Jack stared at her. “Can you pinpoint the place?”
“Absolutely. It covers the ancient mountaintop plateau of Magdala, where the Ethiopian King Theodore had his last stand against the British when they invaded Abyssinia in 1868 to rescue those European hostages. You should know about that, Dad.”
“I certainly do. Our ancestor the Royal Engineers colonel inherited a box with some material relating to the campaign from a fellow officer in India. My father only told me about it just before he died, in a long list of other family documents he hadn’t had time to catalog. Apparently there’s a handwritten diary and some kind of fabric, a piece of tapestry or something brought back from the campaign. The archive’s been in disarray over the last few years, with the new building at the campus under construction, but maybe now’s the time for me to delve into it. My father always told me they weren’t just fighting a war, but were on the trail of biblical antiquities.”
“Another thing puzzles me, though,” Rebecca said. “I get why Hanno might have abbreviated his story when he got back to Carthage. He was probably under strict orders from the magistrates or whoever to keep quiet about his circumnavigation. Who knows what gold and other riches might lie in East Africa. But why then should he give the game away in a plaque he erects at the Cape, saying exactly where he’s going?”
“He would have been in a different mindset then,” Costas said. “That plaque reads almost like a last journal entry—‘We were fifty ships, now we’re one.’ I went round the Cape several times when I was in the navy, and I can tell you that the proposition in a simple square-rigged sailing ship would be little short of terrifying. He didn’t know whether he’d make it back. Revealing trade secrets was the last thing on his mind. At the Cape, faced with the fearful prospect ahead, all that mattered was to leave something that showed his achievement, and perhaps a waymarker for those who might have followed to find out what had happened to him.”
“What happened to his cargo, you mean,” Jack said. “‘The appointed place’ shows that whoever had entrusted him with this cargo had a fixed destination in mind, the mountain called the Chariot of Fire.”
“If that was in Ethiopia, it wasn’t entirely off the ancient map, was it?” Rebecca said. “The Egyptians knew of the Land of Punt to the south, and explorers seeking ivory and precious metals must have known about the rich wildlife and the gold to be found in the Ethiopian highlands. Perhaps someone had a treasure they wanted spirited away, to some hiding place at the edge of the known world but not beyond the bounds of recovery.”
“And important enough to send it on a voyage all the way around the continent of Africa to get there,” Costas said.
Jack gazed at the pictogram of the two men with the box. An idea was forming in his mind, something almost too incredible to contemplate. “The early sixth century was a very unsettled time in the Middle East, in the Holy Land,” he said. “Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon had conquered the old Phoenician lands of Canaan, and Carthage had become the new capital of the Phoenician world. It’s exactly the time you would expect navigators like Hanno and Himilco to be sent on great voyages of exploration to the west, to assert Carthaginian dominance over a new world where they would not have to contend with the ancient powers of the Middle East, a region as intractable then as it is now.”
“And Nebuchadnezzar did something else, didn’t he, Dad?” Rebecca said quietly, eyeing him. “Remember, I worked at Temple Mount in Jerusalem last year, and we were digging through those layers. He destroyed the Temple, and forced the Jews into exile. Something went missing, didn’t it? A great treasure, the greatest, most sacred treasure of the Jews. So here’s what I’m thinking. With the Phoenicians fleeing their homeland for Carthage, who better for their kin in Judah to entrust their treasure to than the greatest navigators of the world, men like Hanno, who might take it safely away from the cauldron of the Middle East and on an extraordinary voyage to that appointed place, somewhere for it to remain concealed until the time was right for its recovery.”
Jack stared at the pictogram, his mind racing, and Jeremy looked at him. “I think we need to examine Costas’s sherd now.”
Costas leaned forward eagerly. “Can you read it?”
Jeremy picked it up and angled it into the light. “The inscription has been scratched into the outside of the sherd, hastily but decisively,” he said. “There’s no doubt the language is Phoenician, of the same time period as the painted sherds from the wreck and the plaque. It has the same toppled letter A, among other similarities.”
“Another reference to the contents of the amphoras, like the painted inscriptions?” Costas suggested.
Jeremy shook his head emphatically. “The markings on those amphoras had been put on where they were filled or at the wharfside. As a result, where we’ve got broken sherds with those markings, from amphoras that shattered during the wrecking, they’re like a jigsaw puzzle, with each sherd only containing part of an inscription. Your sherd is completely different, unique on the wreck so far. It’s a complete inscription, squeezed into the available space, scratched on a sherd that was already broken. It was made by someone who had picked up a broken sherd and used whatever he had to hand, a ring or a knife perhaps.”
Jack took the sherd from Jeremy, inspecting it. “The odd amphora might shatter in the normal course of a voyage, creating a mess that might be swept into the scuppers. But I don’t think that accounts for this sherd. On a voyage such as this one, with the cargo needing to be stowed as well as possible to avoid breakage, with everything needing to be battened down and shipshape, any breakages would have been cleared overboard. And with the presentation of the cargo being of prime importance for trade, the last thing they would want would be to invite merchants on board to see stinking, messy scuppers. So my money is on this sherd being from an amphora that shattered in the final lead-up to the wrecking.”
“That’s consistent with the poor quality of the incisions,” Jeremy replied, taking the sherd back and pointing at it. “They look as if they were scratched by someone being thrown violently about, who maybe knew they weren’t going to make it.”
“A message in a bottle,” Rebecca said.
Jeremy nodded. “That fits with what the inscription actually says.”
Jack leaned forward. “Go on.”
Jeremy placed the sherd in the center of the table, pointing as he spoke. “It contains ten words, in four lines. The first word is ‘Chimilkat,’ evidently the name of the writer. The second word means ‘made this,’ like the Latin fecit. So that first line reads ‘Chimilkat wrote this.’”
Jack stared, stunned. “You sure of that name?”
“You can read it for yourself.”
“Chimilkat is the Phoenician name that the Greeks rendered as Himilco.”
“Correct.”
Costas looked at them. “Himilco the Navigator?”
Jeremy pointed at the sherd again. “The second line also contains two words. The first means ‘go round,’ but in a specific nautical sense, ‘circumnavigate.’ The second is the Phoenician spelling of the word we know from Greek as Cassiterides, the British Isles. So that line means ‘circumnavigated the Cassiterides.’”