Testament

by David Gibbins

  Costas put up his hand. “But I see another problem. There’s nothing volcanic up the east coast of Africa that would fit the description.”

  Rebecca shook her head. “You don’t have to look for volcanoes. When I was in Ethiopia two years ago with my school group working for the aid agency, we used to get up at dawn to see the first light of the sun on the mountain ridges of the plateau. During the dry season, when the wind whips up the dust, it creates a dramatic light effect, a kind of ripple on the western horizon as the sun lights up the mountaintops. The ripple can be seen most clearly at a certain place where there’s a line of ridges angled northwest, so the sun progressively lights up the ridge from south to north over a span of several seconds. On a clear day, where you can see the distant mountains over the plain from the sea, I guess to an ancient sailor that might look like a chariot racing across the sky—a Chariot of Fire.”

  Jack stared at her. “Can you pinpoint the place?”

  “Absolutely. It covers the ancient mountaintop plateau of Magdala, where the Ethiopian King Theodore had his last stand against the British when they invaded Abyssinia in 1868 to rescue those European hostages. You should know about that, Dad.”

  “I certainly do. Our ancestor the Royal Engineers colonel inherited a box with some material relating to the campaign from a fellow officer in India. My father only told me about it just before he died, in a long list of other family documents he hadn’t had time to catalog. Apparently there’s a handwritten diary and some kind of fabric, a piece of tapestry or something brought back from the campaign. The archive’s been in disarray over the last few years, with the new building at the campus under construction, but maybe now’s the time for me to delve into it. My father always told me they weren’t just fighting a war, but were on the trail of biblical antiquities.”

  “Another thing puzzles me, though,” Rebecca said. “I get why Hanno might have abbreviated his story when he got back to Carthage. He was probably under strict orders from the magistrates or whoever to keep quiet about his circumnavigation. Who knows what gold and other riches might lie in East Africa. But why then should he give the game away in a plaque he erects at the Cape, saying exactly where he’s going?”

  “He would have been in a different mindset then,” Costas said. “That plaque reads almost like a last journal entry—‘We were fifty ships, now we’re one.’ I went round the Cape several times when I was in the navy, and I can tell you that the proposition in a simple square-rigged sailing ship would be little short of terrifying. He didn’t know whether he’d make it back. Revealing trade secrets was the last thing on his mind. At the Cape, faced with the fearful prospect ahead, all that mattered was to leave something that showed his achievement, and perhaps a waymarker for those who might have followed to find out what had happened to him.”

  “What happened to his cargo, you mean,” Jack said. “‘The appointed place’ shows that whoever had entrusted him with this cargo had a fixed destination in mind, the mountain called the Chariot of Fire.”

  “If that was in Ethiopia, it wasn’t entirely off the ancient map, was it?” Rebecca said. “The Egyptians knew of the Land of Punt to the south, and explorers seeking ivory and precious metals must have known about the rich wildlife and the gold to be found in the Ethiopian highlands. Perhaps someone had a treasure they wanted spirited away, to some hiding place at the edge of the known world but not beyond the bounds of recovery.”

  “And important enough to send it on a voyage all the way around the continent of Africa to get there,” Costas said.

  Jack gazed at the pictogram of the two men with the box. An idea was forming in his mind, something almost too incredible to contemplate. “The early sixth century was a very unsettled time in the Middle East, in the Holy Land,” he said. “Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon had conquered the old Phoenician lands of Canaan, and Carthage had become the new capital of the Phoenician world. It’s exactly the time you would expect navigators like Hanno and Himilco to be sent on great voyages of exploration to the west, to assert Carthaginian dominance over a new world where they would not have to contend with the ancient powers of the Middle East, a region as intractable then as it is now.”

  “And Nebuchadnezzar did something else, didn’t he, Dad?” Rebecca said quietly, eyeing him. “Remember, I worked at Temple Mount in Jerusalem last year, and we were digging through those layers. He destroyed the Temple, and forced the Jews into exile. Something went missing, didn’t it? A great treasure, the greatest, most sacred treasure of the Jews. So here’s what I’m thinking. With the Phoenicians fleeing their homeland for Carthage, who better for their kin in Judah to entrust their treasure to than the greatest navigators of the world, men like Hanno, who might take it safely away from the cauldron of the Middle East and on an extraordinary voyage to that appointed place, somewhere for it to remain concealed until the time was right for its recovery.”

  Jack stared at the pictogram, his mind racing, and Jeremy looked at him. “I think we need to examine Costas’s sherd now.”

  Costas leaned forward eagerly. “Can you read it?”

  Jeremy picked it up and angled it into the light. “The inscription has been scratched into the outside of the sherd, hastily but decisively,” he said. “There’s no doubt the language is Phoenician, of the same time period as the painted sherds from the wreck and the plaque. It has the same toppled letter A, among other similarities.”

  “Another reference to the contents of the amphoras, like the painted inscriptions?” Costas suggested.

  Jeremy shook his head emphatically. “The markings on those amphoras had been put on where they were filled or at the wharfside. As a result, where we’ve got broken sherds with those markings, from amphoras that shattered during the wrecking, they’re like a jigsaw puzzle, with each sherd only containing part of an inscription. Your sherd is completely different, unique on the wreck so far. It’s a complete inscription, squeezed into the available space, scratched on a sherd that was already broken. It was made by someone who had picked up a broken sherd and used whatever he had to hand, a ring or a knife perhaps.”

  Jack took the sherd from Jeremy, inspecting it. “The odd amphora might shatter in the normal course of a voyage, creating a mess that might be swept into the scuppers. But I don’t think that accounts for this sherd. On a voyage such as this one, with the cargo needing to be stowed as well as possible to avoid breakage, with everything needing to be battened down and shipshape, any breakages would have been cleared overboard. And with the presentation of the cargo being of prime importance for trade, the last thing they would want would be to invite merchants on board to see stinking, messy scuppers. So my money is on this sherd being from an amphora that shattered in the final lead-up to the wrecking.”

  “That’s consistent with the poor quality of the incisions,” Jeremy replied, taking the sherd back and pointing at it. “They look as if they were scratched by someone being thrown violently about, who maybe knew they weren’t going to make it.”

  “A message in a bottle,” Rebecca said.

  Jeremy nodded. “That fits with what the inscription actually says.”

  Jack leaned forward. “Go on.”

  Jeremy placed the sherd in the center of the table, pointing as he spoke. “It contains ten words, in four lines. The first word is ‘Chimilkat,’ evidently the name of the writer. The second word means ‘made this,’ like the Latin fecit. So that first line reads ‘Chimilkat wrote this.’”

  Jack stared, stunned. “You sure of that name?”

  “You can read it for yourself.”

  “Chimilkat is the Phoenician name that the Greeks rendered as Himilco.”

  “Correct.”

  Costas looked at them. “Himilco the Navigator?”

  Jeremy pointed at the sherd again. “The second line also contains two words. The first means ‘go round,’ but in a specific nautical sense, ‘circumnavigate.’ The second is the Phoenician spelling of the word we know from Greek as C
assiterides, the British Isles. So that line means ‘circumnavigated the Cassiterides.’”

  “‘Himilco, who wrote this, circumnavigated the British Isles,’” Costas said.

  “That’s amazing enough,” Jeremy said. “But the third line says something truly astonishing. The same word for ‘circumnavigate’ appears, though with a suffix indicating a future sense, something that will happen. There are two other words you might recognize from the plaque, the word for Africa and, amazingly, the word for Chariot of Fire, the mountain. Then there’s a name, barely visible, and another word.”

  Jack picked up the sherd and angled it again for a better view. “My God,” he said quietly. “It’s Hanno.”

  “And the last word in the line signifies their relationship. They’re brothers.”

  Costas translated again. “‘Himilco, who wrote this, circumnavigated the British Isles. Hanno, his brother, has gone to circumnavigate Africa, to the Chariot of Fire.’”

  “And now to the pictogram at the end, and the two words below,” Jeremy said. “The pictogram is clear enough, but it must have been incised in his final moments. One slash becomes a gouge that trails off to the bottom of the sherd, as if it were done at the moment the ship struck.”

  “It’s very moving,” Rebecca said. “Two brothers, half a world apart, sending the same message to the world, both under duress. Hanno punches that pictogram into a bronze plaque at the Cape of Good Hope, as if to make absolutely sure that any who might follow him would know his purpose. He may not have been facing the same immediate terror as Himilco, but he must have wondered whether he would survive. For Himilco that pictogram is the last thing he’ll ever inscribe, and he knows it. Leaving that message for posterity is the uppermost thing in his mind. Whatever it represents, it must have been something incredibly important. And he’s thinking of his brother in his final moments.”

  Jeremy nodded and leaned forward intently, staring at Jack. “And now the final two words. Prepare yourself for one of the most extraordinary revelations of your archaeological career.”

  11

  Jack felt his pulse quicken as he peered at the ancient potsherd, watching Jeremy trace the faint remains of the inscription with his finger. He cleared his throat and looked up at Jack, his face flushed with excitement. “The two words below the pictogram are ‘Aron Habberit,’ the same in Phoenician as in Hebrew.”

  “Aron Habberit,” Jack repeated, his voice taut with excitement. “The Ark of the Covenant, the Ark of the Testimony. Well I’ll be damned. That makes absolute sense of the pictogram.”

  Costas leaned back, closed his eyes and began to recite. “‘And Bezalel made the ark of acacia wood; two cubits and a half was the length of it, and a cubit and a half the breadth of it, and a cubit and a half the height of it: and he overlaid it with pure gold within and without, and made a crown of gold to it round about. And he cast for it four rings of gold, in the four feet thereof; even two rings on the one side of it, and two rings on the other side of it. And he made staves of acacia wood, and overlaid them with gold. And he put the staves into the rings on the sides of the ark, to bear the ark.’”

  “The Old Testament Book of Exodus, chapter 37, verses 1 to 5,” Jeremy said. “Well remembered.”

  “The benefits of a strict Greek Orthodox upbringing,” Costas said. “The only things that really interested me were the stories of treasure, and I memorized them. I’d wanted to find the Ark of the Covenant way before I first met Jack. This is incredibly exciting.”

  Jeremy tapped on his laptop, opening a black-and-white photo and swiveling it round so that they could all see. “Recognize that?”

  “The treasury in the tomb of Tutankhamun, as it looked just after Howard Carter stepped inside in 1923,” Rebecca said. “That’s the so-called Anubis shrine, made of gilded acacia wood, the wood that the Israelites called shittim, with carrying poles almost three meters long. The shrine is corniced, decorated on the sides like a palace facade covered with hieroglyphic text, and on top there’s that frightening live-sized statue of Anubis, canine god of the dead and guardian of the burial chamber and the pharaoh’s canopic equipment. That’s what was found inside the shrine: sacred materials and equipment used in the mummification process. It was really a kind of portable treasury.”

  “You really know your Egyptology,” Jeremy said.

  “I’ve spent a lot of time with Maurice and Aysha. Being with Maurice is like living inside a virtual museum of ancient Egypt.”

  Jeremy cleared his throat. “I’ve put this image up because the Anubis shrine is the closest we have archaeologically to the description of the Ark of the Covenant. There are a lot of obvious similarities, including the box-like shape, the gilded wooden construction and the carrying poles. They’re of very similar date as well, if we follow Maurice in believing that the Pharaoh of the Book of Exodus is Akhenaten, the likely father of Tutankhamun.”

  Costas looked at him quizzically. “So what you’re suggesting is that when the Israelites came to think of a sacred box for the tablet of the Commandments, they had an obvious model in the type of shrine they would have seen being carried around in processions in Egypt.”

  “Precisely,” Jeremy said. “Many of the Israelites of the Exodus had probably been in Egypt for generations, and as slaves, their own material culture would have been very sparse. Even though they may have despised Egyptian religion and the pharaohs, when it came to conceiving of a receptacle, their imaginations would have been fueled by the treasures they had seen around them in Egypt.”

  “There’s another factor, something that Maurice always talks about,” Rebecca added. “Look at how we use the words. When we call a box a shrine, we give it extra stature, extra strength, the power to protect what’s inside. In the case of the Anubis shrine, it was the sacred canopic equipment; in the case of the Ark, it was the two stone plaques inscribed with the Ten Commandments. The Egyptians were past masters at invoking everything they could to protect their sacred objects. Anubis was the black dog of everyone’s nightmares. In that photo you can still see the shroud that was found covering the dog’s body, probably one of several that would have covered the head as well. People knew what lay beneath, they feared it, but they were probably told that to remove the shroud would be to bring down the wrath of the god upon them. The figures on top of the Ark in the biblical account, the so-called cherubim, probably a pair of winged lion-bodied creatures like the sphinx, had much the same function, and the Ark was also meant to be covered with shrouds or skins in a way that sounds very similar.”

  “The Book of Numbers, chapter 4,” Costas said. “The Ark was to be covered with skins and a blue cloth, and to touch it was to die.”

  “Rebecca’s right,” Jack said. “Maurice and I often argue about the extent of Egyptian influence in the ancient Mediterranean, but in this case I agree with him. At the time when Egypt had its greatest involvement in ancient Mediterranean trade, during the New Kingdom in the late second millenium BC, the time of the Exodus, we should expect to see Egyptian artifacts being copied by other peoples. And remember how close Phoenicia was to Judah, geographically as well as culturally. The Phoenician god Ba’al Hammon had similarities with the early Judaean God, and we know that the concept of one overarching deity may be closely associated with the cult of the sun god Aten under Akhenaten. Even the western Phoenicians would have felt this influence. Hanno and Himilco would have been closely connected with the Phoenician homeland, and as we’ve seen from our wreck find of elephant ivory, they may even have traveled up the Nile themselves in search of trade goods. To me it’s no surprise that when they come to inscribe a pictogram of the Ark, it looks very like an Egyptian hieroglyph, partly because the Ark itself is an Egyptian form.”

  Jeremy swiveled the computer back and tapped the keyboard. “There were two additional points of comparison that struck me when I was looking at the Egyptian material. The first was the association with mountains. We know that Moses was given the Commandments on a mo
untain, and we’re told that the hiding place of the Ark was to be in a mountaintop cave. Well, Anubis was also known as the mountain god, Tepy-dju-ef, ‘he who is upon his mountain.’ The second point concerns the animal skins. I remembered Pliny’s reference to the gorilla skins brought back by Hanno being hung up for display on his return to Carthage. Looking through the other artifacts found in Tut’s treasury, I saw those two strange gilded sculptures of decapitated animal skins hanging from poles, part of the imuit fetish. That too was associated with the cult of Anubis.”

  “Are you suggesting a connection between Tut’s tomb and the gorilla skins?” Costas asked incredulously.

  “It’s as Jack was saying, tendrils of influence that spread out from Egypt by way of the Near East, through Canaan and Judah, through the Phoenicians. The imuit fetish may have lost most of its meaning outside Egypt, but the imagery and symbolism could have remained, even a lingering memory of its power, a hint of the fear that Anubis instilled. And there may have been a more practical meaning. Perhaps Hanno had been instructed to set up the skins as a secret message that he had carried out his task, a message to the priests and prophets of Judah who may have retained a memory of Egyptian cult practices from the time of the Exodus.”

  “Gorilla skins might not have been quite what they had in mind,” Costas said.

  “It probably didn’t matter, so long as they could see them and know they’d been used as a covering for the Ark.”

  “And the connection with Ethiopia, with the mountain called the Chariot of Fire?” Costas asked.

  “I heard about the Ark when I was in Ethiopia, from the village elders in the mountains,” Rebecca said. “And the Lemba people of South Africa, the Mwenye, claimed that they had the Ark and carried it deep into the mountains, hiding it in a cave. The Lemba called it ngoma lungundu, ‘the voice of God.’”

  “It sounds as if you were doing a bit more than relief work on your trip,” Costas said.