Ignoring the exchange, Mansoor pointed to some hieroglyphics on the wall.
‘He had an impressive list of titles: “First among the King’s Companions”, “Deputy of the King’s Chariots”, “He whom the King made Great and Wise, whom the King has made his Double”. And of course “Father of God”.’
‘What does that mean?’ asked Daniel.
‘Well, there’s a dispute over the meaning of that title. Some say it was a purely priestly title, but others say it was a title reserved for the father-in-law of a pharaoh.’
‘And was Yuya the father-in-law of one of the pharaohs?’
‘Oh yes,’ Mansoor confirmed. ‘We know, both from the written record and from DNA evidence, that Yuya and Thuya were the parents of Tiye, the mummy known as the “Elder Lady”, found in a tomb called KV35. Tiye was married to Amenhotep the Third and they in turn were the parents of Akhenaten.’
‘The monotheistic pharaoh?’
‘That’s right. The one who ruled from 1351-1334 BC and who decreed that the Aten – the disk representing the sun God – was the one and only true God.’
‘The first exponent of the “one god” system of belief,’ muttered Gabrielle.
‘Not strictly true,’ Mansoor corrected. ‘Akhenaten never really got rid of all the other Gods. He just declared war on the cult of the Theban God Amun, because the priests in Thebes were getting too powerful.’
‘So he didn’t get rid of Ra,’ said Daniel.
‘Not really. Ra was the sun God. The Aten was originally the sun disk – a manifestation of Ra. Somewhere along the line, it evolved into a God in its own right.’
Daniel froze, not in response to Mansoor’s words, but rather because something had caught his eye. Very low on the wall in front of him, engraved in rather small letters, was some ancient text written in the old script that he had been brought here to decipher.
‘Can you translate it?’ asked Mansoor.
Daniel stared at it for a long time, squinting in the dim light, before he started. ‘God made me the father to the king and all my brothers bowed down to me.’
Mansoor turned to Daniel. Daniel and Gabrielle turned to each other as Daniel uttered one word: ‘Joseph.’
Chapter 30
Goliath was looking at the entrance to the tomb that Daniel and the others had entered. He wanted to act now, firmly and decisively, but there were too many people about. It wasn’t just the guard outside the tomb, it was also the Egyptian soldiers and the throngs of tourists. There were just too many people.
He had followed them there from Cairo with relative ease. The tracking program that he had smuggled into Daniel’s phone had started transmitting regular updates on his position again after the police gave it back to Daniel in London, and Goliath had been tracking him ever since.
Goliath had raced to Cairo airport after him and had seen Daniel, Gabrielle and their Egyptian friend at the desk for an internal flight to Luxor. He guessed that the Valley of the Kings was their destination, so he had simply booked himself on to another flight that was due to land shortly after theirs. From the airport he had taken a taxi to the valley and then made sure to keep them in his sights. He had already been told that they were working with someone important in the Egyptian academic and political hierarchy and so he knew that he would have to tread carefully.
Now it seemed that they could gain access to places that others couldn’t. This could be both a help and a hindrance. He wanted to get them alone, but it didn’t help if they were in an area inaccessible to the public, as it was also inaccessible to him. And by the same token, it did him no good being able to keep a close eye on where they were, if others were milling about and able to see precisely the same thing.
He would have to bide his time.
The trouble was that they had hired a jeep while he was relying on a taxi. He had told the driver to wait and paid him handsomely for doing so, but he could hardly leap into the taxi and say ‘Follow that jeep’ without giving away that he was up to something. And he could hardly expect a local taxi driver to help a foreigner against a powerful public official.
But the very fact that they were visiting places that others couldn’t get to was an encouraging sign. He sensed that an opportunity would present itself very soon.
Chapter 31
‘The theory that Yuya was Joseph of the Old Testament has been around for donkey’s years,’ Mansoor acknowledged, still in a state of shock. ‘But the academic community never took it seriously. I’d always thought of it as an amateur’s theory.’
‘But it has quite a lot going for it, even apart from what Daniel’s just translated,’ said Gabrielle. ‘A foreigner who rose to high rank in ancient Egypt. The beard and lack of body piercings. The name itself, which also has elements of Yahowa or Jehovah. The fact that he was the pharaoh’s father-in-law. And then there’s the Great Harris Papyrus.’
‘Oh, you’re not going to throw that in surely?’ Mansoor sneered.
‘Why not?’
‘Wait a minute,’ Daniel interrupted. ‘What’s the Great Harris Papyrus?’
He looked back and forth between Mansoor and Gabrielle, who were looking at each other. Eventually Gabrielle shrugged and spoke.
‘The Great Harris Papyrus was the longest papyrus ever found in ancient Egypt. Named after the collector who acquired it, the Great Harris Papyrus was one of the most important papyri of ancient Egypt. Some 42 metres long, it contained 1,500 lines of text.’
‘But what’s it got to do with Joseph?’
‘In its final section, it refers to someone called “Yarsu”, which sounds a bit like Yosef, the Hebrew form of Joseph. The text goes something like “Yarsu, a Syrian was with them as Leader. He made the whole land pay tribute to him; he united his companions and looted their possessions. They made the Gods like men, and no sacrifices were offered in the temples.”’
‘ Syrian, ’ Mansoor echoed for emphasis.
‘Yes, but the term Syria was sometimes used to include Canaan, where Joseph originated. And making “the whole land pay tribute to him” sounds like the way Joseph gained effective control of Egypt, by winning the support of the pharaoh.’
Mansoor looked decidedly underwhelmed.
‘And what about: “united his companions and looted their possessions”?’
Gabrielle thought about this for a few seconds.
‘It could refer either to the act of holding the ordinary Egyptian people to ransom because of the famine and his monopoly over the grain supplies. Or it might refer to the way he played those mind games with his own brothers before revealing himself. But the clincher is: “They made the Gods like men.” Who else do we know who made Gods like men? Who believed that man was created in the image of God?’
‘The Israelites,’ Daniel muttered, not quite trusting his voice.
‘ Exactly! ’ cried Gabrielle triumphantly. ‘And it says that no sacrifices were offered in the temples. That must be a reference to the Amarna experiment when Akhenaten not only banned the worship of Amun and decreed the Aten to be the one true God, but even created a new city in his honour and moved his entire court there.’
‘But that was a generation later,’ said Mansoor. ‘Yuya wasn’t around by then.’
‘Yes, but the papyrus was written over 200 years after that, when the time-scale might have got confused.’
Mansoor was shaking his head.
