Costas stuffed some fish into his mouth and waved dismissively. “It’s only a scratch. I can take this thing off tonight.”
“It’s just that I was wondering…”
“Yes?”
“You ready to dive tomorrow?”
Costas took another huge swig of beer, swallowed noisily, and slapped Jack on the back, grinning broadly. “What do you think? Those are the best words I’ve heard all day. I can’t wait.”
Author’s Note
When the power of Carthage flourished, Hanno sailed round from Cadiz to the extremity of Arabia, and published a memoir of his voyage, as did Himilco when he was dispatched at the same date to explore the outer coasts of Europe.
The kernel of this novel came early in my career as an archaeologist when I was standing beside the ancient harbor of Carthage in Tunisia, having just come up from a dive to examine the submerged remains located a few meters offshore. A year earlier, exploring underground passageways near Temple Mount in Jerusalem, I had wondered whether any of the treasures concealed at the time of the Babylonian conquest in the early sixth century BC might still be there, and afterward I had gone down to the Mediterranean coast of Israel to dive at the old Phoenician port of Caesarea Maritima. At Carthage, nothing remains above ground of the early Phoenician settlement, but excavations since the 1970s have revealed much of later Punic date — Punic being the term the Romans used for the Carthaginians — that allowed me to envisage the city at the time of the Babylonian conquest of the Holy Land by Nebuchadnezzar.
Nowhere in Carthage is the Punic past more visible than in the harbors, their landlocked form strikingly reminiscent of the harbor of Carthage’s mother city of Tire in modern Lebanon. Not far from where I was standing was the Tophet, the supposed site of Carthaginian child sacrifice, another tangible link to the old world of Phoenicia and Canaan, to the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac. I began to wonder about the strength of the connection in the sixth century BC of Carthage with old Phoenicia, and by extension with the kingdom of Judah. After Tire and the other ports of Phoenicia had been subjugated by the Babylonians, and with Carthage in the ascendancy — and home of the greatest navigators of the day, men such as Hanno and Himilco — could it have been to Carthage that the Israelites turned to safeguard their treasures? Could the greatest treasure of them all, Aron Habberit, the Ark of the Covenant, have been spirited away by Carthaginian mariners on an incredible journey to a far-distant place, to await the time of revelation prophesied in the Old Testament?
The appearance of the Ark of the Covenant is well known from the account in the Book of Exodus (25:10–22) quoted at the beginning of this novel. Another biblical source is the Second Book of Maccabees, accepted as part of the canon by the Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox churches (though not in the Jewish or Protestant traditions); in it we read of Jeremiah on a mountain putting the Ark inside a “cave-dwelling,” and then sealing up the entrance (2 Maccabees 2:5). There is no mention of the Ark in surviving ancient secular literature, for example by the Roman encyclopedist Pliny the Elder, and all modern discussion must therefore rest solely on the biblical accounts.
The plausibility of the Ark as an actual ancient artifact was given sharp focus by the 1922 discovery in Tutankhamun’s tomb of the Anubis Shrine, a gilded portable chest bearing close similarities to the description of the Ark and dating from the same period — especially if, as I suggest in my novel Pyramid, the biblical Exodus did indeed take place at the time of Akhenaten, Tutankhamun’s immediate predecessor. One oft-cited difference, between the seated dog Anubis on the chest and the two golden kerubim of the Ark, who “spread out their wings on high… with their faces one to the other” (Exodus 25:18–21), may arise from a mistranslation. The word “cherub” in Western art, referring to an angelic child, appears to derive from a rabbinic tradition that defined the ancient Hebrew word kerubim as “like a child.” However, the word at the time of the Old Testament most probably referred to the lion or bull with wings and a human face commonly represented in ancient Middle Eastern art, and appearing in Egypt as the sphinx. The seated Anubis dog and the kerubim may therefore have been similar in appearance, and served a similar protective function over the contents of the box — sacred funerary equipment in the case of the former, the testament of the Ten Commandments in the latter.
If such an artifact, modeled on Egyptian processional chests familiar to the Israelites, did indeed survive the ravages of Nebuchadnezzar, then its whereabouts since the sixth century BC remains a mystery. One theory, associating the Ark with the Lemba people of South Africa, who claim to have carried the ngoma lungundu, “the voice of God,” to a mountain hideaway, may be given weight by a similarity in genetic signature between the Lemba and peoples of known Semitic origins, and by the similarity of some practices and beliefs among the Lemba with those of Judaism. A more deep-rooted tradition places the Ark in Ethiopia, where the Ethiopian Orthodox Church claims that it is kept in the Chapel of the Tablet at the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion in Axum. For the guardian priests of Temple Mount in the early sixth century BC, hemmed in on all sides and with the Babylonians at the gate, the lands south of Egypt might have seemed the best bet for concealing their treasures, away from Babylonian raiders yet within reach of future recovery when the time was right — the “promised land” that was to become the early Christian Kingdom of Axum, flanked to the south by nearly impenetrable mountains that might have provided just the kind of cave refuge for the Ark described in the Second Book of Maccabees.
If such a scenario is correct, then a decision by the priests of Jerusalem not to send their greatest treasure on the perilous overland trip south, fraught with the possibility of brigandage and capture, but instead to use the much longer sea route across the Mediterranean and around Africa, may have been spurred by the greater security offered by their Punic kinsmen in Carthage — masters of sea trade at that time, and expert handlers of cargo — and by the recent success of Phoenician navigators in completing a circumnavigation of Africa. According to Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BC, the Egyptian pharaoh Necho ordered a Phoenician crew to “sail round and return to Egypt and the Mediterranean by way of the Pillars of Hercules,” the Strait of Gibraltar (Histories, 4:42). Necho ruled c.610–595 BC, so that voyage may have taken place only a few years before Nebuchadnezzar captured Jerusalem. The success of those Phoenicians may have led Hanno of Carthage to attempt his own circumnavigation in the other direction, counterclockwise, at the same time that Himilco set off toward the British Isles. Dating these famous voyages of discovery to the early sixth century BC is consistent with Carthage suddenly being thrust into the limelight as the new center of the Phoenician world, both for those already settled in the western Mediterranean and for their kinsmen fleeing the Babylonians, and with the need for Carthaginian traders to assert their dominance over sea routes leading beyond the Strait of Hercules, to the north as well as to the south.
The oldest surviving version of Hanno’s Periplus is a tenth-century copy of a Greek text in the Codex Palatinus Graecus in Heidelberg University Library. The original Punic account is said in the introduction to have been inscribed on tablets hung up in the temple of “Chronos,” a Greek rendition of a Punic god and probably referring to the temple of Ba’al Hammon at Carthage. The idea that Hanno did indeed complete the circumnavigation — the Heidelberg Periplus, which may be incomplete, has him abruptly turning back somewhere near modern Senegal — derives from Pliny’s assertion that he sailed from Cadiz to the “extreme part of Arabia” (Natural History, 2:169). Pliny, writing in the first century AD, probably had access to an early Greek or Latin translation of the Periplus, perhaps one made after the Roman capture of Carthage in 146 BC. He himself reveals that the tablets were still there to be seen at that date in his other famous reference to Hanno’s voyage — his assertion that the skins of the females he calls “Gorgons,” the gorillae of the Greek version (a word perhaps taken verbatim from the original Punic inscription, and of southern African origin), were hung up in a temple “to prove his story and as a curious exhibit,” and were still there when Romans captured Carthage (Natural History, 6:200).