The Moses Stone

67

'So where is Megiddo? I presume we'll be going there.'

'Oh, we'll certainly be going there. It's in northern Israel, on the Plain of Esdraelon overlooking the Jezreel Valley.'

Angela clicked the touchpad on her laptop and brought up a detailed map of Israel.

'This is Esdraelon,' she said, indicating an area close to the northern frontier of the country. 'The Jezreel Valley is shaped a bit like a triangle lying on its side, with the point at the Mediterranean coast and the base paralleling the River Jordan, just here. All that area was once under water. In fact, it was the waterway that linked the inland body of water that's now called the Dead Sea with the Mediterranean. About two million years ago, tectonic shift caused the land lying between the Great Rift Valley in Africa and this end of the Mediterranean to rise, and the waterway turned into dry land. Once the Dead Sea no longer had an outlet, its salinity started to increase, with the result we see today.'

'So what's at Megiddo? A ruined castle or something?'

'More or less. The point about Megiddo was that it had enormous strategic importance. In ancient times there was a major trade and military route known in Latin as the Via Maris or "Road of the Sea" and as Derekh HaYam in Hebrew. This ran from Egypt and up the flat land beside the Mediterranean to Damascus and Mesopotamia. Now, whoever occupied Megiddo controlled the section of this route that was known as the Nahal Iron – the word nahal means a dry river bed – and hence could control all the traffic along the route itself.

'Because of its location, Megiddo is one of the oldest known inhabited places in this part of the world. In fact, in any part of the world. The first settlement there dates from around 7000 BC – over nine thousand years ago – and it was finally abandoned in the fifth century BC, so the site was continually occupied for about six thousand five hundred years.'

'So when the Sicarii went there – assuming you're correct – the place would already have been a ruin?'

'Oh, yes,' Angela agreed. 'The site would have been deserted for well over half a millennium by that time.'

'And you think that could be the place referred to in the inscriptions? I mean, you now think it's more likely than Hezekiah's Tunnel or somewhere on the Temple Mount?'

'Yes, I do.' Angela looked apologetic. 'I suppose with hindsight I should have thought about it a bit more, and I should certainly have checked on what had been done in Hezekiah's Tunnel in the past. And – as you pointed out – with all the activity on and inside the Temple Mount over the years, the chances of anything like the Silver Scroll remaining undiscovered there were pretty slim.'

'So what about Megiddo, then? Has that had scores of archaeologists poring over it as well?' Bronson sounded uncertain.

'Oddly enough, no. It has been excavated, of course, but not as often, nor as exhaustively, as you might expect, given its history. Virtually nobody dug there at all until 1903, when a man named Gottlieb Schumacher led an expedition, funded by the German Society for Oriental Research. Twenty years later John D. Rockefeller financed an expedition by the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute, and that continued until the start of the Second World War.'

'Hang on, that's a dig lasting sixteen years,' Bronson pointed out. 'They must have pretty much covered the whole site.'

'It was a long expedition, true, but Megiddo is simply huge. The city mound itself covers about fifteen acres, and most archaeological digs tend to be focused in one fairly small area and are vertical rather than horizontal. They're usually interested in digging down through the different layers that represent the various civilizations that have occupied the site, and that's certainly what the Chicago team did.

'After that, not too much happened at Megiddo. An Israeli archaeologist named Yigael Yadin did a bit of work there in the 1960s, and since then there have been excavations on the site every other year, funded by the Megiddo Expedition based at the university here in Tel Aviv.'

'That still sounds like quite a lot of activity,' Bronson said doubtfully.

'Perhaps it is,' Angela agreed, 'but the point is that if any of these expeditions had found the Silver Scroll, the whole world would know about it already. And don't forget, none of these archaeologists were looking for what might be described as buried treasure. They were just trying to uncover the history of the site. We're not. We're going there to look for one very specific object, in one very specific place.'

'So there is a cistern somewhere on the hill?' Bronson asked.

'In fact, there isn't,' Angela said, with a slight smile, 'and that's good news. A cistern is where you store water, but a well or a spring is a source of water. When we were checking our transcriptions using the online dictionary, it suggested that the Aramaic word I'd translated as "cistern" more accurately meant a well. And what's at Har Megiddo is a well, not a cistern. That's another indicator that we're now on the right track.'

'Right,' Bronson said. 'There's no time to lose. I'll just go and get my things together. We can look at the route once we're in the car and heading north.' He looked at his watch. 'Ready in five?'