Atlantis jh-1

by David Gibbins

  Hiebermeyer suddenly felt deflated. A Greek document in the Fayum would most likely date from the time of the Ptolemies, the Macedonian dynasty that began with Alexander’s general, Ptolemy I Lagus, and ended with the suicide of Cleopatra and the Roman takeover in 30 BC. Had he been so wrong in his early date for this part of the necropolis? He turned towards Aysha, his expressionless face masking a rising disappointment.

  “I’m not sure I like this. I’m going to take a closer look.”

  He pulled the angle-lamp closer to the mummy. Using a brush from Aysha’s tray, he delicately swept away the dust from one corner of the papyrus, revealing a script as crisp as if it had been penned that day. He took out his magnifying glass and held his breath as he inspected the writing. The letters were small and continuous, uninterrupted by punctuation. He knew it would take time and patience before a full translation could be made.

  What mattered now was its style. Hiebermeyer was fortunate to have studied under Professor James Dillen, a renowned linguist whose teaching left such an indelible impression that Hiebermeyer was still able to remember every detail more than two decades after he had last studied ancient Greek calligraphy.

  After a few moments his face broke into a grin and he turned towards Aysha.

  “We can rest easy. It’s early, I’m sure of it. Fifth, probably sixth century BC.”

  He closed his eyes with relief and she gave him a swift embrace, the reserve between student and professor momentarily forgotten. She had guessed the date already; her master’s thesis had been on the archaic Greek inscriptions of Athens and she was more of an expert than Hiebermeyer, but she had wanted him to have the triumph of discovery, the satisfaction of vindicating his hypothesis about the early foundation of the necropolis.

  Hiebermeyer peered again at the papyrus, his mind racing. With its tightly spaced, continuous script it was clear this was no administrative ledger, no mere list of names and numbers. This was not the type of document which would have been produced by the merchants of Naucratis. Were there other Greeks in Egypt at this period? Hiebermeyer knew only of occasional visits by scholars who had been granted rare access to the temple archives. Herodotus of Halicarnassos, the Father of History, had visited the priests in the fifth century BC, and they had told him many wondrous things, of the world before the conflict between the Greeks and the Persians which was the main theme of his book. Earlier Greeks had visited too, Athenian statesmen and men of letters, but their visits were only half remembered and none of their accounts had survived first-hand.

  Hiebermeyer dared not voice his thoughts to Aysha, aware of the embarrassment that could be caused by a premature announcement which would spread like wildfire among the waiting journalists. But he could barely restrain himself. Had they found some long-lost lynchpin of ancient history?

  Almost all the literature that survived from antiquity was known only from medieval copies, from manuscripts painstakingly transcribed by monks in the monasteries after the fall of the Roman Empire in the west. Most of the ancient manuscripts had been ruined by decay or destroyed by invaders and religious zealots. For years scholars had hoped against hope that the desert of Egypt would reveal lost texts, writings which might overturn ancient history. Above all they dreamed of something that might preserve the wisdom of Egypt’s scholar priests. The temple scriptoria visited by Herodotus and his predecessors preserved an unbroken tradition of knowledge that extended back thousands of years to the dawn of recorded history.

  Hiebermeyer ran excitedly through the possibilities. Was this a firsthand account of the wanderings of the Jews, a document to set alongside the Old Testament? Or a record of the end of the Bronze Age, of the reality behind the Trojan War? It might tell an even earlier history, one showing that the Egyptians did more than simply trade with Bronze Age Crete but actually built the great palaces. An Egyptian King Minos? Hiebermeyer found the idea hugely appealing.

  He was brought back to earth by Aysha, who had continued to clean the papyrus and now motioned him towards the mummy.

  “Look at this.”

  Aysha had been working along the edge of the papyrus where it stuck out from the undamaged wrapping. She gingerly raised a flap of linen and pointed with her brush.

  “It’s some kind of symbol,” she said.

  The text had been broken by a strange rectilinear device, part of it still concealed under the wrapping. It looked like the end of a garden rake with four protruding arms.

  “What do you make of it?”

  “I don’t know.” Hiebermeyer paused, anxious not to seem at a loss in front of his student. “It may be some form of numerical device, perhaps derived from cuneiform.” He was recalling the wedge-shaped symbols impressed into clay tablets by the early scribes of the Near East.

  “Here. This might give a clue.” He leaned forward until his face was only inches away from the mummy, gently blowing the dust from the text that resumed below the symbol. Between the symbol and the text was a single word, its Greek letters larger than the continuous script on the rest of the papyrus.

  “I think I can read it,” he murmured. “Take the notebook out of my back pocket and write down the letters as I dictate them.”

  She did as instructed and squatted by the coffin with her pencil poised, flattered that Hiebermeyer had confidence in her ability to make the transcription.

  “OK. Here goes.” He paused and raised his magnifying glass. “The first letter is Alpha.” He shifted to catch a better light. “Then Tau. Then Alpha again. No, scratch that. Lamna. Now another Alpha.”

  Despite the shade of the niche the sweat was welling up on his forehead. He shifted back slightly, anxious to avoid dripping on the papyrus.

  “Nu. Then Tau again. Iota, I think. Yes, definitely. And now the final letter.” Without letting his eyes leave the papyrus he felt for a small pair of tweezers on the tray and used them to raise part of the wrapping that was lying over the end of the word. He blew gently on the text again.

  “Sigma. Yes, Sigma. And that’s it.” Hiebermeyer straightened. “Right. What do we have?”

  In truth he had known from the moment he saw the word, but his mind refused to register what had been staring him in the face. It was beyond his wildest dreams, a possibility so embedded in fantasy that most scholars would simply disown it.

  They both stared dumbfounded at the notebook, the single word transfixing them as if by magic, everything else suddenly blotted out and meaningless.

  “Atlantis.” Hiebermeyer’s voice was barely a whisper.

  He turned away, blinked hard, and turned back again. The word was still there. His mind was suddenly in a frenzy of speculation, pulling out everything he knew and trying to make it hold.

  Years of scholarship told him to start with what was least contentious, to try to work his finds into the established framework first.

  Atlantis. He stared into space. To the ancients the story could have occupied the tail end of their creation myth, when the Age of Giants gave over to the First Age of Men. Perhaps the papyrus was an account of this legendary golden age, an Atlantis rooted not in history but in myth.

  Hiebermeyer looked into the coffin and wordlessly shook his head. That could not be right. The place, the date. It was too much of a coincidence. His instinct had never failed him, and now he felt it more strongly than he ever had before.

  The familiar, predictable world of mummies and pharaohs, priests and temples seemed to fall away before his eyes. All he could think about was the enormous expenditure of effort and imagination that had gone into reconstructing the ancient past, an edifice that suddenly seemed so fragile and precarious.

  It was funny, he mused, but that camel may have been responsible for the greatest archaeological discovery ever made.

  “Aysha, I want you to prepare this coffin for immediate removal. Fill that cavity with foam and seal it over.” He was site director again, the immense responsibility of their discovery overcoming his boyish excitement of the last few minutes.
“I want this on the truck to Alexandria today, and I want you to go with it. Arrange for the usual armed escort, but nothing special as I do not want to attract undue attention.”

  They were ever mindful of the threat posed by modern-day tomb robbers, scavengers and highwaymen who lurked in the dunes around the site and had become increasingly audacious in their attempts to steal even the smallest trifle.

  “And, Aysha,” he said, his face now deadly serious. “I know I can trust you not to breathe a word of this to anyone, not even to our colleagues and friends in the team.”

  Hiebermeyer left Aysha to her task and grappled his way up the ladder, the extraordinary drama of the discovery suddenly compounding his fatigue. He made his way across the site, staggering slightly under the withering sun, oblivious to the excavators who were still waiting dutifully for his inspection. He entered the site director’s hut and slumped heavily in front of the satellite phone. After wiping his face and closing his eyes for a moment he composed himself and switched on the set. He dialled a number and soon a voice came over the headphone, crackly at first but clearer as he adjusted the antenna.

  “Good afternoon, you have reached the International Maritime University. How may I help you?”

  Hiebermeyer quickly responded, his voice hoarse with excitement. “Hello, this is Maurice Hiebermeyer calling from Egypt. This is top priority. Patch me through immediately to Jack Howard.”

  CHAPTER 3

  The waters of the old harbour lapped gently at the quayside, each wave drawing in lines of floating seaweed that stretched out as far as the eye could see. Across the basin, rows of fishing boats bobbed and shimmered in the midday sun. Jack Howard stood up and walked towards the balustrade, his dark hair ruffled by the breeze and his bronzed features reflecting the months spent at sea in search of a Bronze Age shipwreck. He leaned against the parapet and gazed out at the sparkling waters. This had once been the ancient harbour of Alexandria, its splendour rivalled only by Carthage and Rome itself. From here the grain fleets had set sail, wide-hulled argosies that carried the bounty of Egypt to a million people in Rome. From here, too, wealthy merchants had despatched chests of gold and silver across the desert to the Red Sea and beyond; in return had come the riches of the east, frankincense and myrrh, lapis lazuli and sapphires and tortoiseshell, silk and opium, brought by hardy mariners who dared to sail the monsoon route from Arabia and far-off India.

  Jack looked down at the massive stone revetment ten metres below. Two thousand years ago this had been one of the wonders of the world, the fabled Pharos of Alexandria. It was inaugurated by Ptolemy II Philadelphus in 285 BC, a mere fifty years after Alexander the Great had founded the city. At one hundred metres it towered higher than the Great Pyramid at Giza. Even today, more than six centuries after the lighthouse had been toppled by an earthquake, the foundations remained one of the marvels of antiquity. The walls had been converted into a medieval fortress and served as headquarters of the Institute of Archaeology at Alexandria, now the foremost centre for the study of Egypt during the Graeco-Roman period.

  The remains of the lighthouse still littered the harbour floor. Just below the surface lay a great jumble of blocks and columns, their massive forms interspersed with shattered statues of kings and queens, gods and sphinxes. Jack himself had discovered one of the most impressive, a colossal form broken on the seabed like Ozymandias, King of Kings, the toppled image of Ramses II so famously evoked by Shelley. Jack had argued that the statues should be recorded and left undisturbed like their poetic counterpart in the desert.

  He was pleased to see a queue forming at the submarine port, testimony to the success of the underwater park. Across the harbour the skyline was dominated by the futuristic Bibliotheca Alexandrina, the reconstituted library of the ancients that was a further link to the glories of the past.

  “Jack!” The door of the conference chamber swung open and a stout figure stepped onto the balcony. Jack turned to greet the newcomer.

  “Herr Professor Dr. Hiebermeyer!” Jack grinned and held out his hand. “I can’t believe you brought me all the way here to look at a piece of mummy wrapping.”

  “I knew I’d get you hooked on ancient Egypt in the end.”

  The two men had been exact contemporaries at Cambridge, and their rivalry had fuelled their shared passion for antiquity. Jack knew Hiebermeyer’s occasional formality masked a highly receptive mind, and Hiebermeyer in turn knew how to break through Jack’s reserve. After so many projects in other parts of the world, Jack looked forward eagerly to sparring again with his old tutorial partner. Hiebermeyer had changed little since their student days, and their disagreements about the influence of Egypt on Greek civilization were an integral part of their friendship.

  Behind Hiebermeyer stood an older man dressed immaculately in a crisp light suit and bow tie, his eyes startlingly sharp beneath a shock of white hair. Jack strode over and warmly shook the hand of their mentor, Professor James Dillen.

  Dillen stood aside and ushered two more figures through the doorway.

  “Jack, I don’t think you’ve met Dr. Svetlanova.”

  Her penetrating green eyes were almost level with his own and she smiled as she shook his hand. “Please call me Katya.” Her English was accented but flawless, a result of ten years’ study in America and England after she had been allowed to travel from the Soviet Union. Jack knew of Katya by reputation, but he had not expected to feel such an immediate attraction. Normally Jack was able to focus completely on the excitement of a new discovery, but this was something else. He could not keep his eyes off her.

  “Jack Howard,” he replied, annoyed that he had let his guard down as her cool and amused stare seemed to bore into him.

  Her long black hair swung as she turned to introduce her colleague. “And this is my assistant Olga Ivanovna Bortsev from the Moscow Institute of Palaeography.”

  In contrast to Katya Svetlanova’s well-dressed elegance, Olga was distinctly in the Russian peasant mould. She looked like one of the propaganda heroines of the Great Patriotic War, thought Jack, plain and fearless, with the strength of any man. She was struggling beneath a pile of books but looked him full in the eyes as he offered his hand.

  With the formalities over, Dillen ushered them through the door into the conference room. He was to chair the proceedings, Hiebermeyer having relinquished his usual role as director of the institute in deference to the older man’s status.

  They seated themselves round the table. Olga arranged her load of books neatly beside Katya and then retired to one of the chairs ranged along the back wall of the room.

  Hiebermeyer began to speak, pacing to and fro at the far end of the room and illustrating his account with slides. He quickly ran through the circumstances of the discovery and described how the coffin had been moved to Alexandria only two days previously. Since then the conservators had worked round the clock to unravel the mummy and free the papyrus. He confirmed that there were no other fragments of writing, that the papyrus was only a few centimetres larger than had been visible during the excavation.

  The result was laid out in front of them under a glass panel on the table, a ragged sheet about thirty centimetres long and half as wide, its surface densely covered by writing except for a gap in the middle.

  “Extraordinary coincidence that the camel should have put its foot right in it,” Katya said.

  “Extraordinary how often that happens in archaeology.” Jack winked at her after he had spoken and they both smiled.

  “Most of the great finds are made by chance,” Hiebermeyer continued, oblivious to the other two. “And remember, we have hundreds more mummies to open. This was precisely the type of discovery I was hoping for and there could be many more.”

  “A fabulous prospect,” agreed Katya.

  Dillen leaned across to take the projector remote control. He straightened a pile of papers which he had removed from his briefcase while Hiebermeyer was speaking.

  “Friends and colleagues,” he
said, slowly scanning the expectant faces. “We all know why we are here.”

  Their attention shifted to the screen at the far end of the room. The image of the desert necropolis was replaced by a close-up of the papyrus. The word which had so transfixed Hiebermeyer in the desert now filled the screen.

  “Atlantis,” Jack breathed.

  “I must ask you to be patient.” Dillen scanned the faces, aware how desperate they were to hear his and Katya’s translation of the text. “Before I speak I propose that Dr. Svetlanova give us an account of the Atlantis story as we know it. Katya, if you will.”

  “With pleasure, Professor.”

  Katya and Dillen had become friends when she was a sabbatical fellow under his guidance at Cambridge. Recently they had been together in Athens when the city had been devastated by a massive earthquake, cracking open the Acropolis to reveal a cluster of rock-cut chambers which contained the long-lost archive of the ancient city. Katya and Dillen had assumed responsibility for publishing the texts relating to Greek exploration beyond the Mediterranean. Only a few weeks earlier their faces had been splashed over front pages all round the world following a press conference in which they revealed how an expedition of Greek and Egyptian adventurers had sailed across the Indian Ocean as far as the South China Sea.

  Katya was also one of the world’s leading experts on the legend of Atlantis, and had brought with her copies of the relevant ancient texts. She picked up two small books and opened them at the marked pages.

  “Gentlemen, may I first say what a pleasure it is for me to be invited to this symposium. It is a great honour for the Moscow Institute of Palaeography. Long may the spirit of international co-operation continue.”