The Babylon Idol

Chapter 41

By now, the glow of the fire had spread through the whole cabin. Ben and Anna’s bodies were warm, the whisky flask was empty and they felt as safe and cosy as two people in their predicament ever could. Ben took their dried-out clothes from the rack over the stove and handed Anna’s down to where she sat on the floor. He kept his eyes discreetly averted as she stood up to dress.

‘Such a gentleman,’ she said. ‘You can look now. Oh, it feels so good to be warm again.’

‘You were saying you knew where we have to go next. I’d be interested in knowing that myself.’

She nodded. ‘Thanks to Ercan. At first, when I read the papers from his document safe, I didn’t understand. But then I realised. He figured it out. I told you he was a genius.’

‘He must be, considering it now turns out the fragments of the Muranu tablet are of no use after all.’

‘The tablet was… what’s the expression? A red sardine.’

‘A red herring,’ Ben said.

‘That’s exactly what it was. Ercan realised that the pieces were too badly damaged to be decipherable, leaving him with no choice but to abandon them. But he’s as tenacious a scholar as any detective. When you find one avenue of investigation becomes a dead end, you retrace your steps, go back to the starting point and look for another. This time he took a completely different approach, in order to try to trace the movements of the Muranu family after their escape from Babylon. The problem was, no such records existed. Instead, he found the solution buried in the administrative records of the PFA.’

‘The Persepolis Fortification Archive,’ Ben said, remembering.

Anna nodded.

‘And?’

‘Let me set up the context for you, or none of it will make sense. As we know, the Muranu family and their mysterious cargo left Babylon in October, 539 BC, literally days before the Persian army of Cyrus the Great swept in, conquered the city and took over the whole Babylonian Empire as part of their own, which it would remain for many years. Cyrus eventually died and his son Cambyses became king for eight years, until he died also and his son Darius took over in turn. In some ways, Darius was to the Persian Empire what King Nebuchadnezzar had been to Babylon, a highly capable empire builder. He expanded and consolidated Persia’s conquests in territories including India. Like his father and grandfather before him, initially Darius used the city of Babylon as his capital; then in the year 518 BC he founded Persepolis—’

‘City of the Persians,’ Ben cut in. ‘His new capital, in what’s now Iran. You already told me this part.’

‘But as the empire grew, so did the number of rebellions he had to deal with. Darius was very adept at putting down rebels. We can see that from the famous inscription carved into the rock of a cliff at Mount Behistun in Iran’s Kermanshah Province, studied in depth by a British Army officer called Sir Henry Rawlinson who was the first to scale the mountain in 1835. The carving depicts Darius as a mighty warrior crushing a rebel underfoot.’

‘What’s the point of this?’

‘Stop interrupting,’ she said testily. ‘All this background is important. Now, we also know from various records that minor insurrections began to break out all over Darius’ empire in those years. Most of these rebellions Darius could entrust his local governors to quell. Law enforcement records, including records of executions of insurgents, would be gathered together in a central database, if you like, in the rapidly growing capital Persepolis. Do you follow me?’

‘Every step. I just don’t know where we’re going.’

‘You must have been a terrible student. Did your tutors never tell you that patience is a virtue?’

‘It’s also a luxury.’

‘Well, now here’s where we get to the really interesting part. When Ercan gave up on the tablet fragments and turned instead to the records of the Persepolis Fortification Archive, he found there a translated account of one particular uprising against the Persian authorities. It was led by a man known as The Babylonian, whose force of rebel bandits occupied the ruins of an old fortress in the hills near the city of Harran, within the Persian Imperial Province of Athura.’

‘And?’

‘And, as Ercan confirmed when he cross-checked the story against other historical records, it seems that The Babylonian and his rebels were a real stone in the side for the Persians.’

‘A thorn in their side,’ Ben corrected her. ‘Or a stone in their shoe.’

‘But you get the idea. They were a skilled guerrilla militia who scored a lot of success in attacking army convoys and supply routes, disrupting them very considerably. This went on for some time, until in 516 BC, the Persian-appointed governor finally sent a mass of soldiers who stormed the fortress and caught many of the rebels. The surviving prisoners were brought to the local garrison, where they were horribly put to death. All of which was entered in government records and later became part of the PFA archive. But while the authorities had managed to eliminate most of the outlaws, the leader himself managed to evade capture, and was never caught. Now, by cross-checking all the sources he could find, Ercan discovered that this enigmatic character was also known by another name: Ashar the Babylonian. Ashar the Babylonian,’ Anna repeated, looking at Ben with a sparkle in her eyes. ‘Do you see?’

Ben thought. The name sounded familiar, but where had he heard it? Then he remembered. ‘You told me about him. The boy on the ship.’

‘That’s right. The eight-year-old Muranu child listed on the passenger manifest when they fled the incoming Persian invasion in 539, never to see their beloved home again. So it’s thanks to the very precise records of old Babylon, and then the detailed law enforcement database of the Persian authorities, that for the first time we can pinpoint where the Muranus went after leaving Babylon.’

Ben did the arithmetic. Twenty-three years later, Ashar Muranu would have been thirty-one. A grown man, and a dedicated rebel against the imperial invaders who forced his family into exile. Ben thought about that, then revisualised the map of the ancient Middle East that he’d spent all those hours studying in his youth. ‘Harran, in Mesopotamia. In the Book of Genesis, it’s where Abraham and his wife settled en route to the promised land of Canaan. To get there, the Muranus must have sailed a long way up the Euphrates, and then continued eastwards overland. Quite a journey, in those days. Even so, they can’t have reached beyond Persian territory.’

‘Something like eight hundred kilometres from Babylon,’ Anna said. ‘And you’re right, Harran was still within the borders of the Achaemenid Empire. After the conquest of Babylonia, it was now the biggest empire in all of classical antiquity, covering such a gigantic territory that it was simply too huge for normal travellers to escape from.’

‘Then again, the Muranus weren’t exactly normal travellers. Why not keep moving?’

Anna shrugged. ‘Perhaps they were content to compromise, by settling in a corner of the empire as remote and far-flung as possible, in order to try to get on with their lives. There may have been a Babylonian connection, albeit a tenuous one, as some scholars believe that Addagoppe, the mother of King Nabonidus and grandmother of Belshazzar, may have been from Harran. In any case, in those days Harran was a reasonably busy trading outpost, where they might have thought they could resume their merchant business. But it seems they never returned to their former greatness. Meanwhile Ashar, who clearly had never forgiven the Persians for what they did, seems to have gone his own way. I don’t suppose we’ll ever know all the facts. But that’s history for you.’

‘What about the idol?’ Ben asked. ‘Did they have it, or didn’t they?’

‘We’ve already speculated that they could have sold it, or melted down the gold plates into enough coinage to make them fabulously rich.’

‘In which case, why hang around in some backwater outpost of the same empire that had ravaged their home? With that kind of money they could have travelled as far and wide as they wanted, settled anywhere they pleased, and lived like kings and queens.’

‘It was a bigger world then. Distances seemed much greater than they do to us now, and foreign lands were mysterious and frightening. Especially with wars raging everywhere. Perhaps they still retained enough affinity with the region to make them want to stay.’

‘Or perhaps it’s more than that,’ Ben said. ‘Ashar’s political involvement suggests that at least some of the Muranus must have been sympathetic to the rebel cause. Maybe they hoped that the kingdom of Babylon would one day be restored and they could go back. That could have been why they stayed.’

She shook her head. ‘I doubt anyone could have thought that way. The Persians were too powerful. It would have seemed like a lost cause.’

‘And history’s full of lost causes that people never gave up fighting for.’

‘That’s just speculation,’ Anna said doubtfully. ‘You can’t know these things for sure.’

‘Not for sure,’ Ben said. ‘But close enough. And it changes everything.’