Pyramid: A Novel

by David Gibbins

  All wisdom comes from the Aten and is with him forever.

  Who can count the grains of sand in the sea, and the drops of rain, and the days of existence?

  Who can discover the dimensions of heaven, and the width of the earth, and the depths of the sea, and the entirety of wisdom?

  I come to you like a stream into a river, like a water-channel into a field.

  I said, I will water my orchard and drench my garden;

  And lo, my stream became a river, and my river became a sea.

  I will make wisdom shine like the dawn,

  And leave it for future generations.

  They were silent for a moment. “It’s Akhenaten’s manifesto, his creed for the City of Light,” Jack said. “He’s telling us that his library comes through the Aten, and that he bequeaths it to us. Those words could be inscribed above the entrance to any great library or university today, only here it was one built over three thousand years ago beneath the desert sands of the Giza plateau.”

  “It’s even more incredible than that.” Lanowski’s voice was hoarse with emotion. “I’ve heard those words before, many times in my yeshiva as a boy, growing up studying the Talmud and the holy scriptures. Substitute Lord for Aten and those words are almost exactly the words of the Ben Sira, the Book of Wisdom.”

  “Hang on,” Costas said. “You’re telling me that a Jewish sacred book was originally an Egyptian text written in hieroglyphs?”

  Aysha stared at him. “Some of the oldest fragments of the Ben Sira come from the Cairo Geniza, and it’s thought to have been first set down in Hebrew in Egypt, in Cairo or Alexandria, during the Hellenistic period. But this shows that its composition dates almost a thousand years earlier than that. They were one and the same. The revelation of the one god came at the same time to Akhenaten and to Moses, and their sacred texts spring from the same wellhead.”

  “We’ve got another Geniza on our hands here,” Jack said quietly, shaking his head. “Thousands of papyrus scrolls. It’s going to take an army of scholars a lifetime even to begin to tackle it.”

  “We’re ready, Jack,” Hiebermeyer said, eyeing him determinedly. “Aysha and her team are the best hieroglyphics people anywhere, and they’ll be training up more translators in preparation. The day that Egypt opens up again is the day that we’ll be down there.”

  “And remember, there’s a guardian,” Costas said, his voice thick with emotion. “Little Joey’s in sleep mode, but he’s triggered by motion sensors, and I’ve programmed him to put the fear of God into anyone who tries to get in there. He’ll make the curse of King Tut’s tomb seem lame.”

  “And meanwhile, mum’s the word,” Aysha said. “Nobody outside our group knows anything about it.”

  Hiebermeyer nodded, looking serious. “One slip of the tongue, one inadvertent lapse online, and word of a discovery like this will spread across the Internet like wildfire, and before we know it the extremists will find it and torch the entire place.”

  “One question,” Costas said. “Caliph Al-Hakim wouldn’t have been able to read hieroglyphs, right? Of all the thousands of papyrus documents lying around in that chamber, how come he chose the one that’s so significant?”

  “Ah.” Aysha nodded to Hiebermeyer, who scrolled through a series of photos on the screen. “The answer lies in the memory chip that you so carefully,” she coughed, “concealed on your person.”

  “Excellent. My treasure trove. I knew it would be useful.”

  “These pictures are the most incredible I’ve ever seen, outstripping even those famous first images that Howard Carter took of Tutankhamun’s tomb,” Hiebermeyer said. “Without these pictures and that scrap of papyrus, we’d have nothing tangible to go on. I for one owe you a very large gin and tonic.”

  “There it is,” Aysha said, pointing at the screen. The photo showed the huge golden sarcophagus, the lid slightly ajar where Jack had tried so hard to push it. Hiebermeyer zoomed in to the central part below the crossed arms holding the scepter and the ankh symbol. A curious black wood embellishment like a picture frame lay on the lid below, its interior edges jagged like the broken remains of a windowpane.

  “I get it,” Costas exclaimed. “Al-Hakim found that papyrus inside that frame.”

  Aysha nodded. “You can see where he tore it out. He couldn’t read it, but he guessed that it must be some kind of holy text. He held it close to him as he died.”

  “There’s something else we want to show you, Jack,” Hiebermeyer said. “Something else to close the story.”

  “Go on.”

  Hiebermeyer tapped the laptop and an image of a stone slab covered with hieroglyphs came into view. “This is the so-called Israel Stele, set up in Thebes in the late thirteenth century BC to commemorate the conquests of the pharaoh Merenptah. It’s famous as the only known reference to Israel in an ancient Egyptian inscription. But it now takes second place to Rebecca’s find of the Israel cartouche under Temple Mount in Jerusalem dating at least a century earlier to the time of Akhenaten or shortly after. Here you can see the two cartouches side by side, showing how they contain identical hieroglyphs.”

  “Tell them Rebecca’s theory,” Aysha said.

  Hiebermeyer sat back in his chair and looked pensively at the image. “When Rebecca emailed me her photo of the Jerusalem find, she outlined a startling idea. The other conquered enemies listed in the Stele—Canaan, Ashkelon, Gezer, Yenoam, and Syria—were all city-states or confederations, whereas the determinative hieroglyph written in front of the word for Israel shows that Israel was regarded as a people, not a city. And yet at this date it seems hardly plausible that a nomadic people or a marauding band of warriors would have the strength to oppose an Egyptian army, to be considered opponents worthy enough to list in this fashion. Rebecca then pointed out one city that was missing from the list.”

  “Mât Urusalim,” Jack said. “Jerusalem.”

  “Exactly,” Hiebermeyer continued. “Jerusalem was a significant citadel, on a par with the coastal cities and a gateway for any Egyptian army intent on conquering farther north. Either the alliance revealed in the Amarna letters with Akhenaten still remained in force, or, more likely, Mât Urusalim actually is there in the list, only under a different name.”

  “Israel,” Jack murmured.

  Hiebermeyer nodded enthusiastically. “Here’s a scenario. In the century or so between their arrival as refugees from Egypt and the campaigns of Merenptah, the Israelites had taken over and transformed Jerusalem, strengthening it with their knowledge of Egyptian engineering and winning over the people to their new religion. Rebecca thinks the origins of the Jewish state lie then, not several centuries later with the arrival of King David, as the Old Testament would seem to suggest.”

  “So who exactly were the Israelites?” Costas asked.

  “I think they may originally have been a tough hill people of Canaan, a large enough component of the prisoners captured by the Egyptians in earlier wars of conquest for the name to have stuck. But the migration from Egypt recounted in Exodus probably included peoples of diverse origins. Imagine the composition of a Roman slave revolt, for comparison. At certain periods it would be dominated by prisoners from the current wars, Gaulish, Spanish, or Macedonian, for example, but there would always be others from different parts of the ancient world, some very exotic. In the same way, you can imagine the followers of Moses predominantly claiming Canaanite origins but including a diversity of others whom the Egyptians had enslaved, from captured sailors of the Red Sea and Indian Ocean to Nubians and Saharan nomads. This ethnic diversity may well have been one of the strengths of the early Jewish state and religion.”

  Lanowski pointed at the first hieroglyphs in the cartouche, the determinative of a throw stick, a sitting man and a woman. “That’s what does it for me. Israel was a people, not a land. A people is always restless, always wanting to be on the move, seeking a promised land that lies just out of reach. The refugees from Egypt may have settled in Jerusalem, but that
yearning was always in their blood. You can see it in the history of the diaspora, in that tension between the lure of the Holy Land and the spiritual and creative strength that came from not quite getting there. You can see it in the life of a man like Yehuda Halevi. Would he have been such a great poet if he had reached the Holy Land as a younger man?” Lanowski turned to Jack. “Would you be such a great archaeologist, such a good storyteller, if your Holy Grail didn’t lie most of the time just over the horizon, just beyond your reach?”

  “Speaking of horizons, I wonder what really did happen to Akhenaten,” Aysha said.

  “The sun rises in the east, and sets in the west,” Costas murmured.

  “What did you say?” Jack said.

  “Well, if you’re going to worship the sun, you look east or you look west. It’s too bright in the middle.”

  “Moses and the Israelites went east,” Lanowski said.

  “So which way did Akhenaten go?” Jack tapped his pencil, staring at the image of the empty coffin, and then swivelled the map on the table so that his line of sight took him from Egypt across North Africa and beyond, due west.

  “Uh-oh,” Costas said, peering at him. “It’s that look again.”

  “You know all those theories about the origins of the pyramids in Mesomerica?” Jack said. “We need to look at every scrap of evidence, and I mean every scrap, for Egyptian exploration to the west. If Akhenaten set off in search for his own promised land, it could be anywhere west of Libya.”

  “I’m on it,” Lanowski said, sliding the laptop in front of him, brushing his hair aside, and pushing up his little round glasses. “I’ll start with the fringe stuff first. I’m pretty good at working out which of those theories are crackpot and which have a modicum of sanity behind them. Some of those guys are alarmingly like me.”

  “Maurice?” Jack said.

  Hiebermeyer stared at the map and slowly nodded. “After finishing at the mummy necropolis, my new project was going to be an excavation near Mersa Matruh, a trading site on the Mediterranean coast of Egypt close to the Libyan border. Aysha and her team had already begun to evaluate all the known evidence for Egyptian trade farther west. One of the most intriguing reports comes from the early Phoenician outpost at Mogador, on the Atlantic coast of Mauretania, where surface finds have apparently included fragments of New Kingdom pottery.”

  “Fourteenth century BC?” Jack said.

  “It’s possible.”

  “We have a standing invitation to excavate there,” Aysha said.

  Costas slapped Hiebermeyer on the back. “There you go. Just say yes. Egyptology lives on.”

  Jack turned to Costas and cracked a smile. “And you, my friend, have free rein to go and tinker with submersibles. There’s a possible Egyptian wreck off Sicily I’ve always been meaning to visit that might just need your expertise, and provide the stepping-stone we need to take this theory forward.”

  Costas’ eyes lit up. “That’s even better than a beach holiday, Jack. Way better. With Maurice’s gin and tonic, of course. And you’ll be amazed at what my guys have come up with while we’ve been crawling down slimy tunnels under the desert. I can’t wait to show you.”

  They began to disperse, and Jack sat back, exhausted but elated. The horizon had suddenly opened up for him again, and the possibilities seemed endless. He stared at the map, his eyes narrowing. He had that feeling again, the overwhelming instinct that he was onto something big, as big as any quest he had pursued before. He felt the ship’s engines begin to throb, and he looked out to sea, already planning the next few days, his mind racing.

  Game on.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I’m most grateful to my agent, Luigi Bonomi, and to my editors, Tracy Devine and Sarah Murphy in New York, and Marion Donaldson and Sherise Hobbs in London; to my previous editors Caitlin Alexander and Martin Fletcher; to Crystal Velasquez and Kay Gale for their copyediting; to the rest of the teams at Bantam Dell and Headline, including Jo Liddiard, Jane Morpeth, Tom Noble, and Ben Willis; to the Hachette representatives internationally, including Donna Nopper; to Alison Bonomi, Amanda Preston, and Ajda Vucicevic at Luigi Bonomi Associates; to Nicky Kennedy, Sam Edenborough, Mary Esdaile, Julia Mannfolk, Jenny Robson, and Katherine West at the Intercontinental Literary Agency; to Gaia Banks and Virginia Ascione at Sheil Land Associates; and to my many foreign publishers and their translators.

  I owe a continuing debt to Ann Verrinder Gibbins for her critical reading of all my writing, and for her support. The formative period of travel and fieldwork behind this novel was funded by the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust, the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem, the Palestine Exploration Fund, and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. I’m grateful to the staff of Cambridge University Library for allowing me to examine original documents from the Cairo Geniza when I was a graduate student there, to the Royal Engineers Museum and Library in Chatham for help with research on the officers who appear in this novel, and to Peter Nield for introducing me to recent work on the life of the caliph Al-Hakim. Finally I owe a special thanks to my daughter for organizing a trip to the Black Country Museum in England, where I was able to “wall-walk” a barge in an underground canal just as I have imagined happening in Egypt more than three thousand years ago.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Hidden wisdom and concealed treasure: what is the use of either?

  —From Ben Sira (Ecclesiasticus, the Book of Wisdom), c. third to second century BC, in the Cairo Geniza

  The idea that the Giza plateau in Egypt might contain underground passageways and chambers has long fascinated archaeologists, particularly following the discovery in the 1950s of two pits beside the Pyramid of Khufu containing the pharaoh’s funerary boats. The existence of mortuary temples, man-made harbors, and canals leading from the Nile has long been known, and was given further credence when digging for a new sewage system under the adjacent suburb of Cairo in the 1980s revealed tantalizing evidence for further structures—one of them a huge mud-brick wall interpreted by some as part of a “palace” or priestly complex. The engineering feat in cutting these waterways is in many ways as extraordinary as the construction of the pyramids themselves. Despite being one of the most intensively studied sites in the world, there is much about the Giza plateau that remains open to speculation, including the possibility of subterranean complexes that have been inaccessible to exploration and lie beneath the range of ground-penetrating radar.

  A further possibility, that such a complex might contain an extraordinary revelation, a secret hidden away by a heretical pharaoh, is the basis for this novel. By the time of the New Kingdom, more than a thousand years after the pyramids had been completed, it seems likely that the cults of the three individual pharaohs of the Giza pyramids had coalesced into one, and that this unified cult had become associated with the worship of the sun god Ra. When Amenhotep IV—the future Akhenaten—discarded the old religion in favor of his new sun god, the Aten, and changed his name accordingly, he may have sought a new cult center away from the traditional focus of priestly power in Thebes, and chosen instead a place that remained the oldest and most powerful expression of kingly power in Egypt and already had a strong association with the worship of the sun. Akhenaten was one of the greatest builders of all the pharaohs, with new temples at Heliopolis, not far from Giza, and at Luxor, not to speak of his magnificent new capital at Amarna. The idea that he might have directed that energy to a new complex at Giza—drawing on all the experience in rock cutting, canal building, and large-scale schemes evident in the Old Kingdom structures—is a compelling one, and plausible in terms of the engineering and architectural ambitions that his builders were capable of realizing.

  Some of the inspiration for this idea of a later pharaoh “reinventing” the Giza site comes from the Pyramid of Menkaure itself, where the archaeological evidence suggests a complex picture of restoration and reuse and even the reburial of the pharaoh some two thousand years later in the 26th Dynasty, in a wooden coffin t
hat you can see today in the British Museum. It is the only artifact collected by the British colonel Richard Vyse from the pyramid in the 1830s not to have disappeared with the sarcophagus in the wreck of the Beatrice, the coffin fragments having been despatched in a separate shipment that made it safely to London.

  As well as being a builder, Akhenaten was a thinker; for most of the other pharaohs we can say little about the life of the mind, constricted as they were by the kind of priestly ritual and control that the young Amenhotep IV clearly despised. The fact of his conversion makes him intellectually the most interesting of all the pharaohs. I have speculated that instead of mysticism his revelation may have stimulated a clarity of thought that led him to gather together all the ancient knowledge and wisdom as an expression of his cult, and that the same kind of incentive that we might identify in the foundation of the Great Library of Alexandria almost a thousand years later was rooted in a memory of this center of learning lost in the desert of the Giza Plateau after Akhenaten’s death. Its very secrecy, buried out of sight and known only to a select priesthood, would have reflected Akhenaten’s certainty that his new cult would not long outlast his death, ensuring that knowledge of the place was quickly lost and showing how such a complex might have survived intact without being looted through the ages to the present day.

  —

  The possible association of Akhenaten with the Old Testament prophet Moses has been another constant source of fascination. In his book Moses and Monotheism, Sigmund Freud speculated that Moses was in fact an Egyptian of royal birth, and came close to conflating the two. It is certainly striking that the monotheism of Aten worship and the revelations said to have been experienced by Moses could have been contemporaneous, and that Moses and Pharaoh are presented in the biblical narrative in such close connection with each other. If there was indeed a revelation in the desert, shared perhaps by an Egyptian prince and an Israelite slave, then it was to be in the Judaeo-Christian tradition and later in Islam that the monotheism arising from that revelation survived, with Egyptian religion reverting back to its traditional polytheism after Akhenaten’s death.