City of the Lost

I

In quieter times, the Turkish media might have made the scandal surrounding the Minister for Tourism’s villa last them several days. In fact, it lost top billing before noon. And all it took was a holiday snap of two men drinking coffee together at an Antalyan café.

Alaattin Sahin was Chief Prosecutor of Adiyaman Province. More problematically for the government, he was also the Justice Minister’s first cousin. His companion was a certain Karim Ghazi, a bag-man for the Kurdish separatists with two terrorism-related convictions to his name. And that the photographs were recent was apparent not merely from the men’s appearance but also because the café in question had only been open eighteen months.

Sahin’s immediate response was to deny that he’d been in Antalya at all during the past three years. But an old press release was quickly published, promoting a panel he’d sat on at a conference there the year before. His story switched. Yes, he had been in Antalya that one day. When one sat on as many panels as he did, such things were easy to forget. And yes, he now remembered taking coffee, and how this stranger Ghazi had come to sit at his table, and how they’d exchanged a few inconsequential words. He’d thought nothing of it at the time, but in retrospect it was obviously a crude attempt to discredit him. But that line fell too when footage of the meet was published, showing them talking for over five minutes before Ghazi passed him a fat envelope that he checked and then pocketed. Now came a third story. The man had approached him at the café and had asked for help with a neighbourhood dispute back home. Yes, it had been a backhander, but everyone took backhanders. If you started dismissing people for taking backhanders, Turkey would have no employees left. But it had been too late by then. No one believed a word he said any more.

Journalists gathered outside the Justice Ministry, but no one came down to talk. They contented themselves, therefore, with asking rhetorical questions of their cameras: Did the Justice Minister himself know about these bribes? Was he involved somehow? Were the payments even meant for him? The innuendo finally got beneath his skin. He marched downstairs to address the media directly. After distancing himself from his cousin and announcing his immediate suspension, he dismissed the whispers against himself as self-evidently ridiculous. What, after all, could he possibly have to gain by talking to criminals and terrorists? It was his job to put criminals and terrorists in prison.

Exactly, went the murmurs. And look how well that’s going.

II

A slew of sirens flashing past on the other side of the road signalled that the accident was finally in hand. Engines rumbled back on around them; traffic began squabbling over access to the single lane. With the khamsin still blowing hard, Iain let Mike concentrate on the task in hand. They finally got moving. They passed three cars with crumpled bonnets and rears, then a blue container lorry lying like a beached whale on the verge, and suddenly they were through. The road opened up and Mike quickly shifted through the gears, anxious to make up time despite the continuing sandstorm.

‘The long explanation,’ prompted Iain.

‘Yes.’ Mike gave himself a few moments to think, then said: ‘The Dark Ages affected everywhere in the ancient world; Egypt every bit as much as Greece, Turkey, Israel and the rest. But if we were ever to solve the dating problem, this always looked the best place to start. For one thing, it was relatively out of the way, and so more stable than those other regions. Its climate also meant that its monuments and archives survived well. Most of all, the Egyptians kept the best records, including king lists. So after we’d cracked the language it was comparatively easy for early archaeologists to work out the order of the various dynasties, and how long each Pharaoh reigned for.’

From the fog of sand ahead, the ghostly silhouette of a modern city began slowly to emerge. And then, abruptly, they were upon it. New Cairo was thinly populated at the best of times, but the sandstorm had driven everyone indoors, and right now it looked almost post-apocalyptic.

‘Take New Kingdom Egypt, for example,’ continued Mike, slowing as he approached a junction. ‘It started with a guy called Amosis I and ended nearly five hundred years later with Ramesses XI, which signalled the start of the Dark Ages here. But did those five hundred years run from 1800 BC to 1300 BC or from 1400 BC to 900 BC? No one could say, not for sure. The Dark Ages themselves were too messy for anyone to make sense of, so we desperately needed some astronomical anchor point from the New Kingdom that we could date exactly, like that solar eclipse I mentioned at the Battle of Halys. Then, about a hundred years ago, an ingenious solution called Sothic cycles was proposed. The exact mechanism is quite complex, but — to simplify it outrageously — the Egyptian calendar had 365 days to a year, rather than 365 and a quarter. Their seasons therefore slowly shifted by one day every four years until their summers gradually became their winters, and vice versa; and then, eventually, after fourteen hundred and sixty years, they got back to where they’d started.’

Iain nodded. ‘One Sothic cycle completed.’

Mike flashed him a pleased smile. ‘Exactly. Exactly. Now, a guy called Meyer took it upon himself to trawl through Egyptian inscriptions looking for descriptions of coronations and the like that included some mention of the Sothic cycle. Because if he could work out at what stage of the cycle a specific event took place, then he could retrocalculate the date of that event with some precision. And in fact he found multiple examples, enabling him to come up with the first truly reliable Egyptian chronology. And because the Egyptians had traded with, and corresponded with, and fought wars against all the other great Mediterranean powers, Sothic cycles effectively gave us a framework to date the entire ancient world.’

‘And they placed the Trojan War at 1200 BC?’

‘Exactly. And, of course, things didn’t stop there. We developed scientific techniques like carbon-dating, dendrochronology and ice-core sampling, and they not only more or less endorsed that model, they also allowed us to fine-tune it.’ He allowed himself a wry smile. ‘Our garden was coming up roses.’

‘Ah,’ said Iain. ‘I sense a car crash coming up.’

‘I trust you mean that figuratively and not as a comment on my driving,’ said Mike, peering through the gloom for their turning. ‘But you’re right. A car crash puts it nicely.’