The Lost Testament

14

Before Ali Mohammed began carrying out tests on the parchment, he examined it closely under the bright lights on his workbench. He didn’t know how much of the text Husani had been able to read with the naked eye, but there were certainly several words that could fairly clearly be seen. It was also obvious to him that the text was, indeed, written in Latin, as Husani had indicated at their meeting.

What’s more, two words on the text stood out, because they both appeared to be proper names, and he decided he would quickly check to see if they were significant in the context of Roman history.

The bulk of the data on the Cairo Museum computer system was concerned, predictably enough, with the history of Egypt and the surrounding area, and apart from a single reference to a known place name in ancient Judaea, his search proved fruitless.

Many museums around the world are linked on a kind of academic Intranet — a restricted-access widearea network, to allow scientists and academics in one country to directly research the work of other professionals studying the same field but in different countries — and he did a general search of this resource as well, but with exactly the same result.

Almost as an afterthought, he wrote a brief email requesting specialist assistance, looking up the name of the recipient from his extensive database of contacts around the world, and marked the message as high priority before sending it.