It turned out that the story of Tell el-Amarna was very simple, which was what made it so captivating. For over seven hundred years, the financial and political capital of ancient Egypt had been at Thebes in the south of the country. Royal palaces, temple complexes at Karnak and Luxor, commercial centres, agriculture, everything was within convenient reach. By the reign of Amenhotep III in 1382BC it was the centre of an expanding, powerful and ambitious kingdom. The international influence of the Egyptians was unquestionable, and their armies were fast becoming unbeatable on foreign soil. The kingdom was enjoying a period of unprecedented wealth and power.
Then, at the start of his reign, the young pharaoh Amenhotep IV started work on a new capital, far away from Thebes to the north, on the edge of the Eastern Desert and the banks of the Nile. Shortly afterwards, Amenhotep IV changed his name to Akhenaten. The Aten suffix was derived from the name of a newly promoted god of the sun, suddenly the primary deity of the Egyptian people. Within four years, the seat of government had been moved to the new capital, named Akhetaten.
Akhenaten himself moved to this new capital with his wives and children and at the height of his reign, the city of Akhetaten boasted a population of over twenty thousand people.
Nine years later, Akhenaten died and power quickly shifted back towards Thebes. After barely twenty-five years of occupation, Akhetaten was abandoned. There was evidence that the tombs of the later Aten kings, such as Smenkhkare and Tutankhamen, who even changed his name from Tutankhaten to distance himself from his father’s legacy, were purposefully tampered with so that their occupants never found eternal peace. The succeeding pharaohs ensured that no record of the city or its heretic kings remained intact. Engravings were chiselled and scratched from stone and plaster, written records were buried or destroyed, and the city was razed to the ground and abandoned.
So thorough was their work that it was not until 1887, over three thousand years later, that Egyptologists became aware of the ancient city, when a woman from the modern village of Tell el-Amarna came across a hoard of clay tablets.
For Gail, the most enigmatic of all this was Akhenaten’s famous queen, Nefertiti; with an imposing appearance in artwork, most notably her bust in the Berlin Museum, it was difficult to imagine that she had not played an important role in Akhenaten’s kingdom. And yet to date, her burial place and remains had never been identified and in all likelihood were yet to be discovered.
As Gail finished telling George all of this, he had little doubt that she had indeed found the mystery she had so been longing for. That the capital city of a great kingdom moved from one place to another was important enough, without the Egyptians having changed from polytheism to quasi-monotheism at the same time. But it was what happened afterwards that really made the story intriguing: the Egyptians had made every effort to erase Akhetaten and everyone involved in it from their history.
Gail was so excited that they stayed up until the early hours of the morning talking about the mystery of the site, searching her textbooks on her tablet and surfing the Internet. Over half a million websites made some mention of it and after several hours George would have sworn that they had looked at most of them.
“Are you sure this is the sort of thing you’re looking for?” he asked her as he looked at a page on the video wall. He gestured with the remote to scroll down and read more.
“What do you mean? It’s perfect!” she answered.
“This website here looks a bit far out, to be honest, talking about aliens and the pyramids and all that.”
Gail looked up from one of her own hardcopy textbooks from her undergraduate years: it turned out that there was a whole chapter on Tell el-Amarna that she had never noticed before. “There’s always going to be at least one, isn’t there? I mean there are still people who think that we didn’t land on the Moon!”
“Did we?” her husband joked. In the last ten years, man and woman had landed on the Moon no fewer than three times. The most recent of these, a joint Sino-Russian mission, had visited the historic Apollo 11 landing site and transmitted live video footage to Earth. The conspiracy theories continued, unabated.
“Whatever,” she laughed and continued to look through her book.
George touched her arm. “Gail, isn’t this the sort of thing you wanted to steer clear of, you know, conspiracy theories and cover-ups? Isn’t this what David Hunt goes on about?”
“No, not at all!” She put her book down and took the remote from George, motioning back several pages to a website they had looked at earlier. “This is history,” she gestured with the remote and highlighted a paragraph in yellow. She turned towards George and smiled. “You see, David likes to pick up on where people have made mistakes, trying to find bad dating and conveniently ignored evidence. He’s made a career out of it, and he’s certainly not the only one.”
“And for every piece of evidence in favour of one of his theories, I bet there’s a whole ton of evidence he ignores,” George commented.
Gail smiled. “A bit harsh; he’s a scientist just like you and I, a damn good one at that. He does love going against the flow, and that’s not always the easiest path, but this is the brilliant thing: Amarna isn’t some twentieth century cover-up,” her eyes lit up. “it’s a cover-up made nearly three and a half thousand years ago, by the Egyptians themselves, and that’s what archaeology is all about. We’re just like police at a crime scene, except that we take a really long time to turn up. And no one has yet been able to fully solve the mystery of Tell el-Amarna.”
“Until you showed up, obviously,” he poked her in the ribs and grabbed the remote back from her.
She ignored him and carried on. “And anyway, it doesn’t matter, I’m going for it. I sent off my application already.” Gail looked at George and put her hand on his arm caringly. “I don’t imagine many people want to spend the whole of Christmas holidays away from home, do they?”
“Or pay for the privilege,” he snorted. “Well, I guess it’s lucky my Baltic sensors are all messed up so I can go with you then, isn’t it?” He looked at her with mock suspicion. “Which talking of conspiracy theories certainly is a remarkable coincidence, don’t you think?”
Gail laughed and pulled him towards her. “I planned everything,” she told him, before kissing him passionately.
Chapter 3
The corridors of the Peabody Museum were eerily quiet as Seth Mallus worked his way to the research labs on the first floor. A small group of Mayan figurines watched him go up the ornate late-nineteenth century staircase, past a large pop-up stand advertising an exposition of indigenous identities in the twenty-first century.
He had been to Harvard University’s Anthropology Department many times over the past few years, though this was his first visit to the Peabody Museum after normal opening hours.
Dr Patterson was waiting for him.
“Great to see you, Dr Patterson,” Mallus said going in hand first.
Patterson shook his hand and smiled nervously; he had his agenda and he was going to stick to it. He didn’t want this calculating businessman catching him off-guard.
“Mr Mallus, good to see you too. I expect you will want to see the fruits of our labour first?”
Mallus looked at him and raised an eyebrow. “First?”
Patterson bit his lip. He was better at his day job and barely a heartbeat after shaking hands was already at risk of slipping up. He chose not to say anything else and led Mallus into a small room off the main corridor. Its walls were sterile-white with a long work bench along one side. On it was a strange machine that looked like a cross between an old-fashioned mangle and a newspaper press, enclosed in an acrylic glass box