The Sacred Cipher (7 page)

“There . . . there,” said Joe excitedly. “That’s a match, right? That’s a match, Sammy?”

Rodriguez made room for Rizzo to roll closer to the two pieces of paper. Rizzo traced
the lines and curves of one symbol with the tip of his forefinger while transmitting
that touch through his eyes to the symbol on the other page. Several times, he repeated
the process, a ritual of recognition that didn’t seem to fully satisfy the diminutive
scholar. “It’s close—it’s real close, but there’s something else going on here. It’s
not an exact match, and it should be.

“But there’s one good thing,” Rizzo said, spinning around toward them. “I know what
it is. And I know where it came from.”

Sammy Rizzo plugged in an electric kettle that rested on top of a small filing cabinet.
“I’ve only got tea, so that’s what you get.” Rizzo made a fast intercom connection
to someone elsewhere in the library, while he directed Bohannon and Rodriguez to take
seats around a small, meeting table in the corner of his office.

“I’ll give you guys a short history lesson while we’re waiting for that water to boil,”
said Rizzo, as he joined them at the table. “First, how did this sheet of paper come
about? I mean, you don’t have to tell me your secrets, no offense, but how did you
two come to be in possession of whatever it is that you copied these symbols from?
Come on, Joe, this is not your line of business.”

Rodriguez looked at Rizzo with a scowl on his face. He knew Rizzo would help them
regardless, with or without more information. But he also felt his colleague deserved
some kind of explanation.

“Sam,” Rodriguez said solemnly, leaning across the table to emphasize his words, “obviously,
we’ve discovered something we think may be significant. Tom has unexpectedly found
a number of antiquities. Among them was a document that contained this writing. We
couldn’t even identify the language, let alone decipher what it meant. So we came
to you for help, hoping you might be able to identify what we’re looking at.”

Rizzo rocked back and forth in his chair. He took off his glasses and began to rapidly
clean the lenses with the bottom of his bowling league shirt. “As long as this isn’t
a forgery or a joke of some kind, then I can tell you that these symbols come from
a very old document, perhaps two thousand years old. The document is likely parchment
rolled up as a scroll and very well preserved. Parchment is made of animal skin, most
likely sheepskin. If it was kept in a moist or humid environment or in one with dramatic
climate changes, the skin would have shrunk and expanded hundreds of times, destroying
it and anything written on it. Parchment in the desert, however, seems to last forever.
We have scrolls from twenty-five hundred years ago that are still legible and in good
shape because they were kept in a desert area with little humidity.

“How’s that so far?” Rizzo said, a twinkle in his eye as he perched the glasses on
the crest of his nose. “A regular Sherlock Holmes, eh?”

“I knew you were the right guy,” said Rodriguez. “You are pretty much right on the
money. The letters, the ink, is faded a bit, and some of the letters may have separated
or cracked. But the scroll itself is in pretty good shape. So what else have you been
able to figure out?”

“I’ve figured out that I’d like to see this scroll for myself,” he said bluntly.

Rodriguez and Bohannon looked at each other with questioning glances. How far did
they want to take this with Rizzo?

“Sam, if I were you, I’d want to see this scroll, too. I understand that,” said Rodriguez.
“And I know you could help us try and figure this thing out. But one of the reasons
we’re being as careful as we are is that in the package with this scroll was a letter,
a letter warning about the danger of this document, that people would kill for it.
Whether that’s still true today, who knows? I mean it sounds like a cheap adventure
novel, but it’s possible this could get dangerous. I just want you to understand what
you may be getting into. Tom and I, we’re just curious enough, and just crazy enough,
to want to find out. So what do you think it is?”

Sammy Rizzo’s eyes sparkled. “It’s not what I think it is; it’s what I know it is.”

The whistling kettle broke into Sammy’s thoughts.

“Hey, Tom, would you mind getting that?” Sammy nodded at the filing cabinet. “There
should be some sugar up there, too.”

Rizzo wrestled with conflicting emotions. Part of him felt the elation of a prospector
with a shiny nugget in his hand. Another part of him was heavy with the knowledge
that the nugget was fool’s gold. He waited while Bohannon busied himself with the
mugs, then pressed on, aware that his information would soon crush the excitement
in the room.

“I’m sure you’ve both heard of the Rosetta Stone. We all learned about it in school,”
he began. “But do you know why the Rosetta Stone was such an important find?”

“Sure,” said Rodriguez as they stirred and blew on their steaming mugs. “It gave us
the ability to understand Egyptian hieroglyphics.”

“That’s right,” said Sammy, “but it wasn’t that simple. From the time the Greeks discovered
the first hieroglyphic writing in Egypt about three hundred years before Christ, deciphering
those hieroglyphic images had been an impossibility. Plenty of theories were offered,
but none of the theories held up under scrutiny. Hieroglyphs were an unknown and lost
language, and historians despaired of ever understanding their meaning.

“The Rosetta Stone is an ancient stele, or stone tablet, inscribed with the same message
in three languages . . . two Egyptian languages and classical Greek. The stone was
created in 196
B.C.
It’s a decree from Ptolemy V, the fifth ruler of the Greek’s Ptolemaic Dynasty that
ruled Egypt for over three hundred years. The decree repealed certain taxes and instructed
that statues should be erected in temples. Making decrees and carving the decrees
on stones was common for the Ptolemys,” said Rizzo, as he warmed to the task. “They
would make several copies and then display the stones in key locations all over Egypt
in order to maintain support for the dynasty. As Greeks, it was critical to the Ptolemaic
rulers that all people could understand the decrees. So the stones were inscribed
in several languages to be read, not only by the local people, but also by visiting
priests and government officials.”

A soft knock on the door was followed by a young, African American man who walked
in and silently handed Rizzo a small, soft-cover booklet and a manila folder fairly
thick with documents.

“Thank you, Kevin,” Rizzo said, looking up. “I appreciate your getting this to me
quickly. I owe you one.”

The young man nodded his head, turned, and left as silently as he had entered. Rizzo
was back into his story before the young man had reached the hallway.

“After Napoleon’s 1798 campaign conquered Egypt, the French founded the Institut d’Égypte
in Cairo, bringing many scientists and archaeologists to the region. But the stone
wasn’t discovered by scientists. It was discovered by a guy who was digging a ditch.”
Rizzo picked up the small booklet, opened it, and, referring to the book now and again,
continued with his history lesson. “A French army engineer discovered the stone in
July of 1799 while he was guiding construction workers at Fort Julien near the Egyptian
port city of Rosetta. Recognizing the uniqueness of his discovery, the engineer called
his general, who dispatched the stone to the Institut d’Égypte, where it arrived the
next month. The French then announced its discovery.

“Once Napoleon returned to France, leaving behind his soldiers and a couple hundred
French scientists and scholars, it was like the stone was a war magnet. Both the British
and the Ottoman Turks attacked Egypt. The French soldiers valiantly resisted for two
years, but the British ultimately captured Cairo. French troops and scholars, with
the stone, fled to Alexandria in hopes of escaping to France, but the British blockaded
the port and soon captured Alexandria. That’s when the real fun began.

“If the military battles were fierce, the scholarly ones were even more intense.

“The French refused to hand over the archaeological and scientific discoveries they
had made in Egypt. The British general—Hutchinson, I believe—was anxious to send home
more booty for the newly completed British Museum, so he continued the blockade, refusing
to allow food, water, or supplies through to the French. In response, the French declared
they would burn all they had found, rather than surrender it to the English, at the
same time hiding as many of the objects as they could.

“Imagine,” said Rizzo, his gaze swinging back and forth between the two rapt listeners,
“if the French had followed through with their threat. Imagine all of the history,
all of the knowledge that would have been lost forever. But the British had a solution.

“While a couple of the British scientists were bargaining with the French, telling
them they could take home some biology specimens, English soldiers secretly infiltrated
the French quarter, broke into the institute, and carried off the loot.” Rizzo flipped
a page in the folder and scanned the contents. “Colonel Tomkyns Hilgrove Turner, who
escorted the stone to Britain, personally seized the stone from General de Menou and
carried it away on a gun carriage.

“Wow, this stuff would make a great movie, wouldn’t it?” Rizzo said with a big grin.

“You see, even at that early stage, even though nobody had the foggiest clue what
was inscribed on the stone, scholars and scientists were convinced that the keys to
deciphering hieroglyphs were on the stone because one of the languages was Greek.
Since we understood the Greek, we would probably be able to figure out the other languages.
But it wasn’t that easy.

“More than twenty years passed, and no one—not the scholars at the British Museum,
not the French, who had made plaster casts of the stone before it was swiped by the
Brits, and not any other linguist—had any success making the connection between the
Greek translation and the other two Egyptian languages on the stone.”

Rizzo took a deep breath, drained the remainder of his tea, closed his eyes, and stretched
back in his chair, sharpening the edge of the silence.

“It was a physicist—a physicist!—who finally figured out the key. The guy’s name was
Thomas Young, and he had a revolutionary insight. Young discovered that some of the
hieroglyphs on the Rosetta Stone wrote the sounds, not the letters, of the royal name,
Ptolemy. From there, a French scholar named Champollion realized that all hieroglyphs
recorded the sounds of the Egyptian language, not the letters, and his discovery laid
the foundation of our knowledge of ancient Egyptian language and culture. He unlocked
the stone.”

Without a twitch, Rodriguez and Bohannon waited. And waited some more.

“So . . . ?” Bohannon finally said impatiently. “So . . . what does all that have
to do with our characters? Those aren’t hieroglyphs.”

“No, they’re not,” Rizzo said softly. “In fact, those symbols are even more unknown,
even more difficult to understand than hieroglyphs. Those symbols are the third language
on the Rosetta Stone,” he said, a note of triumph in his voice. “Those symbols are
Demotic.”

“Demonic?” Bohannon squeaked.

“No, not
demonic,”
Rizzo chided, bringing a blush to Bohannon’s cheeks.
“Demotic
. It’s an ancient type of writing that was used in Egypt for a thousand years, up
until about the third century. It was used primarily for business and literary purposes.

“You know something,” he said, pulling on his earlobe, “it’s been over two hundred
years since that stone was found. Two hundred years during which the best minds in
the world have pored over every swoop and swirl on its face. And even with the Greek
and the hieroglyph to work from, only half of the letters of the Demotic language
have been deciphered. Of the fifteen symbols that have been identified, linguists
have only been able to figure out the meaning for eleven. The University of Chicago
has spent years trying to complete a Demotic dictionary and has done a great job,
without a significant amount of success in clearly understanding the entire language.
Duke University has many examples of Demotic, mostly from the wrappings of mummies,
and hasn’t made much headway. The Louvre in Paris has an extensive collection of Demotic
language samples, and it’s still a mystery to them.”