Adam Palmer: The Moses Legacy

‘Aramaic? Phoenician?’ She didn’t bother to include Hebrew or Arabic in her question, because both were familiar to her and she could tell immediately that it wasn’t either.

‘It doesn’t look all that much like Aramaic. It might bear some vague comparison to Phoenician.’

‘Vague comparison?’ Gabrielle echoed.

‘It’s hard to tell until we can look at them under the right lighting conditions. I’ll get one of the photo experts to take some pictures and play around with the contrast then we’ll take another look.’

‘But what’s your gut instinct?’

Mansoor looked at Gabrielle with mild irritation. She was being pushy. He decided nevertheless to hazard a preliminary speculation.

‘It reminds me of the Serabit el-Khadim inscriptions.’

‘Proto-Sinaitic?’

‘Yes.’

Proto-Sinaitic was one of the oldest phonetic alphabets ever used – if not the oldest – dating back nearly 4,000 years. The name was derived from the Greek ‘proto’ meaning first and the place where the writings in the alphabet were initially discovered: Sinai. Some thirty engravings of the script had been found in Sinai at the turquoise mines at Serabit el-Khadim, once used as a penal colony by ancient Egypt.

‘Can you translate it?’

Mansoor was amused by Gabrielle’s eagerness.

‘Well, assuming I’m right, we know how it sounds, but not what it means.’

The letters of the Proto-Sinaitic alphabet had been matched to their equivalent letters in all the other main consonant alphabets – like Hebrew and Arabic – so the pronunciation was reasonably certain. But the underlying language was unknown. Was it an ancient form of Hebrew even older than the Bible itself? Some generic Semitic language that later split up into several different languages? Or was the same alphabet used for a whole variety of languages that were already different, and spoken all around the Middle East?

‘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.’

‘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 prize, and any attempt to get up from their seats now would merely alert their father to the fact that juvenile intrigue was afoot. This was where Uncle Danny came in.

Daniel Klein, who had recently celebrated his fortieth birthday, was sitting to his brother-in-law’s immediate left. In addition to his ideal position, Daniel also had a background as an amateur magician, so it was only natural that the twins should enlist his aid in this conspiracy to commit grand larceny. However, he set a high price for putting his reputation on the line in such a criminal enterprise.

‘You must ask for a present for your little sister Romy, as well as your own presents.’

Little Romy was less than three and a half, and although she could stick up for herself, she couldn’t always explain what she wanted with quite the same clarity as her older siblings.

‘But she likes different things,’ said May.

‘And what if she wants something that costs too much money,’ said Shari, demonstrating her eminently practical side.

‘Well, why don’t you ask for a toy you can all play with?’ suggested Danny.

The twins rose to the occasion and after putting their heads together for half a minute, came up with the ideal solution.

‘We’ll ask for the play house,’ Shari announced.

The ‘play house’ in question was a colourful, flat-packed, plastic kit that they had seen on a previous visit to a toy shop and it was just the right size for all three of them to play in.

There was no time to waste now because Nathan had come to the end of his recital and was putting down the plate with the matzos, and this was the cue for the twins’ turn in the spotlight. According to an old tradition, the youngest person present at the seider asks the ‘Four Questions’ that kick-start the process of reciting the story of the Exodus. However, Romy was too young to read and so it fell on the twins to sing it as a duet. After a few nervous coughs, a shy exchange of eye contact and a little musical prompting from their mother, the twins started singing in perfect unison.