The Sacred Cipher (67 page)

Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1834-1892) was England’s best-known preacher for most of
the second half of the nineteenth century and pastor of London’s famed New Park Street
Church. Spurgeon’s
All of Grace
was the first book published by Moody Press and is still its all-time best seller.
Three of his works have sold more than one million copies, and there is more of Spurgeon’s
work in print than any other Christian author (
http://www.pilgrimpublications.com
).

While Spurgeon’s trip to Alexandria, Egypt, depicted in this book, is a creation of
the author’s imagination, Spurgeon traveled widely in the Near East and Europe and
was an avid student of history. The Spurgeon Archive (
http://www.spurgeon.org
) is a voluminous collection of Spurgeon history.

Spurgeon’s London publication,
The Sword and the Trowel
, was replicated in New York City in 1878 by his cousin Joseph Spurgeon as
The Christian Herald and Signs of Our Times
. Dr. Louis Klopsch purchased the magazine in 1890 and was instrumental in preventing
the Bowery Mission from closing its doors, purchasing the rescue mission from the
Reverend A. G. Ruliffson in 1895 after its original superintendent passed away.

The history of the Rosetta Stone, displayed in London’s British Museum (
http:// britishmuseum.org
) since 1802, is true.

The inscription on the Rosetta Stone is a decree (circa 196
B.C.
) passed by a council of priests, one of a series that affirm the royal cult of the
thirteen-year-old Ptolemy V on the first anniversary of his coronation. The decree
is inscribed on the stone three times, in hieroglyphics (suitable for a priestly decree),
Demotic (the native script used for daily purposes), and Greek (the language of the
administration).

The Demotic language was first a spoken language, then a written language, which was
extensively used in Egypt for over one thousand years, from 660
B.C.
to 425
A.D.
Chicago University’s Oriental Institute embarked on a Demotic Dictionary Project
(
http://oi.uchicago.edu/research/projects/dem
) thirty years ago and has cataloged twenty-seven Demotic letters, only fifteen of
which have been deciphered. For those fifteen letters, which were the equivalent of
words in the spoken Egyptian language, the Demotic dictionary currently contains over
eleven hundred pages of possible meanings for words associated with those letters
or combinations of those letters.

The Collector’s Club, founded in 1896 (
http://www.collectorsclub.org
), is one of the nation’s most influential stamp-collecting societies. Its permanent
home at 22 East 35th Street in New York City, a baroque-style townhouse designed by
Stanford White, houses the vast Collector’s Club Library; its 150,000 volumes comprise
one of the world’s largest and most comprehensive collections of philatelic literature.
The building and its library are open by appointment.

Sir Edward Elgar (1857-1934) was an English romantic composer most notable for his
many compositions
of Pomp and Circumstance
and his orchestral work
The Enigma Variations
. Elgar was also a devotee of codes, puzzles, and ciphers. On July 14, 1897, Elgar
sent a letter to a young friend, Miss Dora Penny, the twenty-two-year-old daughter
of the Reverend Alfred Penny, Rector of St. Peter’s, Wolverhampton—the now famous
Dorabella Cipher.

The cipher consists of eighty-seven characters, apparently constructed from an alphabet
of twenty-four symbols. The symbols are arranged in three lines; contain one, two,
or three semicircles; and are oriented in one of eight directions. A small dot appears
after the fifth character on the third line. No one has yet deciphered its meaning.
Dora Penny died in 1964.

The Elgar Society (
http://www.elgar.org
) holds an annual competition for those code-breakers who are attempting to crack
the Dorabella Cipher. In 2008, seven entries were submitted, but the cipher remains
a mystery and the £1,500 prize has yet to be awarded.

Abiathar was the leader, or Gaon, of the Jewish community in Jerusalem, and Meborak
was the leader, or Exhillarc, of the Jewish community in Egypt, when the crusaders
captured Jerusalem in 1099. The Temple Mount in Jerusalem is a platform, supported
by a series of arches built by Herod the Great. The Mount is a formation of karstic
limestone that has eroded over time by water, creating a honeycomb of cisterns, tunnels,
and caverns. Other than the unofficial diggings of Charles Warren in the nineteenth
century, there has been virtually no archaeological study of the space under the Temple
Mount platform.

Other than the basic facts and associated research listed above, the rest of
The Sacred Cipher
is a result of the author’s imagination. Any “errors of fact” are a result of that
imagination.

Terry Brennan was born and raised in Philadelphia, where he grew into a lifelong Phillies
and Eagles fan, and is a graduate of Penn State University.

Brennan launched his twenty-two-year journalism career as an award-winning writer
and sports editor for a suburban Philadelphia chain of newspapers. He spent seven
years covering the Philadelphia Flyers hockey team, auto racing, and other sports
for the
Philadelphia Bulletin
. He continued to win writing awards during a ten-year career with Ingersoll Publications,
a multinational newspaper firm with papers in the U.S., England, and Ireland. He was
an editor and publisher for Ingersoll newspapers in Pennsylvania, Illinois, and New
York, and in 1989 joined the Ingersoll corporate staff as executive editor of all
U.S. newspaper titles. Brennan led the
Pottstown
(PA)
Mercury
to a Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing during his tenure as editor.