Pyramid: A Novel

by David Gibbins

  The day before, Jack had used the secure IMU channel on the VHF radio to fill him in on their discovery while they had been waiting by the Red Sea for their nitrogen levels to reduce enough to allow them to fly, and there was more to tell him now. But he was determined that Hiebermeyer should have first say; there must have been something exciting for him to have taken a break from the mummy excavation and come all the way here to meet them.

  Hiebermeyer turned as they entered. “Jack. Costas. Good to see you.”

  “You too, Maurice.” Hiebermeyer looked exhausted, even more weather-beaten than usual, and Jack noticed that he had lost weight since they had last met. “What have you got?”

  Hiebermeyer gestured at a paused image from Al-Jazeera news on the TV screen above him. It showed a reporter in front of the dark shapes of the pyramids on the Giza plateau. “What we’ve mainly got is that cleric raving again about blowing up the pyramids. He was the one who hit the headlines a few years ago when he first threatened to do it. Then, it seemed like a sick joke. Now it looks like reality.”

  “Let’s forget that for a moment. I want to see what you’ve got.”

  Hiebermeyer stared at him, his eyes suddenly gleaming. “All right, Jack. Prepare to be amazed.”

  “Go on.”

  Maurice pointed to his computer screen. “Take a look at this.” He clicked the mouse, and an image of an ancient underground chamber appeared. It had plastered walls, an array of artifacts in the corners, and a mummy casing in the center, its painted eyes just visible.

  Jack peered closely. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he murmured. “Undisturbed?”

  “Completely intact,” Hiebermeyer enthused. “It’s an incredible rarity; there’s no evidence of tomb robbing at all. Last night I was the first person in that chamber for more than three thousand years. It’s eighteenth dynasty, Jack. I’m sure of it.”

  “Eighteenth dynasty,” Costas said. “Late second millennium BC? I know that most of the necropolis is later than that, from the first millennium BC, like the mummy that produced the Atlantis papyrus.”

  Hiebermeyer peered at him. “Mein Gott. Costas, we’ll make an archaeologist of you yet.”

  “No chance of that, my friend. Not as long as you guys have robotic equipment you don’t know how to fix. So is this a royal burial?”

  Hiebermeyer shook his head. “Not in the Faiyum oasis. They’re mostly officials, though some of them are pretty high ranking. This one’s an army officer, a previously unknown chariot general by the name of Mehmnet-Ptah. Actually, it wasn’t the mummy casing that got me so excited, but the wall painting. That’s really what I wanted you to see.” He clicked the mouse again, changing the image to a close-up of one of the walls showing flaking colored plaster. “What do you make of that?”

  Costas leaned over his shoulder and peered closely, and then straightened up. “Men in skirts. The usual Egyptian thing.”

  Hiebermeyer snorted impatiently. “You mean Egyptian infantry, marching to the right and carrying spears. Now, if I scroll the image along, you can see chariots, just like the ones you’ve found in the Gulf of Suez, with the charioteers holding bows. And now here’s another group of charioteers, larger than the first and more elaborately attired.” He paused, looking up. “Any thoughts?”

  Jack stared. The charioteers were also skirted but wearing sandals, some form of cuirass, and distinctive segmented helmets, and they were carrying short thrusting swords with bows slung over their shoulders. Above them were a faded hieroglyphic cartouche and the symbol of a bull’s horns. Jack felt a rush of excitement. “Mercenaries,” he exclaimed. “But not any old mercenaries. These are Aegean mercenaries. Those are bone and tusk helmets like the ones found at Mycenae, and the swords are the same type we found on the Minoan shipwreck we were excavating when you and Aysha discovered the Atlantis papyrus.”

  “Perfect,” Hiebermeyer said. “And they’re completely consistent with an eighteenth-dynasty date. Before then we’d expect to see Nubian mercenaries, large dark-skinned men from the desert. But by the eighteenth dynasty they’d become too integrated within Egyptian society. Mercenaries have to be outsiders with no vested interest in the politics, in it only for the loot and the battle. Think of the Varangian bodyguard of the Byzantine emperor in Constantinople. They were Vikings from Scandinavia who guarded the emperors over a period of several centuries, but they weren’t born and bred in Constantinople. New recruits returned to Scandinavia once they’d finished their service and made their fortunes. I believe that the same happened in Egypt during the eighteenth dynasty with the sea peoples from the north.”

  “Mycenaeans?” Costas offered.

  “That’s what you might think. We know that by the fourteenth century BC the Mycenaeans from mainland Greece had taken over the island of Crete. We think of the Mycenaeans as a warrior society, so you might assume that Aegean mercenaries of this date would be Mycenaean. But the truth is more interesting. Far more interesting. In fact, it revolutionizes our picture of this period. For a start, the word in that hieroglyphic cartouche, Hau-nebut, doesn’t specifically denote Mycenaeans, but it’s an old Egyptian term for Aegean peoples used from the time when the Minoan civilization of Crete dominated the Aegean. Why would that term, with its strong Minoan connotations, be used for these warriors if they were Mycenaeans, who were quite distinct? And the bull’s horn symbol specifically denotes Crete, where the symbol is prominent on the palaces of the Minoans.”

  Jack took out his phone and showed Hiebermeyer the screen saver, part of a fragmentary painting showing ducks flying out of a papyrus thicket, impressionistic in shades of blue. “I’ve still got this from when we last debated it, Maurice.” He glanced at Costas. “It’s a wall painting from Akhenaten’s new city of Amarna. It’s a typically Egyptian scene but very reminiscent in style of the Minoan wall paintings from Crete. Amarna also famously produced a cache of clay tablets that shows the extent of trade with the Aegean during this period. I argued that the link with Crete wasn’t just about trade, but that there were cultural influences as well. Akhenaten had turned the old Egyptian religion on its head and was clearly receptive to outside ideas. Now that I see what Maurice has found, it figures that he might have had Aegean mercenaries too. Akhenaten may have been something of a dreamer, but he was practical enough to survive as pharaoh for more than twenty years, so having a strong force of mercenaries who would not be swayed by the factions against him would have made a lot of sense.”

  Hiebermeyer swivelled his chair and raised his hands in a gesture of surrender to Jack, and then cracked a grin. “You and I have debated it for years, and finally I’m forced to concede. It was a two-way process. Egypt influenced Greece, and now we know it also happened in reverse. And there’s even more. In the sixteenth century BC, the first pharaoh of the eighteenth dynasty, Ahmose I, made an astonishing dynastic marriage. A stone stele in the temple of Amun at Thebes describes his wife, Ahhotep, as Mistress of the Shores of Hau-nebut. That’s the first known use of the word Hau-nebut, the term for the Aegean lands, for Crete, that you see in the cartouche here. It goes on to say the following: ‘Her reputation is high over every foreign land.’ This leads me to the most astonishing revelation in our necropolis find.”

  Costas had been peering again at the image of the tomb painting on Hiebermeyer’s screen. He coughed, pointing. “About those cuirasses. Those breastplates. I mean, breast-plates.”

  Hiebermeyer swivelled back to the screen and grinned again. “I was wondering when you’d notice.”

  “Not men in skirts.”

  “Not men in skirts.”

  “No,” Costas said, shaking his head. “These are girl mercenaries.”

  “Good God,” Jack exclaimed, peering. “You’re right.”

  “Feast your eyes on this, then.” Hiebermeyer swept the mouse, and the next charioteer in the army came into view, an astonishing sight. It was unambiguously a woman, her breasts bare above her cuirass, her head towering above the others. Her long ha
ir was braided down her back, and she held swirling snakes above her head. Jack gasped. “It’s the Minoan mother goddess, the Mistress of the Animals.”

  “Not quite, Jack. Look at that cartouche above her head. It’s exactly the same as the one for Ahhotep a century and a half earlier. ‘Not Mistress of the Animals, but Mistress of the Shores of Hau-nebut.’ ”

  Jack’s mind raced. “What are you thinking, Maurice?”

  “I’m thinking, forget all that romantic guff about the Minoans being peace-loving idealists. You just didn’t survive in the Bronze Age that way. The term Mistress of the Animals was made up by Sir Arthur Evans when he excavated Knossos and wanted it to be some kind of paradise, an idealized antidote to the ugly modern world of a hundred years ago. You English can be sentimentalists, Jack. Mistress of the Shores of Hau-nebut is undoubtedly a military term, like Count of the Saxon Shore for the late Roman defender of Britain. Crete was an island too, and that’s where her defenses lay. Your Minoan mother goddess was in truth a Boudica or a Valkyrie, a warrior queen.”

  Jack’s mind raced. “Here’s a scenario. The volcano on Thera erupts in the fifteenth century BC, right? Minoan civilization is devastated, leaving Crete vulnerable to Mycenaean takeover. Shortly before that a Minoan queen, Ahhotep, marries an Egyptian pharaoh, Ahmose I. The bloodline of the Minoan rulers passes down not in Crete but through the eighteenth dynasty in Egypt. Maybe that fuels the brilliant mix of genius, military leadership, and iconoclasm that makes the New Kingdom stand out so much, peaking with Akhenaten and his wife, Nefertiti. Meanwhile, the warrior tradition of Minoan Crete, the female warrior tradition, survives the Mycenaean takeover, perhaps in the remote mountain fastnesses of the south. For generations those warriors sell themselves to the highest bidder, led by a woman the Egyptians knew by the old title of their first Minoan queen, Mistress of the Shores of Hau-nebut. How does that sound?”

  Hiebermeyer opened his arms. “That’s one small corner of Egyptology conceded. One small corner.”

  Jack was thinking the unthinkable. And King Minos was a woman. He put his hand on Hiebermeyer’s shoulder. “Congratulations, Maurice. Really brilliant. This might just lead to that joint book we’ve often talked about. Rewriting contact between Egypt and Crete in the late Bronze Age.”

  “And putting women on the map,” Costas said, still staring at the charioteer. “Big-time.”

  Hiebermeyer turned back to the computer, clicked the mouse, and called up the first image, showing the tomb with its contents. “There’s more to be found in there, Jack. A lot more. We’ve been working against the clock, and I’ve had to make just about the hardest decision of my life, to shut down the tomb and seal it. There are already too many other parts of the excavation ongoing that need to be finished up. I can’t even report the tomb discovery, as that would see the looters descend like vultures as soon as we leave the place. I’m not even sure about the book idea, Jack. What we’ve just discussed is going to have to remain our own speculation, as it’s too controversial to publish without the full excavation and appraisal of that tomb. We all know what happens when a theory like that gets put out prematurely and is ridiculed. It then takes ten times more evidence than is needed to make it stick.”

  Hiebermeyer slumped forward, his head in his hands, looking defeated. For a moment Jack felt paralyzed, unable to think of anything to say that might help. He had a sudden flashback to their boyhood together at boarding school in England, swapping dreams about the great discoveries they would one day make as archaeologists. Those discoveries had come to pass, more than they could ever have imagined, and yet there still seemed as much to uncover as there ever had been. No single treasure was the culmination of the dream, and every extraordinary revelation spurred them on toward another. It seemed impossible that the perversity of extremism, of human self-destruction, should overtake that dream. Jack knew that if their friendship meant anything, he should do all he could to push Maurice through and see that their shared passion was never extinguished.

  Costas put a hand on Hiebermeyer’s shoulder. “Don’t kill yourself over it, man. You’re doing the best you can. There’s light at the end of the tunnel.”

  Hiebermeyer grasped his hand for a moment. “Thanks, Costas. You and Jack have seen it, haven’t you? That light underneath the pyramid. As long as we know it’s there, maybe there’s hope for us yet.”

  Jack took out a memory stick and inserted it into Hiebermeyer’s computer. “I know you have to return to the necropolis as soon as you can, but I want to show you an image from our dive that you haven’t seen yet. I’d like Aysha in on this. Is she around?”

  Hiebermeyer gestured at the door. “Outside on the quay, talking to our son on the phone. We sent him away to stay with my mother in Germany. This place has become too dangerous for a five-year-old. She said she’d come back in here when she finishes.”

  “I sent him a picture from our dive,” Costas said. “A selfie of Uncle Costas with a sea snake wrapped around his helmet, and a goofy face.”

  “That’s good of you, Costas. I really appreciate it. He probably doesn’t get too much humor from his dad right now.” He straightened up and took a deep breath. “Okay, Jack, what have you got?”

  CHAPTER 7

  Jack felt a huge surge of excitement as he saw the photograph on the screen that Costas had taken two days before in the depths of the Red Sea. It was the unmistakable form of a chariot wheel visible in the mass of coral. Hiebermeyer moved the mouse over different points on the image and then zoomed in on the gilded wing of the falcon at the front of the chariot that was partly exposed beneath the coral. “There should be a cartouche above that, a royal cartouche,” he murmured. “An inscription on the temple of Karnak at Luxor mentions a chariot of Thutmose III made from electrum, and this one must have been from the same stable. With this gilding it can only have been a royal chariot, perhaps lent by the pharaoh to a favored general.”

  “It was our final dive, and we were in the same quandary as you were in the tomb in the mummy necropolis,” Jack said. “No time to try removing any of that coral.”

  Hiebermeyer zoomed out to the original view and sat back in his chair, shaking his head. “Still, it’s an incredible find. You know it was Howard Carter who first reconstructed their appearance, based on the disassembled chariots he found in 1922 when he opened the tomb of Tutankhamun?”

  “I know that they first appear in Egypt about the beginning of the New Kingdom, copied from the chariots of the Near East.”

  “It was our friend Ahmose I and his Minoan wife, Ahhotep, fighting off the Hyksos in the northern marshlands of the Nile Delta, capturing and then copying the weapons of their enemy,” Hiebermeyer replied. “Judging by the wall painting in the tomb, it may have been Queen Ahhotep’s Minoan warriors who took to the chariots most readily. Not what you might expect for a people from a mountainous island.”

  Jack shook his head. “The Minoans were renowned for their naval might, remember? They probably used small vessels like the Liburnians of classical antiquity, designed to dart into range of an enemy flotilla and attack with the bow and the slingshot. The transition to desert warfare was maybe not that much of a leap from a tactical viewpoint. Ships at sea became chariots on land.”

  Hiebermeyer put his hands behind his head and stared at the screen. “Two centuries later, at the time of Akhenaten and Tutankhamun, the chariot was at the pinnacle of its technology. They were like modern fly-by-wire jet fighters, capable of astonishing speed and agility but inherently unstable. Drive them too fast and the traditional wheeling maneuver you just described became impossible, leaving them no choice other than to hurtle directly into an enemy and take their chances.”

  Jack looked thoughtfully at the screen. “Technology so advanced that it backfired on them: sheer speed and nimbleness was perhaps their undoing.”

  Costas came over from the computer workstation, where he had been backing up their Red Sea images. “Or maybe someone who knew the risks of the t
echnology played with it. The best systems, the best technologies, often have an inherent instability; it’s that instability that often makes them capable of great things, like those fly-by-wire planes, but also leaves them vulnerable to manipulation and sabotage.”

  “Go on,” Hiebermeyer said.

  “It’s something that Costas and I discussed on the flight here,” Jack interjected. “Thinking laterally, that is. What if the pharaoh, Akhenaten—if that’s who it was—engineered the whole thing? Think about the backdrop. There’s all the modern speculation that he and Moses were more than just master and slave. Sigmund Freud even thought they were two sides of the same coin. Let’s imagine they share the revelation of the one god in the desert, and Akhenaten determines to let Moses take his people and establish his own City of Light. For Akhenaten, it might provide assurance that the new religion, the new monotheism, would have a chance of surviving outside Egypt, where he must have guessed that his focus on the Aten might not survive his own lifetime. If Moses was his big hope for the future, for spreading the word, then the pharaoh is hardly going to want to destroy him as he leads his people to Israel, is he? But it might be politically expedient for him to appear to do so. Akhenaten knows there’s a strong faction against him among the old priesthood, but he also knows he lacks the military credentials of his forebears. Chasing and destroying the Israelites would raise his kudos and hark back to the great victories of earlier pharaohs against the Hyksos and the other peoples of the Middle East. The strength this gave Akhenaten might buy him the time he needed to establish his new religion more firmly, building temples and converting as many people as possible to his beliefs.”