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“Yes!” Jack punched the air with his free hand, his normal reserve giving way to the emotion of a truly momentous discovery. It was the culmination of years of single-minded passion, the fulfillment of a dream that had driven him since boyhood. It was a find that would rival Tutankhamun’s tomb, a discovery that would secure his team front place in the annals of archaeology.

  For Jack these images were enough. Yet there was more, much more, and he stood transfixed by the screen. The camera panned down to the divers on a low shelf below the clump of ingots.

  “Probably the stern compartment.” Costas was pointing at the screen. “Just beyond this ledge is a row of stone anchors and a wooden steering oar.”

  Immediately in front was an area of shimmering yellow which looked like the reflection of the floodlights off the sediment in the water. As the camera zoomed in, there was a collective gasp of astonishment.

  “That’s not sand,” the student whispered. “That’s gold!”

  Now they knew what they were looking at, the image was one of surpassing splendour. In the centre was a magnificent golden chalice fit for King Minos himself. It was decorated in relief with an elaborate bullfighting scene. Alongside lay a life-sized golden statue of a woman, her arms raised in supplication and her headdress wreathed in snakes. Her bare breasts had been sculpted from ivory, and a flickering arc of colour showed where her neck was embellished with jewels. Nestled in front was a bundle of golden-handled bronze swords, their blades decorated with fighting scenes made from inlaid silver and blue enamel.

  The most brilliant reflection came from the area just in front of the divers. Each waft of the hand seemed to reveal another gleaming object. Jack could make out gold bars, royal seals, jewellery and delicate diadem crowns of intertwined leaves, all jumbled together as if they had once been inside a treasure chest.

  The view suddenly veered up towards the ascent line and the screen abruptly went blank. In the stunned silence that followed, Jack lowered the camera and looked at Costas.

  “I think we’re in business,” he said quietly.

  Jack had staked his reputation on a far-flung proposal. In the decade since completing his doctorate he had become fixated on discovering a Minoan wreck, a find that would clinch his theory about the maritime supremacy of the Minoans in the Bronze Age. He had become convinced that the most likely spot was a group of reefs and islets some seventy nautical miles north-east of Knossos.

  Yet for weeks they had searched in vain. A few days earlier their hopes had been raised and then dashed by the discovery of a Roman wreck, a dive Jack expected to be his last of the season. Today was to have been a chance to evaluate new equipment for their next project. Once again Jack’s luck had held out.

  “Mind giving me a hand?”

  Costas had slumped exhausted beside the stern railing on Seaquest, his equipment still unbuckled and the water on his face now joined by rivulets of sweat. The late afternoon sun of the Aegean drenched his form in light. He looked up at the lean physique that towered over him. Jack was an unlikely scion of one of England’s most ancient families, his easy grace the only hint of a privileged lineage. His father had been an adventurer who had eschewed his background and used his wealth to take his family away with him to remote locations around the world. His unconventional upbringing had left Jack an outsider, a man most at ease in his own company and beholden to nobody. He was a born leader who commanded respect on the bridge and the foredeck.

  “What would you do without me?” Jack asked with a grin as he lifted the tanks off Costas’ back.

  The son of a Greek shipping tycoon, Costas had spurned the playboy lifestyle which was his for the asking and opted for ten years at Stanford and MIT, emerging as an expert in submersible technology. Surrounded by a vast jumble of tools and parts that only he could navigate, Costas would routinely conjure up wondrous inventions like some latter-day Caractacus Pott. His passion for a challenge was matched by his gregarious nature, a vital asset in a profession where teamwork was essential.

  The two men had first met at the NATO base at Izmir in Turkey when Jack had been seconded to the Naval Intelligence School and Costas was a civilian adviser to UNANTSUB, the United Nations anti-submarine warfare research establishment. A few years later Jack invited Costas to join him at the International Maritime University, the research institution which had been their home for more than ten years now. In that time Jack had seen his remit as director of field operations at IMU grow to four ships and more than two hundred personnel, and despite an equally burgeoning role in the engineering department, Costas always seemed to find a way to join Jack when things got exciting.

  “Thanks, Jack.” Costas slowly stood up, too tired to say more. He only stood as high as Jack’s shoulders and had a barrel chest and forearms inherited from generations of Greek sponge fishermen and sailors, with a personality to match. This project had been close to his heart as well, and he was suddenly drained by the excitement of discovery. It was he who had set the expedition in train, using his father’s connections with the Greek government. Although they were now in international waters, the support of the Hellenic Navy had been invaluable, not least in keeping them supplied with the cylinders of purified gas which were vital for trimix diving.

  “Oh, I almost forgot.” Costas’ round, tanned face broke into a grin as he reached into his stabilizer jacket. “Just in case you thought I’d faked the whole thing.”

  He extracted a package swaddled in protective neoprene and handed it over, a triumphant gleam in his eye. Jack was unprepared for the weight and his hand momentarily dropped. He undid the wrapping and gasped in astonishment.

  It was a solid metal disc about the diameter of his hand, its surface as lustrous as if it were brand new. There was no mistaking the deep hue of unalloyed gold, a gold refined to the purity of bullion.

  Unlike many of his academic colleagues Jack never pretended to be unmoved by treasure, and for a moment he let the thrill of holding several kilogrammes of gold wash through him. As he held it up and angled it towards the sun, the disc gave off a dazzling flash of light, as if it were releasing a great burst of energy pent up over the millennia.

  He was even more elated when he saw the sun glint off markings on the surface. He lowered the disc into Costas’ shadow and traced his fingers over the indentations, all of them exquisitely executed on one convex side.

  In the centre was a curious rectilinear device, like a large letter H, with a short line dropping from the crossbar and four lines extending like combs from either side. Around the edge of the disc were three concentric bands, each one divided into twenty compartments. Each compartment contained a different symbol stamped into the metal. To Jack the outer circle looked like pictograms, symbols that conveyed the meaning of a word or phrase. At a glance he could make out a man’s head, a walking man, a paddle, a boat and a sheaf of corn. The inner compartments were aligned with those along the edge, but instead contained linear signs. Each of these was different but they seemed more akin to letters of the alphabet than to pictograms.

  Costas stood and watched Jack examine the disc, totally absorbed. His eyes were alight in a way Costas had seen before. Jack was touching the Age of Heroes, a time shrouded in myth and legend, yet a period which had been spectacularly revealed in great palaces and citadels, in sublime works of art and brilliantly honed weapons of war. He was communing with the ancients in a way that was only possible with a shipwreck, holding a priceless artefact that had not been tossed away but had been cherished to the moment of catastrophe. Yet it was an artefact shrouded in mystery, one he knew would draw him on without respite until all its secrets were out.

  Jack turned the disc over several times and looked at the inscriptions again, his mind racing back to undergraduate courses on the history of writing. He had seen something like this before. He made a mental note to email the image to Professor James Dillen, his old mentor at Cambridge University and the world’s leading authority on the ancient scripts of Greece.

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bsp; Jack passed the disc back to Costas. For a moment the two men looked at each other, their eyes ablaze with excitement. Jack hurried over to join the team kitting up beside the stern ladder. The sight of all that gold had redoubled his fervour. The greatest threat to archaeology lay in international waters, a free-for-all where no country held jurisdiction. Every attempt to impose a global sea law had ended in failure. The problems of policing such a huge area seemed insurmountable. Yet advances in technology meant that remote-operated submersibles, of the type used to discover the Titanic, were now little more expensive than a car. Deep-water exploration that was once the preserve of a few institutes was now open to all, and had led to the wholesale destruction of historic sites. Organized pillagers with state-of-the-art technology were stripping the seabed with no record being made for posterity and artefacts disappearing for ever into the hands of private collectors. And the IMU teams were not only up against legitimate operators. Looted antiquities had become major currency in the criminal underworld.

  Jack glanced up at the timekeeper’s platform and felt a familiar surge of adrenaline as he signalled his intention to dive. He began carefully to assemble his equipment, setting his dive computer and checking the pressure of his cylinders, his demeanour methodical and professional as if there were nothing special about this day.

  In truth he could barely contain his excitement.

  CHAPTER 2

  Maurice Hiebermeyer stood up and wiped his forehead, momentarily checking the sheen of sweat that was dripping off his face. He looked at his watch. It was nearly noon, close to the end of their working day, and the desert heat was becoming unbearable. He arched his back and winced, suddenly realizing how much he ached from more than five hours hunched over a dusty trench. He slowly made his way to the central part of the site for his customary end-of-day inspection. With his wide-brimmed hat, little round glasses and knee-length shorts he cut a faintly comic figure, like some empire builder of old, an image that belied his stature as one of the world’s leading Egyptologists.

  He silently watched the excavation, his thoughts accompanied by the familiar clinking of mattocks and the occasional creak of a wheelbarrow. This may not have the glamour of the Valley of the Kings, he reflected, but it had far more artefacts. It had taken years of fruitless search before Tutankhamun’s tomb had been discovered; here they were literally up to their knees in mummies, with hundreds already revealed and more being uncovered every day as new passageways were cleared of sand.

  Hiebermeyer walked over to the deep pit where it had all begun. He peered over the edge into an underground labyrinth, a maze of rock-cut tunnels lined with niches where the dead had remained undisturbed over the centuries, escaping the attention of the tomb robbers who had destroyed so many of the royal graves. It was a wayward camel that had exposed the catacombs; the unfortunate beast had strayed off the track and disappeared into the sand before its owner’s eyes. The drover had run over to the spot and recoiled in horror when he saw row upon row of bodies far below, their faces staring up at him as if in reproach for disturbing their hallowed place of rest.

  “These people are in all likelihood your ancestors,” Hiebermeyer had told the camel drover after he had been summoned from the Institute of Archaeology in Alexandria to the desert oasis two hundred kilometres to the south. The excavations had proved him right. The faces which had so terrified the drover were in reality exquisite paintings. Some were of a quality unsurpassed until the Italian Renaissance. Yet they were the work of artisans, not some ancient great master, and the mummies were not nobles but ordinary folk. Most of them had lived not in the age of the pharaohs but in the centuries when Egypt was under Greek and Roman rule. It was a time of increased prosperity, when the introduction of coinage spread wealth and allowed the new middle class to afford gilded mummy casings and elaborate burial rituals. They lived in the Fayum, the fertile oasis which extended sixty kilometres east from the necropolis towards the Nile.

  The burials represented a much wider cross-section of life than a royal necropolis, Hiebermeyer reflected, and they told stories just as fascinating as a mummified Ramses or Tutankhamun. Only this morning he had been excavating a family of cloth-makers, a man named Seth and his father and brother. Colourful scenes of temple life adorned the cartonnage, the plaster and linen board that formed the breastplate over their coffins. The inscription showed that the two brothers had been lowly attendants in the temple of Neith at Saïs but had experienced good fortune and gone into business with their father, a trader in cloth with the Greeks. They had clearly profited handsomely to judge from the valuable offerings in the mummy wrappings and the gold-leaf masks that covered their faces.

  “Dr. Hiebermeyer, I think you should come and see this.”

  The voice came from one of his most experienced trench supervisors, an Egyptian graduate student who he hoped one day would follow him as director of the institute. Aysha Farouk peered up from the side of the pit, her handsome, dark-skinned face an image from the past, as if one of the mummy portraits had suddenly sprung to life.

  “You will have to climb down.”

  Hiebermeyer replaced his hat with a yellow safety helmet and gingerly descended the ladder, his progress aided by one of the local fellahin employed as labourers on the site. Aysha was perched over a mummy in a sandstone niche only a few steps down from the surface. It was one of the graves that had been damaged by the camel’s fall, and Hiebermeyer could see where the terracotta coffin had been cracked and the mummy inside partly torn open.

  They were in the oldest part of the site, a shallow cluster of passageways which formed the heart of the necropolis. Hiebermeyer fervently hoped his student had found something that would prove his theory that the mortuary complex had been founded as early as the sixth century BC, more than two centuries before Alexander the Great conquered Egypt.

  “Right. What do we have?” His German accent gave his voice a clipped authority.

  He stepped off the ladder and squeezed in beside his assistant, careful not to damage the mummy any further. They had both donned lightweight medical masks, protection against the viruses and bacteria that might lie dormant within the wrapping and be revived in the heat and moisture of their lungs. He closed his eyes and briefly bowed his head, an act of private piety he carried out each time he opened a burial chamber. After the dead had told their tale he would see that they were reinterred to continue their voyage through the afterlife.

  When he was ready, Aysha adjusted the lamp and reached into the coffin, cautiously prising apart the jagged tear which ran like a great wound through the belly of the mummy.

  “Just let me clean up.”

  She worked with a surgeon’s precision, her fingers deftly manipulating the brushes and dental picks which had been neatly arranged in a tray beside her. After a few minutes clearing away the debris from her earlier work she replaced the tools and edged her way towards the head of the coffin, making room for Hiebermeyer to have a closer look.

  He cast an expert eye over the objects she had removed from the resin-soaked gauze of the mummy, its aroma still pungent after all the centuries. He quickly identified a golden ba, the winged symbol of the soul, alongside protective amulets shaped like cobras. In the centre of the tray was an amulet of Qebeh-sennuef, guardian of the intestines. Alongside was an exquisite faience brooch of an eagle god, its wings outstretched and the silicate material fired to a lustrous greenish hue.

  He shifted his bulky frame along the shelf until he was poised directly over the incision in the casing. The body was facing east to greet the rising sun in symbolic rebirth, a tradition which went far back into prehistory. Below the torn wrapping he could see the rust-coloured torso of the mummy itself, the skin taut and parchment-like over the ribcage. The mummies in the necropolis had not been prepared in the manner of the pharaohs, whose bodies were eviscerated and filled with embalming salts; here the desiccating conditions of the desert had done most of the job, and the embalmers had removed only the organ
s of the gut. By the Roman period even that procedure was abandoned. The preservational characteristics of the desert were a godsend to archaeologists, as remarkable as waterlogged sites, and Hiebermeyer was constantly astonished by the delicate organic materials that had survived for thousands of years in near perfect condition.

  “Do you see?” Aysha could no longer contain her excitement. “There, below your right hand.”

  “Ah yes.” Hiebermeyer’s eye had been caught by a torn flap in the mummy wrapping, its ragged edge resting on the lower pelvis.

  The material was covered with finely spaced writing. This in itself was nothing new; the ancient Egyptians were indefatigable record-keepers, writing copious lists on the paper they made by matting together fibres of papyrus reed. Discarded papyrus also made excellent mummy wrapping and was collected and recycled by the funerary technicians. These scraps were among the most precious finds of the necropolis, and were one reason why Hiebermeyer had proposed such a large-scale excavation.

  At the moment he was less interested in what the writing said than the possibility of dating the mummy from the style and language of the script. He could understand Aysha’s excitement. The torn-open mummy offered a rare opportunity for on-the-spot dating. Normally they would have to wait for weeks while the conservators in Alexandria painstakingly peeled away the wrappings.

  “The script is Greek,” Aysha said, her enthusiasm getting the better of her deference. She was now crouched beside him, her hair brushing against his shoulder as she motioned towards the papyrus.

  Hiebermeyer nodded. She was right. There was no mistaking the fluid script of ancient Greek, quite distinct from the hieratic of the Pharaonic period and the Coptic of the Fayum region in Greek and Roman times.

  He was puzzled. How could a fragment of Greek text have been incorporated in a Fayum mummy of the sixth or fifth century BC? The Greeks had been allowed to establish a trading colony at Naucratis on the Canopic branch of the Nile in the seventh century BC, but their movement inland had been strictly controlled. They did not become major players in Egypt until Alexander the Great’s conquest in 332 BC, and it was inconceivable that Egyptian records would have been kept in Greek before that date.