He knew what he was looking at even before she raised the blanket. It was the most extraordinary find made when the quarry was excavated. The St Vartan chapel ship graffito. It was a drawing of a ship, an ancient Roman merchantman, with words below. He knelt down, Costas beside him. He could see the lines of the drawing clearly now, crude but bold, the confident strokes of someone who knew what they were depicting, who got the details right even in this place so far from the sea. An experienced seafarer, a pilgrim, one of the first. Jack’s eyes strayed down from the drawing to the words below. Then he remembered. Suddenly his heart began to pound. He slowly read them out:
‘Of course,’ he whispered.
‘What is it?’ Costas asked.
‘It’s the same words as the inscription from California, from Everett’s painting.’ He glanced excitedly at Helena. ‘This is what you recognized in the photograph.’
‘That’s when I knew,’ she said. ‘It just had to be from here.’
‘Everett must have found this chamber, more than half a century before it was opened up and made into a chapel,’ Jack exclaimed, keeping his voice low. ‘He was here, right here where we are now. These words are the clue in his painting. Somehow, this stone’s the key to the whole thing.’
‘What’s your take on that ship, Jack?’ Helena said.
‘It’s Roman, certainly,’ Jack murmured, trying to control his excitement, narrowing his eyes. ‘High curving stern, reinforced gunwale, distinctive prow. A sailing ship, not an oared galley. The mast has been stepped down, which was done in harbours. It’s got double steering oars, and what looks like an artemon, a raking mast at the bow. All of that suggests a large ship. My guess is we’re looking at the kind of vessel that would have been seen in the harbour of Caesarea Maritima on the coast of Judaea, one of the grain carriers that stopped off there on the way north from Alexandria in Egypt before heading west for Rome. The kind of ship a Christian pilgrim from Rome might have taken back on its return voyage.’
‘Can you date it?’
‘I’d have said early Roman rather than late. If I’d seen this anywhere else, I’d have said first century AD. But in this place, the Holy Sepulchre, there’s hardly anything that’s been dated that early.’
‘The inscription was clearly done at the same time as the ship, the same width and style of line,’ Helena said. ‘But you’re the expert.’
‘Well, it’s Latin, which in this neck of the woods means no earlier than the first century AD, when the Romans arrived in Judaea. Beyond that it’s hard to say. The lettering style certainly could be first century.’
‘It’s usually translated as “Lord we shall go”, or “Let us go to the Lord”,’ Helena said. ‘Some scholars have associated it with the first verse of Psalm 122, one of the Songs of Degrees sung by pilgrims approaching Jerusalem. “I was glad when they said unto me, let us go unto the House of the Lord.”’
‘That doesn’t really help us pin the date down,’ Jack murmured. ‘The Psalms were originally Hebrew, and were probably chanted by the earliest Christians, here at the tomb and in other places where they gathered in the first years after the crucifixion. So they could date to any time from the first century onwards.’
‘I’ve checked, and these two words domine iumius don’t actually appear together in the Latin of the Vulgate, the Roman Bible of the early medieval period,’ Helena said. ‘If they are a translation of Psalm 122, they could be very early, before the Latin translation that appears in the Vulgate was formalized. They could be a translation done by a very early Christian pilgrim, maybe from Rome.’
‘Ships come and go, don’t they?’ Costas said. ‘I mean, it doesn’t have to be a pilgrim arriving here. It could be someone going, leaving Jerusalem. Your first translation, “Lord we shall go”. Maybe it was one of the apostles, practising a bit of Latin before heading out into the big wide world, telling his Lord he was heading off to spread the word.’
Helena remained silent, but her expression was brimming with anticipation. Jack peered at her. ‘What aren’t you telling us?’ he asked.
She reached into her robe, and took out a small plastic coin case. She handed it to Jack. ‘Yereva and I found this bronze coin a few days ago. We did a bit of unofficial excavation. There was some loose plaster under the graffito. The coin was embedded in the base of that stone, in a cavity made for it. It’s like those coins I remember you telling me about that the Romans put in the mast steps of ships, to ward off misfortune. A good luck token.’
Jack was peering at the case. ‘Unusual to put an apotropaic coin like that in a building,’ he murmured. ‘Do you mind?’ He clicked open the case and took out the coin. He held it up by the rim, and the candelight reflected off the bronze. He saw an image of a man’s head, crude, thick necked, with a single word underneath. ‘Good God!’ he exclaimed.
‘See what I mean?’ Helena replied.
‘Herod Agrippa,’ Jack said, his voice hoarse with excitement.
‘Herod Agrippa,’ Costas murmured. ‘Buddy of Claudius?’
‘King of Judaea, AD 41 to 44,’ Helena said, nodding.
Jack touched the wall beside the graffito. ‘So this masonry could be centuries older than the fourth-century church above us.’
‘When that wall was revealed during the 1970s excavations, there was nothing to pin the date down. But it was clearly earlier than the basement wall of the fourth-century Constantinian church, which you can see over there,’ Helena said, pointing off to the side wall of the chapel to her left. ‘The only ancient record of any building at this site before the fourth century comes from Eusebius’ Life of Constantine. Eusebius was a contemporary of the emperor Constantine, so he’s probably pretty reliable on what went on here in the early fourth century. That was when Bishop Macrobius of Jerusalem identified the rock-cut chamber under the Aedicule as the tomb of Christ, and Constantine’s mother Helena had the first church built here. But Eusebius also says that the site had been built on two hundred years before his time, when the emperor Hadrian refounded Jerusalem as Colonia Aelia Capitolina.’
‘Hadrian built a temple of Aphrodite, apparently,’ Costas said, peering in the candlelight at a battered guidebook Jack had given him.
‘That’s what Eusebius claims,’ Helena replied. ‘But we can’t be sure. He was part of that revisionist take on early Christian history under Constantine. Eusebius wanted his readers to think Hadrian had deliberately built on the site of the tomb of Christ to destroy it, to revile it. And Aphrodite, Roman Venus, the goddess of love, was regarded as a particular abomination by the Church fathers in his day, so the identification of the building as a temple of Aphrodite could just have been something Eusebius or his informants dreamed up for their Christian readership.’
‘Bunch of killjoys,’ Costas muttered. ‘What was their problem? I thought Jesus was all about love.’
Helena gave a wry shrug. ‘Eusebius was probably right about the date of the building, though. There are other sections of wall here that are clearly Hadrianic, judging by construction technique. If there was a structure here before that, all memory of it had clearly gone by Eusebius’ day.’