This was not good. All he was getting was genealogical data and junk references. He needed to refine his search a bit, and decided to focus on one of the scholars who had done the key work in deciphering the stone. He typed in: FRANCOIS CHAMPOLLION and immediately received about 1500 hits. The man existed!
He opened the first page, an encyclopedia article:
Champollion was a French Egyptologist, who is acknowledged as the father of modern Egyptology. He achieved many things during his short career that laid the foundations for Egyptian archaeology.
He was born in 1790….
Yes, yes, thought Nordhausen. Get to the point. The man deciphered the hieroglyphics!
…While he was at the Lyceum, he presented a paper in which he argued that the language of the Copts in contemporary Egypt was, in essence, the same as that used by the Egyptians of antiquity.
His education continued at the College de France, where he specialized in languages of the Orient. He knew bits and pieces of many languages, and was fluent in several others. A partial listing of the languages he was familiar with is astounding: Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, Chaldean, Chinese, Coptic, Ethiopic, Sanskrit, Pahlevi, and Persian.
But nothing whatsoever about the hieroglyphics! Nordhausen swallowed hard. Of course… It made perfect sense now. He had seen it with his own eyes. The stone was broken, and the entire body of knowledge surrounding the ancient Egyptian writing was broken with it. He scanned the rest of the article, hoping to find some hint or clue that would lead him to believe that things were all right, but there was nothing; nothing about his greatest achievement: the reading of the stone.
Then it occurred to him that this was not the only source of information about the Egyptian writing. He scoured his memory, trying to recall other instances of artifacts that had been inscribed with multiple languages. “Bubastis!” he said aloud, remembering a relatively new find there just a few years back. He immediately keyed in a new search and came up with an article in short order dated April 19th, 2004.
‘Potsdam – A team of German and Egyptian archaeologists working in the Nile Delta has unearthed “quite a remarkable” stele dating back 2,200 years to Ptolemaic Egypt which bears an identical inscription in three written languages. The grey granite stone, 99cm high and 84cm wide, was found “purely by accident” at the German excavation site of the ruined city of Bubastis, a once important religious and political center 90km north-east of modern-day Cairo.’(1)
Yes, he remembered taking more than a passing interest in this find, as it was just like the Rosetta Stone, a possible key to translating the hieroglyphics. His hopes sank as he read on:
‘The inscription consists of 67 lines of Greek text and 24 lines of Demotic along with traces of Hieroglyphs that were so degraded they could barely be read.
“It’s unfortunate,” said chief Egyptologist Dr, Christian Tieze. “If the Heiroglyphs had been better represented on this stone, we may have had an opportunity to decipher them.”
Archeologists remain baffled to this day by the ancient Egyptian writing, which has confounded cryptologists and historians alike.’
Nordhausen began to panic. Something had happened, and he had no idea of the consequences at this point. He began to search, desperately: HEIROGLYPHICS… TRANSLATION… INTERPRETATION… DYNASTIC EGYPT… BOOK OF THE DEAD… he typed in the names of Pharaohs, archeological sites, museums with noted collections… But it was all a fruitless effort.
Nowhere was there any indication that there was any translation of Hieroglyphics. Except… In his head! He thought hard for a moment, conjuring up the image of the cartouche he had seen on the statue of Horus. He could clearly see the carved figures in his mind, and he remembered how the little girl had traced her finger on the stone… “Ra-me-ses.” He knew how to read them! They all made perfect sense in his head. He had taken a class in graduate school thirty years before, and had been able to transliterate without reference help of any kind. While a student, he had actually kept a journal using hieroglyphics instead of Roman letters! It had been a fun project, and helped him to learn, but that was thirty years ago.
He heard the door behind him open, and he hurried to close the screen he was watching, his guilt reflex overcoming his better judgment. He spun around to see Paul Dorland regarding him with a curious look on his face.
“Where have you been? I’ve been looking for you! Did you get the alert call?” Paul gave him a frustrated look.
“What? Why yes, of course. It was my shift. I was just down looking over the Arch to see if it was all in order… got here as soon as I could… been right here… working,” Nordhausen lied, feeling terrible about it at once.
“Well, I was just here ten minutes ago,” said Paul. “The consoles were humming at full tilt and Kelly’s Golems were running wild. But you were nowhere to be found.”
“I went down to check on the Arch, I tell you… and to the bathroom, if you don’t mind. If you had waited for me here, you would have seen that I came right back.”
“Mmmmhmmmm,” Dorland replied. He made no effort to hide his skepticism. “Anyway, here’s what I’ve managed to find out. The alert call went out at three past four, and we’ve got a preliminary spatial locus somewhere in the Middle East. Nothing hard yet. The Golems are doing a data comparison with the RAM bank now, but, as you can see, there hasn’t been much to report,” he flipped through some pages on a clip board he held. “It’s a bit early, but we should be getting something soon. I’m surprised you didn’t have this ready. It was your shift.” He looked up, suddenly perplexed by his friend’s demeanor.
“Robert, what is it?” He had caught a look of misery on Nordhausen’s face, so at odds with the man’s normal easy going nature, that he was struck by it.
“Oh, Paul,” Nordhausen moaned.
“What?” Dorland was now alarmed.
“Oh, Paul, something has happened…”
“Robert, what? Are you all right?”
“I don’t know… something is very wrong…”
“What are you talking about? What happened? You mean to say you did get a report before I arrived?” He rushed to Nordhausen’s side, eyes scanning the desk top as though he expected to see a variance report.
Nordhausen sat with his face in his hands. He couldn’t look at Dorland. “It was my fault, Paul. I… used the Arch…” he muttered, in a low voice, almost inaudibly.
“You what?”
“I used the Arch!” He lifted his head from his hands, and the look of despair was deep and clear. “I used the Arch and something changed.”
Paul stiffened. He held his clipboard to his chest, and said, slowly: “Robert, what did you do?”
“Nothing! I didn’t do anything! At least not anything I can clue on. But I must have done something, because things are clearly wrong.” Nordhausen gave him a pleading look. Suddenly the whole story came spilling out in a gush of disjointed narrative, clothed in rationalizations and justifications, causing Dorland to slowly sink into the other office chair while Nordhausen went on.
“So, you see, I didn’t do anything! I was just there, and—”
“Didn’t do anything?” Paul gave him an incredulous look. “You say you went out to the opera?”
“But I just watched the show… then went across the street to a club after and…”
“And what?”
Nordhausen hesitated, for the bit about his encounter with Wilde and Gilbert was a source of great anxiety to him. He started to tell his story and saw how Paul just put his hands over his ears with a flabbergasted look on his face.