18

'Angela? My office.'

The summons from Tony Baverstock was, Angela thought, typical of the man: short to the point of being brusque, and completely lacking any of the usual social graces. When she went in, he was leaning comfortably back in his swivel chair, his feet up on one corner of the desk. The two photographs she'd given him were in front of him.

'Any progress?' Angela asked.

'Well, yes and no, really.'

That was also typical Baverstock, Angela thought. He was an acknowledged expert at giving curved answers to straight questions.

'In English, please,' she said, sitting down in one of his visitor's chairs.

Baverstock grunted and leant forward. 'Right. As you guessed, the text is Aramaic, which is slightly unusual in itself. As you ought to know' – Angela's hackles rose at his thinly veiled implication of her lack of knowledge – 'the use of this type of tablet declined after the sixth century BC, simply because it was a lot easier to write cursive Aramaic on papyrus or parchment than inscribe the individual characters into clay. The even more unusual feature is that it's gibberish.'

'Oh, for heaven's sake, Tony. In English, please.'

'That is English. The stupid woman – I presume it was a female behind the camera – who took these pictures was clearly incompetent as a photographer. She's somehow managed to take two photographs of the upper surface of the tablet without ever managing to get more than about half of one line of the inscription actually in focus. A translation of the whole tablet is absolutely impossible and, from what I have been able to decipher, it would probably be a waste of time.'

'What do you mean?'

'What's on the tablet seems to be a series of Aramaic words. Their individual meanings are perfectly clear, but taken together they make no sense.' He pointed at the second of the six lines of characters on one of the pictures. 'This is the only line of the inscription that's anything like readable, and even then there's one word that's unclear. This word here – 'ar b 'a h – is the number four, which is simple enough. The word after it means "of", and three of the words that precede it translate as "tablets", "took" and "perform", so the sentence reads "perform took" another word, then "tablets four of". That's what I mean by gibberish. The words make sense, but the sentence doesn't. It's almost as if this was a piece of homework for a child, just a list of words selected at random.'

'Is that what you think it is?'

Baverstock shook his head. 'I didn't say that. I've seen a lot of Aramaic texts, and this looks to me like an adult hand because the letters are formed with short, confident strokes. In my opinion, this was written by an educated adult male – don't forget, in this period women were usually illiterate, much like many of them are today,' he added waspishly.

'Tony,' Angela warned.

'Just a joke,' Baverstock said, though Angela knew that there was always an edge to his remarks about women. In her opinion, he was arrogant and pompous but essentially harmless, a closet misogynist who made little secret of the fact that he resented high-achieving women, and especially high-achieving women who were inconsiderate enough to combine beauty with their brains. Angela remembered a couple of occasions when he'd even had a pop at her, though both times she'd verbally slapped him down.

Angela knew she wasn't beautiful in the classical sense, but her blonde hair and hazel eyes – and lips that Bronson always used to describe as 'lucky' – gave her a striking appearance. She almost invariably made an impression on men, an impression that tended to linger, and she knew Baverstock had resented her from day one.

'What date are we talking about?' she asked.

'This is Old Aramaic, which covers the period between about 1100 BC and AD 200.'

'Come on, Tony. That's well over a thousand years. Can't you narrow it down a bit more than that?'

Baverstock shook his head. 'Do you know anything about Aramaic?' he asked.

'Not very much,' Angela admitted. 'I work with pottery and ceramics. I can recognize most ancient languages and read a few words in them but the only one I can translate or understand properly is Latin.'

'Right, then. Let me give you a short lesson. Aramaic first appeared around 1,200 BC when a people later known as the Aramaeans first settled in an area called Aram, in upper Mesopotamia and Syria. It was apparently derived from Phoenician, and, like that language, it was read from right to left. Phoenician didn't have any letters for vowels, but the Aramaeans began using certain letters – principally 'aleph, he, waw and yodh – to indicate vowel sounds.

'Written examples of the language that became known as Aramaic started appearing about two hundred years later, and by the mid 700s BC, it was the official language of Assyria. Around 500 BC, after the conquest of Mesopotamia under the Persian king Darius I, the administrators of the so-called Achaemenid Empire started using Aramaic in all official written communications within their territory. There's some dispute about whether this was imperial policy, or if Aramaic was simply adopted as a convenient lingua franca.'

'The Achaemenid Empire? Remind me.'

'I thought even you would know that,' Baverstock said, slightly testily. 'It lasted from about 560 to 330 BC, and was the first of the various Persian Empires to govern the majority of the country we now call Iran. In terms of occupied territories, it was the biggest pre-Christian empire, covering nearly three million square miles on three continents. The regions subjugated by the Persians included Afghanistan, Asia, Asia Minor, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Thrace.

'The important point is that from about 500 BC, the language became known as Imperial or Achaemenid Aramaic and, because it had acquired official status, it showed remarkably little variation for the next seven hundred years or so. Usually the only way to find out where and when a particular text was written is to identify loanwords.'

'Which are what?'

'Words describing objects or places, or expressing views or concepts, that didn't have an exact equivalent in Aramaic and were borrowed from the local language to ensure clarity or accuracy in a particular passage.'

'And there's nothing like that in the text you've read?' Angela asked.

'In those half a dozen words, no. If I had to guess, I'd say the tablet's fairly late, probably no earlier than the start of the first millennium BC, but I can't be any more specific.'

'Nothing else?'

'You know I hate speculating, Angela.' Baverstock paused for a few seconds, looking down again at the pictures of the clay tablet. 'Do you have any better photographs than these?' he asked. 'And where did the tablet come from?'

Something in Baverstock's manner put Angela on her guard. She shook her head. 'As far as I know these are the only ones,' she said, 'and I've no idea where the tablet was found. I was just sent the photographs for analysis.'

Baverstock grunted. 'Let me know if it turns up. With better pictures of the inscription I might be able to narrow down its origin for you. But there is,' he added, 'just a possibility it might have come from Judea.'

'Why?'

Baverstock pointed at the single Aramaic word he hadn't translated in the second line of the text. 'These pictures are so blurred they're almost useless,' he said, 'but it's possible that word is Ir-Tzadok.'

'And that means what?'

'Nothing useful by itself, but it could be the first part of the proper name Ir-Tzadok B'Succaca. That's the old Aramaic name for a settlement on the north-west coast of the Dead Sea. We know it rather better these days by its Arabic name, which means "two moons".'

Baverstock stopped and looked across his desk.

'Qumran?' Angela suggested.

'Got it in one. Khirbet Qumran, to give it its full name.

"Khirbet" means a ruin. The word comes from the Hebrew horbah, and you'll find the name used all over Judea to indicate ancient sites.'

'I do know what "khirbet" means, thank you. So you believe the tablet came from Qumran?'

Baverstock shook his head. 'No. I can't guarantee I'm reading it correctly and, even if I am, the word isn't conclusive – it could be a part of a different phrase. And if it does mean Qumran, it might be nothing more than a reference to the community.'

'Qumran was started when – first century BC?'

'A little earlier. Late second century BC, and it was occupied until about AD 70, round about the time Jerusalem fell. That's the main reason I think the tablet's fairly late, simply because, if I'm right and the word Ir-Tzadok forms a part of Ir-Tzadok B'Succaca, then the tablet was most probably written while the Yishiyim – the tribe now commonly known as the Essenes – were supposedly in residence at Qumran, hence the rough date I suggested to you.'

'So the tablet just refers to Qumran, but didn't come from the Essene community.'

'No, I didn't say that. What I said was that the inscription possibly refers to Qumran and the tablet probably didn't come from the Essenes.'

'So were there any other words you thought you could translate?'

'Here.' Baverstock pointed at the bottom line of text. 'That word could be "cubit" or "cubits", but I wouldn't want to put any money on it. And I think this word here could mean "place".'

'And you've still no idea what the clay tablet itself is? Or if it's valuable?'

Baverstock shook his head. 'It's certainly not valuable. As to what it is, my best guess is that it was used in a school environment. I think it was a teaching aid, something to show children how to write particular words. It's a curiosity, nothing more, and certainly of no value other than simple academic interest.'

'OK, Tony,' Angela said, standing up. 'That was my conclusion, too. I just wanted to make sure.'

Once she'd left, Baverstock sat in thought for a few minutes. He hoped he'd done the right thing in giving Angela Lewis an accurate translation of some of the sections of Aramaic script he'd been able to read. There were another half-dozen words he'd managed to decipher, but he'd decided to keep the meanings of those to himself. He would far rather have told her nothing at all, but he didn't want her running off to another translator who might take an interest in the possible implications of some of the words on the tablet.

And now, if she did decide to do any more digging, about the only place she'd be likely to turn up was Qumran, and he was quite certain that she'd find absolutely nothing there.

About two hours later Baverstock knocked on Angela Lewis's office door. There was no reply, as he'd hoped and expected, because he knew she normally went out to lunch at about that time. He knocked again, then opened the door and stepped inside.

Baverstock spent fifteen minutes carrying out a rapid but thorough search, checking all her drawers and cupboards, but without success. He'd hoped she might actually have had the clay tablet in her possession, but all he found were two other pictures of the relic, which he took. The last thing he did was try to check her emails, but her screen-saver was protected by a password so he couldn't access her PC.

There was, he supposed, still a possibility Angela had the tablet in her possession, maybe at her apartment. It was time, he mused, as he walked back to his own office, to make another call.