David Gibbins - Pyramid

“I sent him a picture from our dive,” Costas said. “A selfie of Uncle Costas with a sea snake wrapped around his helmet, and a goofy face.”

“That’s good of you, Costas. I really appreciate it. He probably doesn’t get too much humor from his dad right now.” He straightened up and took a deep breath. “Okay, Jack, what have you got?”

Jack felt a huge surge of excitement as he saw the photograph on the screen that Costas had taken two days before in the depths of the Red Sea. It was the unmistakable form of a chariot wheel visible in the mass of coral. Hiebermeyer moved the mouse over different points on the image and then zoomed in on the gilded wing of the falcon at the front of the chariot that was partly exposed beneath the coral. “There should be a cartouche above that, a royal cartouche,” he murmured. “An inscription on the temple of Karnak at Luxor mentions a chariot of Thutmose III made from electrum, and this one must have been from the same stable. With this gilding it can only have been a royal chariot, perhaps lent by the pharaoh to a favored general.”

“It was our final dive, and we were in the same quandary as you were in the tomb in the mummy necropolis,” Jack said. “No time to try removing any of that coral.”

Hiebermeyer zoomed out to the original view and sat back in his chair, shaking his head. “Still, it’s an incredible find. You know it was Howard Carter who first reconstructed their appearance, based on the disassembled chariots he found in 1922 when he opened the tomb of Tutankhamun?”

“I know that they first appear in Egypt about the beginning of the New Kingdom, copied from the chariots of the Near East.”

“It was our friend Ahmose I and his Minoan wife, Ahhotep, fighting off the Hyksos in the northern marshlands of the Nile Delta, capturing and then copying the weapons of their enemy,” Hiebermeyer replied. “Judging by the wall painting in the tomb, it may have been Queen Ahhotep’s Minoan warriors who took to the chariots most readily. Not what you might expect for a people from a mountainous island.”

Jack shook his head. “The Minoans were renowned for their naval might, remember? They probably used small vessels like the Liburnians of classical antiquity, designed to dart into range of an enemy flotilla and attack with the bow and the slingshot. The transition to desert warfare was maybe not that much of a leap from a tactical viewpoint. Ships at sea became chariots on land.”

Hiebermeyer put his hands behind his head and stared at the screen. “Two centuries later, at the time of Akhenaten and Tutankhamun, the chariot was at the pinnacle of its technology. They were like modern fly-by-wire jet fighters, capable of astonishing speed and agility but inherently unstable. Drive them too fast and the traditional wheeling maneuver you just described became impossible, leaving them no choice other than to hurtle directly into an enemy and take their chances.”

Jack looked thoughtfully at the screen. “Technology so advanced that it backfired on them: sheer speed and nimbleness was perhaps their undoing.”

Costas came over from the computer workstation, where he had been backing up their Red Sea images. “Or maybe someone who knew the risks of the technology played with it. The best systems, the best technologies, often have an inherent instability; it’s that instability that often makes them capable of great things, like those fly-by-wire planes, but also leaves them vulnerable to manipulation and sabotage.”

“Go on,” Hiebermeyer said.

“It’s something that Costas and I discussed on the flight here,” Jack interjected. “Thinking laterally, that is. What if the pharaoh, Akhenaten — if that’s who it was — engineered the whole thing? Think about the backdrop. There’s all the modern speculation that he and Moses were more than just master and slave. Sigmund Freud even thought they were two sides of the same coin. Let’s imagine they share the revelation of the one god in the desert, and Akhenaten determines to let Moses take his people and establish his own City of Light. For Akhenaten, it might provide assurance that the new religion, the new monotheism, would have a chance of surviving outside Egypt, where he must have guessed that his focus on the Aten might not survive his own lifetime. If Moses was his big hope for the future, for spreading the word, then the pharaoh is hardly going to want to destroy him as he leads his people to Israel, is he? But it might be politically expedient for him to appear to do so. Akhenaten knows there’s a strong faction against him among the old priesthood, but he also knows he lacks the military credentials of his forebears. Chasing and destroying the Israelites would raise his kudos and hark back to the great victories of earlier pharaohs against the Hyksos and the other peoples of the Middle East. The strength this gave Akhenaten might buy him the time he needed to establish his new religion more firmly, building temples and converting as many people as possible to his beliefs.”

“So you’re suggesting he faked it,” Hiebermeyer said, staring at him.

Jack leaned forward, nodding. “Faked the destruction of the Israelites, but not of his own Egyptian army. He would have known that a victory could be made even more glorious by sacrifice. Imagine Akhenaten returning to Amarna with only a few survivors, telling of a great victory but one where divine intervention caused victor and vanquished alike to plunge into the sea. That’s the basis of the story in the Book of Exodus. Akhenaten’s status is enhanced not only by his claim of victory but also by his miraculous survival. Maybe he even lets a favored general use his golden chariot, the one we found, so that Akhenaten would return without it, something the people would take as evidence of his own role in the battle. Pharaohs in the past would never let others take their place. With the Egyptian army gone, the Israelites could escape from Egypt unhindered. There’s no reason why Moses and his people should ever be heard of again in Akhenaten’s lifetime as they develop their settlement in a new place of worship that Akhenaten has secured for them in the land of Israel.”

“You’re suggesting that Akhenaten was party to the entire exodus?”

“More than that. I’m saying that he engineered it. I’m saying that the death ride of the charioteers was a setup. I’m saying that he and Moses chose the place in advance, that the Israelite encampment was placed dangerously close to an unstable cliff, but that Moses and his people had left it secretly before the attack. To pull it off, Akhenaten would have needed some way of egging his men on, of convincing them that they could wheel to safety after trampling over and destroying the encampment and its occupants.”

“Mercenaries,” Hiebermeyer said. “Those who would do a pharaoh’s word without question.”

“ Female mercenaries,” Jack said. “ Bare-breasted female mercenaries. What better way to get an army on the move.”

“Like running a rabbit before a pack of racing dogs,” Costas said, sitting down on a chair. “I love it.”

Hiebermeyer shook his head. “I’m going to miss these brainstorming sessions, Jack.”

“One thing I wanted to ask,” Costas said. “About your tomb in the mummy necropolis.”

Hiebermeyer swivelled his chair. “Go on.”

“The chariot general. Did you get a look at him? I mean, did you see inside his sarcophagus?”

Hiebermeyer pursed his lips, nodding. “I didn’t mention that earlier because I felt like a tomb robber. Thank God none of my team saw me. Just before leaving and sealing up the tomb, I took a crowbar and jacked off the coffin lid. As I suspected, it was empty.”