The Messiah Secret - James Becker [75]
Slowly they started to retrace their steps, looking closely at all the structures as they passed them. A couple of times Angela thought she’d spotted it, but each time she was mistaken. Then she looked ahead and muttered something under her breath.
‘I don’t believe it.’
‘What?’ Bronson looked where she was pointing.
‘I think these Egyptian idiots have driven the bloody road straight through the temple. Look, you can see the same kind of stone walls on both sides of it over there.’
It wasn’t anything like as clear as that to Bronson. ‘You might be right,’ he said, ‘but perhaps the engineers had no option. There might have been nowhere else here they could have built the road.’
‘So they demolished half of an irreplaceable temple just to lay down a strip of tarmac? There’s always an alternative in this kind of situation, Chris. This is just archaeological vandalism, caused by nothing more than sheer laziness. They could have routed the road around the hill, down in the valley. It would only have added a few tens of yards to the length, and it might even have been easier to do.’
‘Yes, but when this road was built the government may not have realized this was an important site. I thought that most of the excavations over here had been undertaken by foreign archaeologists anyway. Essentially, Egypt’s been dug up by the British and the French and the Americans, not by the Egyptians themselves. They probably just saw a bunch of old stones and thought they’d do nicely as a hardcore base for the road. I don’t suppose it’s the first time something like that has happened.’
Angela nodded slowly. ‘That’s a remarkably accurate assessment, actually, and you’re quite right – it’s been very common. A lot of people don’t know that when St Peter’s Basilica was being built in Rome, many of the stones they used for it were taken from the Coliseum, which is one reason why it’s in the state it is now. It was only a lot later that the Italians seemed to realize that the Coliseum was an internationally important archaeological site – at least as important as St Peter’s, maybe even more important – and started taking steps to give it the protection it deserved.’
Bronson put a comforting hand on her shoulder. ‘Let’s take a look at what’s left of the temple.’
They walked up the slope towards the structure that remained standing beside the road. The walls were very low and the majority were little more than tumbled piles of masonry. Angela crouched down beside one of them and pointed at the carving of a foot and lower leg. The rest of the carving had vanished when the wall fell to pieces – or perhaps was demolished – but there were just a few hieroglyphic characters visible over to one side.
‘Anything useful here?’ Bronson asked, bending down beside her.
‘Not a lot. The carving could have been of Shoshenq, or even of the god Amun, but of course there’s no way of telling now.’ She bent lower and looked more closely at the hieroglyphic characters, where a curved incision was visible at the edge of a vertical line of characters. ‘That looks like the upper edge of a cartouche, so this inscription probably relates to a pharaoh.’
‘A cartouche – that’s the kind of border they drew around an important name, yes?’
‘Yes. The names of pharaohs were always enclosed within a cartouche. In fact, these three symbols above it confirm that the inscription is talking about a pharaoh.’
Bronson looked at the characters she was pointing at. He could see what looked like a walking stick symbol with two curved lines sprouting from either side of its bottom end, a half-moon shape and a wavy line.
‘That’s a word, is it?’ he asked. ‘What does the walking stick thing mean?’
Angela nodded. ‘It’s actually a sedge plant, and it’s used as a determinative. The letters spell “n”, “s” and “w”, and that means “nesu”, or “king”. About the only word which could follow that would be the name of the pharaoh himself and, as this temple was built