Testament

by David Gibbins

  He took another swig and watched Rebecca sit down on the same rock as Jeremy with her plateful. He looked back at the sea again, thinking about diving. Macleod had told him about Rebecca’s project as soon as she had introduced it, but he had let her take it forward. They would need to sit down tomorrow with the Admiralty charts to talk about currents and reefs. He had already scoped out the island for the most likely places for wreckage, the places nearest to the sailing routes where ships might have been blown ashore. They would have to take account of the variegation of the seabed he had seen on their hurried dive from the doomed trawler. A few hundred meters of easy-looking coastal water on the surface could be a jumble of rocks and gullies underwater, hard to navigate and impossible to survey systematically. It would be Rebecca’s project, but he would make sure they did not come away empty-handed. And she might well be right. There could be a great treasure lurking under these waves in front of them, something to add to IMU’s rich bank of projects for the future.

  Rebecca passed her phone over to Jack. “Maurice just sent me this. He wanted you to see it.”

  Jack stared at the image, a selfie of Maurice holding a small Egyptian statue of a god and beaming at the camera. “Huh,” he said. “A shabti, a funerary figurine. That looks like the one he found when we excavated the Roman villa as schoolboys, the find that really turned him on to Egyptology. Good to see him looking happy again.”

  “No,” Rebecca said. “That’s one he’s just found in Carthage. That’s why he’s so happy.”

  Jack smiled broadly. “Well I’ll be damned. Good on you, Maurice.”

  “It was at the bottom of the harbor entrance channel, below the bronze of Ba’al and the gorilla skin. He says he knows it doesn’t prove anything, that it could have been dropped overboard by a passing ship, but he does say that it’s the right date—ninth century BC—for an Egyptian presence in the early trading post at Carthage. He says finding it makes him feel as if he’s come full circle. He says from now on he’s not going to hold back on telling you what he’s found. From now on he’s going to tell you everything.”

  “That sounds like the old Maurice. I knew he’d be back.”

  Costas slapped a fish on Jack’s plate and sat down beside him, grunting with satisfaction as he contemplated the pile on his own plate. He nudged Jack along on his rock to make more space, and peered at him. “You’ve got that look again.”

  “You always say that. I’ve just been thinking, that’s all.”

  Costas picked up a fish by the tail and pulled the flesh off the bone, then cracked open a beer. “Is there something you want to ask me?”

  “About what?”

  He took a swig. “You know. The usual. About my plans.”

  “About your arm.”

  “My arm? What about it?”

  “Salt water would do it good. Clean up the wound.”

  Costas stuffed some fish into his mouth and waved dismissively. “It’s only a scratch. I can take this thing off tonight.”

  “It’s just that I was wondering…”

  “Yes?”

  “You ready to dive tomorrow?”

  Costas took another huge swig of beer, swallowed noisily, and slapped Jack on the back, grinning broadly. “What do you think? Those are the best words I’ve heard all day. I can’t wait.”

  Author’s Note

  When the power of Carthage flourished, Hanno sailed round from Cadiz to the extremity of Arabia, and published a memoir of his voyage, as did Himilco when he was dispatched at the same date to explore the outer coasts of Europe.

  Pliny, Natural History, 2:169

  The kernel of this novel came early in my career as an archaeologist when I was standing beside the ancient harbor of Carthage in Tunisia, having just come up from a dive to examine the submerged remains located a few meters offshore. A year earlier, exploring underground passageways near Temple Mount in Jerusalem, I had wondered whether any of the treasures concealed at the time of the Babylonian conquest in the early sixth century BC might still be there, and afterward I had gone down to the Mediterranean coast of Israel to dive at the old Phoenician port of Caesarea Maritima. At Carthage, nothing remains above ground of the early Phoenician settlement, but excavations since the 1970s have revealed much of later Punic date—Punic being the term the Romans used for the Carthaginians—that allowed me to envisage the city at the time of the Babylonian conquest of the Holy Land by Nebuchadnezzar.

  Nowhere in Carthage is the Punic past more visible than in the harbors, their landlocked form strikingly reminiscent of the harbor of Carthage’s mother city of Tire in modern Lebanon. Not far from where I was standing was the Tophet, the supposed site of Carthaginian child sacrifice, another tangible link to the old world of Phoenicia and Canaan, to the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac. I began to wonder about the strength of the connection in the sixth century BC of Carthage with old Phoenicia, and by extension with the kingdom of Judah. After Tire and the other ports of Phoenicia had been subjugated by the Babylonians, and with Carthage in the ascendancy—and home of the greatest navigators of the day, men such as Hanno and Himilco—could it have been to Carthage that the Israelites turned to safeguard their treasures? Could the greatest treasure of them all, Aron Habberit, the Ark of the Covenant, have been spirited away by Carthaginian mariners on an incredible journey to a far-distant place, to await the time of revelation prophesied in the Old Testament?

  * * *

  The appearance of the Ark of the Covenant is well known from the account in the Book of Exodus (25:10–22) quoted at the beginning of this novel. Another biblical source is the Second Book of Maccabees, accepted as part of the canon by the Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox churches (though not in the Jewish or Protestant traditions); in it we read of Jeremiah on a mountain putting the Ark inside a “cave-dwelling,” and then sealing up the entrance (2 Maccabees 2:5). There is no mention of the Ark in surviving ancient secular literature, for example by the Roman encyclopedist Pliny the Elder, and all modern discussion must therefore rest solely on the biblical accounts.

  The plausibility of the Ark as an actual ancient artifact was given sharp focus by the 1922 discovery in Tutankhamun’s tomb of the Anubis Shrine, a gilded portable chest bearing close similarities to the description of the Ark and dating from the same period—especially if, as I suggest in my novel Pyramid, the biblical Exodus did indeed take place at the time of Akhenaten, Tutankhamun’s immediate predecessor. One oft-cited difference, between the seated dog Anubis on the chest and the two golden kerubim of the Ark, who “spread out their wings on high … with their faces one to the other” (Exodus 25:18–21), may arise from a mistranslation. The word “cherub” in Western art, referring to an angelic child, appears to derive from a rabbinic tradition that defined the ancient Hebrew word kerubim as “like a child.” However, the word at the time of the Old Testament most probably referred to the lion or bull with wings and a human face commonly represented in ancient Middle Eastern art, and appearing in Egypt as the sphinx. The seated Anubis dog and the kerubim may therefore have been similar in appearance, and served a similar protective function over the contents of the box—sacred funerary equipment in the case of the former, the testament of the Ten Commandments in the latter.

  If such an artifact, modeled on Egyptian processional chests familiar to the Israelites, did indeed survive the ravages of Nebuchadnezzar, then its whereabouts since the sixth century BC remains a mystery. One theory, associating the Ark with the Lemba people of South Africa, who claim to have carried the ngoma lungundu, “the voice of God,” to a mountain hideaway, may be given weight by a similarity in genetic signature between the Lemba and peoples of known Semitic origins, and by the similarity of some practices and beliefs among the Lemba with those of Judaism. A more deep-rooted tradition places the Ark in Ethiopia, where the Ethiopian Orthodox Church claims that it is kept in the Chapel of the Tablet at the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion in Axum. For the guardian priests of Temple Mount in the earl
y sixth century BC, hemmed in on all sides and with the Babylonians at the gate, the lands south of Egypt might have seemed the best bet for concealing their treasures, away from Babylonian raiders yet within reach of future recovery when the time was right—the “promised land” that was to become the early Christian Kingdom of Axum, flanked to the south by nearly impenetrable mountains that might have provided just the kind of cave refuge for the Ark described in the Second Book of Maccabees.

  * * *

  If such a scenario is correct, then a decision by the priests of Jerusalem not to send their greatest treasure on the perilous overland trip south, fraught with the possibility of brigandage and capture, but instead to use the much longer sea route across the Mediterranean and around Africa, may have been spurred by the greater security offered by their Punic kinsmen in Carthage—masters of sea trade at that time, and expert handlers of cargo—and by the recent success of Phoenician navigators in completing a circumnavigation of Africa. According to Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BC, the Egyptian pharaoh Necho ordered a Phoenician crew to “sail round and return to Egypt and the Mediterranean by way of the Pillars of Hercules,” the Strait of Gibraltar (Histories, 4:42). Necho ruled c.610–595 BC, so that voyage may have taken place only a few years before Nebuchadnezzar captured Jerusalem. The success of those Phoenicians may have led Hanno of Carthage to attempt his own circumnavigation in the other direction, counterclockwise, at the same time that Himilco set off toward the British Isles. Dating these famous voyages of discovery to the early sixth century BC is consistent with Carthage suddenly being thrust into the limelight as the new center of the Phoenician world, both for those already settled in the western Mediterranean and for their kinsmen fleeing the Babylonians, and with the need for Carthaginian traders to assert their dominance over sea routes leading beyond the Strait of Hercules, to the north as well as to the south.

  The oldest surviving version of Hanno’s Periplus is a tenth-century copy of a Greek text in the Codex Palatinus Graecus in Heidelberg University Library. The original Punic account is said in the introduction to have been inscribed on tablets hung up in the temple of “Chronos,” a Greek rendition of a Punic god and probably referring to the temple of Ba’al Hammon at Carthage. The idea that Hanno did indeed complete the circumnavigation—the Heidelberg Periplus, which may be incomplete, has him abruptly turning back somewhere near modern Senegal—derives from Pliny’s assertion that he sailed from Cadiz to the “extreme part of Arabia” (Natural History, 2:169). Pliny, writing in the first century AD, probably had access to an early Greek or Latin translation of the Periplus, perhaps one made after the Roman capture of Carthage in 146 BC. He himself reveals that the tablets were still there to be seen at that date in his other famous reference to Hanno’s voyage—his assertion that the skins of the females he calls “Gorgons,” the gorillae of the Greek version (a word perhaps taken verbatim from the original Punic inscription, and of southern African origin), were hung up in a temple “to prove his story and as a curious exhibit,” and were still there when Romans captured Carthage (Natural History, 6:200).

  On the other hand, the Periplus of Himilco, if it ever existed, does not survive even in part; the only indication that there might have been such a work is a remark by Pliny that Hanno “published an account of his voyage, as did Himilco.” A circumnavigation of the British Isles would have been at least as worthy of celebration in Carthage as Hanno’s voyage, and if a Periplus did exist in Pliny’s time, it seems surprising that he should not have made more of it. For that reason I have imagined that Himilco did not, in fact, survive his voyage, that his brother Hanno waited in vain for him in Carthage until all hope was lost, and that the only news that eventually did come of Himilco—none of which mentioned a successful circumnavigation of the British Isles—originated with those who had left the expedition earlier, and who could report nothing that Pliny centuries later could regard as interesting or reliable enough to put in his Natural History.

  * * *

  The chapter set in Carthage was inspired by my own experiences co-directing investigations at the ancient harbor site as part of the UNESCO “Save Carthage” project when I was a post-doctoral research fellow at Cambridge University. Just as Hiebermeyer does in the novel, we watched while a digger excavated deep into the sediment at the harbor entrance, eventually revealing the gray-black sludge of the channel; on the way it exposed a skeleton, perhaps of a sixteenth-century Spanish soldier, that our students dubbed “Miguel.” At the time, I wondered whether the unexcavated seafront flanking the channel might have been the site of a monumental harbor entrance, just the kind of place where the achievement of the great navigators might have been celebrated—perhaps even the site of a temple precinct of Ba’al Hammon that contained the tablets of the Periplus and the gorillae skins from Hanno’s voyage.

  A harbor-front platform might also have been a place where propitiatory child sacrifice was performed before great voyages, rather than at the Tophet sanctuary some distance inland. As of yet, nothing has been found of the horrifying furnace described by the Roman author Diodorus Siculus (20:14.6), a “bronze image of Ba’al Hammon extending its hands, palms up and sloping toward the ground, so that each of the children when placed thereon rolled down and fell into a sort of gaping pit filled with fire.” However, recent analysis of child cremation burials from the Tophet, suggesting that most were healthy infants, not premature or stillbirths, strongly supports the picture of Carthaginian child sacrifice presented by Diodorus and other Roman historians, something that would fall in line with similar practice evidenced among the ancient Semitic peoples of the Near East.

  * * *

  One of my most exciting recent discoveries has been in Gunwalloe Church Cove, Cornwall, the site of the fictional Phoenician wreck in this novel, after winter storms had stripped away meters of sand and revealed the well-preserved hull of the steamship SS Grip. You can see a film I took of that dive on my website, as well as images of cannon found on other wrecks in the vicinity. Beyond the Grip was an expanse of shingle just as I describe Jack seeing in this novel, and as I swam over it I imagined the wreck I had always dreamed of finding in these waters—a Phoenician tin trader, blown inshore by the prevailing westerlies like so many other ships through the centuries that had foundered in the cove. No such wreck has yet been found off Britain, but several Phoenician wrecks recently investigated in the Mediterranean give an idea of the artifacts that might be uncovered. One off Cartagena in southeast Spain from the seventh or sixth century BC has produced amber from the Baltic, tin and other metal ingots, artifacts inscribed with Phoenician letters, and, most amazingly of all, sections of elephant tusk from northwest Africa. Seeing those tusks reminded me of elephant and rhino ivory of East African origin that I had handled from a late Bronze Age wreck off Turkey, part of a cargo that showed the interrelationship of Canaanite, Egyptian and other traders and suggested a similar model for trade in Phoenician times, with goods being sought by men such as Hanno and Himilco from the very farthest reaches of the known world and beyond.

  * * *

  The idea of setting part of this novel in the wartime Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park came to me while I was sitting in Alan Turing’s reconstructed office in Hut 8 during a visit to Bletchley with my daughter. The recent Hollywood films, the large number of books and TV documentaries, and the revitalization of the site as a tourist attraction have lifted some of the veil of secrecy from wartime operations at Bletchley, but much remains poorly known—in particular, some of the uses to which Ultra intelligence was put, including difficult decisions not to act on all intercepts of U-boat movements for fear of alerting the Germans that the code had been broken. Nazi organizations monitored at Bletchley undoubtedly included the Ahnenerbe, Himmler’s “Department of Cultural Heritage,” whose schemes included the search for lost Jewish treasures; another would have been the organization responsible for the exchange of high-grade raw materials and gold between Japan and
Germany, carried out by Japanese and German submarines. The characters and the special operations hut in my novel are fictional—as is the letter in Chapter 14 from Fan to Louise—but my account is based as closely as possible on the types of people who worked at Bletchley, on the procedure for conveying intelligence to the Admiralty, and on the circumstances of the Battle of the Atlantic during those pivotal months of April–May 1943.

  My account of the British merchant ship Clan Macpherson is based on the actual circumstances of her wrecking on May 1 1943, when she was one of seven ships in convoy TS-37 torpedoed by U-515 some seventy-five nautical miles off Freetown in West Africa. No attempt has ever been made to locate the wreck, which could lie close to the edge of the continental shelf as I suggest here. The names of the four engineer officers who went down with her can be seen on the Tower Hill Memorial to the Merchant Navy in London, along with the names of thousands of other merchant seamen who died as a result of enemy action during the war. The correspondence in Chapter 7 between the Admiralty and Clan Macpherson’s master, Captain Edward Gough, OBE, Lloyd’s War Medal—a veteran of two previous sinkings—is quoted from letters in private hands reproduced in part in Gordon Holman’s In Danger’s Hour (1948), the Clan Line Second World War history. A file containing further correspondence relating to the sinking and the adequacy of the escort is in the National Archives (ADM 1/14944), and extracts from it can be seen on my website.

  My grandfather, Captain Lawrance Gibbins, was an officer with the Clan Line during the war, and only a few months earlier had sailed the exact route taken by Clan Macpherson on her final voyage, including the Takoradi and Sierra Leone convoys. I was very fortunate to be able to talk to him about his wartime experiences, and to use that as a basis for researching the ships, convoys and actions of his service, the results of which can be seen on my website. I myself have dived on two Clan Line wrecks, the Clan MacMaster, which ran aground off the Isle of Man in 1923, and the Clan Malcolm, which foundered off the Lizard peninsula in 1935, not far from Gunwalloe Church Cove and the wreck of the Grip. Both of those Clan ships were built in 1917 and were similar to Clan Macpherson, with triple-expansion steam engines and comparable dimensions. My image of the wreck in Chapters 2 and 3 derives from numerous wartime merchantmen I have dived on over the years, from the Red Sea to the English Channel, including one deep wreck in the Mediterranean with an unexploded torpedo lodged inside its hull just as described here.