The Sinai Secret

Gregg Loomis
PROLOGUE

Mount Horeb Sinai Peninsula March 1904

Sir W. M. Flinders Petrie was astonished but certainly not pleased by his discovery.

His expedition had been funded by the Egypt Exploration Fund for the purpose of revisiting and mapping the area of mining activity by the ancient Egyptians between the gulfs of Suez and Aqaba. Like so many explorers before him, he had found something quite different from the object of his search.

Although this was supposedly Mount Sinai, the mountain from which Moses had brought down the Ten Commandments, Petrie had no particular expectations. The place was in the area he was surveying, so the expedition had struggled up the sharp outcrop to its summit. Instead of more craggy red sandstone boulders, scrubby brush, and a surplus of scorpions, they were viewing something totally unexpected.

Jutting out from what was clearly a man-made cave were remnants of walls of ancient handmade brick. The southern side of the walls had long ago been abraded by sand blown by millennia of wind, the consistent gritty, hot breeze Petrie had come to think of as the breath of the desert. The northern side still displayed a patina of the painted plaster that had once covered the crude bricks. In the plaster were inscriptions, hieroglyphics that Petrie recognized as possibly dating back to the Twelfth Pharaonic Dynasty of about 2600 b.c.

Long before Moses.

This presented a problem.

The articles of association of the sponsoring Egypt Exploration Fund were quite clear: One of its objectives was excavation and exploration for the purpose of confirming or elucidating the Old Testament. This was the mountain where Moses had spoken with God in the form of a burning bush; from which he had brought down not one, but two sets of commandments; and at the base of which he had burned the idolatrous golden calf.

Petrie's discovery was tantamount to betraying his friends and sponsors, something no English gentleman could countenance.

Making the find public would certainly lose future financing from the fund. It could well lead to disgrace, even his loss of privileges at the Explorers' Club in Mayfair.

He wished he had never seen this wretched mountain.

Still, he and his exploration team were here, and not even investigating the site would be wasteful indeed.

By sunset the shifting sands had yielded an impressive collection of tablets, statues, and tools typical of a temple. Petrie was confident the next day would reveal an altar and other evidence of worship of the oft-depicted Hathor, the goddess of love, tombs, gold, and song, and from whose milk pharaohs gained immortality. There was no doubt about the god pictured: No other deity had cow horns and a solar disk on its head.

By the time dinner was over and the native porters had erected tents for him and the three other Englishmen,

Petrie had decided to simply submit his findings and let the Fund decide what use to make of them.

A bother, that. He had planned to publish an account of this exploration himself.

By the next afternoon loose sand had been removed from a number of halls and chambers. Reliefs of various pharaohs and their favorite wives, sons, and chamberlains were uncovered, but not the main altar.

What had been discovered was a series of rectangular and round holes carved into the sandstone, each hole larger than a bathtub. Petrie had never seen anything quite like them, and their possible function eluded him. The discovery of a metallurgist's crucible and perhaps several pounds of an unidentified white powder beneath a stone floor was equally puzzling. Perhaps it was the strange object frequently mentioned in the inscriptions on the walls and surrounding stelae. He certainly had no other idea what the word referred to. He had never seen it before. Even more mysterious was why a crucible would be in a temple in the first place.

It was referred to again in a portrayal of Anubis, the jackal-god who led the deceased into the afterlife. The animal was lying on an ark while the pharaoh Amenhotep presented a conical object. The inscription stated something about giving gold and rejoicing mouths.

Another search revealed no gold, only the enigmatic white powder.

Like any competent archaeologist, Petrie recorded his findings, completed his excavation (without locating the missing altar), and continued the survey he had been sent to complete.

Having apparently reached some sort of peace with the Fund, he published a short book on his exploration, Ancient Egypt and Ancient Israel, in 1910. His discoveries might have caused reactions in the academic world had the real discovery not been overshadowed by the storm clouds of two world wars.

Again, like many explorers, he had set in motion forces he could not have imagined. No one in early twentieth-century Europe could have.