The Moses Legacy - Adam Palmer [7]
‘I thought it was more important to bring back what we already found.’
‘I figured as much when you phoned me on your mad dash to Sharm el-Sheikh Airport.’
‘Well, it’s not as if the remaining stones are going to get up and walk away.’
Mansoor frowned at Gabrielle’s levity. She should have remembered that he was an utterly humourless man, and proud of the fact.
‘We can carry on today. I put the team on standby, waiting for your decision. I’d already pulled them off their regular duties to concentrate on this find. I didn’t want to put them back on the areas they were digging because they’re all too excited about—’
‘You told them your theory?’ he blurted out in a mixture of shock and fear.
‘I didn’t tell them,’ replied Gabrielle. Then after a few seconds she added, ‘But it must have been fairly obvious.’
‘To an overenthusiastic kid, perhaps. Not to a serious scholar.’
‘I think a credible case can be made out.’ Her tone was defensive. She knew that Mansoor was always sceptical about Big Theories.
‘Let’s keep some sense of proportion. So far all we can say is that we have fragments of two stone tablets with an old, somewhat simple linear script with repeated characters engraved on them.’
‘But it is definitely two stones?’ she asked cautiously.
‘We have seven corner pieces. That suggests at least two separate stones.’
‘What’s your assessment of the writing?’
Mansoor peered at it carefully. ‘Well, the style is a bit like hieroglyphics, but only the simplest hieroglyphics. In fact, some of the symbols are quite recognizable – if we can find the right light to view them in.’
‘So it can’t be a diplomatic document or treaty.’
‘If it was, it would be written in Akkadian cuneiform.’
‘And that also rules out Hittite and Sumerian.’
‘Exactly,’ Mansoor confirmed.
‘I’m wondering if this could be our Knossos.’
‘This isn’t Mycenaean or Minoan, Professor Gusack; I can assure you of that!’
‘I didn’t mean that,’ replied Gabrielle irritably. ‘I mean another syllable alphabet, like Linear A or Linear B.’
‘And I suppose you were hoping to be the next Michael Ventris.’
‘Well, it would be nice to follow in the footsteps of the man who rewrote ancient Greek history.’
‘Nice, perhaps. Likely, no.’
‘What makes you so sure?’
Mansoor’s voice took on a dour tone. ‘Well, as far as I can tell, there aren’t enough unique characters for a syllable alphabet.’
‘So it’s… what? A phonetic alphabet?’
‘Precisely. More specifically, an abjad. No vowels – just consonants.’
‘Aramaic? Phoenician?’ She didn’t bother to include Hebrew or Arabic in her question, because both were familiar to her and she could tell immediately that it wasn’t either.
‘It doesn’t look all that much like Aramaic. It might bear some vague comparison to Phoenician.’
‘Vague comparison?’ Gabrielle echoed.
‘It’s hard to tell until we can look at them under the right lighting conditions. I’ll get one of the photo experts to take some pictures and play around with the contrast then we’ll take another look.’
‘But what’s your gut instinct?’
Mansoor looked at Gabrielle with mild irritation. She was being pushy. He decided nevertheless to hazard a preliminary speculation.
‘It reminds me of the Serabit el-Khadim inscriptions.’
‘Proto-Sinaitic?’
‘Yes.’
Proto-Sinaitic was one of the oldest phonetic alphabets ever used – if not the oldest – dating back nearly 4,000 years. The name was derived from the Greek ‘proto’ meaning first and the place where the writings in the alphabet were initially discovered: Sinai. Some thirty engravings of the script had been found in Sinai at the turquoise mines at Serabit el-Khadim, once used as a penal colony by ancient Egypt.
‘Can you translate it?’
Mansoor was amused by Gabrielle’s eagerness.
‘Well, assuming I’m right, we know how it sounds, but not what it means.’
The letters of the Proto-Sinaitic alphabet had been matched to their equivalent letters in all the other main consonant alphabets – like Hebrew and Arabic – so the pronunciation was reasonably certain. But the underlying language was unknown. Was it