The Nemesis Origin

XXIII

The museum was located on Meret Basha on the eastern banks of the Nile, just north of Tahrir Square, a handsome building fronted with fountains and stone sphinxes bustling with tourists. Ethan led the way, his features concealed behind sunglasses and a cheap tourist hat that he had found being hawked by an Egyptian vendor in one of Cairo’s busy streets. The sun was beating down on the busy square as they made their way through the bustling crowds.

It had taken them almost three hours to reach the museum from the lake, hitching a lift into the city and booking into a cheap hotel in order to shower and change into hastily purchased clothes. Nobody took any notice of them, the hoteliers assuming them to be American tourists and making no remark on their damp hair or creased and dirty clothing.

As they reached the museum entrance Ethan hung back and allowed Lucy to lead the way inside. She walked with confidence through the vast halls filled with Egyptian mummies, the ancient remains of Rameses II and the elaborate gold head mask of Tutankhamen attracting crowds of tourists, their cameras flashing as they photographed of the famous relics.

Ethan watched Lucy walk up to a member of the museum staff and speak to him quietly. The man appeared surprised to have been approached at all, but then he seemed to recognise Lucy and moments later he was beckoning her to follow him. Ethan and Lopez again hung back as they followed Lucy and the staff member toward a series of locked doors near the back of the main hall.

‘You have any idea what she’s up to?’ Lopez asked him.

‘None whatsoever.’

‘What’s your stake in this?’

‘She came to me,’ Ethan replied. ‘I don’t have a stake. You?’

Lopez did not reply as they reached the doors and were led through into a laboratory of sorts, where sealed Perspex boxes contained antiquities that were being cleaned and prepared for display by museum staff. Lucy’s new friend led them between the staff workers toward a series of offices at the back of the laboratory, and he called out.

‘Dr El-Wari?’

From within one of the offices stepped an Egyptian man wearing spectacles and with receding black hair, his dark skin stark against his crisp white shirt. He took one look at Lucy and then spread his arms wide.

‘Dr Morgan,’ he exclaimed as he stepped forward and swept her up into an embrace. ‘I thought we had seen the last of you in Egypt a long time ago, more was the pity.’

Lucy returned the embrace warmly, and then turned to gesture to Ethan and Lopez as she introduced them. El-Wari greeted them with vigorous handshakes and beckoned them into his office as he shut the door behind them.

‘Dr El-Wari is one of Egypt’s foremost experts on hieroglyphics and ancient Egyptian iconography,’ Lucy said by way of an explanation. ‘He may be able to help us.’

‘Help you with what?’ El-Wari asked.

Lucy produced from her rucksack photographs of the icons they had taken in Japan and Cambodia and laid them on the doctor’s table.

‘These images were taken by us in Cambodia and Japan,’ Lucy explained. ‘The sites where the icons were found were dated as being 800 A.D. and anything up to 3000 BCE. I wanted to ask if you’d seen anything similar in your work here in Egypt?’

El-Wari nodded. ‘Many times. This is the hieroglyph for the sun god Aten and is found on many tombs and obelisks around Egypt. But I’ve never heard of it being found on any other monuments on the planet and this version of it is slightly different. The length of the beams projecting from the sun are always the same length in Aten’s hieroglyphic, but these are represented at variable lengths.’

El-Wari moved across his office to a large poster that had been laminated and stuck to the wall. Upon it were dense ranks of hieroglyphs, each with a translation beneath them in both Greek and Latin that Ethan guessed had been taken from the famous Rosetta Stone, a granodiorite stele inscribed with a decree issued at Memphis, Egypt in 196 BCE on behalf of King Ptolemy V. The decree appeared in three scripts: Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, the Demotic script, and Ancient Greek, and had allowed linguists with a means to finally decode the mysterious Egyptian hieroglyphs. The doctor tapped one of the icons, a round disc with sun beams extending from beneath it in exactly the same manner as the icons that Lucy had found in Japan in Cambodia.

Lucy nodded. ‘Okay, can you think of the largest or most prominent hieroglyph of this kind in Egypt that you have found so far? Do you know where it is located?’

‘I know precisely where it was located. The great Temple of the Aten was constructed in the city of el-Amarna, Egypt, and was the main temple for the worship of the god Aten during the reign of Akhenaten around 1353–1336 BCE.’

‘You mean it doesn’t exist anymore?’ Lucy asked, somewhat deflated.

‘The reign of Akhenaten, the father of the more famous Tutankhamen, was a unique period in ancient Egyptian history that created an entirely new religion by establishing a religious cult dedicated to the sun-disk Aten. Akhenaten shut down traditional worship of other deities like Amun-Ra and brought in a new era, though short-lived, of monotheism where the Aten was worshipped as a sun god and Akhenaten and his wife, Nefertiti, represented the divinely royal couple that connected the people with their god. He built a new capital at Amarna along the east bank of the Nile River, setting up workshops, palaces, suburbs and temples. The Great Temple of the Aten was located just north of the Central City and, as the largest temple dedicated to the Aten, was where Akhenaten fully established the proper cult and worship of the sun-disk.’

‘Can we visit the temple? Has enough of it remained to study?’

‘The temple was destroyed by later pharaohs who considered the worship of the sun alone to be something of a heresy,’ El-Wari explained. ‘In addition, the temple did not have any icons engraved upon it. Instead, it was open roofed allowing worshippers to pray directly to the sun in the sky above, as opposed to previous religions within ancient Egypt that worshipped images of deities in temples and such like.’

‘So a pharaoh comes along and suddenly begins worshipping the sun,’ Ethan said, ‘after thousands of years of the people worshipping other gods. Why would he do that?’

‘Nobody knows,’ El-Wari admitted. ‘But there is much about Akhenaten that we do not know and that stands out as different from other pharaohs both before and after. What few busts we have of him depict an unusual looking man with a long, slender face and what appears to be an extended cranium, as though he was deformed in some way.’

‘Do we have any iconography from the temple at all?’ Lucy asked.

‘There is an engraving on the wall of one of the tombs in Amarna that depicts the shape of the temple. I think that the tomb belongs to somebody called Meryre, and the depiction of the temple includes a very large image of the sun disc of Aten. In fact, I think that…’

El-Wari hurried across to one of his shelves and searched through it for several moments before he produced a thick book that he dragged across to the desk and opened. He flipped through several pages before he found what he was looking for, a large depiction of ancient hieroglyphs that appeared to show a temple.

‘Yes, here, look. The depiction of the temple and the icon of Aten does not present equal lines but instead resembles the iconography you’ve showed me from Cambodia Japan.’

Lucy seemed almost to begin hopping about from foot to foot as she grasped the doctor’s arm. ‘Do you know the orientation of this tomb when it was found?’

‘East to west,’ El-Wari replied, ‘which would have meant that the sunbeams of the Aten cartouche would have pointed east.’

Lucy hurriedly pulled out a map that she had bought in Cairo, on which she had already redrawn the lines that extended from Japan and Cambodia to intersect on the coast of South America. Within moments she had plotted a line east from Cairo, carefully transposing the angle of the longest beam from the temple icon to match the orientation of her map.

Ethan stepped closer and to his amazement he saw the line extend and pass directly through the point where those from Japan and Cambodia bisected.

‘It’s a match,’ Ethan realized. ‘They’re pointing to the same place as the other lines.’

‘This isn’t possible,’ El-Wari protested. ‘It’s a coincidence. These civilizations would have had no contact with each other and would not have shared any kind of iconography.’

‘That’s not what the evidence is telling us,’ Lucy replied. ‘The civilizations were all connected by one thing, something that could traverse the great distances between them and was important enough to the people respectively that they recorded its presence in their religious icons over thousands of years. And all of it points to one place. Peru.’

‘And what does that mean?’ Lopez asked. ‘What’s so special about Peru?’

‘You said that Akhenaten was deformed in some way?’ Lucy pressed El-Wari.

‘He was possessed of an unusual appearance,’ El-Wari confirmed, ‘and had a considerably extended cranium, perhaps as a result of deliberate deformation as a child.’

‘Perhaps,’ Lucy murmured. ‘But then, perhaps not. This may be the very link that we’ve been searching for. I can’t believe that I didn’t make the connection earlier.’

‘There is no connection,’ El-Wari insisted. ‘These cultures never made contact with each other.’

‘Yet both Egyptian and Inca cultures mysteriously possess the same identical body of ancient art, architecture, symbolism, mythology and religion,’ Lucy countered. ‘Isn’t it true that Victorian scholars, faced with this enigma, concluded that both cultures must have been children of a Golden Age parent civilization? Today, the parallels between the two cultures are not only being ignored by American and Western scholars, they’re being suppressed.’

‘Pah!’ El-Wari scoffed. ‘That’s not science, it’s pseudo-archaeology. Nobody believes that sort of thing.’

Lucy shot the doctor a harsh look and then stormed across to his book shelves. She scanned for several moments and then selected two thick tomes that she brought back to the table and opened side-by-side. Ethan saw a series of images that Lucy identified as she flipped through the books.

‘Both the Incas and the Egyptians mummified their dead and interred them with crossed arms, gold funerary masks and gifts for the afterlife,’ Lucy pointed out as she identified images in the books portraying identical appearances of the two cultures’ artefacts. ‘Both cultures built megalithic structures with incredibly precise stonework and masonry joined with metal clasps, trapezoidal entrances, and obelisks with hieroglyphic writing etched into the stonework. Both worshipped the solar icon of the sun, Aten for the Egyptians and Inti for the Inca. Both used animal symbolism on funerary masks as a representation of the third or mind’s eye, both used the ankh and staff symbol for their gods, a symbolism found in many ancient cultures separated by thousands of miles and yet a correlation ignored by mainstream science. Anthropoidal coffins, reed boat construction, tryptich three-door temples denoting the same religious practices… the list is endless, doctor. It’s staring us in the face!’

Ethan saw Dr El-Wari hesitate, trying to absorb a new line of thought that perhaps he had refused to consider before. ‘These people could not have met,’ he insisted. ‘Their cultures are separated by not just thousands of miles, but by thousands of years!’

‘No,’ Lucy shot back. ‘The city of Caral in Peru was built some five thousand years’ ago. Pyramid-shaped public buildings were being built at Caral at the same time that the Saqqara pyramid, the oldest in Egypt, was going up. Caral’s pyramids were already being revamped when Egypt’s Great Pyramid of Khufu was under construction.’ Lucy was virtually radiating sunlight herself as she pointed at the icon of the Egyptian sun god Aten. ‘We’ve been looking at this all the wrong way. We’ve been assuming that this image, this icon hieroglyph, depicts the sun.’

‘It does,’ El-Wari insisted. ‘That’s what it’s famous for.’

‘I think that’s what it’s become famous for,’ Lucy replied. ‘But I think it has more than one meaning, because we have all seen this icon before in a different way.’

‘I don’t understand,’ El-Wari admitted.

‘That makes two of us,’ Ethan pointed out.

‘Three,’ Lopez added.

‘If we put aside the assumption that none of these civilizations knew each other,’ Lucy persisted, ‘and we start looking at this hieroglyph as not that of a god being worshipped but of information being recorded, then we find that it also appears within the culture of a society that lived in South America for thousands of years. It was used by them to record information, a means to maintain records among a people that had no written dialect of their own.’

‘In South America?’ El-Wari echoed as he thought for a moment and then his jaw dropped as he stared at Lucy. ‘You don’t think that this is a message?’

‘I don’t think it’s a message at all,’ Lucy replied. ‘I know that it’s a message.’

‘But it can’t be,’ El-Wari protested. ‘If this is true it throws into doubt virtually everything we know about the development of our civilizations!’

‘And that’s why so many people are pursuing it.’

‘Do you want to fill in the ignorant among us?’ Lopez demanded.

Lucy turned to face them.

‘This is not a picture of the sun beaming light down upon the earth,’ she said. ‘This is a message written in a Peruvian language that is appearing all around the world at different archaeological sites. It is the image of something called a Quipu.’

‘And what the hell is one of those?’ Lopez demanded.

‘It is the physical language of the Inca people of South America,’ Dr El-Wari explained. ‘Quipu are a series of knots tied into strings that are themselves attached to a circular ring that was often worn as a necklace. It was recently discovered that these devices, which had once been thought to contain only numerical information, are in fact able to record dialect.’

‘I thought that the Inca were a relatively recent people,’ Ethan said. ‘Weren’t they wiped out by the conquistadors a few hundred years ago?’

‘That’s right,’ Lucy agreed, ‘but archaeologists in Peru have found a ‘quipu’ on the site of Caral, indicating that the device was in use thousands of years earlier than previously believed. Previously the oldest known quipus dated from about A.D. 650. They knew that the new quipus corresponded to the very ancient period of Caral because it was found in a public building. It was an offering placed on a stairway when they decided to bury the building and put down a floor to build another structure on top.’

Ethan frowned as he connected the train of Lucy’s thought with their own quest.

‘So the quipu might be an ancient connection between cultures, and might also be the most recently used method of communication between them?’

‘Precisely,’ Lucy agreed. ‘The Inca represent the most recent civilization that has a connection to this iconography. That means that they may also be home to the most recent remains of individuals who carry what we’re looking for. If this Egyptian king might have had some connection to the remains we found in Israel, then perhaps the ancient Inca do too, and there may be remains of people there much fresher than those of ancient Egyptian pharaohs. The Inca were experts in the practice of mummification.’

‘So, we go to Peru now?’ Lopez asked.

Lucy shook her head and looked at Dr El-Wari. ‘Many of Peru’s ancient antiquities now reside in museums across the globe. They were scattered after the conquistadors conquered the Inca civilization in search of gold and other valuables that they plundered. Somewhere, we need to find a particular quipu, one is associated with the iconography we are seeing at all of these ancient sites.’

Dr El-Wari spoke softly.

‘The largest collection of ancient Peruvian artefacts associated with the Inca civilization is not held in South America.’

‘Where is it?’ Ethan asked.

‘In Germany,’ El-Wari replied. ‘At the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.’

Lucy turned to Ethan. ‘If there is a quipu that matches these icons, it may tell us everything we need to know to narrow down the location of the remains. We need to go to Germany, right now.’