by Talbot, Luke
Now, here they were about to do PhDs. And along with her husband George, Ellie was the closest Gail had to family.
“You’ll find your Burynshik sooner or later, I know you will. Just make sure it is sooner rather than later: you’ve pretty much got a September deadline for your proposal, which is less than ten weeks away!” Ellie exclaimed. “Why don’t you ask David if you can look into those Caspian Sea structures with him?”
“I don’t know,” she mused. “I do find it really interesting, but then is that really a good idea?”
David Hunt obviously enjoyed his subject matter enormously, and his enthusiasm always rubbed off on his study group, but he was by no means what you would call a traditional academic, having written more than one bestseller on the subject of ancient conspiracies and so-called forgotten history. His theory was that the history of the human race had been vastly underestimated by scholars, and that there were advanced civilisations tens of thousands of years before the rise of even the earliest known written records. This usually led to unfortunate parallels with Atlantis theories, which never went down well with his peers, regardless of how enthralled his students were.
He was in the middle of investigating some new finds in Kazakhstan; pretty much all of his spare time was spent on site, and he was preparing to return for the summer break.
The rapidly receding waters of the Caspian Sea had uncovered some perplexing archaeology near the small town of Burynshik, on the north-eastern coast of the country. What the remains had once been was certainly nothing unusual: wooden posts sunk deep into the mud, forming the foundation of what had almost certainly been small buildings above the water, possibly a fishing village. The technology and architecture were similar to that found in early northern-European Iron Age settlements, before the arrival of the Romans. But experts had started to scratch their heads when the results of dating analysis had returned from Moscow State University.
At first, they had tried to use radiocarbon dating, and their first samples were found to contain less than five percent of Carbon-14. This meant that the wood had to be over twenty-thousand years old. Not believing this to be the case, further samples were sent to Moscow, all returning similar results. The wood was also sent to Cambridge in England, to be dated using dendrochronology, or tree-ring dating. The combined results were conclusive: the Burynshik remains did not fit into any known long tree-ring sequences, meaning they could not be chronologically linked with any other wood found to date.
As he had told them this, he had put his tablet on his desk and leaned forward, fixing them all intently with his gaze. He then almost whispered, as if letting them in on a closely-guarded secret, that the structures were confirmed to be between 23,560 and 23,760 years old. The general intake of breath from his small audience made him smile, and they had finished the study group with an animated debate on the subject of dating accuracy and sample contamination.
In the café, Gail was now scrolling through her notes on the site while Ellie went to get another cup of tea. She was just about to open a browser and start surfing the net when David Hunt’s face popped up on the side of the screen.
She tapped it.
“Hi Gail,” he said as his face filled the screen. “Studying hard, I see?” he smiled.
“Just having a chat with Ellie about your dig, actually,” she told him.
He grinned. “Excellent! Look, I’ve got some great news. Do you want to come and see me in my office?”
As Gail walked with Ellie along the main corridor of the Department of Archaeology, she thought about Mr Hunt and his passion for upsetting the natural order of things. In her mind, such a tack was a bit risky for her thesis; knowing her luck she would be shot down in flames for it, and she couldn’t risk her PhD like that. She and George had invested heavily in her academic career and had spent the last four years relying principally on his income. To throw everything away now wouldn’t go down well.
“What I really need is a good mystery that doesn’t involve upsetting half the department!” she said aloud, causing strange and amused looks from a group of future first-year students being shown around the campus.
For all their similarities, two more physically distinct people could not be found on the entire campus: while Gail was athletic and dressed in fashionable jeans and blouse, with smartly-combed chestnut hair tied back in a short ponytail, Ellie was plump and round, wore baggy combats and a loose t-shirt, and her hair was a mess of long dreadlocks.
“What I need is something different, something –”
“What you need is another coffee, maybe Irish it up a little this time though!” interrupted Ellie.
“Isn’t 11am a little early for that?” she grinned.
She knocked on David’s door and they both entered before waiting for a response.
“Ah, my favourite future doctorates!” he said rubbing his hands together. “Ellie, you’re welcome to stay.”
She nodded, though she hadn’t really offered to leave.
“Gail, I have just been speaking to an old friend of mine. I happened to mention your lack of inspiration for your thesis, and it just so happens that he is leading some expeditions this winter that you might find interesting. He’s short a couple of spaces, and I persuaded him he could do with a PhD student on the books,” he tapped his tablet a couple of times. “I’ve sent you some details. I told him that you are one of the brightest students here, and as such he would be a fool not to offer you a place immediately. I’m sorry I lied, but needs must,” he winked.
Gail flipped open her tablet and the brief summary from David flashed up.
“Egypt?” she gasped.
Ellie looked at the small, colourful, slightly amateurish summary brochure on her screen. She looked at her friend’s face, then back again at the screen. “Egypt, for a month? You can’t do a thesis on Egypt!”
David shook his head. “The Department doesn’t specialise in Egyptology, for sure. But I think your Social Archaeology master’s sets you up perfectly, Gail.”
“It looks interesting, different,” Gail was nodding enthusiastically. “Besides, we’ve touched on Egypt before, in ‘Classical Mediterranean’ and I’m sure there was a first year course that covered it.”
David grinned. “One of mine in fact: ‘The Emergence of Civilisation’.”
“And the cost?” Ellie continued. “It’s for volunteers, Gail. They even underlined that bit, so they’re not going to pay for a free holiday to Egypt for you; you’ll probably even have to fork out for the accommodation and food yourself!”
They looked up at David, who sat on the corner of his desk and put his tablet down. “You’ve both been on digs before, and this is no different: they will have some reasonable accommodation and catering on site. From what I’ve heard it’s in the middle of the desert, so everyone will be in the same situation. As for flights, I can’t imagine they’re too expensive.”
Gail grinned. “I’m sure I can persuade George that it’s a good idea.” She knew she was probably going to have to soften him up a bit beforehand, though.
“Speaking of which, what about George?” Ellie replied. “You can’t just leave him on his own for a month,” she sounded almost sorry for him, “and over Christmas!”
Gail knew this would hardly be a bar: she had no living relatives, her parents having died in a car crash while on holiday in France when she was nine. Her foster parents had younger children to care for now, so they rarely imposed on them for anything more than a coffee and an exchange of presents. For his part, George’s family were spread across three continents and his parents had moved to Canada the year before. Christmas was going to be a quiet affair.
Gail thought about this for a moment and checked her calendar. She looked up at David and smiled. “I’ll think of something, don’t worry.”
“Great!” David clapped. “Look, you still have to apply for a place, but I’ll put in as good a word as I can. In the meantime do some brushing up, I’ve sent you a read
ing list so you should have some documents waiting for you.” The University library had digital copies of all its textbooks, and free access to most other digital libraries in the academic network. As her master’s supervisor, David was able to select any texts from these resources and assign them to her automatically, at which point they would become available in her tablet’s digital library. “If you want to do this, you need to send me your thoughts on your proposal by the end of next week, that way I can help you to make sure it’s perfect in time for your PhD application deadline.”
Gail thanked him and turned to go, leaving Ellie standing next to David. “Well, are you coming?” she asked her. “We’ve got another study-group in five minutes.”
Ellie looked at David and then laughed. “My God, that Egypt thing really has affected her, hasn’t it?”
“What do you mean?”
“Gail Turner: on time!”
Chapter 2
George was in the living room when Gail got home, stretched out on the settee. His bare feet were resting on a small chair in front of him and his t-shirt was riding up, exposing what had recently become a slightly podgy belly. His short, dark hair was a mess and his face was covered in what he called ‘designer stubble,’ but what Gail called the result of working from home for a whole week. She often joked that as George worked from home, it was as if she was doing the studying and he was living the life of a student.
His career as a marine biologist often meant that he had to go on extended field-trips, though he had so far failed to be sent any further than the freezing waters of the Baltic. In between trips, he spent most of his time building simulation models for micro-organism behaviour.
He was facing the video wall, their latest toy. It had been installed the previous week, and was literally a normal everyday wall, which at the flick of a switch could display from any one of a number of multimedia sources, or even all of them simultaneously. George’s favourite setup was watching the football on eighty percent of the wall, with the remaining fifth split between browsing the internet and social feeds. Having just splashed out on such a big gadget, she knew she had leverage for some flights to Egypt if she needed it.
As she sat down beside him she gave him a peck on the cheek, at the same time leaning over and grabbing the remote. Before he could complain she had changed the channel.
“Good day then?” he laughed.
“Not bad, not bad.” She continued to look at the video wall intently. “You?” she asked nonchalantly.
He looked at the wall and smiled: the History channel. When Gail wasn’t watching programs on archaeology she was watching history, and she preferred to view it full screen. She claimed that you simply couldn’t concentrate on more than one source at the same time; anyone who said they could was obviously trying to impress someone. George had thought this to be slightly out of character, considering how she tended to jump from topic to topic at the drop of a hat.
“OK, I suppose,” he sat up and shifted his body to face her on the settee. “I couldn’t do much today because most of our data from Latvia was corrupted, again. Apart from that, just the usual.”
“Corrupted?”
He sighed. “The data from another one of the sensors we put on the seabed came through all garbled, missing half the packet information. It might just be the data transfer, but they’re organising a dive team to go and replace it. Then they’ll send us the memory chips to see if we can salvage anything.”
“That’s the fourth one, isn’t it?”
“Yup,” he said with a sigh. “It’ll push that trip back by a few weeks now, probably at least a month.”
“Pushed back a month, eh? When was that supposed to happen?” she asked, still looking at the wall.
It was a loaded question and he knew it. She had sent him a strange email that afternoon, asking him how much holiday he had left for the year. He only had a couple of weeks. “Late December, early next year. Doesn’t matter now.”
Gail turned to face him with a huge smile on her face. Although she was eager to go to Egypt, going to such an amazing place with George by her side would make it extra special.
“Oh, no. What are you planning?” he asked.
“What do you think of going to Egypt this Christmas?” She could barely contain her excitement.
George took a moment to react. When he did, Gail was reminded why she had married him two years earlier: his smile turned into a grin, and he leant forward to kiss her. “Tell me all about it, honey.”
She had immediately been interested in the idea of going to Egypt for a dig. But as the hours had gone by and she looked ever deeper into the background of the excavations, that interest had turned into raving enthusiasm. She had completed her application form for the dig online and had spent the rest of the afternoon surfing the Internet for more information.
It turned out that the story of Tell el-Amarna was very simple, which was what made it so captivating. For over seven hundred years, the financial and political capital of ancient Egypt had been at Thebes in the south of the country. Royal palaces, temple complexes at Karnak and Luxor, commercial centres, agriculture, everything was within convenient reach. By the reign of Amenhotep III in 1382BC it was the centre of an expanding, powerful and ambitious kingdom. The international influence of the Egyptians was unquestionable, and their armies were fast becoming unbeatable on foreign soil. The kingdom was enjoying a period of unprecedented wealth and power.
Then, at the start of his reign, the young pharaoh Amenhotep IV started work on a new capital, far away from Thebes to the north, on the edge of the Eastern Desert and the banks of the Nile. Shortly afterwards, Amenhotep IV changed his name to Akhenaten. The Aten suffix was derived from the name of a newly promoted god of the sun, suddenly the primary deity of the Egyptian people. Within four years, the seat of government had been moved to the new capital, named Akhetaten.
Akhenaten himself moved to this new capital with his wives and children and at the height of his reign, the city of Akhetaten boasted a population of over twenty thousand people.
Nine years later, Akhenaten died and power quickly shifted back towards Thebes. After barely twenty-five years of occupation, Akhetaten was abandoned. There was evidence that the tombs of the later Aten kings, such as Smenkhkare and Tutankhamen, who even changed his name from Tutankhaten to distance himself from his father’s legacy, were purposefully tampered with so that their occupants never found eternal peace. The succeeding pharaohs ensured that no record of the city or its heretic kings remained intact. Engravings were chiselled and scratched from stone and plaster, written records were buried or destroyed, and the city was razed to the ground and abandoned.
So thorough was their work that it was not until 1887, over three thousand years later, that Egyptologists became aware of the ancient city, when a woman from the modern village of Tell el-Amarna came across a hoard of clay tablets.
For Gail, the most enigmatic of all this was Akhenaten’s famous queen, Nefertiti; with an imposing appearance in artwork, most notably her bust in the Berlin Museum, it was difficult to imagine that she had not played an important role in Akhenaten’s kingdom. And yet to date, her burial place and remains had never been identified and in all likelihood were yet to be discovered.
As Gail finished telling George all of this, he had little doubt that she had indeed found the mystery she had so been longing for. That the capital city of a great kingdom moved from one place to another was important enough, without the Egyptians having changed from polytheism to quasi-monotheism at the same time. But it was what happened afterwards that really made the story intriguing: the Egyptians had made every effort to erase Akhetaten and everyone involved in it from their history.
Gail was so excited that they stayed up until the early hours of the morning talking about the mystery of the site, searching her textbooks on her tablet and surfing the Internet. Over half a million websites made some mention of it and after several hours George would have sworn that th
ey had looked at most of them.
“Are you sure this is the sort of thing you’re looking for?” he asked her as he looked at a page on the video wall. He gestured with the remote to scroll down and read more.
“What do you mean? It’s perfect!” she answered.
“This website here looks a bit far out, to be honest, talking about aliens and the pyramids and all that.”
Gail looked up from one of her own hardcopy textbooks from her undergraduate years: it turned out that there was a whole chapter on Tell el-Amarna that she had never noticed before. “There’s always going to be at least one, isn’t there? I mean there are still people who think that we didn’t land on the Moon!”
“Did we?” her husband joked. In the last ten years, man and woman had landed on the Moon no fewer than three times. The most recent of these, a joint Sino-Russian mission, had visited the historic Apollo 11 landing site and transmitted live video footage to Earth. The conspiracy theories continued, unabated.
“Whatever,” she laughed and continued to look through her book.
George touched her arm. “Gail, isn’t this the sort of thing you wanted to steer clear of, you know, conspiracy theories and cover-ups? Isn’t this what David Hunt goes on about?”
“No, not at all!” She put her book down and took the remote from George, motioning back several pages to a website they had looked at earlier. “This is history,” she gestured with the remote and highlighted a paragraph in yellow. She turned towards George and smiled. “You see, David likes to pick up on where people have made mistakes, trying to find bad dating and conveniently ignored evidence. He’s made a career out of it, and he’s certainly not the only one.”
“And for every piece of evidence in favour of one of his theories, I bet there’s a whole ton of evidence he ignores,” George commented.