“And putting women on the map,” Costas said, still staring at the charioteer. “Big-time.”
Hiebermeyer turned back to the computer, clicked the mouse, and called up the first image, showing the tomb with its contents. “There’s more to be found in there, Jack. A lot more. We’ve been working against the clock, and I’ve had to make just about the hardest decision of my life, to shut down the tomb and seal it. There are already too many other parts of the excavation ongoing that need to be finished up. I can’t even report the tomb discovery, as that would see the looters descend like vultures as soon as we leave the place. I’m not even sure about the book idea, Jack. What we’ve just discussed is going to have to remain our own speculation, as it’s too controversial to publish without the full excavation and appraisal of that tomb. We all know what happens when a theory like that gets put out prematurely and is ridiculed. It then takes ten times more evidence than is needed to make it stick.”
Hiebermeyer slumped forward, his head in his hands, looking defeated. For a moment Jack felt paralyzed, unable to think of anything to say that might help. He had a sudden flashback to their boyhood together at boarding school in England, swapping dreams about the great discoveries they would one day make as archaeologists. Those discoveries had come to pass, more than they could ever have imagined, and yet there still seemed as much to uncover as there ever had been. No single treasure was the culmination of the dream, and every extraordinary revelation spurred them on toward another. It seemed impossible that the perversity of extremism, of human self-destruction, should overtake that dream. Jack knew that if their friendship meant anything, he should do all he could to push Maurice through and see that their shared passion was never extinguished.
Costas put a hand on Hiebermeyer’s shoulder. “Don’t kill yourself over it, man. You’re doing the best you can. There’s light at the end of the tunnel.”
Hiebermeyer grasped his hand for a moment. “Thanks, Costas. You and Jack have seen it, haven’t you? That light underneath the pyramid. As long as we know it’s there, maybe there’s hope for us yet.”
Jack took out a memory stick and inserted it into Hiebermeyer’s computer. “I know you have to return to the necropolis as soon as you can, but I want to show you an image from our dive that you haven’t seen yet. I’d like Aysha in on this. Is she around?”
Hiebermeyer gestured at the door. “Outside on the quay, talking to our son on the phone. We sent him away to stay with my mother in Germany. This place has become too dangerous for a five-year-old. She said she’d come back in here when she finishes.”
“I sent him a picture from our dive,” Costas said. “A selfie of Uncle Costas with a sea snake wrapped around his helmet, and a goofy face.”
“That’s good of you, Costas. I really appreciate it. He probably doesn’t get too much humor from his dad right now.” He straightened up and took a deep breath. “Okay, Jack, what have you got?”
CHAPTER 7
Jack felt a huge surge of excitement as he saw the photograph on the screen that Costas had taken two days before in the depths of the Red Sea. It was the unmistakable form of a chariot wheel visible in the mass of coral. Hiebermeyer moved the mouse over different points on the image and then zoomed in on the gilded wing of the falcon at the front of the chariot that was partly exposed beneath the coral. “There should be a cartouche above that, a royal cartouche,” he murmured. “An inscription on the temple of Karnak at Luxor mentions a chariot of Thutmose III made from electrum, and this one must have been from the same stable. With this gilding it can only have been a royal chariot, perhaps lent by the pharaoh to a favored general.”
“It was our final dive, and we were in the same quandary as you were in the tomb in the mummy necropolis,” Jack said. “No time to try removing any of that coral.”
Hiebermeyer zoomed out to the original view and sat back in his chair, shaking his head. “Still, it’s an incredible find. You know it was Howard Carter who first reconstructed their appearance, based on the disassembled chariots he found in 1922 when he opened the tomb of Tutankhamun?”
“I know that they first appear in Egypt about the beginning of the New Kingdom, copied from the chariots of the Near East.”
“It was our friend Ahmose I and his Minoan wife, Ahhotep, fighting off the Hyksos in the northern marshlands of the Nile Delta, capturing and then copying the weapons of their enemy,” Hiebermeyer replied. “Judging by the wall painting in the tomb, it may have been Queen Ahhotep’s Minoan warriors who took to the chariots most readily. Not what you might expect for a people from a mountainous island.”
Jack shook his head. “The Minoans were renowned for their naval might, remember? They probably used small vessels like the Liburnians of classical antiquity, designed to dart into range of an enemy flotilla and attack with the bow and the slingshot. The transition to desert warfare was maybe not that much of a leap from a tactical viewpoint. Ships at sea became chariots on land.”
Hiebermeyer put his hands behind his head and stared at the screen. “Two centuries later, at the time of Akhenaten and Tutankhamun, the chariot was at the pinnacle of its technology. They were like modern fly-by-wire jet fighters, capable of astonishing speed and agility but inherently unstable. Drive them too fast and the traditional wheeling maneuver you just described became impossible, leaving them no choice other than to hurtle directly into an enemy and take their chances.”
Jack looked thoughtfully at the screen. “Technology so advanced that it backfired on them: sheer speed and nimbleness was perhaps their undoing.”
Costas came over from the computer workstation, where he had been backing up their Red Sea images. “Or maybe someone who knew the risks of the technology played with it. The best systems, the best technologies, often have an inherent instability; it’s that instability that often makes them capable of great things, like those fly-by-wire planes, but also leaves them vulnerable to manipulation and sabotage.”
“Go on,” Hiebermeyer said.
“It’s something that Costas and I discussed on the flight here,” Jack interjected. “Thinking laterally, that is. What if the pharaoh, Akhenaten — if that’s who it was — engineered the whole thing? Think about the backdrop. There’s all the modern speculation that he and Moses were more than just master and slave. Sigmund Freud even thought they were two sides of the same coin. Let’s imagine they share the revelation of the one god in the desert, and Akhenaten determines to let Moses take his people and establish his own City of Light. For Akhenaten, it might provide assurance that the new religion, the new monotheism, would have a chance of surviving outside Egypt, where he must have guessed that his focus on the Aten might not survive his own lifetime. If Moses was his big hope for the future, for spreading the word, then the pharaoh is hardly going to want to destroy him as he leads his people to Israel, is he? But it might be politically expedient for him to appear to do so. Akhenaten knows there’s a strong faction against him among the old priesthood, but he also knows he lacks the military credentials of his forebears. Chasing and destroying the Israelites would raise his kudos and hark back to the great victories of earlier pharaohs against the Hyksos and the other peoples of the Middle East. The strength this gave Akhenaten might buy him the time he needed to establish his new religion more firmly, building temples and converting as many people as possible to his beliefs.”
“So you’re suggesting he faked it,” Hiebermeyer said, staring at him.