“‘Himilco, who wrote this, circumnavigated the British Isles,’” Costas said.
“That’s amazing enough,” Jeremy said. “But the third line says something truly astonishing. The same word for ‘circumnavigate’ appears, though with a suffix indicating a future sense, something that will happen. There are two other words you might recognize from the plaque, the word for Africa and, amazingly, the word for Chariot of Fire, the mountain. Then there’s a name, barely visible, and another word.”
Jack picked up the sherd and angled it again for a better view. “My God,” he said quietly. “It’s Hanno.”
“And the last word in the line signifies their relationship. They’re brothers.”
Costas translated again. “‘Himilco, who wrote this, circumnavigated the British Isles. Hanno, his brother, has gone to circumnavigate Africa, to the Chariot of Fire.’”
“And now to the pictogram at the end, and the two words below,” Jeremy said. “The pictogram is clear enough, but it must have been incised in his final moments. One slash becomes a gouge that trails off to the bottom of the sherd, as if it were done at the moment the ship struck.”
“It’s very moving,” Rebecca said. “Two brothers, half a world apart, sending the same message to the world, both under duress. Hanno punches that pictogram into a bronze plaque at the Cape of Good Hope, as if to make absolutely sure that any who might follow him would know his purpose. He may not have been facing the same immediate terror as Himilco, but he must have wondered whether he would survive. For Himilco that pictogram is the last thing he’ll ever inscribe, and he knows it. Leaving that message for posterity is the uppermost thing in his mind. Whatever it represents, it must have been something incredibly important. And he’s thinking of his brother in his final moments.”
Jeremy nodded and leaned forward intently, staring at Jack. “And now the final two words. Prepare yourself for one of the most extraordinary revelations of your archaeological career.”
11
Jack felt his pulse quicken as he peered at the ancient potsherd, watching Jeremy trace the faint remains of the inscription with his finger. He cleared his throat and looked up at Jack, his face flushed with excitement. “The two words below the pictogram are ‘Aron Habberit,’ the same in Phoenician as in Hebrew.”
“Aron Habberit,” Jack repeated, his voice taut with excitement. “The Ark of the Covenant, the Ark of the Testimony. Well I’ll be damned. That makes absolute sense of the pictogram.”
Costas leaned back, closed his eyes and began to recite. “‘And Bezalel made the ark of acacia wood; two cubits and a half was the length of it, and a cubit and a half the breadth of it, and a cubit and a half the height of it: and he overlaid it with pure gold within and without, and made a crown of gold to it round about. And he cast for it four rings of gold, in the four feet thereof; even two rings on the one side of it, and two rings on the other side of it. And he made staves of acacia wood, and overlaid them with gold. And he put the staves into the rings on the sides of the ark, to bear the ark.’”
“The Old Testament Book of Exodus, chapter 37, verses 1 to 5,” Jeremy said. “Well remembered.”
“The benefits of a strict Greek Orthodox upbringing,” Costas said. “The only things that really interested me were the stories of treasure, and I memorized them. I’d wanted to find the Ark of the Covenant way before I first met Jack. This is incredibly exciting.”
Jeremy tapped on his laptop, opening a black-and-white photo and swiveling it round so that they could all see. “Recognize that?”
“The treasury in the tomb of Tutankhamun, as it looked just after Howard Carter stepped inside in 1923,” Rebecca said. “That’s the so-called Anubis shrine, made of gilded acacia wood, the wood that the Israelites called shittim, with carrying poles almost three meters long. The shrine is corniced, decorated on the sides like a palace facade covered with hieroglyphic text, and on top there’s that frightening live-sized statue of Anubis, canine god of the dead and guardian of the burial chamber and the pharaoh’s canopic equipment. That’s what was found inside the shrine: sacred materials and equipment used in the mummification process. It was really a kind of portable treasury.”
“You really know your Egyptology,” Jeremy said.
“I’ve spent a lot of time with Maurice and Aysha. Being with Maurice is like living inside a virtual museum of ancient Egypt.”
Jeremy cleared his throat. “I’ve put this image up because the Anubis shrine is the closest we have archaeologically to the description of the Ark of the Covenant. There are a lot of obvious similarities, including the box-like shape, the gilded wooden construction and the carrying poles. They’re of very similar date as well, if we follow Maurice in believing that the Pharaoh of the Book of Exodus is Akhenaten, the likely father of Tutankhamun.”
Costas looked at him quizzically. “So what you’re suggesting is that when the Israelites came to think of a sacred box for the tablet of the Commandments, they had an obvious model in the type of shrine they would have seen being carried around in processions in Egypt.”
“Precisely,” Jeremy said. “Many of the Israelites of the Exodus had probably been in Egypt for generations, and as slaves, their own material culture would have been very sparse. Even though they may have despised Egyptian religion and the pharaohs, when it came to conceiving of a receptacle, their imaginations would have been fueled by the treasures they had seen around them in Egypt.”
“There’s another factor, something that Maurice always talks about,” Rebecca added. “Look at how we use the words. When we call a box a shrine, we give it extra stature, extra strength, the power to protect what’s inside. In the case of the Anubis shrine, it was the sacred canopic equipment; in the case of the Ark, it was the two stone plaques inscribed with the Ten Commandments. The Egyptians were past masters at invoking everything they could to protect their sacred objects. Anubis was the black dog of everyone’s nightmares. In that photo you can still see the shroud that was found covering the dog’s body, probably one of several that would have covered the head as well. People knew what lay beneath, they feared it, but they were probably told that to remove the shroud would be to bring down the wrath of the god upon them. The figures on top of the Ark in the biblical account, the so-called cherubim, probably a pair of winged lion-bodied creatures like the sphinx, had much the same function, and the Ark was also meant to be covered with shrouds or skins in a way that sounds very similar.”
“The Book of Numbers, chapter 4,” Costas said. “The Ark was to be covered with skins and a blue cloth, and to touch it was to die.”
“Rebecca’s right,” Jack said. “Maurice and I often argue about the extent of Egyptian influence in the ancient Mediterranean, but in this case I agree with him. At the time when Egypt had its greatest involvement in ancient Mediterranean trade, during the New Kingdom in the late second millenium BC, the time of the Exodus, we should expect to see Egyptian artifacts being copied by other peoples. And remember how close Phoenicia was to Judah, geographically as well as culturally. The Phoenician god Ba’al Hammon had similarities with the early Judaean God, and we know that the concept of one overarching deity may be closely associated with the cult of the sun god Aten under Akhenaten. Even the western Phoenicians would have felt this influence. Hanno and Himilco would have been closely connected with the Phoenician homeland, and as we’ve seen from our wreck find of elephant ivory, they may even have traveled up the Nile themselves in search of trade goods. To me it’s no surprise that when they come to inscribe a pictogram of the Ark, it looks very like an Egyptian hieroglyph, partly because the Ark itself is an Egyptian form.”