‘If I’d known this was how you did business, I would never have come to you for help,’ she uttered.
‘You’re welcome,’ Ethan replied. ‘We’re now in your hands. Wherever it was you intended to go, you have the lead.’
Lucy rolled her eyes and kicked off towards the narrow spit of land encircling the bay.
XXIII
The museum was located on Meret Basha on the eastern banks of the Nile, just north of Tahrir Square, a handsome building fronted with fountains and stone sphinxes bustling with tourists. Ethan led the way, his features concealed behind sunglasses and a cheap tourist hat that he had found being hawked by an Egyptian vendor in one of Cairo’s busy streets. The sun was beating down on the busy square as they made their way through the bustling crowds.
It had taken them almost three hours to reach the museum from the lake, hitching a lift into the city and booking into a cheap hotel in order to shower and change into hastily purchased clothes. Nobody took any notice of them, the hoteliers assuming them to be American tourists and making no remark on their damp hair or creased and dirty clothing.
As they reached the museum entrance Ethan hung back and allowed Lucy to lead the way inside. She walked with confidence through the vast halls filled with Egyptian mummies, the ancient remains of Rameses II and the elaborate gold head mask of Tutankhamen attracting crowds of tourists, their cameras flashing as they photographed of the famous relics.
Ethan watched Lucy walk up to a member of the museum staff and speak to him quietly. The man appeared surprised to have been approached at all, but then he seemed to recognise Lucy and moments later he was beckoning her to follow him. Ethan and Lopez again hung back as they followed Lucy and the staff member toward a series of locked doors near the back of the main hall.
‘You have any idea what she’s up to?’ Lopez asked him.
‘None whatsoever.’
‘What’s your stake in this?’
‘She came to me,’ Ethan replied. ‘I don’t have a stake. You?’
Lopez did not reply as they reached the doors and were led through into a laboratory of sorts, where sealed Perspex boxes contained antiquities that were being cleaned and prepared for display by museum staff. Lucy’s new friend led them between the staff workers toward a series of offices at the back of the laboratory, and he called out.
‘Dr El-Wari?’
From within one of the offices stepped an Egyptian man wearing spectacles and with receding black hair, his dark skin stark against his crisp white shirt. He took one look at Lucy and then spread his arms wide.
‘Dr Morgan,’ he exclaimed as he stepped forward and swept her up into an embrace. ‘I thought we had seen the last of you in Egypt a long time ago, more was the pity.’
Lucy returned the embrace warmly, and then turned to gesture to Ethan and Lopez as she introduced them. El-Wari greeted them with vigorous handshakes and beckoned them into his office as he shut the door behind them.
‘Dr El-Wari is one of Egypt’s foremost experts on hieroglyphics and ancient Egyptian iconography,’ Lucy said by way of an explanation. ‘He may be able to help us.’
‘Help you with what?’ El-Wari asked.
Lucy produced from her rucksack photographs of the icons they had taken in Japan and Cambodia and laid them on the doctor’s table.
‘These images were taken by us in Cambodia and Japan,’ Lucy explained. ‘The sites where the icons were found were dated as being 800 A.D. and anything up to 3000 BCE. I wanted to ask if you’d seen anything similar in your work here in Egypt?’
El-Wari nodded. ‘Many times. This is the hieroglyph for the sun god Aten and is found on many tombs and obelisks around Egypt. But I’ve never heard of it being found on any other monuments on the planet and this version of it is slightly different. The length of the beams projecting from the sun are always the same length in Aten’s hieroglyphic, but these are represented at variable lengths.’
El-Wari moved across his office to a large poster that had been laminated and stuck to the wall. Upon it were dense ranks of hieroglyphs, each with a translation beneath them in both Greek and Latin that Ethan guessed had been taken from the famous Rosetta Stone, a granodiorite stele inscribed with a decree issued at Memphis, Egypt in 196 BCE on behalf of King Ptolemy V. The decree appeared in three scripts: Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, the Demotic script, and Ancient Greek, and had allowed linguists with a means to finally decode the mysterious Egyptian hieroglyphs. The doctor tapped one of the icons, a round disc with sun beams extending from beneath it in exactly the same manner as the icons that Lucy had found in Japan in Cambodia.
Lucy nodded. ‘Okay, can you think of the largest or most prominent hieroglyph of this kind in Egypt that you have found so far? Do you know where it is located?’
‘I know precisely where it was located. The great Temple of the Aten was constructed in the city of el-Amarna, Egypt, and was the main temple for the worship of the god Aten during the reign of Akhenaten around 1353–1336 BCE.’
‘You mean it doesn’t exist anymore?’ Lucy asked, somewhat deflated.
‘The reign of Akhenaten, the father of the more famous Tutankhamen, was a unique period in ancient Egyptian history that created an entirely new religion by establishing a religious cult dedicated to the sun-disk Aten. Akhenaten shut down traditional worship of other deities like Amun-Ra and brought in a new era, though short-lived, of monotheism where the Aten was worshipped as a sun god and Akhenaten and his wife, Nefertiti, represented the divinely royal couple that connected the people with their god. He built a new capital at Amarna along the east bank of the Nile River, setting up workshops, palaces, suburbs and temples. The Great Temple of the Aten was located just north of the Central City and, as the largest temple dedicated to the Aten, was where Akhenaten fully established the proper cult and worship of the sun-disk.’
‘Can we visit the temple? Has enough of it remained to study?’
‘The temple was destroyed by later pharaohs who considered the worship of the sun alone to be something of a heresy,’ El-Wari explained. ‘In addition, the temple did not have any icons engraved upon it. Instead, it was open roofed allowing worshippers to pray directly to the sun in the sky above, as opposed to previous religions within ancient Egypt that worshipped images of deities in temples and such like.’
‘So a pharaoh comes along and suddenly begins worshipping the sun,’ Ethan said, ‘after thousands of years of the people worshipping other gods. Why would he do that?’
‘Nobody knows,’ El-Wari admitted. ‘But there is much about Akhenaten that we do not know and that stands out as different from other pharaohs both before and after. What few busts we have of him depict an unusual looking man with a long, slender face and what appears to be an extended cranium, as though he was deformed in some way.’
‘Do we have any iconography from the temple at all?’ Lucy asked.
‘There is an engraving on the wall of one of the tombs in Amarna that depicts the shape of the temple. I think that the tomb belongs to somebody called Meryre, and the depiction of the temple includes a very large image of the sun disc of Aten. In fact, I think that…’
El-Wari hurried across to one of his shelves and searched through it for several moments before he produced a thick book that he dragged across to the desk and opened. He flipped through several pages before he found what he was looking for, a large depiction of ancient hieroglyphs that appeared to show a temple.
‘Yes, here, look. The depiction of the temple and the icon of Aten does not present equal lines but instead resembles the iconography you’ve showed me from Cambodia Japan.’