Will Adams - The Exodus Quest

He fetched Omar, who pulled a ring binder from the filing cabinet. Knox read out the reference numbers while he flipped through the pages, ran his finger down the entries, came to the right one, frowned in puzzlement. 'But that can't be right,' he said. 'It's not even a bowl.'

'What is it, then?'

'A lid. A storage jar lid.'

Knox grunted. Obvious, now that Omar pointed it out. Not that it helped much. Egypt had been the breadbasket of the ancient world. Huge quantities of produce had passed through Alexandria's multiple harbours. Making jars to store and transport it had been a vast industry. 'My mistake,' he agreed.

His admission did little to mollify Omar. 'But it's not from anywhere near here,' he said. 'It's not even from Egypt.'

'Where, then?'

He squinted at Knox, as though he suspected himself the victim of a bad joke. 'Qumran,' he said flatly. 'It's what the Dead Sea Scrolls were found in.'

Assiut Railway Station, Middle Egypt Gaille Bonnard was beginning to regret coming inside the station to meet Charles Stafford and his party. She usually enjoyed crowds, the clamour and camaraderie, especially here in Middle Egypt, with its effusively friendly people, not yet soured by overexposure to tourists. But tensions had grown palpably over recent weeks. A protest march was even taking place that afternoon elsewhere in the city, which presumably explained why she could see only three men from the Central Security Forces on the platform, as opposed to the usual flood of uniforms. To make matters worse, an earlier train had broken down, so twice the usual number of passengers were waiting to board, all girding themselves for the inevitable squabbles over seats.

The tracks started to rattle. Vermin scurried. People manoeuvred for position. The ancient train rolled in, windows already being lowered, doors crashing open, passengers spilling out, laden with belongings, fighting through the scrum. Hawkers walked along the line of windows offering translucent bags of baladi bread, paper cones packed with seeds, sesame bars, sweets and drinks.

Away down the platform, a strikingly good-looking thirty-something man emerged from the first-class carriage. Charles Stafford. Despite his two-day stubble, she recognized him at once from the jacket photographs on the books Fatima had lent her the night before. She'd skimmed through them out of courtesy, though they were the kind of populist history she deplored – wild speculation backed by outrageously selective use of the evidence. Conspiracies everywhere, secret societies, lost treasures waiting beneath every mound; and never a dissenting voice to be heard, unless it could be ridiculed and dismissed.

Stafford paused to put on a pair of mirror shades, then hoisted a black leather laptop case to his shoulder and descended onto the platform. A stumpy young woman in a navy-blue suit came after him, tucking wilful strands of bright-red hair back beneath her floral headscarf. And an Egyptian porter followed behind, struggling beneath mounds of matching brown-leather luggage.

An elderly woman stumbled against Stafford as he pushed his way through the crowd. His laptop swung and clipped a young boy around the ear. The boy saw instantly how wealthy Stafford looked and promptly started bawling. A man in dirty-brown robes said something curt to Stafford, who waved him arrogantly away. The boy bawled even more loudly. Stafford sighed heavily and glanced around at the redhead, evidently expecting her to sort it out. She stooped, examined the boy's ear, clucked sympathetically, slipped him a banknote. He couldn't suppress his grin as he danced off. But the man in the brown robes was still feeling stung from Stafford's dismissal, and the transaction only irritated him further. He declared loudly that foreigners evidently now thought they could batter Egyptian children at will, then pay their way out of it.

The redhead gave an uncertain smile and tried to back away, but the man's words struck a chord with the crowd, and a cordon formed, trapping them inside, the atmosphere turning ugly. Stafford tried to barge his way out, but someone jolted him hard enough that his shades came off. He grabbed for them but they fell to the ground. A moment later Gaille heard the crunch of glass as they went underfoot. A scornful laugh rang out.

Gaille glanced anxiously over at the three CSF men, but they were walking away into the ticket hall, heads ducked, wanting nothing to do with this. Fear flared hot in her chest as she debated what to do. This wasn't her problem. No one even knew she was here. Her 4x4 was parked directly outside. She hesitated just a moment longer, then turned and hurried out.

'But it's just a lid,' protested Omar, as he hurried down the SCA's front steps after Knox. 'There must have been thousands like it. How can you be so certain it came from Qumran?'

Knox unlocked his Jeep, climbed in. 'Because it's the only place Dead Sea Scroll jars have ever been found,' he told Omar. 'At least, there was one other found in Jericho, just a few miles north, and maybe another at Masada, also close by. Other than that…'

'But it looked perfectly ordinary.'

'It may have looked it,' replied Knox, waiting for a van to pass before pulling out. 'But you have to understand something. Two thousand years ago, jars were used either for transporting goods or for storing them. Transportation jars were typically amphorae, with big handles to make them easier to heft about, and robust, because they had to withstand a lot of knocks, and cylindrical, because that made them more efficient to stack.' He turned right at the end of the street, then sharp left. 'But once the goods reached their final destination, they were decanted into storage jars with rounded bottoms that bedded into sandy floors and were easy to tip whenever people needed to pour out their contents. They also had long necks and narrow mouths so that they could be corked and their contents kept fresh. But the Dead Sea Scroll jars weren't like that. They had flat bottoms and stubby necks and fat mouths, and there was a very good reason for that.'

'Which was?'

His brakes sang as he slowed for a tram clanking across the junction ahead. 'How much do you know about Qumran?' he asked.

'It was occupied by the Essenes, wasn't it?' said Omar. 'That Jewish sect. Though haven't I heard people claim that it was a villa or a fort or something?'

'They've suggested it,' agreed Knox, who'd been fascinated by the place since a family holiday there as a child. 'I think they're wrong, though. I mean, Pliny said that the Essenes lived on the northwest of the Dead Sea. If not Qumran itself, then very close to it, and no one has found a convincing alternative. One expert put it very succinctly: Either Qumran and the scrolls were both Essene, or we have a quite astonishing coincidence: Two major religious communities living almost on top of each other, sharing similar views and rituals, one of which was described by ancient authors yet left no physical traces; while the other was somehow ignored by all our sources but left extensive ruins and documents.'

'So Qumran was occupied by the Essenes,' agreed Omar. 'That doesn't explain why their jars are unique.'

'The Essenes were fanatical about ritual purity,' said Knox. 'The slightest thing could render a pure receptacle impure. A drop of rain, a tumbling insect, an inappropriate spillage. And if it did, it was a major headache. I mean, if a receptacle became tainted, then obviously anything in it was immediately tainted too, and had to be chucked. But that wasn't the worst of it. Liquids and grain are poured in a stream, you see, so the real issue was whether the impurity climbed back up that stream and infected the storage jar too. The Pharisees and other Jewish sects took a relaxed view, but the Essenes believed that everything would be contaminated, so they couldn't risk pouring out contents in a stream. Instead, they'd lift the lid a little, dip in a measuring cup and transfer it that way. And because they no longer had to tip their storage jars, they could have flat bottoms, which made them much more stable; and short necks and fat mouths, too, to make them easier to dip into.'