David Gibbins - The Tiger warrior

Jack followed Rebecca inside. Four long tables had been drawn together to form one surface, their legs locked into runnels on the floor. Above them a cluster of fixed tungsten lights bathed the tables in a warm glow. Aysha and Hiebermeyer were hunched together over a camera stand. Aysha was nudging something into place on the black baseboard under the camera, and Hiebermeyer was poised over the viewfinder, holding the remote shutter control. They looked as if they were performing a strange embrace. Rebecca glanced at Jack, pointing at them as if to rest her case. They both waited silently while Hiebermeyer clicked the shutter, and then Aysha slid the object back onto the table. Hiebermeyer turned toward them. “Jack!” In the tungsten light his face seemed to have a feverish glow, and his eyes were red-rimmed. “Sorry to keep you in the dark for so long. I just wanted to be absolutely sure.”

Rebecca went around to the far side of the table and sat on a stool, surrounded by the books and notepads she had accumulated over the past few days. Costas had also been summoned and came through the door behind Jack, and they moved to the table. On the surface were hundreds of fragments of pottery, some of them tiny, only a centimeter or two across, others the size of small saucers.

“We playing jigsaw?” Costas said.

Jack’s pulse began to race. “Ostraka!” He leaned over the table. Aysha ushered Costas to a stool. “It’s the Greek word for potsherd,” she said. “But archaeologists use it for sherds with inscriptions on them, where the pottery was used as a writing surface. In the ancient world, papyrus was a fairly valuable commodity, used only for top copies. If you wanted a writing surface for day-to-day use, for jotting notes, writing letters, composing rough drafts, you just found the nearest old amphora and smashed it up.”

Jack circled the table, staring at the sherds, his mind racing. “They’re Roman amphora fragments, Italian, first century BC or first century AD. It’s the same type as the wine amphora we saw at Berenike. And the writing’s Greek, as you’d expect in Egypt at that time. Greek was the lingua franca ever since Alexander conquered Egypt. The writing all looks as if it’s in the same hand. I’m assuming you found all of these sherds in the merchant’s house you were excavating?”

Hiebermeyer’s face gleamed. “It’s an astonishing find. I still can’t believe it.” He paused, looking Jack steadily in the eye. “You ready for this? Okay. What you’re looking at is the only known ancient text of the Periplus Maris Erythraei. The only one actually to date from the Roman period when it was first written.”

Jack gasped. The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea. The greatest travel book to survive from antiquity. It was exactly what you might find at Berenike, in an outpost on the edge of the empire. Not a great work of literature, not a lost history or a volume of poetry, but a travel guide, an itinerary for sea captains and merchants. He cleared his throat. “Copy, or draft?” he said.

“Draft.”

Jack exhaled forcefully. Draft. This was even more extraordinary. A draft could mean emendations, material deleted from the polished version. All the rough notes that get edited out. Precious words and phrases. He peered at Hiebermeyer. “I hardly dare ask. Have you seen anything new?”

Hiebermeyer was bursting with excitement. “I saw it within days of starting the excavation at Berenike. You remember when I tried to speak to you in Istanbul? Little did I know then how many more sherds we’d find, and how long it would take. This has been an exercise in patience. I couldn’t have done it without Aysha.” He turned and looked at Aysha, who nodded. He reached over and clicked a control panel. The plasma screen on the wall beside the table showed a CGI of the sherds in 3-D, jumbled together. “This is how they looked in the excavation. We call it the archive room, but really it was more like a study. After drafting each sentence on a large amphora sherd, we believe the author transferred it to papyrus and then tossed the sherds in a corner. Some sherds survived almost intact, others broke into pieces. I realized we were going to have to record all the spatial relationships in situ if we were going to stand any hope of piecing it all back together. That’s been Aysha’s job. She’s been wonderful.”

“Somebody had better fill me in,” Costas said.

“Maris Erythraea, the Erythraean Sea, translates as Red Sea,” Aysha said. “Which to the ancients meant all the seas east of Egypt-the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean, what lay beyond. Periplus means to sail around, and was the term for a nautical guide, an itinerary.”

“The nautical guide of the Erythraean Sea,” Costas murmured.

“It’s truly one of the most amazing documents to survive from antiquity,” Jack said. “The Periplus wasn’t written by an aristocrat, by a Claudius or a Pliny the Elder, but by a working man with his feet on the ground. Yet it tells of a journey far greater than any fantasy of Odysseus or Aeneas, a true-life account of exploration and trade to the nether regions of the ancient world. The whole text seemed hard to believe until archaeologists began to find Greek and Roman remains where we are now, in southern India.”

“So the guy who lived in the villa, the merchant, was the author?” Costas said.

“I’m absolutely convinced of it.” Hiebermeyer clicked the console again, revealing an aerial shot of the excavated house in Berenike they had visited three days before, looking down over the ancient port and the Red Sea. “We know from a Roman coin embedded in the foundations that the archive room was built soon after 10 BC, and the whole house was abandoned about AD 20. Because these sherds hadn’t been swept out of the room, we’re guessing that the text dates from just before the abandonment, about the early years of the reign of the emperor Tiberius.”

“You mean when the trade was beginning to decline?” Costas said. “What we were saying in Egypt a few days ago, about the emperor plugging up the bullion flow?”

“Correct. But I don’t think that was why the house was abandoned. Everything points to this man being old, retired. Aysha?”

She looked up. “Luckily, we’ve got a lot of scholarship to go on. Before this find, the earliest surviving text of the Periplus was a medieval copy dating from the tenth century AD, and it’s been studied in translation since the nineteenth century. What we’ve found confirms what many scholars have thought, but adds a fascinating new dimension. First of all, it’s clear from the vocabulary, the analogies, that he was Egyptian Greek. Second, there’s no doubt that he himself had sailed the routes described in the Periplus, as far down Africa as Zanzibar, then around Arabia to northwest India, and using the monsoon route to southern India. He’s done it enough times to know a lot about navigation, but it’s clear that he’s a merchant, not a sea captain. He’s mainly interested in naming the ports, telling how to get to them, and listing the goods to be traded there. In southern India it’s predominantly bullion, meaning gold and silver Roman coins that were exchanged for pepper and a fantastic range of other spices and exotica, some of it transshipped from far distant places.”

“Any idea of his specialization?” Costas asked.

“You remember the piece of silk we showed you at the excavation? We think that was it. He would have had contacts with the very farthest reaches of the trade, with traders who had come west through the Strait of Malacca from the South China Sea, and down through Bactria, modern Afghanistan, from central Asia. From the Silk Road.”

“I think I’ve got you,” Costas said. “The book was a retirement project. He finished it, he croaked and the house went on the market, but there were no buyers.”