The Moses Legacy

Chapter 17

‘He was a friend of Lord Byron, you know,’ said the curator, a young Indian. ‘They met at Cambridge.’

‘Yes, he was actually two years ahead of Byron, at Trinity,’ said Gabrielle. ‘In many ways he was his mentor, until Byron’s fame left him behind. But they stayed friends.’

Gabrielle was in an office on the top floor of the British Museum, sitting at a large work table with one of the curators of the Egyptian department. The police had told her that she wouldn’t be allowed any contact with Daniel before he was either released or charged. He had chosen not to take a lawyer, so she couldn’t even get a message to him indirectly.

She faced a stark choice. She could either sit around doing nothing except brood about her uncle’s death and Daniel’s fate or she could keep herself occupied, following up on the trail that had started in Egypt. It was ironic that finding the Mosaic tablets had proved to be not the end of the trail, but the start, and had in fact opened the door to other discoveries.

Having her name second or third on a paper about the discovery of the Mosaic tablets was prestigious enough. But after Mansoor had told them about the mysterious papyrus in the Egyptian Museum, it looked like there was a lot more to discover – especially as he had told them that the papyrus was carbon-dated to 1600 BC. That would make it older than the Bible – yet written in the same script as the original Mosaic tablets.

A secret that pre-dated the Bible? And one that must have been related to the Bible because it was written in the same ancient script as the original Ten Commandments!

That was a find well worth pursuing. If the credit for finding the Mosaic tablets would be great, the prestige for revealing older documents relating to the Semitic peoples would be enormous.

But of the three of them, only Daniel could decipher the papyrus. He had made it clear that to have any chance of doing so, he needed some idea of its origins. So now Gabrielle was sitting here with the curator talking about William John Bankes, explorer, artist and Egyptologist. Between 1815 and 1819, Bankes travelled throughout Egypt, Nubia, Palestine and Syria, meticulously recording many of the great sites and artefacts with notes and drawings with a skilled and practised hand in the days before photography.

Several huge ledger-sized folders with cardboard ‘pages’ and heavy covers were stacked up on one side of the table. These were the Bankes archives. Pictures were held between the cardboard sheets, and many had clear plastic or cellophane over them to offer fuller protection of the drawing beneath. Gabrielle turned the pages in awe.

‘It’s amazing,’ she said with a shake of her head, admiring the skill and detail of the drawings.

Through his travels, Bankes had accumulated a substantial portfolio of manuscripts and illustrations of previously unknown historical sites in ancient Egypt and Sudan, preserving the details and imagery of sites that, in some cases, later became lost to vandalism and theft. For while the artefacts plundered by foreign explorers were still extant in Western museums, the spoils taken by local thieves – who were usually looking for gold and didn’t always appreciate the priceless value of knowledge – were in many cases gone for good.

‘So if I’ve understood you correctly,’ said the curator, ‘you don’t actually know where you’re looking, only what you’re looking for.’

‘Exactly,’ said Gabrielle. ‘We have an ancient Egyptian jar that bears a symbol like the Rod of Asclepius. We think it may have some connection with the ancient Israelites, as well as the Egyptians. So what we’re wondering is if there’s anything in the Bankes archives that shows such a symbol in ancient Egypt.’

‘I do actually remember seeing a drawing with that symbol before, in the Bankes collection,’ said the curator. ‘Now let me see.’

He selected one of the folders and started flicking through it.

‘Oh look,’ he said.

He had just stopped at a picture engraved on a rock showing a snake coiled around a pole.

‘It’s at Deir el-Medina,’ said the curator. ‘Literally “monastery of the town”.’

‘The town where the stonemasons, carpenters and scribes who worked on the tombs in the Valley of the Kings lived. Of course in those days, they didn’t speak Arabic.’

‘That’s right,’ said the curator. ‘They called it Set Maat.’

‘“The Place of Truth”.’

‘Precisely.’

Gabrielle was staring at the picture.

‘This would presumably have been before the place was excavated.’

‘Oh, long before,’ the curator acknowledged. ‘The first archaeological excavation was by an Italian called Ernesto Schiaparelli from 1905 to 1909. The second, between 1922 and 1951, was by French archaeologists under the direction of Bernard Bruyere. That one was somewhat more extensive.’

‘That’s about a hundred years after Bankes travelled in Egypt and Nubia,’ said Gabrielle. ‘Why the long wait before they started digging?’

The curator scratched his chin. ‘Well, let me just put that into its proper historical context. The site was known about for some considerable time before that. Indeed, a large number of papyri were found there as far back as the 1840s.’

‘Papyri?’

‘Yes.’

‘Were any of them in Proto-Sinaitic script?’

‘Proto-Sinaitic?’ The curator sounded genuinely surprised. ‘Not as far as I know. But not all the papyri are extant. Some of them were stolen.’

‘And never found?’ asked Gabrielle.

‘Well, a few of them ended up in the village well. Actually, that’s from the second excavation. The Schiaparelli excavation turned up loads of pottery and ostraca but no papyri. The Bruyere excavation, on the other hand, turned up many papyri. But unfortunately it wasn’t administered or controlled all that well. Consequently, something like half the papyri were taken without Bruyere’s consent or even his knowledge. Those were the ones that got stolen.’

‘And do we have any way of knowing how much of it ended up in private collections?’ asked Gabrielle.

‘Probably not.’

‘And by the same token,’ she pressed on, ‘we have no way of knowing what language or writing system they were written in?’

‘Not unless the heirs of those private collectors come forward,’ the curator conceded.

Gabrielle’s mind was racing ahead.

Could the papyrus Mansoor showed us be one of the missing Deir el-Medina papyri? If so, it could be part of a huge collection – and what a story THEY could tell!