“I’m not the first one to have these ideas. You ever heard of Hiwi al-Bakhi?”
Jack was glued to the screen, but nodded. “His name means the Bactrian Heretic, a medieval Jewish dissenter from ancient Bactria, modern Afghanistan. He openly criticized the Hebrew Bible for lack of clarity and contradictions, and for representing God as inconsistent and capricious. His writing was another great discovery in the Cairo Geniza.”
“Well, he also tried to debunk the supernatural. For him, the parting of the Red Sea was a matter of the water ebbing and flowing, something he’s probably seen in the huge tidal flows on the shores of the Indian Ocean. He wasn’t to know that the Gulf of Suez doesn’t have much tide, nor does it have tidal flats like those he might have seen off India, but I like his way of thinking.”
“A rationalist like you, Jacob.”
“There’s something else that’s very interesting about Hiwi, Jack. Dillen and I talked about it too. His sect was so intent on cleansing Jewish religion and starting afresh that they wanted to change the Sabbath from Sunday to Wednesday, the day in Genesis when the sun was created. The sun, Jack. Does that ring any bells? We thought of Akhenaten and Moses together in the desert, and the revelation of the one god, the Aten. Akhenaten too was seeking a cleansing of the old religions, a return to a purer notion of deity, a rejection of gods who had become too anthropomorphic and displayed the human traits that Hiwi lamented in the God of the Bible. Maybe we should expect these periodic attempts at cleansing in the history of religion, but maybe too we should be looking for continuity, for a memory preserved even in Hiwi’s time of that foundation event in the desert almost two thousand years before. Egypt has had its takeovers — the Greeks, the Romans, the Muslims — and cultural destruction like the loss of the Alexandria library, but it never suffered the utter devastation of so many other regions, the sweeping away of its culture and people. And for the Jewish people, their history is all about maintenance of the tradition, isn’t it? That’s the biggest lesson of the Cairo Geniza, that it’s about continuity, not change.”
Jack nodded. “Even dissent like Hiwi’s became part of the Jewish intellectual tradition, one of debate rather than persecution, ensuring that inquiring minds were not stifled in the way they have been in so many other religions.”
Costas looked at Lanoswki. “I’d no idea you were also something of a rabbi, Jacob. A real multitasker.”
“ ‘Happy is the man who meditates on wisdom and occupies himself with understanding.’ That’s from Ben Ezra. My parents were Ukrainian Jews who were smuggled out of Europe just before the Second World War. All the rest of my family — my grandparents, my uncles and aunts — died in the Holocaust. Both my grandfathers had been rabbinical scholars, and my parents hoped that I’d follow the same route.”
“Is that how you got interested in Egyptology?” Jack asked.
Lanowski nodded. “I always wanted to know the specific identity of Pharaoh in the Bible. It annoyed me that he was unnamed, as if he’s the one and only pharaoh, but then I realized there was something special about him. Being part of your team in the quest for Akhenaten is fulfilling a childhood dream, Jack. I’m grateful to you.”
“We’ve got a good way to go yet.”
Lanowski turned to Costas. “And now about the theory of relativity. Funny you should mention that. As it happens, I do have a niggle with the space-time continuum model. It’s…well,” he chuckled, “wrong.” He suddenly looked deadly serious. “I mean, wrong.” He whipped his portable blackboard from beside the desk, picked up a piece of chalk, and scribbled a formula. “It’s like this.”
Costas immediately took Lanowski’s hand and steered the board back down to the floor. “Not now, Jacob. That’s too big even for IMU. Save it for the Nobel Prize committee. Jack has got to go. He’s meeting Aysha and Maria in Cairo this evening. And I need to get back on the phone to Macalister on Seaquest.”
Lanowski looked crestfallen, but then brightened up. “Anything comes up out there, you let me know.”
“Come again?”
“Boots on the ground. Jack and Costas stuff.” He pointed meaningfully at his gear. “You need help, I’m good to go.”
Costas nodded slowly. “I can see that. Good to go.”
Jack stared at him. “Thanks for the offer, Jacob. We’ll let you know. Meanwhile, get this written up so I can send it to the board along with Costas’ photos of the chariots for the press release. It’ll make a fantastic mix of hard data and speculation.”
Lanowski looked dumbfounded. “Where’s the speculation, Jack? From where I see it, there’s only hard data.”
Jack grinned, and slapped him on the shoulder. “Of course. Only hard data. Brilliant work, Jacob.”
Just over four hours later, Jack jumped out of the institute’s Land Rover and hurried after Aysha under the medieval wall into the ancient compound of Fustat. He was thankful to be in the old part of Cairo, away from the din and congestion of the modern city. The drive from Alexandria had been hampered by a seemingly endless succession of police roadblocks and checkpoints. It was already almost nine in the evening, just over three hours to curfew. The Institute of Archaeology logo in Arabic on the Land Rover had eased them through a few sticky checkpoints, but they knew that once the police had been ousted by the extremists, then any Western affiliation, in Arabic or otherwise, would become a liability. Earlier, while they had been in Alexandria, Aysha had not wanted to depress Hiebermeyer any further by dwelling on the political situation, but in the Land Rover she had told Jack that she believed a coup in Cairo was now a near certainty. The moderate Islamist regime that had replaced the pro-Western government a few months ago was never going to work, with policies that satisfied nobody. The decision of the new minister of culture and his antiquities director to shut down foreign excavations had not been enough for the extremists, but they had been too much for Western governments, which had begun to withdraw financial aid in protest. Increasingly the new regime was being seen as a prop that had been engineered all along by the extremists, a stepping-stone to their own imminent takeover. The regime was filled with petty tyrants such as the new antiquities director, who had jumped eagerly on the bandwagon without realizing that the extremists who had opened the door for them would also be their nemesis in the aftermath of a coup.
As they drove into the city, Aysha had been concerned by the absence of gunfire or signs of demonstrations, routine features of Cairo life for months now. The extremist thugs who had battled the pro-democracy demonstrators had seemingly disappeared into the night, leaving the squares festooned with banners but strangely empty of protesters. It had seemed ominous, like a lull before a storm. Reports had come through on the radio of convoys of “specials,” pickup trucks with mounted machine guns, breaking through the border from Sudan virtually unopposed by the Egyptian police or army. The presence of extremist training camps to the south had been an open secret for some time, and now they were seen for what they were: staging posts for a terrorist invasion of Egypt, taking up where their forebears had been forced to leave off after Kitchener’s defeat of the Mahdi army at Omdurman in 1898. Those events of more than a century ago had come back to haunt the world. The slaughter at Omdurman, and Kitchener’s desecration of the Mahdi’s tomb in revenge for the death of General Gordon, had been barely remembered in the West, eclipsed by the horrors of the twentieth century. Yet for the extremists they were still as fresh as if they had happened yesterday. The smell of the blood of Omdurman and the sight of the Mahdi’s paraded remains were embedded in their collective memory and were stoking the fires of hate. Jack and Costas had been on the edge of that tidal wave of extremism in Sudan a few months ago, and now Jack knew they had been lucky to get out when they did. If Aysha was right, that wave was coming at them again, a matter of days at most before Cairo was overrun, with the Egyptian army officer corps infiltrated by sympathizers and the extremist leaders calling for the mass desertion of conscript soldiers. She was convinced that this evening would be their last chance in Cairo, and they needed to make the most of the few hours that lay ahead of them now.