Sir General Charles Warren was a larger-than-life character who, in fact, had an incredible impact on the lore of nineteenth-century England. Both a war hero and a criticized military leader, General Warren commanded the British military forces in Singapore and later the Thames District outside London. But his two most memorable exploits were his clandestine tunneling under Jerusalem’s Temple Mount in 1867 and his three-year service as commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Service (Scotland Yard) in London during the Jack the Ripper murders. London newspapers at one time even theorized that Warren himself was a suspect in the serial killings.
The US Navy has actually deployed its Laser Weapons System (LaWS) on the warship USS Ponce, the navy’s first Afloat Forward Staging Base, which patrols in the Persian Gulf. The Laser Weapons System marks, illuminates, and obliterates its targets within seconds.
The Jewish prophets Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel were all in Babylon at the same time, while Daniel was chancellor to the great Chaldean Emperor, Nebuchadnezzar, who ordered the great tower to be built near his palace in Babylon. The foundation pit of the “Tower of Babylon” is visible from the air today.
In 2006, thirty Sunni tribes who called the Great Anbar Desert in western Iraq their home, rose up in opposition to a radical, Islamic terror group—Al Qaeda in Iraq—and its violently fanatic religious extremism. Led by the Albu Mahals, the Sons of Iraq, as they called themselves, allied with US Marines. For the next three years, the Sunni fighters of the Anbar Awakening engaged in some of the bloodiest and brutal battles of the Iraq war and were critical to the marines driving Al Qaeda in Iraq over into Syria. Al Qaeda in Iraq merged with Syrian jihadists and became known as the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS).
The Bowery Mission (http://bowery.org) has served the lost, the least, and the lonely of New York City since 1878. It is the third-oldest rescue mission in the United States and one of its most effective. Besides serving more than 250,000 meals yearly to the homeless and poor, the Bowery Mission’s nine-month, faith-based residential recovery program has guided thousands of men in transforming themselves from addiction and hopelessness to productive and healthy lives. There are more than three hundred rescue missions in the United States helping the poor and homeless with a combined one million donors and more than four hundred thousand volunteers. Most of them belong to the Association of Gospel Rescue Missions (http://agrm.org).
Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1834–92) was England’s best-known preacher for most of the second half of the nineteenth century and pastor of London’s famed New Park Street Chapel. Spurgeon’s All of Grace was the first book published by Moody Press and is still its all-time bestseller. Three of his works have sold more than one million copies, and there is more of Spurgeon’s work in print than any other Christian author (http://www.pilgrimpublications.com).
Spurgeon’s London publication, The Sword and the Trowel, was replicated in New York City in 1878 by his cousin, Joseph Spurgeon, as The Christian Herald and Signs of Our Times. Dr. Louis Klopsch purchased the magazine in 1890 and was instrumental in preventing the Bowery Mission from closing its doors by purchasing the rescue mission from the Rev. A. G. Ruliffson in 1895 after its original superintendent passed away.
Now extinct, Demotic is the third language inscribed on the Rosetta Stone. First a spoken language then a written language it was extensively used in Egypt for more than one thousand years, from 660 BC to 425 AD. University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute recently completed its nearly forty-year Demotic Dictionary Project (http://oi.uchicago.edu/research/projects/dem), cataloguing and deciphering the twenty-seven Demotic letters. As noted in the book, because Demotic was first a spoken language, each of its letters carries hundreds—if not thousands—of potential definitions. The current Demotic Dictionary contains more than two thousand pages of possible meanings for words associated with those letters or combinations of those letters.
In 2012, the New York Times wrote an article about the completion of the Institute’s Demotic Dictionary Project: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/18/science/new-demotic-dictionary-translates-lives-of-ancient-egyptians.html.
Sir Edward Elgar (1857–1934) was an English romantic composer most notable for his many compositions of Pomp and Circumstance and his orchestral work the “Enigma” Variations. Elgar was also a devotee of codes, puzzles, and ciphers. On July 14, 1897, Elgar sent a letter to a young friend, Miss Dora Penny, the twenty-two-year-old daughter of the Rev. Alfred Penny, rector of St Peter’s, Wolverhampton—the now famous Dorabella Cipher.
The cipher consists of eighty-seven characters, apparently constructed from an alphabet of twenty-four symbols. The symbols are arranged in three lines, contain one, two, or three semicircles, and are oriented in one of eight directions. A small dot appears after the fifth character on the third line. No one has yet deciphered its meaning. Dora Penny died in 1964.
Temple Mount in Jerusalem is a platform supported by a series of arches built by Herod the Great. The Mount is a formation of karstic limestone, which has been eroded over time by water, creating a honeycomb of cisterns, tunnels, and caverns. Other than the unofficial diggings of Charles Warren in the nineteenth century, there has been virtually no archaeological study of the space under the Temple Mount platform.
St. Antony’s Monastery actually exists. St. Antony was a Coptic Christian monk and the father of monasticism. The monastery is, in fact, the oldest inhabited Christian monastery in the world, being continually occupied by monks since its founding in AD 356. The monastery itself was plundered a number of times by the Bedouins. In response to these attacks, a fortress-like structure was built around the monastery for its protection.
The modern monastery (http://stantonymonastery.com/) is a self-contained village in the Oasis Dayr al Qiddis deep in the Red Sea wilderness with gardens, a mill, a bakery, and five churches. The walls are adorned with paintings of knights in bright colors and hermits in more subdued colors, and the oldest date to the seventh and eighth centuries. The monastery also has a library with more than seventeen hundred handwritten manuscripts. The library probably contained many more volumes but was significantly reduced by the plundering.
Other than the basic facts and associated research listed above, the rest of The Aleppo Code is a result of the author’s imagination. Any “errors of fact” are a result of that imagination.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Terry Brennan’s twenty-two-year career in journalism included leading The Mercury of Pottstown, Pennsylvania, as its editor, to a Pulitzer Prize in Editorial Writing; serving as executive editor of a multinational newspaper firm—Ingersoll Publications—with papers in the United States, England, and Ireland; and earning the Valley Forge Award for editorial writing from the Freedoms Foundation.
In 1996 Brennan transferred to the nonprofit sector and served for twelve yeas as vice president of operations for the Christian Herald Association, Inc., the parent organization of four New York City ministries, including the Bowery Mission.
He now serves as chief administrative officer for Care for the Homeless, a New York City nonprofit that delivers medical teams to serve homeless people in shelters, soup kitchens, and drop-in centers. Two of his adult sons and their families live in Pennsylvania. Terry and his wife, Andrea, their two adult children, son-in-law, and a precious granddaughter live in the New York City area.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Prominent: Characters
Prologue
Part One
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
23
24
25
26
Part Two
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
Part Three
48
49
50
Author’s Note
About the Author
The Aleppo Code (The Jerusalem Prophecies) Page 41