The Moses Legacy

Chapter 3

‘It’s a pity you didn’t find the rest,’ said Akil Mansoor in a quiet monotone.

‘Assuming there is a “rest”,’ Gabrielle replied.

‘Of course there’s a rest!’

They were in the lab at the University of Cairo that the Supreme Council of Antiquities used for examining ancient Egyptian artefacts. Mansoor was somewhat shorter than Gabrielle and was showing signs of a middle-aged paunch. But his white hair gave him a kind of patrician gravitas that made others around him instantly recognize his academic authority.

‘We branched out radially from the square where it was found,’ Gabrielle explained, ‘stopping at forty-nine square metres.’

The air conditioning had failed again and so Mansoor left three buttons undone on his check shirt and used a handkerchief to wipe the area between his chin and neck. The assembled fragments of stone looked like an incomplete jigsaw puzzle. Mansoor moved to his left, as if to get a better view of the engraved characters on the surface, brushing against Gabrielle in the process. She didn’t say anything, but moved away quietly to the other side of the workbench to give him room to view the stone fragments.

Temporarily distracted from the arrangement of stones, he watched her athletic body, more with a sense of curiosity than outright lust. He remembered that she had been a competitive swimmer, winning a silver medal for Austria in the European Student Games. Even now, in her tight-fitting T-shirt and dark blue jeans, she cut a striking figure.

‘The distribution of fragments was like a V formation from the main group.’ Her words snapped him out of his thoughts. ‘That would suggest that the stones had been dropped or thrown from a certain position and smashed outwardly in the same direction. So working outward radially any further made no sense.’

‘You could have excavated another line of squares on the far side, to follow up your V distribution theory.’ His tone was impatient.

‘We did. And we found another two pieces. But they were both quite small, without any engravings. The only reason we think it might have formed part of the stone or stones is because of the shape. One of the students on the dig is a physics graduate and he said they looked like break lines. He also told us that lighter pieces travel further when they bounce.’

‘And?’ Mansoor prompted.

‘Well, he also said that with stone lighter means smaller, and that meant that if we found any more fragments, they’d be too small to physically handle to put them together.’

Mansoor shook his head. ‘We’ve got people who can do that with tweezers and glue. Besides, nowadays we scan them in 3-D and then examine them on a computer screen. I’m surprised your physics student didn’t tell you that.’

There was more than a hint of mockery in his tone.

‘I thought it was more important to bring back what we already found.’

‘I figured as much when you phoned me on your mad dash to Sharm el-Sheikh Airport.’

‘Well, it’s not as if the remaining stones are going to get up and walk away.’

Mansoor frowned at Gabrielle’s levity. She should have remembered that he was an utterly humourless man, and proud of the fact.

‘We can carry on today. I put the team on standby, waiting for your decision. I’d already pulled them off their regular duties to concentrate on this find. I didn’t want to put them back on the areas they were digging because they’re all too excited about-’

‘You told them your theory?’ he blurted out in a mixture of shock and fear.

‘I didn’t tell them,’ replied Gabrielle. Then after a few seconds she added, ‘But it must have been fairly obvious.’

‘To an overenthusiastic kid, perhaps. Not to a serious scholar.’

‘I think a credible case can be made out.’ Her tone was defensive. She knew that Mansoor was always sceptical about Big Theories.

‘Let’s keep some sense of proportion. So far all we can say is that we have fragments of two stone tablets with an old, somewhat simple linear script with repeated characters engraved on them.’

‘But it is definitely two stones?’ she asked cautiously.

‘We have seven corner pieces. That suggests at least two separate stones.’

‘What’s your assessment of the writing?’

Mansoor peered at it carefully. ‘Well, the style is a bit like hieroglyphics, but only the simplest hieroglyphics. In fact, some of the symbols are quite recognizable – if we can find the right light to view them in.’

‘So it can’t be a diplomatic document or treaty.’

‘If it was, it would be written in Akkadian cuneiform.’

‘And that also rules out Hittite and Sumerian.’

‘Exactly,’ Mansoor confirmed.

‘I’m wondering if this could be our Knossos.’

‘This isn’t Mycenaean or Minoan, Professor Gusack; I can assure you of that!’

‘I didn’t mean that,’ replied Gabrielle irritably. ‘I mean another syllable alphabet, like Linear A or Linear B.’

‘And I suppose you were hoping to be the next Michael Ventris.’

‘Well, it would be nice to follow in the footsteps of the man who rewrote ancient Greek history.’

‘Nice, perhaps. Likely, no.’

‘What makes you so sure?’

Mansoor’s voice took on a dour tone. ‘Well, as far as I can tell, there aren’t enough unique characters for a syllable alphabet.’

‘So it’s… what? A phonetic alphabet?’

‘Precisely. More specifically, an abjad. No vowels – just consonants.’

‘Aramaic? Phoenician?’ She didn’t bother to include Hebrew or Arabic in her question, because both were familiar to her and she could tell immediately that it wasn’t either.

‘It doesn’t look all that much like Aramaic. It might bear some vague comparison to Phoenician.’

‘Vague comparison?’ Gabrielle echoed.

‘It’s hard to tell until we can look at them under the right lighting conditions. I’ll get one of the photo experts to take some pictures and play around with the contrast then we’ll take another look.’

‘But what’s your gut instinct?’

Mansoor looked at Gabrielle with mild irritation. She was being pushy. He decided nevertheless to hazard a preliminary speculation.

‘It reminds me of the Serabit el-Khadim inscriptions.’

‘Proto-Sinaitic?’

‘Yes.’

Proto-Sinaitic was one of the oldest phonetic alphabets ever used – if not the oldest – dating back nearly 4,000 years. The name was derived from the Greek ‘proto’ meaning first and the place where the writings in the alphabet were initially discovered: Sinai. Some thirty engravings of the script had been found in Sinai at the turquoise mines at Serabit el-Khadim, once used as a penal colony by ancient Egypt.

‘Can you translate it?’

Mansoor was amused by Gabrielle’s eagerness.

‘Well, assuming I’m right, we know how it sounds, but not what it means.’

The letters of the Proto-Sinaitic alphabet had been matched to their equivalent letters in all the other main consonant alphabets – like Hebrew and Arabic – so the pronunciation was reasonably certain. But the underlying language was unknown. Was it an ancient form of Hebrew even older than the Bible itself? Some generic Semitic language that later split up into several different languages? Or was the same alphabet used for a whole variety of languages that were already different, and spoken all around the Middle East?

‘Maybe this could be our Rosetta Stone.’

The Rosetta Stone; written in three languages – hieroglyphs, Egyptian demotic script and ancient Greek – had facilitated the deciphering of hieroglyphics by enabling scholars to compare the Greek, which was already understood, to the unknown hieroglyphics and demotics.

‘The problem is that the writing on these fragments appears to be all one language, or at least one alphabet. In order to use it like the Rosetta Stone, we’d need a suitable candidate text in another language to compare it to.’

‘Well, if I’m right, then we already have one.’

Mansoor noticed the look on Gabrielle’s face and realized that she wasn’t backing down.

‘That’s a bit of a quantum leap in logic, Professor Gusack.’

‘Is it really? The site where we found it is a very good candidate for the real Mount Sinai-’

‘In the opinion of some people.’

‘According to the Bible, Moses smashed the original tablets of stone-’

‘If you take the Bible literally.’

‘And now we’ve found fragments of stone with ancient writing on them that appear to have been smashed, quite possibly deliberately.’

‘Well, even if you’re right, my biblical Hebrew isn’t that good. And neither is yours.’

‘Then maybe we should call in someone who has specialized knowledge of biblical languages.’

‘I’m not going to call in anyone from Israel,’ said Mansoor. ‘At least not at this stage. It would just be too controversial.’

‘I wasn’t thinking of an Israeli. The man I have in mind is British.’

‘Who?’

‘Daniel Klein.’

‘Klein?’ said Mansoor, not recognizing the name. ‘That sounds like a…’

‘He was my uncle’s star pupil,’ said Gabrielle. ‘Just like I was yours,’ she added with a twinkle in her eye.

Mansoor was silent for a moment. After a while, he nodded reluctantly. ‘Well, I guess if this Daniel Klein was Harrison Carmichael’s star pupil, then that’s good enough for me.’

‘Shall I call him?’ asked Gabrielle. ‘He knows me.’

‘Okay, you call him and introduce me and then put me on.’ Sensing her excitement, Mansoor added, ‘But let’s not tell him at this stage that we think we’ve found the original Ten Commandments.’