Lucy seemed almost to begin hopping about from foot to foot as she grasped the doctor’s arm. ‘Do you know the orientation of this tomb when it was found?’
‘East to west,’ El-Wari replied, ‘which would have meant that the sunbeams of the Aten cartouche would have pointed east.’
Lucy hurriedly pulled out a map that she had bought in Cairo, on which she had already redrawn the lines that extended from Japan and Cambodia to intersect on the coast of South America. Within moments she had plotted a line east from Cairo, carefully transposing the angle of the longest beam from the temple icon to match the orientation of her map.
Ethan stepped closer and to his amazement he saw the line extend and pass directly through the point where those from Japan and Cambodia bisected.
‘It’s a match,’ Ethan realized. ‘They’re pointing to the same place as the other lines.’
‘This isn’t possible,’ El-Wari protested. ‘It’s a coincidence. These civilizations would have had no contact with each other and would not have shared any kind of iconography.’
‘That’s not what the evidence is telling us,’ Lucy replied. ‘The civilizations were all connected by one thing, something that could traverse the great distances between them and was important enough to the people respectively that they recorded its presence in their religious icons over thousands of years. And all of it points to one place. Peru.’
‘And what does that mean?’ Lopez asked. ‘What’s so special about Peru?’
‘You said that Akhenaten was deformed in some way?’ Lucy pressed El-Wari.
‘He was possessed of an unusual appearance,’ El-Wari confirmed, ‘and had a considerably extended cranium, perhaps as a result of deliberate deformation as a child.’
‘Perhaps,’ Lucy murmured. ‘But then, perhaps not. This may be the very link that we’ve been searching for. I can’t believe that I didn’t make the connection earlier.’
‘There is no connection,’ El-Wari insisted. ‘These cultures never made contact with each other.’
‘Yet both Egyptian and Inca cultures mysteriously possess the same identical body of ancient art, architecture, symbolism, mythology and religion,’ Lucy countered. ‘Isn’t it true that Victorian scholars, faced with this enigma, concluded that both cultures must have been children of a Golden Age parent civilization? Today, the parallels between the two cultures are not only being ignored by American and Western scholars, they’re being suppressed.’
‘Pah!’ El-Wari scoffed. ‘That’s not science, it’s pseudo-archaeology. Nobody believes that sort of thing.’
Lucy shot the doctor a harsh look and then stormed across to his book shelves. She scanned for several moments and then selected two thick tomes that she brought back to the table and opened side-by-side. Ethan saw a series of images that Lucy identified as she flipped through the books.
‘Both the Incas and the Egyptians mummified their dead and interred them with crossed arms, gold funerary masks and gifts for the afterlife,’ Lucy pointed out as she identified images in the books portraying identical appearances of the two cultures’ artefacts. ‘Both cultures built megalithic structures with incredibly precise stonework and masonry joined with metal clasps, trapezoidal entrances, and obelisks with hieroglyphic writing etched into the stonework. Both worshipped the solar icon of the sun, Aten for the Egyptians and Inti for the Inca. Both used animal symbolism on funerary masks as a representation of the third or mind’s eye, both used the ankh and staff symbol for their gods, a symbolism found in many ancient cultures separated by thousands of miles and yet a correlation ignored by mainstream science. Anthropoidal coffins, reed boat construction, tryptich three-door temples denoting the same religious practices… the list is endless, doctor. It’s staring us in the face!’
Ethan saw Dr El-Wari hesitate, trying to absorb a new line of thought that perhaps he had refused to consider before. ‘These people could not have met,’ he insisted. ‘Their cultures are separated by not just thousands of miles, but by thousands of years!’
‘No,’ Lucy shot back. ‘The city of Caral in Peru was built some five thousand years’ ago. Pyramid-shaped public buildings were being built at Caral at the same time that the Saqqara pyramid, the oldest in Egypt, was going up. Caral’s pyramids were already being revamped when Egypt’s Great Pyramid of Khufu was under construction.’ Lucy was virtually radiating sunlight herself as she pointed at the icon of the Egyptian sun god Aten. ‘We’ve been looking at this all the wrong way. We’ve been assuming that this image, this icon hieroglyph, depicts the sun.’
‘It does,’ El-Wari insisted. ‘That’s what it’s famous for.’
‘I think that’s what it’s become famous for,’ Lucy replied. ‘But I think it has more than one meaning, because we have all seen this icon before in a different way.’
‘I don’t understand,’ El-Wari admitted.
‘That makes two of us,’ Ethan pointed out.
‘Three,’ Lopez added.
‘If we put aside the assumption that none of these civilizations knew each other,’ Lucy persisted, ‘and we start looking at this hieroglyph as not that of a god being worshipped but of information being recorded, then we find that it also appears within the culture of a society that lived in South America for thousands of years. It was used by them to record information, a means to maintain records among a people that had no written dialect of their own.’
‘In South America?’ El-Wari echoed as he thought for a moment and then his jaw dropped as he stared at Lucy. ‘You don’t think that this is a message?’
‘I don’t think it’s a message at all,’ Lucy replied. ‘I know that it’s a message.’
‘But it can’t be,’ El-Wari protested. ‘If this is true it throws into doubt virtually everything we know about the development of our civilizations!’
‘And that’s why so many people are pursuing it.’
‘Do you want to fill in the ignorant among us?’ Lopez demanded.
Lucy turned to face them.
‘This is not a picture of the sun beaming light down upon the earth,’ she said. ‘This is a message written in a Peruvian language that is appearing all around the world at different archaeological sites. It is the image of something called a Quipu.’
‘And what the hell is one of those?’ Lopez demanded.
‘It is the physical language of the Inca people of South America,’ Dr El-Wari explained. ‘Quipu are a series of knots tied into strings that are themselves attached to a circular ring that was often worn as a necklace. It was recently discovered that these devices, which had once been thought to contain only numerical information, are in fact able to record dialect.’
‘I thought that the Inca were a relatively recent people,’ Ethan said. ‘Weren’t they wiped out by the conquistadors a few hundred years ago?’
‘That’s right,’ Lucy agreed, ‘but archaeologists in Peru have found a ‘quipu’ on the site of Caral, indicating that the device was in use thousands of years earlier than previously believed. Previously the oldest known quipus dated from about A.D. 650. They knew that the new quipus corresponded to the very ancient period of Caral because it was found in a public building. It was an offering placed on a stairway when they decided to bury the building and put down a floor to build another structure on top.’
Ethan frowned as he connected the train of Lucy’s thought with their own quest.