“It must be an altar,” Jeremy said.
Rebecca nodded excitedly. “That’s what I thought. And if you look around you can see apertures and fissures in the walls that could have served as niches for displaying sacred objects. But what really made my heart leap was seeing a patch of the wall that had been plastered over, with plaster of exactly the same color and composition as the plaster that Wilson used to seal the rubble wall that he put in place in the tomb after he left this area for the last time.”
“Can you be certain he was here?” Jeremy asked.
Rebecca nodded vehemently. “This is where he found that piece of golden chariot decoration. I’m absolutely sure of it. I think he dug around in here and that’s all he found, perhaps concealed in one of those niches. But I’ve no doubt that three thousand years ago there were more — many more — artifacts of similar age and origin, all of them of sacred significance to the people who stored them here. This was their holy of holies.”
“What about the plaster?” Jack asked. “What did that conceal?”
She beckoned them over to the far side of the chamber as she lit up a polished section of wall about a meter wide and half a meter high. Jack could see that it was covered with several dozen lines of written inscription, the letters alphabetic but spidery and difficult to discern. “Fantastic,” he exclaimed. “I’ve seen something similar to this before, in the Istanbul Archaeological Museum, taken from Jerusalem when the Ottomans ruled Palestine. It was found in the Siloam Tunnel near the Gihon Spring.”
“Look closer, Dad.”
Jack made his way past the altar stone, and as he did so he saw something else on the stone, faint lines and symbols that appeared to underlie the inscription. He stared, hardly believing what he was seeing. “My God, Rebecca. Now I get it.”
“It’s the Aten sun symbol, the radiating arms,” Jeremy exclaimed, coming alongside.
“And the symbols at the bottom are hieroglyphic cartouches,” Rebecca said. “You can barely make them out, but I’m sure they’re identical to the groupings of symbols that Aysha showed me, one for Akhenaten and the other for Israelites.”
“Of course,” Jack murmured, looking around. “Of course.”
Jeremy peered closely at the words of the inscription. “It’s Palaeo-Hebrew,” he said. “That puts it before the Babylonian period, before Nebuchadnezzar conquered Jerusalem and destroyed the first temple in the early seventh century BC. I think I recognize some of the words, but I haven’t done Old Hebrew since I was an undergraduate. I’d need some time and some reference material.”
“Don’t worry, Jeremy. I’m one step ahead of you.” Rebecca turned to Jack. “I brought Danny in on this. When I found the inscription, all I recognized for certain was that sun symbol and the hieroglyphs, and I knew I was going to need someone else to translate it. Danny’s got a PhD from Chicago in Near Eastern archaeology, and he’s also a reserve captain in the Israeli Army intelligence corps. He knows perfectly well the need to keep this discovery absolutely secret until the time is right. He’s the reason I’ve felt confident that nobody else would follow us down here, and he’ll see that the entry tunnel from the tomb is completely sealed up after we leave.”
“Go on,” Jack said.
She pulled out her phone and opened up a paragraph of text. “First, the date. You’ve probably guessed it, but this inscription is much older than the Babylonian period. The Siloam Tunnel inscription is thought to date to the eighth century BC, but Danny thinks that ours might be even earlier, ninth or even tenth century BC, right at the beginning of the Iron Age and the inception of Hebrew script. The sun symbol and the hieroglyphs are part of an earlier inscription. Danny studied the wear and patination on the inscribed lines and reckons it could be two to three centuries earlier than the Palaeo-Hebrew writing, putting it close to the time of Akhenaten and the Exodus.”
“It’s like a palimpsest,” Jack said. “Like Yehuda Halevi’s letter that Maria and I found in the Geniza, written on a reused piece of vellum that preserved a shadow of the original text. Only here no attempt was made to erase the earlier inscription.”
Rebecca nodded. “The Siloam inscription was made to commemorate the joining up of two tunnels, part of a complex dug to improve access to the spring. As you’ll see, this inscription served a similar purpose. The tunnel we came in through was a later cutting into this chamber, and it continues on ahead of us to the east where it joins a natural fissure that must have been the original entrance from the surface when this was a holy place. The foreman of the tunnel gang may have chosen this slab simply because there’s no other suitable flat surface inside this chamber, so it was ready-made for a new inscription. The sun symbol and the hieroglyphs already there would probably have meant nothing to him, though as you’ll see there was a memory of the earlier significance of this place.”
Jeremy stared at the inscription. “I can see it now. There are numbers, cubits. And I recognize the word for water.”
“Here’s Danny’s translation.” Rebecca read out from her screen:
This is the way the tunnel was joined. As the men were wielding their pickaxes, each toward the other, and while there were yet three cubits to the breach, the foreman could see through an opening to the cavern ahead, and beyond it another tunnel. On the day of the breach, the men struck hard, pickax beside pickax, and broke through. Down below, the water flowed from the spring to the pool, a distance of one thousand cubits. In the cavern, one hundred and fifty cubits was the height of the rock above the men. I, Yeshua-hamin, foreman, made this with my team. In the days of the king Abdu-Heba, this was the place occupied by the prophet when he came from Egypt.
There was a stunned silence. “Incredible,” Jack said. “Are we really talking about Moses?”
“That’s what Danny thinks the word he translates as ‘prophet’ would have meant to people at the time.”
“Abdu-Heba,” Jeremy murmured. “Wasn’t he the king of Jerusalem at the time of the Amarna letters?”
“Precisely,” Rebecca said, her eyes lit with fervor. “The Amarna letters were cuneiform tablets found in Akhenaten’s capital that included an archive of correspondence from foreign rulers swearing allegiance to the pharaoh, and at least six of them are from Jerusalem. Listen to this one.” She read from her screen.
To the Pharaoh, my Lord, say: thus Abdu-Heba, your servant. At the two feet of my Lord, the Pharaoh, seven times and seven times more I fall. Behold, the Pharaoh has set his name in mât urusalim, the Land of Jerusalem, forever.
Rebecca looked up. “That’s Amarna Letter number 287, lines 60 to 64. The others are in a similar vein, obsequious, almost fawning, as if the pharaoh had threatened him. But why should the pharaoh have done so, to the extent that Abdu-Heba felt the need to swear allegiance over and over again?”
Jeremy looked at her. “The land of Canaan was a battleground for the Egyptians and the Assyrians and the Hittites, with citadels like Jerusalem acting as pawns for one side or another. Alliances with the big powers were the name of the game for a king like Abdu-Heba.”
“That may be true for the New Kingdom period in general,” Rebecca replied pensively. “But I’ve been listening to everything you guys have been saying about Akhenaten over the last couple of months. He bucks the trend. He’s not a bellicose pharaoh. He makes a halfhearted attempt to suppress a tribal rebellion in the southern desert, and he waves his hand in the direction of Assyria. His only fixed battle that we know of is his disastrous chariot charge against the Israelite encampment beside the Red Sea. Ramses the Great he definitely is not. So why pick on a relatively minor settlement in the Jordan Valley and insist that its ruler swear undying allegiance to him, over and over again?”