“The monastery has literally been carved into the mountain-side. Inside, a great dining hall was hewn out of the mountain, its pillars formed from verticals of uncut rock. The church has five altars, one room with a floor of stone coffins, and a saint’s burial chamber. The library has documents going back to the fifteenth century.”
“Is it still occupied?”
“The Chaldean Church reclaimed it in 1975. A caretaker community lives on here.”
“Is this where you studied for the priesthood?”
“No, in Baghdad. My grandparents lived in Alqosh. As boys, Ari and I often played among the grottos here, secretly, of course. You couldn’t imagine a better place for hide-and-seek. When I saw the inscriptions on Nahum’s engraving, I recalled seeing the same ones on the wall of one of the caves.”
He indicated the terrain below the structure, a scattering of boulders, plants, and small cave-like openings. The monks had probably meditated and fasted in the black holes of these grottos. In the distance a phantom-like figure robed in black appeared for a moment in an arched doorway, then turned and vanished. Otherwise, I could see no one else around.
Before approaching the monastery grounds, Tomas and his men knelt and bent their heads in prayer. I felt awkward, wanting to respect their faith but unsure of what to do. I crossed a patch of sandy soil to lean against an outcropping of rock. After a few minutes Tomas rose and beckoned to me.
I could make out a shadowy hole in front of us. Was I marching toward my execution? My rational side argued against that. They could have killed me any number of times, any number of ways, at Tomas’s house. I crept forward into the recess.
We’d gone about thirty feet when a light suddenly flared ahead. Turning a corner, I found a cavity with a roughly rounded ceiling and square-cut stone floor. Tomas held a jacklight with a beam as strong as a searchlight; it lit up every crevice and cranny. I could see niches cut into the rocky surface and sanded smooth. They must have once held figurines, perhaps magical talismans, but now they were empty.
Tomas pointed to one of them. “This once held a small relief of a lion and his cubs. It was plastered over a long time ago. Below it, a cuneiform inscription has been incised into the rock.” He shone his light so I could see. “On Nahum’s engraving an inscription appears after the words ‘Take ye the spoil of silver, take the spoil of gold.’ It says, ‘By the bond of heaven and earth, from the great above to the great below.’”
“Like the quote used by the Hermetics—as above, so below. But that was Egyptian I thought.”
“Indeed it is the Hermetic quote,” Tomas said. “But the phrase is a magical Mesopotamian incantation seen on many tablets and used to introduce their texts. It goes back to early written documents. Orally probably longer. The quotation came originally from Mesopotamia, not Egypt.”
“Why was it attributed to the Egyptians then?”
“Because it first became known to the Greeks in Alexandria.
Active trade between Egypt and Mesopotamia grew enormously in the Neo-Assyrian period. Caravans brought Arabian spices, the frankincense and myrrh of the Magi, prized commodities. It’s not hard to see how such a common phrase could have been transported to Egypt. An inscription like that should have appeared right at the beginning of Nahum’s book. Deliberately putting it where he did—incorrectly in the middle—was meant to be a signal. And to emphasize the point, Ishtar’s eight-pointed stars terminated the inscription.”
I bent down and ran my hand over the inscription. I recognized Ishtar’s eight-pointed stars but couldn’t read the cuneiform markings. “What does it say?”
Tomas’s face lit up. “Dur-An-Ki, ‘By the bond of heaven and earth.’ And following that it says, ‘From the great above to the great below.’ Those two phrases are the beginning of a Mesopotamian incantation.” He bent down beside me and traced the inscription with his finger. “It’s immensely ironic. A mark of Nahum’s genius.”
“You’re saying he inscribed it?”
“Yes. Nahum was here; he saw the grotto and left signs to show the way to the temple. The grottos were originally natural caves, here long before the monastery. Nahum added his mark for his people to see. And he meant it literally. The brightest stars of the Renaissance passed this phrase along to each other. But many centuries before that, Nahum used the same phrase to point the way to our Assyrian temple.”
“You’re saying the temple lies underneath us?” Had he allowed himself to be carried away over the excitement of a new find? How could an underground temple rival the glories of the Nineveh palaces and their treasures?
He motioned for me to stand back. “Press yourself against the wall. There’s little room to maneuver here.” I stood at the side of the cavity while Mazare used a large chisel to pry one of the floor stones loose. He shoved it aside, revealing a deep black hole.
Tomas turned toward me. “You go first. Take great care—it’s almost fifty feet down.”
“You’ve done it before. Wouldn’t it make more sense for you to go first?”
“If you fall I don’t want you taking us with you.” Tomas shone the light down the hole. At the lip I could see crude wedges carved into the side of the tunnel, a rudimentary ladder.
Light from above cast ominous shapes and shadows as I inched my way down. The steps were slick with ancient slime and dripping water, my clothes picking up a greenish-black stain. It smelled like the bottom of a well where a stew of water and rotting things had lingered for centuries.
Only by gripping the upper wedges as tightly as possible with my hands could I stop myself from falling. My foot would slip and I’d hug my body to the rough stone wall like a lover. Once more I felt my foot give way. I gripped my handhold, a crack, and the chunk of rock split off the wall. I let out a yell and dropped.
“Going up is easier.” Mazare laughed when he reached me and switched on his own flashlight, holding it up to guide the way for Tomas. I’d been close enough to the bottom that I’d suffered nothing more than embarrassment.
The third man posted at the top stood ready to slide the floor stone back into place at any sign of trouble. While Tomas made his way down I looked around. By the light of the flashlight, I could see two tunnels at the bottom of the shaft. Rock debris blocked the first one a few feet in. The second, which we’d have to stoop to enter, trailed off into inky shadow.
When he reached us, Tomas flicked on his light again and shone it toward the blocked aperture. “We think it was once the actual entrance to the temple and they cut the shaft we climbed down for ventilation. King Sennacherib was the grand developer of Nineveh, and that included a magnificent park. For irrigation his workmen diverted mountain streams to increase the flow of water into the River Khosr that bisected the Nineveh precinct. This tunnel was once the path of one of those underground streams.”
Blackened stone glistened in the light. Water dripped off the roof, slithering down the walls, forming little rivulets that disappeared into the floor crevices. We descended, how far I couldn’t guess, but it seemed like a long way. All of us were forced to crouch, the tunnel roof being about five feet in height. “Men then were much shorter,” Tomas said.
We crept along for the better part of an hour, my knees and back aching with the awkward position, the various sites of my injuries reawakening in pain. As our lights receded, the tunnel closed in again to black and it began to feel as if the darkness were a material thing pursuing us.
I was on the verge of asking for a rest stop when Mazare, who’d taken the lead, waved his flashlight. “Up ahead now. Here it is.”
The cavity abruptly widened and grew higher. His jacklight shone on a flight of stairs angling up into the darkness. As we climbed, our surroundings grew noticeably drier. I was beginning to think the steps were endless when the floor leveled out abruptly. This section was man-made, surfaced with enormous limestone blocks. Every three rows of blocks bore cuneiform words etched in the stone. Tomas pointed to one of them. “King Ashurbanipal’s roya
l inscription. The treasure lies ahead.”
Interesting, the formal title he always used when referring to the Assyrian kings. National pride had a long shelf life.
The treasure lies ahead. He made it sound like some Indiana Jones hoard of caskets brimming with gold coins, ruby-eyed idols, and ropes of fat pearls.
The half-rotted wooden timbers of what I guessed had once been magnificent cedar doors partially blocked the tunnel. I pressed one of the planks and it collapsed into a powdery wood dust.
They asked me to wait. Mazare handed me his light, then he and Tomas clambered over the wood and vanished into the gloom beyond. I’d stay a couple of minutes, no more. Even that much time was a trial.
Soft patches of light materialized ahead. When I heard Tomas call my name I scrambled over the timbers and emerged into an enormous cavern.
The place was vast. Big enough to easily hold the Great Court of the British Museum. In the middle of the cave was a magnificent temple. Not a ziggurat, but a rectangular building. Its roof must have risen forty feet. Undeniably Neo-Assyrian in design. Glazed tile friezes decorated the exterior in the iridescent blue, red, white, and black commonly used in Mesopotamian antiquity for high-status structures. This in itself was a major discovery, since it was the later Babylonians who’d been known to use this kind of tiling on exteriors. Two enormous stone Lamassu guarded the temple entrance.
“Come inside.” Tomas’s voice echoed strangely, as if he were the ancient king himself issuing an order to one of his subjects. I suddenly felt it had been wrong to come here, and I feared we’d pay a price for invading the goddess’s precinct. But I walked through the entrance. It was far too late for any misgivings.
Tomas and Mazare had turned off their lights. Soft glimmers came from oil lamps set around the central room. My breath deserted me.
Shimmering with gold, a life-sized lion and lioness harnessed to a chariot faced me. I thought of Nahum’s words. Where the lion and the lioness walked. Shell and ivory inlays of doves, rosettes, and stars embellished the harness and the chariot’s booth. Ishtar’s chariot. I walked around it, not touching it, just taking in the splendor of the work. The chariot was likely wooden and the lions would have been sculpted from stone, all of it coated with electrum, a gold-silver alloy. In places the electrum had flaked off, revealing the underlying material.
The interior temple walls—giant slabs of gypsum—were faced with life-sized images of Apkallu, the guardian spirits with human bodies, wings, and vulture heads. Their wrists sported rosette armbands; they held purification objects that looked like large pine cones.
Tomas watched as I toured the objects, pride lighting up his face. I thought of Samuel then—the sight of this would have brought him to tears. And no price could conceivably be attached to it. The value of Nahum’s engraving paled in comparison. No wonder Ward and his people had killed for this.
Treasures like these would have graced a royal household. Crystal chalices; golden cups and bowls; amphorae for wine and olive oil; jewelry chests in gold, silver, and bronze. One of the chests was filled with necklaces, bead strings of alternating green malachite and banded agate, the agate carved to resemble fish eyes. The chests sat on small tables and chairs inlaid with ivory, shell, and precious stones. I saw alabaster statuettes; glass bottles for perfume; cylinder seals of chalcedony; ivory combs; copper hand mirrors, green now but originally burnished to a glassy shine.
One shallow silver bowl, black with tarnish, still held husks of grain. Nahum’s script floated into my mind again: Take ye the spoil of silver, take the spoil of gold; for there is no end of the store, rich with all precious vessels. The oil lamps with their flickering flames looked just like the lamps genies sprang from in Arabian folk tales, the idea for the design inspired by the shape of the shells originally used as lamps. I recognized in the inlays the muddy rose of carnelian.
The rush of sensation almost overwhelmed me.
Tomas interrupted my thoughts. “These are typical of temple furnishings, all the items placed for the use of the goddess. Every day her human attendants would have brought real food and drink to her, clothed her in finery and jewels. The statue would have been taken out for processions on special days.
“Come over here.” Tomas gestured toward an alcove. On the floor, an array of brown bones; I could make out a rib cage, a skull. Bracelets and anklets encircled the long bones of the arms and legs absurdly, as if the skeleton had wanted to dress up. A sword and an elongated gold helmet with elaborate designs lay a few feet from the skull.
“Look carefully,” Tomas said. “This solves a 2400-year-old mystery.”
Tangled in the rib bones I noticed a necklace. A hoop of gold with pendants dangling from it, each one embossed with symbols— a rosette, a sun, a lion.
“What you’re seeing are the remains of the last King of Assyria, Ashur-uballit II.”
“How could you know that?”
“When Nineveh was sacked and the king died, a few members of the royal family escaped. They fled to Harran but were routed from there and continued on to join their Egyptian allies at Carchemish. Ashur-uballit was declared Assyria’s king at that time. But in 605 B.C. a brilliant young Babylonian general named Nebuchadnezzar decimated the combined Assyrian and Egyptian forces. There is no further account of Ashur-uballit’s fate.
“Those accoutrements would only have belonged to the king. The necklace and the helmet, in particular. They’re inscribed with royal symbols. No one knows what became of Ashur-uballit. That the king would seek refuge here makes sense. Do you recall Nahum’s words, ‘Where is the den of lions, which was the feeding-place of the young lions, where the lion and the lioness walked, and the lion’s whelp, and none made them afraid’?”
“Yes,” I said.
“At first I thought the rockfall closing off the main entrance had been caused by an earthquake, but when I took a second look I realized that none of the fissures and cracks you’d expect from earth tremors were present. I believe his enemies hunted him down and caused the rockfall. They sealed the king in.”
“Surely he wouldn’t have come here alone?”
Tomas pointed to the rear of the temple. “Behind that wall is his entourage. His queen, probably his personal guard, even the bones of children. But come, a much greater surprise awaits.”
If this wasn’t enough of a bombshell, I couldn’t imagine what was.
He led me to a room. Inside were orderly rows of baked brick boxes. “The temple filing system. Each one is filled with tablets, although the clay is badly eroded now. King Ashurbanipal’s library at Nineveh survived partly because the tablets were cooked in the high heat of the fires that destroyed the city. It’s relatively dry here but not enough to preserve the clay.”
On the way out he indicated an unusually shaped flask, a rounded bowl with a long snout projecting sideways, like some bizarre teapot. This was not metal but fired clay. “The first distillation apparatus, forerunner of the alembic still,” he said. “For making perfume. The original model for alchemical vessels.”
With great care I took it in my hands. A magical scent of rose and foreign spices seemed to cling to it. Only my imagination, I knew, but this place stimulated reveries. I knew also that I shouldn’t touch a thing. Archaeologists rivaled forensics technicians in their insistence on the sanctity of a site. They’d photograph and measure the tiniest distance between objects before moving them. But for me it was impossible not to touch, not to make a direct connection with these lovely emblems of the past.
“So,” Tomas said, “have you seen enough?”
“I want to stay here forever.” I ran my hand over my forehead.
“There’s a certain irony here, don’t you think?” He frowned. “What’s that?”
“It’s now the property of the Chaldeans and the Roman Catholic Church.”
“Not just us. It belongs to all the Iraqi people. The Church will do its best to safeguard it for everyone.” He turned away. “Come. We have to le
ave soon. But before we do I promised you something truly amazing.”
“What are you talking about? There’s something else?”
“What we’ve just seen would have been temple property. King
Ashurbanipal’s plunder is hidden in Ishtar’s shrine.”
I’d completely forgotten about the shrine room, mesmerized as I was by the bones of the ancient king and all the temple treasure. His statement caught me off guard. “You’re right. These are all Mesopotamian, so they couldn’t be described as spoil.”
“They may be Babylonian. Ashurbanipal destroyed Babylon and took everything of value.”
“Technically that’s not plunder because he controlled both Assyria and Babylon.”
“Yes. The real prize is inside the shrine.”
I looked to see whether Mazare was coming. He stayed back, a look on his face that could only be described as fear. What on earth was ahead of us?
I was not to make any discoveries immediately. In the shrine room a large tarp had been hung over a frame standing a few feet from the rear wall. The walls sported incredible paintings, some of the paint corrupted but the images still clearly readable. The first showed a winged Ishtar with her horned cap and war bow, surrounded by an arc of eight-pointed stars. The second pictured a lion disemboweling a man. Nahum’s words came back to me again. The lion did tear in pieces enough for his whelps, and strangled for his lionesses, and filled his caves with prey.
A low stand held more pots. I knelt down and picked one up.
Iron. Easy to see because it was coated with rust. Exceptional care would be necessary to remove the accumulation of rust without destroying the metal underneath. These had a beautiful form but were nothing compared to the poorest item outside. I looked at Tomas. “These are probably from Anatolia.”
“Yes, you’re correct. From Phrygia.”
“There must be something pretty spectacular underneath the tarp.”
Thirty-six
The Witch of Babylon Page 30