THE OBJECT OF THEIR ATTENTION WAS REVEALED in every detail, the ancient sheet of writing almost luminous beneath the protective glass plate. The others drew their chairs forward, their faces looming out of the shadows at the edge of the light.
“First, the material.”
Dillen handed round a small plastic specimen box containing a fragment removed for analysis when the mummy was unwrapped.
“Unmistakably papyrus, Cyperus papyrus. You can see the criss-cross pattern where the fibres of the reed were flattened and pasted together.”
“Papyrus had largely disappeared in Egypt by the second century AD,” Hiebermeyer said. “It became extinct because of the Egyptian mania for record-keeping. They were brilliant at irrigation and agriculture but somehow failed to sustain the reed beds along the Nile.” He spoke with a flush of excitement. “And I can now reveal that the earliest known papyrus dates from 4000 BC, almost a thousand years before any previous find. It was discovered during my excavations earlier this year in the temple of Neith at Sa?s in the Nile Delta.”
There was a murmur of excitement around the table. Katya leaned forward.
“So. To the manuscript. We have a medium which is ancient but could date any time up to the second century AD. Can we be more precise?”
Hiebermeyer shook his head. “Not from the material alone. We could try a radiocarbon date, but the isotope ratios would probably have been contaminated by other organic material in the mummy wrapping. And to get a big enough sample would mean destroying the papyrus.”
“Obviously unacceptable.” Dillen took over the discussion. “But we have the evidence of the script itself. If Maurice had not recognized it we would not be here today.”
“The first clues were spotted by my student Aysha Farouk.” Hiebermeyer looked round the table. “I believe the burial and the papyrus were contemporaneous. The papyrus was not some ancient scrap but a recently written document. The clarity of the letters attests to that.”
Dillen pinned the four corners of his scroll to the table, allowing the others to see that it was covered with symbols copied from the papyrus. He had grouped together identical letters, pairs of letters and words. It was a way of analysing stylistical regularity familiar to those who had studied under him.
He pointed to eight lines of continuous script at the bottom. “Maurice was correct to identify this as an early form of Greek script, dating to no later than the high classical period of the fifth century BC.” He looked up and paused. “He was right, but I can be more precise than that.”
His hand moved up to a cluster of letters at the top. “The Greeks adopted the alphabet from the Phoenicians early in the first millennium BC. Some of the Phoenician letters survived unaltered, others changed shape over time. The Greek alphabet didn’t reach its final form until the late sixth century BC.” He picked up the light pointer and aimed at the upper right corner of the scroll. “Now look at this.”
An identical letter had been underlined in a number of words copied from the papyrus. It looked like the letter A toppled over to the left, the crossbar extending through either side like the arms of a stick figure.
Jack spoke excitedly. “The Phoenician letter A.”
“Correct.” Dillen drew his chair close to the table. “The Phoenician shape disappears about the middle of the sixth century BC. For that reason, and because of the vocabulary and style, I suggest a date at the beginning of the century. Perhaps 600, certainly no later than 580 BC.”
There was a collective gasp.
“How confident are you?” asked Jack.
“As confident as I have ever been.”
“And I can now reveal our most important dating evidence for the mummy,” Hiebermeyer announced triumphantly. “A gold amulet of a heart, ib, underneath a sun disc, re, together forming a symbolic representation of the pharaoh Apries’ birth name Wah-Ib-Re. The amulet may have been a personal gift to the occupant of the tomb, a treasured possession taken to the afterlife. Apries was a pharaoh of the Twenty-sixth Dynasty who ruled from 595 to 568 BC.”
“It’s fantastic,” Katya exclaimed. “Apart from a few fragments we have no original Greek manuscripts from before the fifth century BC. This dates only a century after Homer, only a few generations after the Greeks began to use the new alphabet. This is the most important epigraphical find in decades.” She paused to marshal her thoughts. “My question is this. What is a papyrus with Greek script doing in Egypt in the sixth century BC, more than two hundred years before the arrival of Alexander the Great?”
Dillen looked round the table. “I won’t beat about the bush any longer. I believe we have a fragment of the lost work of Solon the Lawmaker, his account of his visit to the high priest at Sa?s. We have found the source of Plato’s story of Atlantis.”