by James Becker
‘Well,’ she said, ‘the first thing you need to understand is that we don’t really know whether or not it is a temple. We’ve been calling it that ever since we found it, but really only because it’s a convenient name. We could be quite wrong about what it was used for.’
‘Agreed,’ Stephen said from the back seat, ‘but the signs are that it was some kind of a place of worship or veneration. Why don’t you tell Chris exactly how we found it?’
Bronson looked at his ex-wife, and she glanced at him and smiled, then returned her attention to the road in front.
‘OK,’ she said. ‘There are more potential sites dotted around the world than there are archaeologists to investigate them. This particular area of southern Iraq was identified as being of interest perhaps twenty years ago because the Marsh Arabs lived there, and not a huge amount was known about their early history. This was also the height of Saddam Hussein’s regime so for several reasons – mainly political – nobody did anything about it. And as he seemed to be determined to wipe out the Marsh Arabs there was no way any expedition could possibly be mounted while he was in power. And then, of course, there was the turmoil after he’d been deposed, when it still wasn’t safe to travel or work there.’
‘So what’s the site?’ Bronson asked. ‘A Marsh Arab village or something?’
‘It might have been,’ Stephen interjected, ‘but we really aren’t sure what it is. The initial reports had only stated that there were signs of habitation there, and clear physical evidence in the form of pottery fragments on the ground. The assumption was that it was probably the site of a settlement that had been abandoned some considerable time ago. That deduction was based on the type of pottery people had picked up there, none of which appeared to have been made within the last couple of hundred years or so, and the absence of any recent artefacts. No plastic or metal objects, I mean.’
‘Anyway,’ Angela continued, ‘when the situation in Iraq seemed to be a bit more stable, the Baghdad Museum decided it was worth sending a team down to do a test excavation, and because the location is so close to the Kuwaiti border they invited the corresponding museum in Kuwait City to take part, and also asked for a handful of Western specialists to join the group. The British Museum sent Stephen and me, and a chap called George who you’ll meet at the dig.
‘It really didn’t look all that promising when we got there, but that’s the thing about archaeology. Until you get below the surface you genuinely have no idea what you’re likely to find. The site is a fairly level area, but when we set up our tents and stuff I couldn’t see any obvious signs that there had been a village there. No outlines on the ground or anything like that, but there were quite a few bits of pottery lying around, all quite ancient.’
‘Of course, we are talking about a desert here,’ Stephen said, ‘and that particular area is a mixture of sand, rock and earth, so it’s quite conceivable that there could have been a substantial village there, but after only a few months drifting sand could have completely buried it. Or, and this might be more likely, the people who built the settlement there might have decided for whatever reason – better grazing for their animals, their normal water source drying up or something of that sort – to dismantle everything and move somewhere else.’
‘So you pitched your tents and started digging?’
‘Basically, yes. And in fact, what we found was pretty much what we had expected to find. Quite a lot of pottery, the dates consistent with what we had anticipated, a few ritual ornaments and the like, and clear indication of the remains of a building in one trench – rotted sections of cut timber, that kind of thing. But nothing exciting until a few days ago. And then, at the very end of one trench, we found something different: worked stone.
‘It was just a right-angled piece of rock on the left-hand side of the trench, and we thought at first it was the base of an individual object, a stone carving or something of that sort, but when we shifted more of the earth from around it, we realized it was nothing of the sort. It was actually a step carved into the bedrock that ran beside the trench. Even before we’d fully exposed that length of stone, we did the obvious and checked to see if there was another step below it. There was, and there was a third one under that. What we were looking at was the beginning of a rough-hewn staircase that descended below the desert floor.
‘As you can imagine, that changed the mood on the team quite dramatically. What we’d expected to be nothing more than a perfectly routine excavation of a long-abandoned village had suddenly turned into a treasure hunt. We had no idea what might be waiting for us at the bottom of that stone staircase. We did it properly, though, documenting and photographing each phase of this unexpected turn the excavation had taken, but we were all caught up in the excitement of the moment, and I think that most of us believed we might have stumbled upon something of real importance. After all, it was a buried stone staircase that had led Howard Carter to the untouched tomb of Tutankhamun in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt.’
‘But I presume it wasn’t a tomb?’ asked Bronson.
‘Patience,’ Angela said, with a faint smile. ‘We excavated the length of the staircase, which went down to about twelve feet below the desert floor. It finished at a small square stone platform, surrounded on two sides by vertical slabs of bedrock. On the third side, directly in front of the staircase, there were half a dozen lengths of roughly shaped wood that formed a kind of door, or that’s what it looked like initially. It turned out that they were just individual planks of timber, positioned there to cover an opening in the rock.’
‘And?’ Bronson asked impatiently. ‘What did you find?’
‘That was the disappointing bit,’ Angela replied. ‘There was a large opening, an archway about seven feet tall and four feet wide that had been carved out of the rock. Beyond it was an open space that was clearly a natural geological feature, a small cave, which had been used in the past by some group of people. It seemed fairly obvious to us that the wood had been positioned to keep the dust and sand out of the cave when the decision had been taken to fill in the staircase. And it had worked well. When we cleared away the lengths of timber, we found only the equivalent of a couple of buckets of debris had penetrated behind it.
‘So that opened up the entrance and Mohammed – he’s the senior Iraqi archaeologist on the team, from the Baghdad Museum – took a look inside first.’
‘Rank has its privileges, in archaeology, just like every other job,’ Stephen mused.
‘Exactly. Anyway, as soon as the lights were working, we went down there in groups of four to have a look.’
‘And it wasn’t quite what we’d expected,’ Stephen said. ‘It was just an empty room, and there were no treasures of any sort down there. I don’t just mean no gold or anything like that, but I was certainly hoping that it might have been a burial vault or something of that sort, and we might at least have recovered a few bones and maybe some grave goods as well. But there was nothing. It looked as if at some point, maybe a few centuries ago, the people who had used the space had changed their mind, taken out everything that was movable, covered the entrance with the lengths of timber and then filled in the stone staircase leading down to it. And in fact that did sort of tie up with our first deduction that the settlement had been deliberately abandoned for some reason.’
‘But you said right at the start that it was a temple,’ Bronson objected, ‘so it can’t just have been a completely empty room, otherwise you would probably have thought it was a storeroom for grain or something.’
‘Quite right,’ Angela agreed. ‘In fact, once we had the lights burning and could examine every inch of the place, we found exactly three artefacts, and one or perhaps two of them did suggest that the cave might originally have been a temple.
‘The most obvious of these was a small stone altar – well, actually it’s little more than an oblong slab of stone positioned on two shorter vertical stone pillars. But we called it an altar because that’s what it looked like
more than anything else, though in reality it could have been a stone seat. But the main indicator that the space might have been some kind of a temple was an image carved into the wall directly behind the “altar”. That image is a human face. It’s not very clear, and the carving is fairly basic – I suppose you could call it primitive – but it appears to be the face of a bearded man with long hair.’
‘You mean it’s a kind of graven image?’ Bronson said. ‘I thought a lot of religions forbade images of human beings or animals? Judaism and Islam, for example?’
‘You’re absolutely right,’ Stephen said. ‘The technical term is aniconism, and that’s basically a prohibition against depicting any kind of living creature, and especially not a religious figure, as an image to be worshipped. It’s an important character of the Jewish, Islamic and Byzantine artistic traditions, but it’s also worth saying that there are a few grey areas. Public buildings in Islamic states were often allowed to have such images on them as decoration, and back in 1932 a third-century Jewish synagogue was discovered in Syria with its interior walls almost completely covered in paintings showing priests and religious events like the consecration of the Tabernacle. So although you’re right in principle, the fact that we have a graven image in this particular structure doesn’t mean that it wasn’t a temple, and it also doesn’t mean we can rule out any particular religion, though I suppose we could probably suggest that the cave was unlikely to have been used by either Jewish or Islamic worshippers.’
‘And I suppose the image itself wouldn’t help to date it?’ Bronson asked.
‘No, not really,’ Angela said. ‘Men shaving their faces and having their hair cut is actually a comparatively recent innovation. For quite literally centuries, going back to the very dawn of recorded history, men wore beards and had long hair as a matter of course. You can see this in all the old paintings and images, everyone from Moses and Solomon to Jesus Christ. So the way the face had been carved was no real help in dating the temple. Unfortunately, radiocarbon dating the wood isn’t all that likely to give us a definitive answer either. What we will know when the tests have been completed is the date of the wood. We’ll be able to say with certainty that the entrance to the structure must have been covered after that date, but we have no obvious way of proving when the temple itself was created. The cave might have been opened up and used for some kind of religious services for only a year or two before it was shut up. Equally, it could have been used for a millennium, and then abandoned. At the moment, we simply have no way of telling.’
‘You didn’t find any organic matter inside the cave, then?’
‘No, nothing,’ Angela replied. ‘It was as if the place had been swept clean before they boarded up the entrance.’
‘Right, so you have the carving of a face on the wall, and what might have been a kind of altar right in front of it. You said there were three things in there, so what was the third?’
‘You can see why he’s a detective, can’t you, Stephen? The third relic, for want of a better word, was an inscription carved into the wall of the cave at the opposite end to the altar. And that, we hope, might provide us with sufficient information to identify the period and the function of the cave.’
‘You mean you haven’t translated it yet?’ This time it was Bronson who sounded surprised.
‘It’s not that simple,’ Angela said. ‘It looks like Latin but it isn’t. In fact, let me just clarify that. I’m pretty sure that it is Latin, but some kind of encryption has been applied to it – maybe Atbash or something similar – because at the moment it just reads like gibberish.’
‘If you can’t read any of the text, why do you think that it’s written in Latin?’
‘It’s the character set,’ Angela replied. ‘You speak fluent Italian and more than enough French to get by, so if somebody handed you a piece of paper with meaningless words written on it, but you saw an acute or grave accent over a letter “e”, or a cedilla under a “c”, you’d probably guess that it was written in French, even if the words themselves were encrypted. This is pretty much the same thing, though we’re not looking at diacritical marks but the actual script itself. We’re guessing that this temple or whatever it is dates from at least five hundred years ago because of the known history of the region, and so we would expect an inscription from that period to almost certainly be written in Arabic and probably in what’s known as Kufic script. And if it wasn’t written in Arabic, then other common options would be one of the other North Arabian languages like Safaitic or Talmudic, which are quite similar to Arabic. But what we wouldn’t expect would be to find an inscription written in the Latin alphabet, the same alphabet that we use today, pretty much.’
‘Latin changed over time,’ Stephen Taverner explained, ‘like all languages. The classical Latin alphabet had only twenty-three letters, and all but two of those were derived from the earlier Etruscan alphabet, but during the Middle Ages the letters “j”, “u” and “w” were added, and that gave us the same twenty-six letters that are used today in English and form the basis of most other European languages. We have no idea if this inscription contains the full character set, because not one of those letters is carved into the rock, so if it is written in Latin, we have no idea of the approximate date. If there had been a “w”, for example, that would have told us it had to be late mediaeval.’
‘So what do you think the encryption is?’ Bronson said.
‘Perhaps Atbash – it’s a really early form of cipher, allegedly used by Julius Caesar. Basically, you just write out the letters of the alphabet in a horizontal line, then write out the reversed alphabet directly below it, so that “z” is under “a” and “y” is under “b”, and so on. In order to encrypt your message, all you do is write down the plaintext and then substitute the letters from the reversed alphabet. The obvious problem is that you always end up with nonsense, so it’s immediately apparent to anyone seeing it that the message must be encrypted. The other problem is that if you apply frequency analysis to the message – there are certain letters that occur much more frequently than others in every language – you can probably work out some of the plaintext letters fairly quickly.’
‘But if everybody knows that Atbash just uses the reversed alphabet, then presumably anybody could translate the message about two minutes after they’d realized that it was enciphered. Or am I missing something?’ Bronson sounded puzzled.
‘You are,’ Stephen said, ‘but not a lot. That’s basic Atbash, but there were refinements, most of which involved picking a different letter of the alphabet underneath which you would start the reversed alphabet, so that instead of “z” going under “a”, for example, it might appear under “m” or “p”. And of course, the second alphabet need not necessarily be reversed, or perhaps the person encrypting the message could reverse only half the alphabet. The result would still be gibberish, the ciphertext, I mean, but fiddling about with the cipher like that would create a huge range of different possibilities for the decoding.’
‘Right, I understand all that,’ Bronson said, ‘but you haven’t answered the other obvious question.’
Neither Stephen nor Angela responded, so he ploughed on.
‘If you’re assuming that the people who wrote that inscription were Marsh Arabs or a similar group that lived way out in the bundu at the southern end of Iraq about half a millennium ago, why did they use Latin? Presumably they would have spoken Arabic or some local language. So why did they use Latin for this inscription? Was it a kind of lingua franca in those days? Or at least a written lingua franca?’
‘Now that,’ Angela said slowly, ‘is a very good question. Their lingua franca, most probably, would actually have been Arabic, and I wouldn’t have expected very many people in that part of the world to be able to either read or speak Latin during the time period that we’re talking about. So I have no idea why whoever carved the inscription chose that language.’
‘You’re right,’ Stephen said. ‘It really doesn�
��t make any sense.’
Bronson switched his gaze from Angela to the man in the back seat and then to Angela again.
‘Well, it does make sense in one context,’ he said.
‘What context?’ Angela asked.
‘The message contained in the inscription has got to be important. Or, to be absolutely accurate, it must have been important when it was written, although it might be completely meaningless now, of course. If it wasn’t important, there would have been no point in encrypting it, obviously.’
‘Yes, obviously.’ Angela sounded rather testy. ‘I thought we’d already established that. What’s your point?’
‘The point, as I see it, is that you have a mysterious inscription not only written in Latin – or at least that’s what you think – but in encrypted Latin and hidden away under the desert in Iraq. From what you’ve told me, it’s quite likely that almost nobody who used that temple, not even the priest, would have been able to read it. So it seems to be fairly obvious that the inscription wasn’t meant to be understood by the people who worshipped in the temple. Perhaps it was intended to be read by somebody else entirely.’
4
Vicinity of Al Muthanna, Iraq
‘Is this what you expected, Khaled?’ Farooq asked.
He and the man in the white suit were standing side by side in the underground chamber, the powerful arc lights switched on and casting a pitiless white light that illuminated every corner of the space. Faintly, in the background, they could hear the throb of the petrol generator that was supplying the power.
Khaled stared at the carved inscription, nodding slowly. ‘We will need to decipher this, but I have no doubt at all it will provide the information we need to track down the relic.’
‘But you can’t know that for certain,’ Farooq pointed out reasonably, ‘until you have decoded the inscription.’
In Farooq’s case, appearances were more than slightly deceptive. He looked and dressed like the leader of a gang of terrorists, which to all intents and purposes he was, but he was also a highly educated man, possessing two separate degrees from a Middle Eastern university. And he was, just like Osama bin Laden – the man who had first inspired him to take up arms in the service of radical Islam – the product of a wealthy and respected Saudi Arabian family. Khaled, who also had two degrees – and a doctorate – was by no stretch of the imagination a man of violence, though he was more than capable of ordering it when necessary. As such he treated Farooq as an equal.
