Costas leaned over his shoulder and peered closely, and then straightened up. “Men in skirts. The usual Egyptian thing.”
Hiebermeyer snorted impatiently. “You mean Egyptian infantry, marching to the right and carrying spears. Now, if I scroll the image along, you can see chariots, just like the ones you’ve found in the Gulf of Suez, with the charioteers holding bows. And now here’s another group of charioteers, larger than the first and more elaborately attired.” He paused, looking up. “Any thoughts?”
Jack stared. The charioteers were also skirted but wearing sandals, some form of cuirass, and distinctive segmented helmets, and they were carrying short thrusting swords with bows slung over their shoulders. Above them were a faded hieroglyphic cartouche and the symbol of a bull’s horns. Jack felt a rush of excitement. “Mercenaries,” he exclaimed. “But not any old mercenaries. These are Aegean mercenaries. Those are bone and tusk helmets like the ones found at Mycenae, and the swords are the same type we found on the Minoan shipwreck we were excavating when you and Aysha discovered the Atlantis papyrus.”
“Perfect,” Hiebermeyer said. “And they’re completely consistent with an eighteenth-dynasty date. Before then we’d expect to see Nubian mercenaries, large dark-skinned men from the desert. But by the eighteenth dynasty they’d become too integrated within Egyptian society. Mercenaries have to be outsiders with no vested interest in the politics, in it only for the loot and the battle. Think of the Varangian bodyguard of the Byzantine emperor in Constantinople. They were Vikings from Scandinavia who guarded the emperors over a period of several centuries, but they weren’t born and bred in Constantinople. New recruits returned to Scandinavia once they’d finished their service and made their fortunes. I believe that the same happened in Egypt during the eighteenth dynasty with the sea peoples from the north.”
“Mycenaeans?” Costas offered.
“That’s what you might think. We know that by the fourteenth century BC the Mycenaeans from mainland Greece had taken over the island of Crete. We think of the Mycenaeans as a warrior society, so you might assume that Aegean mercenaries of this date would be Mycenaean. But the truth is more interesting. Far more interesting. In fact, it revolutionizes our picture of this period. For a start, the word in that hieroglyphic cartouche, Hau-nebut, doesn’t specifically denote Mycenaeans, but it’s an old Egyptian term for Aegean peoples used from the time when the Minoan civilization of Crete dominated the Aegean. Why would that term, with its strong Minoan connotations, be used for these warriors if they were Mycenaeans, who were quite distinct? And the bull’s horn symbol specifically denotes Crete, where the symbol is prominent on the palaces of the Minoans.”
Jack took out his phone and showed Hiebermeyer the screen saver, part of a fragmentary painting showing ducks flying out of a papyrus thicket, impressionistic in shades of blue. “I’ve still got this from when we last debated it, Maurice.” He glanced at Costas. “It’s a wall painting from Akhenaten’s new city of Amarna. It’s a typically Egyptian scene but very reminiscent in style of the Minoan wall paintings from Crete. Amarna also famously produced a cache of clay tablets that shows the extent of trade with the Aegean during this period. I argued that the link with Crete wasn’t just about trade, but that there were cultural influences as well. Akhenaten had turned the old Egyptian religion on its head and was clearly receptive to outside ideas. Now that I see what Maurice has found, it figures that he might have had Aegean mercenaries too. Akhenaten may have been something of a dreamer, but he was practical enough to survive as pharaoh for more than twenty years, so having a strong force of mercenaries who would not be swayed by the factions against him would have made a lot of sense.”
Hiebermeyer swivelled his chair and raised his hands in a gesture of surrender to Jack, and then cracked a grin. “You and I have debated it for years, and finally I’m forced to concede. It was a two-way process. Egypt influenced Greece, and now we know it also happened in reverse. And there’s even more. In the sixteenth century BC, the first pharaoh of the eighteenth dynasty, Ahmose I, made an astonishing dynastic marriage. A stone stele in the temple of Amun at Thebes describes his wife, Ahhotep, as Mistress of the Shores of Hau-nebut. That’s the first known use of the word Hau-nebut, the term for the Aegean lands, for Crete, that you see in the cartouche here. It goes on to say the following: ‘Her reputation is high over every foreign land.’ This leads me to the most astonishing revelation in our necropolis find.”
Costas had been peering again at the image of the tomb painting on Hiebermeyer’s screen. He coughed, pointing. “About those cuirasses. Those breastplates. I mean, breast-plates.”
Hiebermeyer swivelled back to the screen and grinned again. “I was wondering when you’d notice.”
“Not men in skirts.”
“Not men in skirts.”
“No,” Costas said, shaking his head. “These are girl mercenaries.”
“Good God,” Jack exclaimed, peering. “You’re right.”
“Feast your eyes on this, then.” Hiebermeyer swept the mouse, and the next charioteer in the army came into view, an astonishing sight. It was unambiguously a woman, her breasts bare above her cuirass, her head towering above the others. Her long hair was braided down her back, and she held swirling snakes above her head. Jack gasped. “It’s the Minoan mother goddess, the Mistress of the Animals.”
“Not quite, Jack. Look at that cartouche above her head. It’s exactly the same as the one for Ahhotep a century and a half earlier. ‘Not Mistress of the Animals, but Mistress of the Shores of Hau-nebut.’ ”
Jack’s mind raced. “What are you thinking, Maurice?”
“I’m thinking, forget all that romantic guff about the Minoans being peace-loving idealists. You just didn’t survive in the Bronze Age that way. The term Mistress of the Animals was made up by Sir Arthur Evans when he excavated Knossos and wanted it to be some kind of paradise, an idealized antidote to the ugly modern world of a hundred years ago. You English can be sentimentalists, Jack. Mistress of the Shores of Hau-nebut is undoubtedly a military term, like Count of the Saxon Shore for the late Roman defender of Britain. Crete was an island too, and that’s where her defenses lay. Your Minoan mother goddess was in truth a Boudica or a Valkyrie, a warrior queen.”
Jack’s mind raced. “Here’s a scenario. The volcano on Thera erupts in the fifteenth century BC, right? Minoan civilization is devastated, leaving Crete vulnerable to Mycenaean takeover. Shortly before that a Minoan queen, Ahhotep, marries an Egyptian pharaoh, Ahmose I. The bloodline of the Minoan rulers passes down not in Crete but through the eighteenth dynasty in Egypt. Maybe that fuels the brilliant mix of genius, military leadership, and iconoclasm that makes the New Kingdom stand out so much, peaking with Akhenaten and his wife, Nefertiti. Meanwhile, the warrior tradition of Minoan Crete, the female warrior tradition, survives the Mycenaean takeover, perhaps in the remote mountain fastnesses of the south. For generations those warriors sell themselves to the highest bidder, led by a woman the Egyptians knew by the old title of their first Minoan queen, Mistress of the Shores of Hau-nebut. How does that sound?”
Hiebermeyer opened his arms. “That’s one small corner of Egyptology conceded. One small corner.”
Jack was thinking the unthinkable. And King Minos was a woman. He put his hand on Hiebermeyer’s shoulder. “Congratulations, Maurice. Really brilliant. This might just lead to that joint book we’ve often talked about. Rewriting contact between Egypt and Crete in the late Bronze Age.”