data was taken from pollen seeds and spores found inside the pyramids,’ Lucy countered.

  ‘Precisely!’ Hellerman said. ‘Not from the pyramids themselves. Grave robbers entered the pyramids throughout Egyptian history and would have contaminated the otherwise sealed buildings time and again, carrying pollen and spores in with them. No dating from a pollen seed can be relied upon!’

  Ethan looked up at the stars.

  ‘What about the shafts inside the pyramids?’ he asked. ‘What were they for?’

  ‘Most scholars believe that they aligned to specific stars,’ Hellerman explained. ‘The only true alignment that made any sense was one that followed the longitude of Perihelion at zero degrees. That last happened in 4,043 BCE, while the building of the Sphinx was calculated to be approximately 4,500 BCE, the last time that the constellation of Leo rose before the Sphinx itself.’

  ‘Nearly seven thousand years ago,’ Lopez said as she looked at Ethan, ‘right about the time civilization first rose up in the fertile crescent. Those people were barely out of the hunter gatherer lifestyle.’

  ‘Exactly my point,’ Hellerman agreed. ‘Whoever built the pyramids, no matter what exotic conspiracy theory you may believe, possessed technological abilities far beyond those traditionally ascribed to the people of the time. If the older dates are correct, then they exceed the oldest known dates of human civilization.’

  Ethan thought for a moment.

  ‘And if the Ark was placed inside the Great Pyramid way back then, and it was as powerful and significant as the Hebrews thought it was…’

  ‘Then the Egyptians would have found it and revered it,’ Hellerman agreed. ‘It would have become a powerful weapon, just the kind of weapon that could allow pastoral desert nomads to grow into the world’s first true superpower. The Egyptians, not the Hebrews, found and held the Ark aloft in battle, conquering all before them.’

  Ethan looked at Lopez.

  ‘And that’s what Majestic Twelve were interested in: whatever the Ark really was.’

  Lillian spoke with a sense of finality.

  ‘Tjaneni records that he would bury the Ark with himself, that it was too powerful to remain in the hands of men. Of course we assume that to be the Great Pyramid, but as that is empty he must have gone elsewhere. We’re going to need help to find out where he might have chosen to bury the ark, and for that we need the rest of the tablet decoded.’

  Lucy Morgan sighed.

  ‘I know somebody in Cairo who can help.’

  ‘Then we move as fast as we can. If Elena is guiding the Russians, they’re going to head out there as fast as they can.’

  Mitchell moved across to Ethan’s side and grabbed his shoulder in a vice–like grip.

  ‘Don’t go in there without first having a plan to get out again, like in Syria. There’s likely a good reason that thing hasn’t been seen for thousands of years. Tjaneni hid it so well to protect his own people as well as others, and that means that he was afraid of something.’

  Ethan looked up at the big man and nodded.

  ‘I’m afraid of something too,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid of whatever it is Tjaneni buried out there getting into the hands of people like Gregorie and Mishkin.’

  ***

  XXXVIII

  The Museum of Egyptian Antiquities,

  Tahrir Square, Cairo

  The museum was located on Meret Basha on the eastern banks of the Nile, just north of Tahrir Square, a handsome building fronted with fountains and stone sphinxes bustling with tourists. Ethan led the way, his features concealed behind sunglasses and a cheap tourist hat that he had found being hawked by an Egyptian vendor in one of Cairo’s busy streets. The sun was beating down on the busy square as they made their way through the bustling crowds. Ethan walked with confidence into the museum and through the vast halls filled with Egyptian mummies, the ancient remains of Rameses II and the elaborate gold head mask of Tutankhamen attracting crowds of tourists, their cameras flashing as they photographed of the famous relics.

  ‘Do you have any idea where he is?’ Lopez asked.

  Ethan saw the man he was looking for, working on an exhibit that looked like an ancient mummy encased in glass.

  ‘Dr El–Wari?’

  The Egyptian man wearing spectacles and with receding black hair, his dark skin stark against his crisp white shirt, turned and his eyes widened as he recognized Ethan. Almost immediately his heart sank with his expression.

  ‘Warner,’ he said as though he had eaten something unpleasant and was seeking to spit it out. ‘I thought I’d last seen you years ago.’

  ‘Nice to see you again too,’ Ethan replied. ‘You helped Doctor Lucy Morgan a few years back and we need your help again.’

  ‘If you’re here to talk to me about aliens building the pyramids and contacting ancient Peruvian cultures I swear I’ll mummify you and put you on display in this museum myself. Do you know how long it took me to re–establish my reputation here after what
you and Lucy Morgan put me through and…’

  ‘This way doctor,’ Ethan said as he took El–Wari firmly by the arm and guided him toward a nearby access door.

  Ethan hurried the Egyptologist through the access door into a quiet corridor, Lopez following them through and pulling the door shut behind them.

  ‘We’re here about a manuscript that was recorded during the reign of a Pharaoh, called the Tulli Manuscript.’

  ‘Oh no,’ El–Wari shook his head wearily and tried to push past Ethan. ‘Take your questions to somebody else, please. I don’t want anything to do with this, with any of you.’

  ‘We’re not interested in any ancient astronaut theories,’ Ethan snapped as he pinned the academic in place against the wall as gently as he could. ‘This is about children.’

  ‘What?’ El–Wari asked, confused.

  ‘Trafficked children,’ Lopez said from nearby as she kept watch on the door behind them. ‘They’re being abducted and smuggled out of Syria into Lebanon, and one or two of them ended up in Utah.’

  El–Wari’s collapsed helplessly. ‘I don’t understand. What does this have to do with me?’

  ‘We found this on the wall of a Utah compound belonging to an apocalyptic cult,’ Ethan said as he fished out the image of the hieroglyphics from his pocket and showed it to El–Wari. ‘You recognize it?’

  The Egyptologist scrutinized the image for a moment and nodded. ‘Yes, I can read it, but what’s it doing in Utah?’

  Ethan released the old man as he replied.

  ‘The cult had purchased a number of girls who had been smuggled out of Syria under the cover of a charity they operated,’ he explained. ‘They were being used because the cult believed that they were some kind of Egyptian Oracles.’