Aysha furrowed her brow, looking skeptical. “Mmm. I remember Rebecca at Troy three years ago volunteering to help us clean potsherds. As I recall, it lasted about a day. Cleaning potsherds isn’t really a Howard thing, is it? Not when there’s real excitement around.”
“It did strike me as a bit odd,” Jack said. “I thought there might have been a boyfriend involved. I think Jeremy was there. I didn’t ask because I didn’t want to interfere. It’s tricky being a dad sometimes.”
Aysha gave him a questioning look. “Would you ever put a girlfriend above archaeology? And remember, I’m good friends with both Katya and Maria. I know everything.”
Jack fidgeted slightly, tapping a pencil on his hand. Katya and Maria were two of his closest colleagues, instrumental in several of his greatest discoveries. Jeremy had been Maria’s graduate student in Oxford. He was an American who was now assistant director of her palaeography institute. “Katya’s always impossible to get hold of, always in the middle of nowhere looking for ancient petroglyphs in Kyrgyzstan, and Maria’s always up to her neck in some medieval manuscript in Oxford.”
Aysha peered at him. “When did Rebecca make the decision to visit Israel?”
“We’d been talking about General Gordon in Khartoum, about how he and the other Royal Engineers survey officers had a fascination with the Holy Land and its archaeology. I’d been telling her my theory that their quest for Akhenaten in the desert of Sudan had been spurred by something they’d found in Israel, in Jerusalem itself, something that had drawn them there repeatedly over the years right up to the time of Gordon’s final appointment as governor general in Khartoum.”
“And Israel is the one place you haven’t visited on your quest.”
“I’d been planning to go there if things in Egypt go belly-up.”
Hiebermeyer looked at him. “Did you put Rebecca in touch with IMU’s Israel representative, Solomon Ben Ezra? Sol and I have been planning a joint Israeli-Egyptian project to evaluate coastal sites at the border, something that seems inconceivable now.”
“I tried that. She wanted to go it alone. But I let him know anyway, so he can keep a discreet eye on her.”
“It had better be pretty discreet,” Costas muttered. “Otherwise you won’t hear the end of it.”
“That’s it then,” Aysha said. “Rebecca hasn’t gone to Israel to clean potsherds. She’s gone there as part of this project, to make her mark. And she’s not the only one working behind the scenes this time. You’d be surprised who else is involved, Jack, right here in Egypt. That’s what I want to talk about now. What do you know of the early caliphs of Cairo?”
Costas raised his hand. “I know about Malek Abd al-Aziz Othan ben Yusuf, son of Saladin in the twelfth century. He was the one who tried to destroy the pyramid of Menkaure, who’s responsible for all that missing masonry on the southern face above the entrance where Jack and I went in.”
“My worst nightmare,” Hiebermeyer murmured. “And he didn’t even have explosives.”
“Any more takers?” Aysha asked.
“Well, there’s Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah,” Jack said. “The one whom the Druze Christians regard almost as a god. He springs to mind because Rebecca and I talked about how he ordered the destruction of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem in the tenth century.”
“Okay. He’s the one I want. Anything more about him?”
Jack thought for a moment. “Odd behavior. Took to wandering alone at night in the desert, disappearing for days on end. Murdered, I think.”
“And what do you know about the Cairo Geniza?”
Jack stared at her. “Arguably the greatest treasure ever found in Egypt, greater even than Howard Carter’s discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb.”
Hiebermeyer shot bolt upright. “You’re treading on thin ice there, Jack. Very thin ice.”
Jack grinned at him. “I thought that would get you going. Intellectually, I meant. Tut’s tomb may have contained the greatest physical treasure, but the Geniza has drawn us into the detail of the past like no other archaeological find except perhaps Pompeii and Herculaneum. And studying it hasn’t been just a matter of cataloguing and conservation, but immediately involved some of the greatest scholars of recent times, not just of Jewish religion and literature but also of medieval history and historiography, of the very meaning of history and why we study it.”
Costas peered at Jack. “You’d better fill me in, Jack.”
“Genizot were the storerooms in synagogues where worn-out sacred writings were deposited. In Jewish tradition any sacred or liturgical writing in Hebrew was considered the word of God and therefore couldn’t be thrown away, but the Cairo Geniza was unusual in containing a huge amount of other material related to the medieval Jewish community in Egypt as well. It was found in the Ben Ezra synagogue in Fustat, the Old City of Cairo, the synagogue of the Palestinian Jews. When the Ben Ezra Geniza was opened up in the late nineteenth century, the bulk of it — over two hundred thousand fragments — was shipped to Cambridge under the care of Solomon Schechter, reader in rabbinical studies at the university. I was fortunate to be able to study the archive firsthand when I was researching for my doctorate. I was looking at Jewish involvement in maritime trade in the Indian Ocean.”
Aysha peered at him. “So you’ll know that it also contains a huge amount of incidental detail on early medieval Cairo, and not just on Jewish life.”
“ ‘The unconsidered trifles that make up history,’ as one Geniza scholar put it,” Jack said.
“Including references to the caliphs, and to ancient parts of Cairo that have since been demolished or lie buried beneath the modern city.”
“Where are you heading with this, Aysha? Fustat was the main settlement of Cairo when the Fatimids arrived from Tunisia to take over control of Egypt, and much of the Geniza dates to about the time of Al-Hakim and the two centuries or so that followed. Is that the connection?”
“I don’t want to tell you more now because what we’ve found is being translated as we speak. You need to see it for yourself at the actual place where it was discovered. Today may well be our last chance. Cairo is still open to us, but a midnight curfew has already been imposed, and the city will very likely be a no-go zone within days. I’ve arranged for transport to get us there this evening.”
Jack thought for a moment. “All right. If you think it’ll be a good use of my time here. The clock’s ticking.”
“Believe me, it will.”
Hiebermeyer gestured down the corridor. “Before you go, there’s another friend here who wants to see you. A genius-level physicist with a penchant for computer simulation and Egyptology.”
“Uh-oh,” Costas said, raising his eyes theatrically. “Here we go.”
“What on earth is Lanowski doing here?” Jack asked.
“He flew in from Seaquest late last night. You know that Seaquest is still over the wreck of the Beatrice off Spain? They were making the final preparations for raising the sarcophagus of Menkaure, but there’s been some kind of hitch. He’s come to consult Costas.”
Jack nodded. “I know Captain Macalister’s been trying to get in touch with me. Costas took the call before we came in.”
Costas grinned. “Lanowski comes all the way across the Mediterranean to consult with me? We must really be friends.”
“You and me both,” Hiebermeyer said. “His brain is like an analog of ancient Egypt. Every measurement, angle, and coordinate is in there. I can’t keep up with him.”
Jack pursed his lips. “They weren’t supposed to raise the sarcophagus without me being there. I don’t like being out of the loop.”