The Moses Legacy - Adam Palmer [8]
‘Maybe this could be our Rosetta Stone.’
The Rosetta Stone; written in three languages – hieroglyphs, Egyptian demotic script and ancient Greek – had facilitated the deciphering of hieroglyphics by enabling scholars to compare the Greek, which was already understood, to the unknown hieroglyphics and demotics.
‘The problem is that the writing on these fragments appears to be all one language, or at least one alphabet. In order to use it like the Rosetta Stone, we’d need a suitable candidate text in another language to compare it to.’
‘Well, if I’m right, then we already have one.’
Mansoor noticed the look on Gabrielle’s face and realized that she wasn’t backing down.
‘That’s a bit of a quantum leap in logic, Professor Gusack.’
‘Is it really? The site where we found it is a very good candidate for the real Mount Sinai—’
‘In the opinion of some people.’
‘According to the Bible, Moses smashed the original tablets of stone—’
‘If you take the Bible literally.’
‘And now we’ve found fragments of stone with ancient writing on them that appear to have been smashed, quite possibly deliberately.’
‘Well, even if you’re right, my biblical Hebrew isn’t that good. And neither is yours.’
‘Then maybe we should call in someone who has specialized knowledge of biblical languages.’
‘I’m not going to call in anyone from Israel,’ said Mansoor. ‘At least not at this stage. It would just be too controversial.’
‘I wasn’t thinking of an Israeli. The man I have in mind is British.’
‘Who?’
‘Daniel Klein.’
‘Klein?’ said Mansoor, not recognizing the name. ‘That sounds like a…’
‘He was my uncle’s star pupil,’ said Gabrielle. ‘Just like I was yours,’ she added with a twinkle in her eye.
Mansoor was silent for a moment. After a while, he nodded reluctantly. ‘Well, I guess if this Daniel Klein was Harrison Carmichael’s star pupil, then that’s good enough for me.’
‘Shall I call him?’ asked Gabrielle. ‘He knows me.’
‘Okay, you call him and introduce me and then put me on.’ Sensing her excitement, Mansoor added, ‘But let’s not tell him at this stage that we think we’ve found the original Ten Commandments.’
Chapter 4
‘This is the bread of affliction that our ancestors ate in the land of Egypt,’ Nathan Greenberg solemnly intoned.
In a house in Golders Green, Nathan Greenberg, father of three, was holding up a plate of three matzos, reciting a paragraph attesting to its significance. Nathan’s own parents and siblings lived in America, but he and his glamorous wife Julia had invited some of Julia’s extended family for the Passover seider.
The seider is a quasi-religious service performed at the dinner table before the festive meal marking the beginning of Passover in which Jewish families retell the story of the Exodus of the Israelite slaves from Egypt. ‘Bread of affliction’ was perhaps a misnomer, because it wasn’t the bread the Israelites ate when they were slaves in Egypt, but rather the bread prepared in haste when they were allowed to leave by the Egyptian Pharaoh whose will had been broken by the Ten Plagues.
But Nathan’s six-year-old daughter May and her twin sister Shari were not looking at the plate with the matzos. Their big, wide eyes were focused squarely on the area of the tablecloth just to the left of their father, under which he had placed half of the middle matzo that he had broken off and wrapped in a serviette less than a minute before. This was the afikoman – from the Greek meaning ‘leave it till later’ – so called because it was to be put aside and eaten at the end of the meal. According to a long-standing tradition, the children are supposed to ‘steal’ the afikoman and use it to bargain for presents and gifts from their beleaguered parents.
However, the twins were sitting too far away from their daddy to get their little hands on the