German archaeologists like Robert Koldewey and Walter Andrae came did photography and careful documentation of sites become standard.
“It was hard work. Our men spent most of their time constructing new braces and shoring up walls. We had to sift through large deposits of debris. The winter rains filled our trenches with water and disturbed the markers we’d so carefully laid out and photographed. A lot of it had to be redone.”
“Why pick that time of year then?”
“Our funding was good only until the end of December. We had no choice. It was one of the greatest thrills of my life. My first major project and Samuel made me a supervisor.”
“Did you find anything?”
“We made an incredible discovery. There’d been a couple of dry days, and I used them to work through a small hill of rubble. The surface was damp, but with careful troweling and brushing I made headway. That’s when I unearthed the first bone. I knew immediately that I’d found something phenomenal.”
“A burial ground?”
“No. We brought the entire team in at that point. It took us ages to uncover everything. Whole skeletons, flattened by the weight of the earth. No sign of armor, shields, or that sort of thing, so they weren’t soldiers, and of course any clothing would have disintegrated long ago. But along with a lot of ash, wood char, and bone masses we found bronze jewelry—armbands, earrings and the like.
“By that we knew we’d discovered the remains of citizens who fled as Nineveh burned. Amazing. As if we’d traveled back thousands of years. All the evidence of the catastrophe lay before us. You could almost hear the people’s cries as they choked on the black smoke and clouds of ash and as hot embers struck their flesh. Many had lethal wounds, hacked by the swords and daggers of the Medes.”
“Were there any other artifacts?”
“A few small guardian statues and cylinder seals, things people wanted to rescue from the fires.”
“Is that where you found the engraving?”
“Close by. One evening we’d worked later than usual. The sun was low in the sky. The land had beautiful reddish hues, deepened by the fading sunlight. A certain scent of the earth hangs over these old sites. I don’t know what it is—I’m sure some geologist could explain its chemical composition. But I like to think it results from the freeing of things that have lain buried for centuries, when they are released from their graves and restored to the world.”
“Samuel was about forty feet away from me,” Tomas went on. “It had been a long stretch. I’d been swatting away clouds of flies all day; I was tired and thinking only of getting ready to pack up and go. I heard him yell. Hanna Jaffrey and I rushed over, afraid he’d hurt himself. Even in the weak light I could see he’d turned pale. He told us to look down. He’d been working a cavity that extended horizontally into the earth. At first I couldn’t see anything significant. I bent down. The protrusion just looked like a chunk of rock, part of the volumes of detritus we were accustomed to finding in these sites. Then I realized what I was looking at. A tooled piece of stone extending from the debris wall, with clearly visible cuneiform markings on it. We all felt re-energized then. For the vast number of hours of work you put into these places, discoveries are often thin indeed. It set our hearts racing.
“Hanna and I rushed to get our battery-powered lights and our cameras. We set them up, and the three of us spent several hours carefully removing the surrounding material. We cheered when we finally eased the slab out. It was a very large piece, the entire surface covered with writing. Best of all it was intact, and because it was stone, not clay, well preserved.”
“Was Samuel able to identify it right away?” I asked.
“Within a day he’d understood the first lines. Of course you’re aware several stages are needed to transcribe cuneiform symbols into meaningful words in our language? It’s nothing like simple translation.”
“Sure,” I said. “It takes a lot of patience.”
He gave me a quick look. Lurking in that glance was the suspicion that I knew a lot less than I’d claimed to, but he didn’t call me on it. He continued. “Within a week Samuel was sure of what he’d found. He was elated.”
“So you know what it says?”
“Only what he told us. My skills are still developing so it would have taken me quite some time to decipher, and Hanna Jaffrey, she barely knows it, the script.”
He had a formal way of speaking that lapsed only occasionally into a misplaced word or grammatical mistake. It matched the restrained, almost cold edge to his personality.
Tomas seemed on comfortable ground here. He probably taught in addition to his fieldwork. “Scribes devoted their lives to learning the ancient languages because it took so many years to master the hundreds of characters in early alphabets. How amazing to think of the Canaanites in the Sinai turquoise mines. They first came up with the idea of associating symbols with sounds rather than images. That’s why the Phoenician alphabet was revolutionary. Its twenty-four characters meant, theoretically anyway, everyone could learn to read and write.
“Because the engraving was made on stone, we knew it was important. Royal inscriptions and oracles of special significance were often recorded on stone due to its permanence. Less lofty documents were written on clay. Scribes would sometimes put water on them to use them over again.”
I wanted to be polite, but now he really was telling me stuff I already knew. I held up my hand. “I’m aware of that.”
He gave me a faint smile. “Ah, sorry again. I forget.”
“What did Samuel say about the text?”
“He couldn’t contain himself. ‘One of the greatest finds in all of Iraq’s history,’ he told us.”
I thought of my brother and how much this would have meant to him. His joy would have rivaled George Smith’s, the amateur Assyriologist who discovered the story of Noah and the Flood in the 1850s. Smith interpreted cuneiform tablets at the British Museum during his lunch hour. His eureka moment arrived when he discovered the famous story on a tablet, part of the Epic of Gilgamesh. When Smith realized what he’d found, anecdotal reports told of him dashing about and flinging off his clothes in front of his fellow scholars. Samuel had a more restrained personality, but he would have been jubilant all the same.
“Someone tried to steal it,” Tomas carried on. “The next day Samuel took it to the Baghdad Museum and concealed it there.”
“He could do that without anyone knowing? I checked the sources—FBI, Interpol, and the Art Loss Register —and there’s no mention of anything like the engraving.”
“In the museum itself many tablets and cylinder seals still have not been transcribed. That’s also true for foreign museums. It’s one of the great tragedies of this looting. Much was never recorded. Even if objects resurface, there will be no way, if identification marks have been erased, to show they belonged to us.”
Tomas paused, signaling to our server that he’d like more tea and motioning to my cup. I shook my head. “The scribe signed his name, Nahum. Does that mean anything to you?” he asked.
“No.”
“Nahum was one of the twelve minor prophets of the Hebrew Bible. The Book of Nahum, called the Burden of Nineveh, prophesizes the destruction of Nineveh. The city was burned in 612 B.C.”
This new information hit me like a thunderbolt. He’d just made the connection to the prophecy Hal referred to in his letter. “You’re trying to suggest the engraving I’m searching for is an original version of an Old Testament book?” My pulse quickened in anticipation of his answer.
“Yes, exactly. Can you imagine its significance? They’ve found quotations from the Book of Nahum among the Qumran Dead Sea Scrolls, but only fragments. The engraving contains the original words, intact. It’s a phenomenal find—I can hardly think of a comparison. We can only dream about its value to history.”
The server set a fresh cup of tea down before Tomas. Thanking her, he continued. “A Mesopotamian statue recently sold in Switzerland for twenty-two million. That had nothing like the importance of an original book of the Bible. I couldn’t even guess what it would be worth.”
The initial thrill faded as I came to my senses. “And I’m sure you were all thinking it would be front-page news. How could Samuel fall for that? It can’t be genuine. And Hal was murdered for the thing.”
Tomas shrank back as if my words were actual blows.
