Upon entering the room for the first time, Ben had immediately associated the symbol with a stickman, because quite simply it looked just like one, except that it had a second pair of legs just above the first.
From that moment on, it had been known popularly as the Amarna Stickman, previously unheard of and seemingly unique to the Amarna Library. Academically, it remained nameless in the hope that one of the texts in the Library would shed light on its ancient Egyptian pronunciation.
She had not dared to open the book, for fear of it falling apart, and had therefore spent several minutes examining it from every angle. It was about the size of a modern coffee-table book. The covers were a quarter of an inch thick, and the whole thing was bound together, incredibly neatly, with reed. It was in immaculate condition, as if it had only just been placed there.
After a while, she had left the plinth and had walked slowly back to the tunnel, but along the opposite side of the room. It was then that she had noticed that all of the shelf uprights were also engraved with the Stickman symbol from the book-cover. As she had walked past the final row of shelves, she had seen for the first time in full the end wall of the Library, through which the tunnel had been drilled. In the centre of the wall was the same symbol again, but about six feet high. Next to it, but roughly half as tall, was Nefertiti’s Cartouche. The two symbols were separated by a single vertical line.
It was later confirmed that aside from Nefertiti’s cartouche, the strange symbol was the only marking inside the Library. To date, none of the other documents in the Library had been found to contain the symbol.
It was only present on the book from the plinth. And it had never before been seen outside the Library.
She had spent a total of four weeks at the site, longer than she had initially planned, and had returned regularly ever since. In the ten years since the excavation, only a small fraction of the texts from the Library had even been looked at.
Because of the mystery surrounding the Amarna Stickman, she had decided to put it on the cover of her book. Her publisher had readily agreed. For an academic book, it had sold in surprising numbers, nothing short of a best-seller, and beyond her wildest expectations.
Chapter 35
The double-doors of the lecture theatre suddenly burst open. She jumped as she was torn from her reminiscing and three hundred students poured inside.
The noise was incredible. There was shouting, laughing, jeering, talking, banging of chair seats as they were flipped down, shuffling of feet, somebody tripping on the stairs and dropping their bag and a particularly deep laugh somewhere near the back which she could only describe as a ‘guffaw’.
After about five minutes, Gail looked at her watch and decided it was time to close the doors. As she returned to the podium, she could see students pointing to her slide and whispering comments to their neighbours. This lot are lively, she thought to herself with a smile as she prepared to start her lecture.
She dimmed the lights and checked attendance on the podium’s console: a better turnout than usual, there were three hundred and fifty-two people seated in the theatre; eighty-six more than the previous year.
Walking out from behind the podium – she briefly thought of the first lecture she had given, when she had literally hidden behind it - she introduced herself and welcomed them to the course, Introduction to Egyptology.
Looking around the room, she noted with a certain degree of pride that practically everyone was transfixed by either her or the projection on the wall behind. She had never seen such an eager group.
“Egyptology is the study of Egypt and its antiquities,” she began. “It has been practiced in its present form for over two hundred years, and is closely linked both to archaeology and history. How many of you here are taking Archaeology and History?”
Approximately half the theatre raised their hands. Some said yes, one person near the back said he wasn’t sure, to which everyone laughed.
“Until the turn of the twenty-first century,” she continued, “the last royal tomb to be excavated in Egypt was that of Tutankhamen, in 1922. For decades, many people believed that the last tomb in the Valley of the Kings had been discovered. They were very wrong. Since 2006, three more tombs have been discovered and excavated there, two in the last decade alone.” She looked around the theatre at her wide-eyed audience. I must be getting good at this, she thought to herself. “Over the past fifteen years, Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities has seen major investment and modernisation; it now has the capability to regulate and oversee three times the number of simultaneous archaeological excavations compared to fifty years ago, particularly in the pharaonic sector. In other words, the Egyptian government, aided by UNESCO, has invested millions in making it easier to go to Egypt and do archaeology.” She paused and looked behind her at her introduction slide. “And believe me, if you thought two hundred years was enough to find out everything there is to know about Egypt, think again. Egypt is throwing up unexpected find after unexpected find, every day.”
She stopped talking and walked back to the podium. Hitting the screen once with her index finger, the slide changed to a photograph of the book that had been on the plinth in the Library at Amarna, with the Stickman carved into its cover.
“Has anyone seen this Stickman symbol before?” she asked confidently. She always liked to follow this up with ‘don’t worry, until about ten years ago, neither had anyone else’.
Except that this time, not one hand stayed down.
She was used to the normal group, usually near the front, who would raise their hands, sometimes smugly. But since she had started giving the same lecture two years earlier, nothing had come close to this. She was amazed, and was about to say ‘Wow!’, when Professor David Hunt burst through the door at the back of the lecture theatre.
He stumbled down the steps, mumbling apologies to the students, most of whom still had their hands held high. He didn’t even say hello to Gail as he rushed over to the podium and closed her presentation. Bringing up an Internet browser, he found the BBC website and expanded the ‘Breaking News’ of the day.
“Look!” he said, out of breath, pointing up at the projection on the wall.
Gail turned round, still in shock. She read the words, her eyes widening.
‘Evidence of Intelligent Life Revealed on Mars,’ the headline claimed, boldly.
“Wow!” she finally said, as if her brain had queued the word she had been about to say before David’s entrance, and had to make her say it before more words could be used.
“No,” David said with a grin like a Cheshire cat. “This is wow!” He scrolled down to the bottom of the page, and clicked on a picture. She saw two people in space suits standing on some sort of platform on the side of a cliff. He clicked to show the next picture: a close up of the platform, which she now saw was like a small stone jetty coming out of the cliff wall. He clicked to show the last picture. It was another close up of the stone, clearly showing the engraving on its surface.
“Is this some kind of joke?” she said, walking towards the screen. She was oblivious to the excited talking going on in the theatre behind her. “Is that really Mars?”
“Yes!” he almost shouted.
Gail needed to sit down. She pulled a stool out from under the podium and perched herself on top of it. “How?”