The fact that she’d been moved so quickly from the sterile ‘cell’ to this almost comfortable apartment worried her; it felt permanent. Ironically, that very feeling made her want to leave more than ever before.
The apartment was divided into the dining area, single bedroom and shower room. There were no windows and she was, presumably, underground, built into the vast complex of corridors and offices belonging to DEFCOMM.
“I know you’re one of the good guys, Dr Patterson. Can I call you Henry?”
Henry grinned and nodded approvingly. “Of course, but only if I can call you Gail?” he added cheekily.
Gail grinned back. Henry. It would be easy calling him that, she told herself, as she’d gone out with an annoying idiot called Henry many, many years ago.
The only problem was that Henry was turning out to be far less of an annoying idiot than she had expected.
“Tell me,” he said. “I’ve read your research on Amarna and Aniquilus. But everything, including of course my research here, has centred around the main texts from the pedestal in the Library. What else have you found?”
She gave a wry smile. “You haven’t read my research very well, then, have you?” He looked down briefly, as if ashamed at not having known more about her. “The Library contained a vast number of texts, indeed thousands, broken down into four categories,” she continued. “The tablets, mostly made out of clay, we found stacked on most of the lower shelves. Remember the shelves were made of wood, so the bottom ones were probably the best place to put them. We also found that the shelf space was classified quite carefully: the higher the document in the shelf, the more important it appeared to be. The pedestal is clearly the epitome of this.”
“So the tablets were the least important?”
“It appears so. Ironically, they’re also the best preserved by a good margin. In a dry environment, the hardened clay doesn’t deteriorate visibly. What they showed, almost exclusively, were purchase ledgers for agricultural produce, such as the trade in livestock and the provision of grain to the royal palace. They were written in a mixture of cuneiform, obviously for international trade, and hieratic hieroglyphs. One tablet was different, in that it had a mixture of full hieroglyphs and hieratic; we believe, I believe, that it was written by the Library’s architect, a sort of ‘I did this’ note, although there is no signature.”
Henry raised an eyebrow. “I wonder if it could be matched to the story that led us to Amarna in the first place.”
“You mean your architect’s scroll? Well, you could try, but tablets were written on by pressing a stylus into soft clay, whereas scrolls are written with brushstrokes. In my opinion you could probably trace two tablets back to the same stylus, but it would be impossible to link a scroll to a tablet. You may however be able to link the hieratic, which is highly stylised, to the same author. Your main problem would be getting hold of the tablet in Cairo. I would have been happy to help, but then this all happened.”
“What other types of text were in the Library?” Henry did his best to ignore her jab.
“The papyrus scrolls. We were pretty excited to find those, because they’re exceptionally rare. Because papyrus can’t be folded without cracking, it’s generally rolled up. This was the principal medium for storing long texts until the time of the Romans, when parchments were chopped into pages and bound into a codex with a wooden cover. Papyrus is really susceptible to pretty moderate conditions. It doesn’t like damp, because it rots, and it doesn’t like dryness, because it cracks. In fairness, they had nothing better and at the time it was a technological revolution, as papyrus is cheap and easy to use. But for us archaeologists, they couldn’t have made a worse choice. Most surviving papyrus scrolls are from the Roman era, so the Library discovery was remarkable.” She paused to sip some wine. “Your architect scroll is a unique sample. From what I saw, it may be one of the oldest and best preserved. It belongs in a museum.”
“What of the scrolls in the Library?” he tried to change the subject. Ten years ago he had missed his only opportunity to get the scroll in a museum, and it was too late to go back now.
She sighed. “We were spoilt. While a lot of the scrolls were evidently ruined, dried to the extent that they disintegrated on contact, most were solid. Solid evidently means they cannot be unravelled by hand. The reason some were better preserved than others probably goes back to the origin of the papyrus reeds themselves, their age, storage prior to entering the Library, possibly even the ink used to write on them. The surviving ones were boxed up pretty much within a day of the Library being accessed, and over the next few years, robotic ‘readers’ at the Museum of Cairo opened them, millimetre by millimetre, until their content could be read. The first to be opened revealed a biography of an inhabitant of Amarna. The everyday account of one family’s life, who they were, what they did, and why they were there. On its own, that one scroll confirmed the main theory behind Amarna: that it was a religious experiment, a new beginning and a departure from the ways of the previous dynasties. What astounded us more than anything was the way you could really sense the excitement in the text. They were living in an age of religious enlightenment, where the Pharaoh was not so removed from his people; a more ‘down to earth’ culture. They really had no idea the experiment wouldn’t work. Since then, half a dozen scrolls have been accessed, all with the same subject matter, but each focusing on a different family.”
“Why did the experiment fail?”
She shrugged. “There are many ideas. It probably became economically unviable, there would have been foreign pressure on a shrinking Egyptian military power, a coup driven by supporters of the traditional polytheistic ways could have ousted them, and so on. Tutankhaten, Akhenaten’s son from a marriage with his own sister, Tiye, changed his name to Tutankhamen, becoming the first king to return to the old capital at Thebes and reject the worship of one god, the Aten. He was young and quite unwell, so probably bowed easily under pressures from traditionalists, most notably the priesthood and military leaders.”
“What do you believe?” he looked at her intently.
She accepted his offer of a refill and took a gulp of wine. The more she drank, the sweeter it tasted. “I think that someone, Nefertiti to be precise, persuaded her husband, the new King of Egypt, to leave behind Egypt’s militaristic, expansionist ways in favour of a simple life in the country. From what I know now, I believe she did this because she believed that the old ways, if continued, could only lead to destruction and suffering for us all. I think she was a pacifist and a humanist. But in the long run, it failed. Professor al-Misri once compared Amarna to the old Soviet Union, because it looked impressive, but was badly built from poor quality materials, and in the end destined to crumble.
“But it also has another parallel to the Soviet Union: it couldn’t exist in isolation, and its premise was counter-intuitive to human nature. They were surrounded by other civilizations, all ready to eat away at their weakened state. You have to remember Egypt was a superpower at this time, so it was an attractive target, too. And as if that wasn’t enough, Nefertiti’s utopian ideal was destroyed from within by greed. To be honest, I’m amazed it lasted as long as it did.” She finished talking and emptied her glass. Henry filled it again.
“Sounds like a good theory.”
“Hypothesis,” she corrected him.
“What else was in the Library?”
“Architectural drawings carved into wooden tablets, some maps, and our famous books. Until the last couple of days, I thought that my Book of Aniquilus was the only surviving Egyptian codex, predating any known Roman effort by more than a thousand years. But now, it has a twin!” She stopped talking for long enough to realise that Henry was looking at her with a smile on his face. She cringed. He was nice enough as a person, but she could see where this was going; the wine, the mood lighting, the meal. His greasy bald head.