The Moses Stone

30

'So there were originally four tablets, and together they formed a larger oblong?'

'Exactly,' Angela said. 'And we've identified three of them, but we've only got a clear photographic image of one – an image clear enough to read the inscription on it, I mean. The other problem is that we don't have the fourth tablet, and that means we're completely missing a quarter of the inscription.'

'You can't do anything with the three we've located?'

'Not a lot,' Angela replied. 'We'll need to buy or maybe download an Aramaic–English dictionary before we can even start doing any work on the inscriptions. The bigger problem is that the pictures of these two tablets' – she pointed – 'simply aren't good enough to allow us to translate more than the odd word. Most of them are blurred and out of focus, and to translate Aramaic you need a clear image of the original, because several of the letters are very similar in appearance.'

'But it's still worth trying, especially as we've got a complete translation of the Paris tablet.'

Angela nodded. 'Yes, assuming I can find a suitable dictionary. Let's see what the web can offer.'

She opened Google, typed 'Aramaic dictionary' in the search field and hit the return key.

The two of them leant forward and peered at the screen of Angela's laptop.

'Over a hundred thousand hits,' Bronson muttered. 'Somewhere in that lot there must be a dictionary that we can use.'

'There is,' Angela said. 'The very first entry, in fact.' She double-clicked the listing in Google and checked the screen. 'This site offers translations both ways – to and from Aramaic – for single words. And it even includes a downloadable font that we'll need to use for the Aramaic text. Aramaic is an abjad, a consonantal alphabet, with only twenty-two letters, and in appearance it's very similar to Hebrew. So we need a font like this one – this is called Estrangelo – to display it, so that the dictionary can recognize the words.'

Angela downloaded and installed the font, then opened a new document in her word processor, selected the Estrangelo font and carefully wrote out one of the words from the clay tablet Margaret O'Connor had found in the souk.

'This is one of the words Tony couldn't translate,' she said. 'He told me it wasn't clear enough.'

When she was satisfied that she'd got it as accurate as possible, she copied the word into the online dictionary and pressed the 'search' button.

'That's not a good start,' she muttered, looking at the screen. The message 'word not recognized' was displayed under the search field. 'It looks like Tony was right about this word, at least.'

'Maybe one of the characters you've used isn't exactly right,' Bronson suggested. 'It is pretty blurred in that photograph. Why don't you try a different word?'

'OK. This is what Tony translated as "tablet", and it's one of the words I checked earlier. Let's see what the system makes of this.'

She prepared the Aramaic characters and copied the word into the search field. Immediately the system returned the English translation as 'tablet'.

'That worked,' she said. 'Let's try this one.'

She carefully composed a different set of characters – – and input that. The system correctly translated the Aramaic word as 'cubit'.

'OK, now we're cooking.' She looked up at Bronson and smiled. 'Let's make a start on the Cairo tablet.'