‘But I presume it wasn’t a tomb?’ asked Bronson.
‘Patience,’ Angela said, with a faint smile. ‘We excavated the length of the staircase, which went down to about twelve feet below the desert floor. It finished at a small square stone platform, surrounded on two sides by vertical slabs of bedrock. On the third side, directly in front of the staircase, there were half a dozen lengths of roughly shaped wood that formed a kind of door, or that’s what it looked like initially. It turned out that they were just individual planks of timber, positioned there to cover an opening in the rock.’
‘And?’ Bronson asked impatiently. ‘What did you find?’
‘That was the disappointing bit,’ Angela replied. ‘There was a large opening, an archway about seven feet tall and four feet wide that had been carved out of the rock. Beyond it was an open space that was clearly a natural geological feature, a small cave, which had been used in the past by some group of people. It seemed fairly obvious to us that the wood had been positioned to keep the dust and sand out of the cave when the decision had been taken to fill in the staircase. And it had worked well. When we cleared away the lengths of timber, we found only the equivalent of a couple of buckets of debris had penetrated behind it.
‘So that opened up the entrance and Mohammed — he’s the senior Iraqi archaeologist on the team, from the Baghdad Museum — took a look inside first.’
‘Rank has its privileges, in archaeology, just like every other job,’ Stephen mused.
‘Exactly. Anyway, as soon as the lights were working, we went down there in groups of four to have a look.’
‘And it wasn’t quite what we’d expected,’ Stephen said. ‘It was just an empty room, and there were no treasures of any sort down there. I don’t just mean no gold or anything like that, but I was certainly hoping that it might have been a burial vault or something of that sort, and we might at least have recovered a few bones and maybe some grave goods as well. But there was nothing. It looked as if at some point, maybe a few centuries ago, the people who had used the space had changed their mind, taken out everything that was movable, covered the entrance with the lengths of timber and then filled in the stone staircase leading down to it. And in fact that did sort of tie up with our first deduction that the settlement had been deliberately abandoned for some reason.’
‘But you said right at the start that it was a temple,’ Bronson objected, ‘so it can’t just have been a completely empty room, otherwise you would probably have thought it was a storeroom for grain or something.’
‘Quite right,’ Angela agreed. ‘In fact, once we had the lights burning and could examine every inch of the place, we found exactly three artefacts, and one or perhaps two of them did suggest that the cave might originally have been a temple.
‘The most obvious of these was a small stone altar — well, actually it’s little more than an oblong slab of stone positioned on two shorter vertical stone pillars. But we called it an altar because that’s what it looked like more than anything else, though in reality it could have been a stone seat. But the main indicator that the space might have been some kind of a temple was an image carved into the wall directly behind the “altar”. That image is a human face. It’s not very clear, and the carving is fairly basic — I suppose you could call it primitive — but it appears to be the face of a bearded man with long hair.’
‘You mean it’s a kind of graven image?’ Bronson said. ‘I thought a lot of religions forbade images of human beings or animals? Judaism and Islam, for example?’
‘You’re absolutely right,’ Stephen said. ‘The technical term is aniconism, and that’s basically a prohibition against depicting any kind of living creature, and especially not a religious figure, as an image to be worshipped. It’s an important character of the Jewish, Islamic and Byzantine artistic traditions, but it’s also worth saying that there are a few grey areas. Public buildings in Islamic states were often allowed to have such images on them as decoration, and back in 1932 a third-century Jewish synagogue was discovered in Syria with its interior walls almost completely covered in paintings showing priests and religious events like the consecration of the Tabernacle. So although you’re right in principle, the fact that we have a graven image in this particular structure doesn’t mean that it wasn’t a temple, and it also doesn’t mean we can rule out any particular religion, though I suppose we could probably suggest that the cave was unlikely to have been used by either Jewish or Islamic worshippers.’
‘And I suppose the image itself wouldn’t help to date it?’ Bronson asked.
‘No, not really,’ Angela said. ‘Men shaving their faces and having their hair cut is actually a comparatively recent innovation. For quite literally centuries, going back to the very dawn of recorded history, men wore beards and had long hair as a matter of course. You can see this in all the old paintings and images, everyone from Moses and Solomon to Jesus Christ. So the way the face had been carved was no real help in dating the temple. Unfortunately, radiocarbon dating the wood isn’t all that likely to give us a definitive answer either. What we will know when the tests have been completed is the date of the wood. We’ll be able to say with certainty that the entrance to the structure must have been covered after that date, but we have no obvious way of proving when the temple itself was created. The cave might have been opened up and used for some kind of religious services for only a year or two before it was shut up. Equally, it could have been used for a millennium, and then abandoned. At the moment, we simply have no way of telling.’
‘You didn’t find any organic matter inside the cave, then?’
‘No, nothing,’ Angela replied. ‘It was as if the place had been swept clean before they boarded up the entrance.’
‘Right, so you have the carving of a face on the wall, and what might have been a kind of altar right in front of it. You said there were three things in there, so what was the third?’
‘You can see why he’s a detective, can’t you, Stephen? The third relic, for want of a better word, was an inscription carved into the wall of the cave at the opposite end to the altar. And that, we hope, might provide us with sufficient information to identify the period and the function of the cave.’
‘You mean you haven’t translated it yet?’ This time it was Bronson who sounded surprised.
‘It’s not that simple,’ Angela said. ‘It looks like Latin but it isn’t. In fact, let me just clarify that. I’m pretty sure that it is Latin, but some kind of encryption has been applied to it — maybe Atbash or something similar — because at the moment it just reads like gibberish.’
‘If you can’t read any of the text, why do you think that it’s written in Latin?’
‘It’s the character set,’ Angela replied. ‘You speak fluent Italian and more than enough French to get by, so if somebody handed you a piece of paper with meaningless words written on it, but you saw an acute or grave accent over a letter “e”, or a cedilla under a “c”, you’d probably guess that it was written in French, even if the words themselves were encrypted. This is pretty much the same thing, though we’re not looking at diacritical marks but the actual script itself. We’re guessing that this temple or whatever it is dates from at least five hundred years ago because of the known history of the region, and so we would expect an inscription from that period to almost certainly be written in Arabic and probably in what’s known as Kufic script. And if it wasn’t written in Arabic, then other common options would be one of the other North Arabian languages like Safaitic or Talmudic, which are quite similar to Arabic. But what we wouldn’t expect would be to find an inscription written in the Latin alphabet, the same alphabet that we use today, pretty much.’