Jack leaned forward, tense with anticipation. “All right. Show us what you’ve got. The plaque first.”
Jeremy slid the envelope toward him. “That contains a sharpened still from your helmet video inside Clan Macpherson, along with my translation. Remember what we were saying about Hanno the Carthaginian, whether or not he circumnavigated Africa? Prepare to be amazed.”
10
Jack stared in astonishment at the photograph that Jeremy had put in front of him, showing the bronze plaque from Clan Macpherson in the upper part and Jeremy’s translation below. “Are you certain about this?” he asked, rereading the text, hardly daring to believe what was before his eyes.
“Absolutely,” Jeremy replied. “It’s the early Punic alphabet, pretty well identical to Phoenician from the Levant, the text reading from right to left. You can see the early form of the Punic letter A, toppled over on one side. There’s no chance of this being some kind of forgery, because there are distinctive features of the letters bet, tet, and mem, the equivalent of the Greek beta, theta, and mu, that are only found elsewhere on the potsherd inscriptions from our Phoenician wreck, and we know from the Lydian coins and the datable Greek painted pottery in the cargo that our wreck sherds date to the early sixth century BC. We’ve run a thorough paleographic comparison between the early alphabetic letters on the plaque and those on the wreck inscriptions, and have concluded beyond doubt that they are contemporaneous. Both the plaque and the wreck date to the most likely time period of Hanno and Himilco’s voyages, about the 590s or 580s BC.”
Jack slowly read out Jeremy’s translation: “‘Hanno the Carthaginian affixed this at the southernmost point of the Libyan regions beyond the Pillars of Hercules, having commanded fifty ships and now only having one, before setting off up the far shore with his cargo to the appointed place at the mountain called the Chariot of Fire. To Ba’al Hammon he dedicates this plaque.’”
Jeremy leaned over and pointed at the photo. “And then there’s that symbol crudely stamped at the end, looking like an Egyptian hieroglyph of two stick-figure men carrying a box on poles between them. It’s a pictogram, certainly. I haven’t yet asked Maurice if he’s seen one like it in Egypt, but will do so now that his excavation at Carthage is coming to a close and he’ll have more time to check for comparisons.”
“That’s exactly what I found on my potsherd,” Costas said. “I think Jenny from the conservation tent has just left it outside.” He got up, hurried out of the tent and came back moments later carrying a bucket full of water. He reached in and pulled out an amphora sherd, carefully patting it on his shirt and placing it on the table between them. “You can see that the letters are scratched, not painted, so that’s one difference from the other amphora inscriptions. But if you look carefully, you can just make out that pictogram among the scratchings. You see?”
Jeremy pushed up his glasses, leaned forward and peered at it. He looked up, staring into the middle distance, and then looked down again. “My God,” he said quietly.
“Let’s deal with the plaque first,” Jack said, still focused on the photograph. “Have you got the text of the Periplus of Hanno to hand?”
Jeremy cleared his throat, still gazing at the sherd. “Yes, of course.” He turned to his laptop, tapped the screen and swiveled it toward Jack. “The Heidelberg manuscript.”
“It mentions a mountain called Chariot of the Gods, toward the end.”
Jeremy nodded. “Here it is: ‘And we sailed along with all speed, being stricken by fear. After a journey of four days, we saw the land at night covered with flames. And in the midst there was one lofty fire, greater than the rest, which seemed to touch the stars. By day this was seen to be a very high mountain, called Chariot of the Gods.’”
Jack looked at him. “Could Chariot of the Gods and Chariot of Fire be the same thing?”
“I’m certain of it. Remember, the Heidelberg text is a copy made more than fifteen hundred years after the event of a Greek translation that may itself have been copied from earlier translations, each time offering the possibility of mistakes and corruption. ‘Chariot of the Lord’ or ‘Chariot of God’ is most familiar as the translation from Hebrew into Greek of the conveyance in which the Israelite God appears in the Old Testament Book of Ezekiel. It’s possible that the monks in the scriptorium, steeped in the Bible, would have seen the Greek word for ‘chariot’ and inserted the familiar biblical phrase, restricting reference to fire to the other fiery images in that passage. But with the evidence of the plaque, in Phoenician and dating to the time of Hanno, we can be certain that the original phrase was the one that I translate as ‘Chariot of Fire.’”
“There is a geographical problem, though,” Jack said, thinking hard. “In the Heidelberg text, the chariot appears on the west coast of Africa, just before the land of the gorillas. The image of rivers of fire is usually equated with an active volcano that Hanno must have seen in the region of modern Senegal. And yet the text in the plaque indicates that it was set up hundreds of miles to the south, at the Cape of Good Hope, and that the chariot lay ahead of them, somewhere up the east coast of Africa.”
“That’s why the plaque is a game-changer,” Jeremy said, talking intently. “It suggests that the fiery passage in the Heidelberg text is a conflation, combining the Senegal volcano with something awesome to come, something that Hanno chose not to present accurately when he returned to Carthage and composed his Periplus.”
Jack nodded slowly. “And yet something he could use to embellish his description of the volcanic region, making it seem even more terrifying, even more as if anyone traveling there would be transgressing in the realm of the gods.”
“Exactly.” Jeremy turned to Rebecca. “Earlier you mentioned the idea of trade secrets, of the explorers extolling their achievements but being careful not to give away too much, to make sure they were not providing a route map for their rivals. Well, here I think we have evidence that the Heidelberg Periplus is a truncated version of the truth, one that Hanno himself connived in, making a decision not to tell the full story when he came to present it to the world on his return to Carthage.”
“How then do you account for Pliny’s assertion that he did reach Arabia?” Rebecca said.
Jeremy shrugged. “Perhaps several of his sailors survive with him, and they can’t keep their mouths shut. Perhaps Hanno himself lives to old age, when he no longer has anything to lose, and it becomes important for him to tell the truth of his achievement, to keep the names of Hanno and Himilco high in the annals of exploration. The tablets of the Periplus remain unaltered, sacrosanct in the temple of Ba’al Hammon, but rumor spreads, soon becoming a fixed truth among Carthaginian mariners, men who would have revered the memory of Hanno, just as later ones did Vasco da Gama or Captain Cook. When the Romans sack Carthage, the story is still there, surviving with enough authority for Pliny to present it as fact in his Natural History.”
Costas put up his hand. “But I see another problem. There’s nothing volcanic up the east coast of Africa that would fit the description.”
Rebecca shook her head. “You don’t have to look for volcanoes. When I was in Ethiopia two years ago with my school group working for the aid agency, we used to get up at dawn to see the first light of the sun on the mountain ridges of the plateau. During the dry season, when the wind whips up the dust, it creates a dramatic light effect, a kind of ripple on the western horizon as the sun lights up the mountaintops. The ripple can be seen most clearly at a certain place where there’s a line of ridges angled northwest, so the sun progressively lights up the ridge from south to north over a span of several seconds. On a clear day, where you can see the distant mountains over the plain from the sea, I guess to an ancient sailor that might look like a chariot racing across the sky — a Chariot of Fire.”