the normal procedure was to handle it as little as possible, and only ever while wearing cotton gloves, because of the damage that the moisture present on a person’s bare hands could do to ancient relics over time.
But Angela didn’t need to touch it, only to read the translation of the Hebrew text, which didn’t take long, because the fragment was so small. Roughly triangular in shape, it contained only four partial lines on one side of the papyrus and a mere three words, two of them incomplete, on separate lines on the reverse. She looked at the translation of those words first.
When she looked at the translation again, it was immediately clear that its authorship was uncertain, that the incomplete second word had simply been assumed to be a part of the proper name Hillel, and that name had then been used to identify the fragment. None of that mattered, of course – it was the writing on the other side of the papyrus that she was interested in.
It had been common practice to write on both sides of papyrus and parchment, so there was no reason to suppose that those three words had anything to do with the text on the reverse. Then she read the translation of that text, the longer piece of Hebrew on the other side of the fragment, which included the phrase that had stuck in her mind:
Angela nodded in satisfaction. She
Angela smiled again. She’d been right. There were enough points of comparison to show that the Bartholomew’s Folly text, as she’d mentally labelled it, had been derived from the same source as the Hillel fragment. It was just possible that one had been copied from the other, but it was much more likely that both were versions of an earlier and separate source document.
It also meant that the British Museum’s description of the Hillel fragment was inaccurate, though that wasn’t any concern of hers. That particular piece of text – at least the last two lines of it and most probably the whole thing – wasn’t interpretative, but was simply a copy of a part of a separate document. It was plausible that Hillel – if he really had been the author – might have then gone on to comment on some aspect of the text, but they’d never know that unless another part of the fragment turned up.
It was a start, of sorts. Angela thought for a few moments, looking at the Bartholomew’s Folly text. She could only hazard a guess at the two sections of missing text. Before the expression ‘with his trusted followers’ there was probably a phrase something like ‘journeyed in company’ or ‘travelled along’. After the end of the text, following the phrase ‘world for all’, about all she could suggest was either ‘time’ or perhaps ‘eternity’. And if that deduction was correct, then it might mean that the hiding place of the ‘treasure of the world’ was somewhere fairly secure. The fact that it was buried in ‘a place of stone’ and that the burial was intended to last ‘for all time’ suggested both a permanent and a properly concealed hiding place.
And that could mean the treasure, whatever it was, was still buried out there somewhere, waiting to be discovered.
22
Angela had decided to start her search by researching references to ‘the Valley of the Flowers,’ but this had soon proved frustrating – there seemed to be flower-filled valleys almost everywhere, in virtually every country. But finding places that were known by that name in the first century AD had proved to be considerably more difficult.
She sighed and stretched her back to ease the tension she was feeling. She had found three locations in ancient Persia that more or less fitted the bill. None of them, as far as she could tell, had actually been called the ‘Valley of the Flowers’, but all three had names that included the word ‘flowers’ or a synonym. The best match was a place called the ‘gorge of blossoms’, if her translation of the old Persian name was correct, and she guessed that it was one of the locations Bartholomew Wendell-Carfax had investigated because she’d found two references in the museum records to surveys being carried out there in the first half of the twentieth century by teams from Britain.
There were no indications of the identity of the sponsors of those teams, or the names of any of those involved, and of course the word ‘survey’ could cover almost any type of investigation, but Angela reckoned it was a fair bet that old Bartholomew had been there. However, it also meant he hadn’t found what he was looking for.
What she didn’t know was how thorough he’d been. Had he and his men just ambled up and down the gorge looking for the ‘place of stone’, or had they done a proper, in-depth survey, checking for hidden caves and underground chambers?
The Persian text stated that the people who’d buried the treasure had fashioned the hiding place with their own hands. Angela didn’t have a date when this was done, but the age of the Hillel fragment meant it had to have been no later than the first century AD, and that in turn meant the hiding place was probably a fairly simple structure. Unless the ‘trusted followers’ included a large slave-labour force, skilled masons and a lot of equipment, the ‘place of stone’ had to be reasonably basic, and would probably have made use of some natural feature – a cave or something like that. And as it
There was, of course, a more important question: had he been looking in the right valley? Or even in the right country? She looked again at the search results for the whole of the Middle East. Altogether, she’d identified almost fifty locations spanning countries from Turkey to India. Any one of them could be the place she was looking for, which meant she had no real idea where to start. If this was going to work, she’d have to find some way of narrowing the search parameters.
It was time she tried to track down the other reference – to the ‘treasure of the world’.
