Testament

Author’s Note

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 early 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.

In this novel, the ancient hull found in 1868 at Annesley Bay on the Red Sea, the tapestry depicting Hanno discovered at Magdala in Ethiopia, and the underground chamber in the church there are all fictional, though based closely on actual historical circumstances. In the preparations for the 1868 British campaign against King Theodore of Abyssinia (Ethiopia), the Royal Engineers officer responsible for building the head of the pier in Annesley Bay — site of the fictional hull discovery — was Captain Herbert William Wood of the Madras Sappers and Miners, the basis for my fictional officer. A veteran of the 1857–9 Indian Mutiny, Wood later went on to join Grand Duke Constantine of Russia in an expedition to the Oxus and wrote a fascinating account of it in The Shores of Lake Aral (1876).

At the time of Wood’s early death in Madras in 1879, my great-great-grandfather, Lieutenant Walter Andrew Gale — the basis for Jack’s fictional ancestor — had been in the Madras Sappers for almost two years, and I have therefore imagined Wood handing on his account and the tapestry to the younger officer. The tapestry is based on an actual painting on woven wool that you can see on my website, showing fighting involving Axumites in Ethiopia; the painting is Egyptian in origin but thought to be based on a Sassanid silk that may be copied from a much older depiction. In the center is a bearded man, the basis for my fictional image of Hanno on the tapestry. Much of the loot taken by the British at Magdala, ranging from gold crosses and church vestments to weapons, manuscripts, and tabots—representations of the Tablet of Commandments — was auctioned in the field under orders of the force commander, General Napier, the proceeds being distributed among the soldiers of the expedition. Hundreds of manuscripts were acquired by the expedition archaeologist, Richard Rivington Holmes (later Sir Richard), and are in the collections of the British Museum, the British Library and Windsor Castle, among other places. You can see images of some of those treasures and read an account of the ongoing attempt to restore them to Ethiopia on my website.

The church at Magdala was guarded after the assault by soldiers of the 33rd Foot, who had been the first to enter the fortress along with an advance party of sappers, including Lieutenant Le Mesurier of the Bombay Sappers, but the guard appear to have done little to limit the plunder. Two men of the 33rd, Private Bergin and Drummer Magner, won Victoria Crosses for their exploits in climbing the fortress wall, the only decorations awarded in a campaign that was decidedly one-sided — the British did not suffer a single soldier killed in action against at least 700 Abyssinians killed and 1,200 wounded (to that figure should be added the many hundreds of his own people murdered by Theodore — Abyssinian hostages or others who displeased him — many of whom were hideously mutilated by having their hands and feet chopped off). Among the casualties of the final assault was Theodore himself, killed by his own hand with a pistol that had been sent to him as a present by Queen Victoria. The numerous eyewitness accounts of the assault of Magdala and the plundering include Coomassie and Magdala (1874) by Henry Morton Stanley, the Welshman-turned-American who was to find fame a few years later by discovering Dr. Livingstone near Lake Tanganyika.

The Abyssinian campaign was an engineers’ war, entirely dependent on the officers of the Royal Engineers and their Indian sappers for the construction of piers, railways, and roads, for supply, survey, and communication, and for many other necessities, including the operation of condensers by the sea to make fresh water. Another role was photography, and it is the extensive photo archive — much of it now online — that makes the Abyssinian campaign stand above many others of the period, not least because of the extraordinary landscape it depicts. One of those images, of the plateau overlooking the route to Magdala, I have imagined being taken by Captain Wood and Sapper Jones from their ledge the day before the assault. Many men present were struck and even unnerved by the spectacular environment in which they found themselves, so far removed from their previous experiences. One of them, the expedition geographer Clements Robert Markham (later Sir Clements, Fellow of the Royal Society), wrote in A History of the Abyssinia Expedition (1869) of seeing a celestial phenomenon in a manner that sounds like an ancient author writing of portents before a battle: “Early in the forenoon a dark-brown circle appeared round the sun, like a blister, about 15° in radius; light clouds passed and repassed over it, but it did not disappear until the usual rain-storm came up from the eastward late in the afternoon. Walda Gabir, the king’s valet, informed me that Theodore saw it when he came out of his tent that morning, and that he remarked that it was an omen of bloodshed.”

Photographs are not the only images to survive from the campaign. Another historical character in my story, Major Robert Baigrie of the Bombay Staff Corps, painted watercolors that were published as etchings in the Illustrated London News; before beginning to research this novel I had been familiar with his work because a decade earlier he had painted another of my ancestors when they had been young officers together during the Indian Mutiny. It was one of his paintings in Abyssinia, Half-way to Senafe, showing a towering mountain ridge over a valley on the route to Magdala, that inspired me to think that the mountain called the “Chariot of the Gods” in Hanno’s Periplus could refer to a mountain in present-day Ethiopia — to Magdala itself, perhaps — with the light of the sun at dawn or at dusk rippling along the ridge like fire.

You can see Baigrie’s painting and much else of interest on my website (www.davidgibbins.com; www.facebook.com/DavidGibbinsAuthor), including photographs and videos of me diving, discussion of artifacts, shipwrecks and ancient texts, and links to online source material mentioned in this note.