Pyramid

AUTHOR’S NOTE

The idea that the Giza plateau in Egypt might contain underground passageways and chambers has long fascinated archaeologists, particularly following the discovery in the 1950s of two pits beside the Pyramid of Khufu containing the pharaoh’s funerary boats. The existence of mortuary temples, man-made harbors, and canals leading from the Nile has long been known, and was given further credence when digging for a new sewage system under the adjacent suburb of Cairo in the 1980s revealed tantalizing evidence for further structures — one of them a huge mud-brick wall interpreted by some as part of a “palace” or priestly complex. The engineering feat in cutting these waterways is in many ways as extraordinary as the construction of the pyramids themselves. Despite being one of the most intensively studied sites in the world, there is much about the Giza plateau that remains open to speculation, including the possibility of subterranean complexes that have been inaccessible to exploration and lie beneath the range of ground-penetrating radar.

A further possibility, that such a complex might contain an extraordinary revelation, a secret hidden away by a heretical pharaoh, is the basis for this novel. By the time of the New Kingdom, more than a thousand years after the pyramids had been completed, it seems likely that the cults of the three individual pharaohs of the Giza pyramids had coalesced into one, and that this unified cult had become associated with the worship of the sun god Ra. When Amenhotep IV — the future Akhenaten — discarded the old religion in favor of his new sun god, the Aten, and changed his name accordingly, he may have sought a new cult center away from the traditional focus of priestly power in Thebes, and chosen instead a place that remained the oldest and most powerful expression of kingly power in Egypt and already had a strong association with the worship of the sun. Akhenaten was one of the greatest builders of all the pharaohs, with new temples at Heliopolis, not far from Giza, and at Luxor, not to speak of his magnificent new capital at Amarna. The idea that he might have directed that energy to a new complex at Giza — drawing on all the experience in rock cutting, canal building, and large-scale schemes evident in the Old Kingdom structures — is a compelling one, and plausible in terms of the engineering and architectural ambitions that his builders were capable of realizing.

Some of the inspiration for this idea of a later pharaoh “reinventing” the Giza site comes from the Pyramid of Menkaure itself, where the archaeological evidence suggests a complex picture of restoration and reuse and even the reburial of the pharaoh some two thousand years later in the 26th Dynasty, in a wooden coffin that you can see today in the British Museum. It is the only artifact collected by the British colonel Richard Vyse from the pyramid in the 1830s not to have disappeared with the sarcophagus in the wreck of the Beatrice, the coffin fragments having been despatched in a separate shipment that made it safely to London.

As well as being a builder, Akhenaten was a thinker; for most of the other pharaohs we can say little about the life of the mind, constricted as they were by the kind of priestly ritual and control that the young Amenhotep IV clearly despised. The fact of his conversion makes him intellectually the most interesting of all the pharaohs. I have speculated that instead of mysticism his revelation may have stimulated a clarity of thought that led him to gather together all the ancient knowledge and wisdom as an expression of his cult, and that the same kind of incentive that we might identify in the foundation of the Great Library of Alexandria almost a thousand years later was rooted in a memory of this center of learning lost in the desert of the Giza Plateau after Akhenaten’s death. Its very secrecy, buried out of sight and known only to a select priesthood, would have reflected Akhenaten’s certainty that his new cult would not long outlast his death, ensuring that knowledge of the place was quickly lost and showing how such a complex might have survived intact without being looted through the ages to the present day.

The possible association of Akhenaten with the Old Testament prophet Moses has been another constant source of fascination. In his book Moses and Monotheism, Sigmund Freud speculated that Moses was in fact an Egyptian of royal birth, and came close to conflating the two. It is certainly striking that the monotheism of Aten worship and the revelations said to have been experienced by Moses could have been contemporaneous, and that Moses and Pharaoh are presented in the biblical narrative in such close connection with each other. If there was indeed a revelation in the desert, shared perhaps by an Egyptian prince and an Israelite slave, then it was to be in the Judaeo-Christian tradition and later in Islam that the monotheism arising from that revelation survived, with Egyptian religion reverting back to its traditional polytheism after Akhenaten’s death.

I have imagined Akhenaten foreseeing this outcome, and engineering the escape of the Israelites to a place where their religion might flourish. He did so by finding a haven for them in the city of Jerusalem, a place whose allegiance to Akhenaten is revealed in the clay tablet archive from Amarna, as well as by bringing about the destruction of his own chariot army in the pursuit of the Israelites. This is the basis for the famous accounts in the Book of Exodus and the Qur’ān quoted at the beginning of this novel as well as for the fictional Red Sea discovery made by Jack and Costas in the Prologue.

In Fustat, the Old City of Cairo, blocks of masonry thought to have come from Akhenaten’s temple at nearby Heliopolis have been found reused in the medieval walls. This is the basis for the fictional discovery in this novel of a block beside the Ben Ezra synagogue containing a hieroglyphic cartouche of the pharaoh. If you visit the synagogue today, you may be told that the infant Moses was found in the reeds of a tributary of the Nile that ran up behind the precinct, a fascinating foundation myth by a people who had been forced out of Jerusalem by the Babylonians and the Romans and had returned to Egypt with their religion now strong enough to survive persecution and the vicissitudes of history.

For me one of the most powerful images of the demands of scholarship is a famous photo taken in 1912 of the Cambridge academic Solomon Schechter surrounded by boxes and table loads of fragments from the Cairo Geniza shortly after the collection had been removed from the Ben Ezra synagogue to Cambridge University Library. The image of a man bowed down before a project that he knew would occupy far more than his lifetime has added poignancy because the dust he inhaled when he first sorted through the scraps in the synagogue severely damaged his health and probably shortened his life. The story of the recovery and study of the Geniza documents is one of the greatest in the history of scholarship, and its discovery should rank alongside that of Tutankhamun’s tomb in the annals of Egyptian research.

In a fictional addition to the hundreds of thousands of fragments recovered when the Geniza was cleared out in the late nineteenth century, I have imagined a new exploration of the empty chamber revealing a hole in the wall with a few additional fragments overlooked in the clearance and restorations of the synagogue. The scrap with superimposed texts found by Jack and Maria closely mirrors actual palimpsests from the collection in which an earlier text on vellum has been scraped away to allow the sheet to be reused, but where the original text is still visible beneath. Some of the oldest of these texts have been fragments of Ben Sira (Ecclesiaticus), the Book of Wisdom thought to have been first written down by Ben Sira in the third century BC. The overlying text, a fictional letter from the prolific Spanish poet Yehuda Halevi, draws inspiration from other texts in the archive related to Halevi, one of the most appealing of the individuals of the early medieval period who come alive again through the archive. The letter contains phrases from a number of actual letters and poems by him, examples of which can be seen on the Cambridge University Schechter-Taylor Project website and the many other websites from researchers around the world who continue to work on the Cairo Geniza.

In 1196, Malek Abd al-Aziz Othman ben Yusuf, son of the caliph Saladin, spent eight months removing stones from the north face of the Pyramid of Menkaure, causing a degree of damage not to be visited on the pyramid again until Colonel Vyse used explosives to blast his way into the burial chamber in the 1830s. For Malek the pyramid would have been a quarry for building stone, the cause of damage to many of the pyramids at this period, though some extremists in recent years have imagined a religious motivation and have threatened to complete what they regard as unfinished business, on much the same grounds that led to the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan in 2001.

Another caliph who figures in this novel is the erratic Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah (996 to 1021), founder of a public library in Cairo and patron of the sciences. He was also a persecutor of Jews and Christians — he ordered the destruction of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem as well as the Ben Ezra synagogue — and his strange nocturnal behavior and disappearance in the desert added further to his mystique. Whether or not he was seeking some kind of spiritual redemption or simply relished the solitude is unclear; all that is known with reasonable certainty is that he took to wandering alone in the desert south of Cairo at night, and after his disappearance all that was found was his hobbled donkey and bloodstained clothes.

I have imagined that the place he discovered was the same one entered from the Nile by my fictional Corporal Jones, who also appears in my novels Pharaoh and The Tiger Warrior. Of the two men I have imagined accompanying Jones on that night in 1892, the French diver is fictional, though his gear is based closely on the compressed-air cylinder and reduction valve that had been developed recently by the Frenchmen Rouquayrol and Denayrouze. It is fascinating to think of the military and civil impact had a fully functional demand valve indeed been developed in secret by this date, as in my story, and not lost beneath the Nile. The second character, Charles Chaillé-Long, is historical, and one of the more colorful of the adventurers to make their way to Egypt at this period. An American of Huguenot French ancestry — hence his surname — he had fought in the U.S. Civil War, served under Gordon in Sudan, explored Lake Victoria, and worked as an international lawyer based in Alexandria, and later made a name for himself in America with his sometimes embellished tales of his adventures in deepest Africa. Chaillé-Long was one of some sixty veterans of the U.S. Civil War from both sides to accept commissions in the Khedive’s army in Egypt, a little-known but fascinating episode that — though unofficial — marks the first major involvement of Americans in the affairs of the Middle East. They were in the employ of an Islamic regime but one that was ultimately to be reined up against the growing movement of the Mahdi in Sudan.

Fustat and the Ben Ezra synagogue would have been intimately familiar to another historical character of this period, Howard Carter, the future excavator of Tutankhamun’s tomb, when he first arrived in Egypt as an impressionable teenager in 1891. Before being whisked off to work as a draftsman on the excavation of Akhenaten’s capital at Amarna, he would have learned much about the characters and byways of Old Cairo, knowledge that would have stood him in good stead after he resigned from the Antiquities Service in 1905 and became an antiquities dealer. The diary entry from him in this novel is fictional, though it reflects a constant curiosity and quest for new finds that ultimately were to lead him back to the Valley of the Kings and fame. During his years in Cairo after his resignation, he would undoubtedly have come across men like the fictional Corporal Jones, former British soldiers who had stayed to try their hand in Egypt but had fallen on hard times, some of them Sudan war veterans disturbed by their experiences and with tall stories to tell of tombs and mummies that might nevertheless just contain a kernel of truth.

The tomb of the chariot general in the mummy necropolis in the Faiyum is fictional, though the necropolis itself is based on reality. The region has produced tombs of officials of New Kingdom date; it features as well in my novel Atlantis, where a crucial papyrus is discovered as a mummy wrapping. Despite many claims and several hoaxes, archaeological evidence for the destruction of the chariot army described in the Book of Exodus and the Qur’ān has never conclusively been identified. What is well substantiated, though, is the evidence for Minoan influence on New Kingdom Egypt, in particular Queen Ahhotep’s epithet “Mistress of the Shores of Hau-nebut,” found on a stele set up by her husband Ahmose at Ipetsut in the Temple of Amun, and evidence for Minoan connections in her grave goods. If “Hau-nebut” does indeed refer to Crete, and if she was therefore Minoan, it is fascinating to imagine her bloodline influencing the character of the pharaohs in subsequent dynasties. Whether this lay behind Akhenaten’s tastes or was simply his receptivity to external ideas, the wall paintings from his palace at Amarna are strikingly similar in naturalism and color to those seen in Minoan Crete.

The oldest known reference to Israel, and the only known reference to Israel in a second millennium BC Egyptian inscription, is on the so-called “Israel Stele” from Thebes; the two other occurrences of the hieroglyphic word in this novel are both fictional. The stele, in the Cairo Museum (JE31408), is a slab of gray granite over three meters high erected by the 19th Dynasty pharaoh Merenptah in his funerary temple in Thebes. It commemorates his conquests in the lands of Syria-Palestine toward the end of the thirteenth century BC: “Their chiefs prostrate themselves and beg for peace: Canaan is devastated, Ashkelon is vanquished, Gezer is taken, Yenoam annihilated, Israel is laid waste, its seed exists no more, Syria is made a widow for Egypt, and all lands have been pacified.” In the hieroglyphic word for Israel, the “determinative”—the first hieroglyph in the group — signifies a people rather than a place, a fascinating indication that the sense of identity as a people that was to become so much a part of Jewish history may have been evident well before the diaspora.

The development of Jerusalem in the second millennium BC remains scantily known, with many modern accounts using the Old Testament as a framework, and little being certain in the written evidence before the foundation of the “City of David” about the beginning of the first millennium BC. It seems clear, though, that Jerusalem was a substantial settlement by the time of the Egyptian New Kingdom in the late Bronze Age. Among the most fascinating of the “Amarna letters” from Akhenaten’s capital in Egypt are several from the ruler of Jerusalem confirming the loyalty of mât urusalim—the Land of Jerusalem — to the pharaoh, presumably Akhenaten himself, and from the same period comes the oldest writing from Jerusalem itself in the form of a fragmentary cuneiform tablet.

Whether or not any part of the Israelite Exodus from Egypt reached Jerusalem is a matter for speculation, but it is the type of question that taxed the many foreign archaeologists who descended on Ottoman Palestine in the nineteenth century, Bibles in hand. These included a remarkable group of British officers of the Royal Engineers who carried out the first detailed mapping of the city and its environs, working officially as well as on their own initiative. Among them are several officers who were to achieve fame in the war against the Mahdi in Sudan and feature extensively in my previous novel Pharaoh, including Charles Wilson, intelligence chief in the 1884 Gordon Relief Expedition; Charles Gordon himself, doomed defender of Khartoum; and Horatio Herbert Kitchener, whose desecration of the Mahdi’s tomb at Omdurman in 1898 satisfied his promise to avenge Gordon. But it set the stage for the resurgent extremist movement generations later that forms a present-day fictional backdrop to this novel.

Two of the books by these men, Gordon’s Reflections in Palestine, 1883 (1884), and Charles Warren’s Underground Jerusalem: An Account of Some of the Principal Difficulties Encountered in Its Exploration and the Results Obtained (1876), provide accounts of exploration beneath Jerusalem, the latter detailing extensive investigations that resulted in the discovery of a vertical hole still known as “Warren’s Shaft.” Much of the prehistoric rock cutting beneath Jerusalem is likely to have been associated with securing the water supply — opening up vertical shafts to reach the level of springs and horizontal tunnels to channel the water to convenient points beneath the city. One of the most remarkable finds detailing this type of work, now in the Istanbul archaeological museum — a legacy of Ottoman rule in Jerusalem — is a stone block from the “Siloam Tunnel” with an inscription in Palaeo-Hebrew of the early first millennium BC, the inspiration for the fictional inscription that Rebecca discovers in Chapter 17 of this novel.

Whether or not undiscovered man-made spaces exist beneath Temple Mount, perhaps including tombs and storage chambers, may become apparent only when the authorities allow further exploration, though one underground passage is known to exist to the east of “Wilson’s Arch” beside the Western Wall leading toward the temple site. Meanwhile, in the area surrounding the temple precinct, several recent excavations have been carried out that closely parallel those presented fictionally in this novel. They suggest the revelations that may await those who one day may be able to resume the explorations of Warren and his colleagues and penetrate even farther into the spaces beneath Temple Mount where access is currently forbidden.

You can read about Jack and Costas’ exciting discovery of the wreck of the Beatrice in my previous novel Pharaoh. The actual wreck site from 1837 remains undiscovered, though southeast Spain and the scenario for her wrecking presented in this novel fit the available evidence, including the likely wind patterns at that time of year for her voyage from Alexandria via Malta and probably Livorno. Since carrying out my initial research, I have unearthed more details from Lloyd’s Register and other sources about her structural changes after a refit, including the addition of iron knees, and about her armaments. The idea that these might have included guns made initially for the East India Company was inspired by the discovery in 2014 of EIC guns on a merchantman wreck in the English Channel, and by the idea that EIC weapons requisitioned by the Crown during the Napoleonic Wars before being shipped to India may have included naval ordnance that was sold off afterward when neither the Crown nor the EIC had any use for it.

The hieroglyphs that appear as a heading through this novel are taken from the Israel Stele in the Cairo Museum, mentioned above, and show the ancient Egyptian word for Israel. Of the quoted material in this novel not already attributed, the wording of the fictional inscription found under Jerusalem in Chapter 17 is based closely on the Siloam Tunnel inscription, in the Archaeological Museum, Istanbul. The Amarna Letter quoted by Rebecca in the same chapter is no. 287: 60–64. The text of the fictional papyrus document shown by Aysha in the Epilogue is inspired by a translation of passages of the Ben Sira (Ecclesiasticus, the Book of Wisdom) by Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole in Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza (2011, pp. 53–54), also the source of the pithy quote at the beginning of this note.

Since completing Pharaoh, I have discovered a fine contemporary watercolor depicting the Beatrice a few years before her loss, and you can see that, a drawing by Colonel Vyse’s draftsman Edward Andrews of the sarcophagus of Menkaure in the pyramid before he removed it, the photo of Solomon Schechter with the Geniza archive, Corporal Jones’ medals, and many other images related to the novel and the facts behind the fiction at www.davidgibbins.com and Facebook.com/DavidGibbinsAuthor.