Most confusing of all, though, was the fact that Mamdouh couldn’t have removed a book from the Library himself. Gail was the first to enter after the engineers, and the book had been sitting on the plinth undisturbed.
How had he made the swap?
She closed the email program and sipped her water. Her emotions had given way to curiosity, and concerns over the future of her career had been replaced by a number of questions she was eager to put to her friend in Cairo. Unfortunately, since their brief phone conversation, he’d not answered any of her calls or emails. Maybe he’s fending off questions left, right and centre, too, she thought.
She brought another application to the front of the desktop. A simple window, not unlike a word-processor, filled her screen. She dragged George’s sheepish rabbit picture over and dropped it in, then tapped a button on the application toolbar. A simple dialogue popped up asking her to enter her keyword.
She smiled to herself and typed bunny. A progress bar briefly worked its way along the bottom of the picture, and then a message emerged:
Good Luck Bunny, always with you. Love George xxx
The application she was using had been written by George as a Christmas present for her several years earlier. At first, she had believed it to be a simple viewer for all of her scanned pages of books from the Library. She had thanked him, but had secretly been a little disappointed that the fruit of his labours – three months of programming in the evenings after work – had produced a simple program she could have obtained for free from the Internet.
George had said nothing more of it.
The Christmas holidays had been over for nearly a month before Gail actually used the program he had made. She had uploaded her scanned images, and had been idly flipping through them when she noticed the strange icon along the toolbar. She had clicked it, only to be faced with an error: Please select glyph(s) for translation. Her heart had literally left her chest.
George had not simply made a viewer for her Egyptian texts, he had made a tool that helped her translate them. She grinned to herself as she remembered how she had thanked him that evening for his Christmas present.
Closing the message and the picture, she dragged another file into the application and a series of tiny rectangles filled the screen, as if someone had ripped the pages from a book and laid them out in rows on a grey background. She tapped the first page and zoomed in to the wooden cover of the book from the Library plinth, the Stickman book as it had become known. The engraved Stickman looked so real she felt she could touch it. Memories of the dry atmosphere of the Library came flooding back to her, memories of the smell of old leather and wood.
The application let you select a hieroglyph or group of hieroglyphs, such as a cartouche, and add custom text, which would serve as the translation. The application would then run through all of the text and suggest the same translation for any matching symbols. It used a simple bitmap comparison algorithm with some additional routines for cleaning up background noise, so it couldn’t do anything too sophisticated. A common problem was that Egyptian hieroglyphs should be read in the direction in which the characters were facing. This meant that the bitmap analysis would correctly match two sets of glyphs reading from left to right, but would fail to recognise that a third set, reading from top to bottom, was also a match. It was a minor gripe, which George had promised to look into at some point in the future.
Once the analysis was complete, tooltips would appear all over the text. An overview pane would also give a summary of all the available translations in any given selection. By selecting multiple tooltips, it was possible to add further contextual translations too, giving a second or even third meaning to common groups when used in conjunction with each other. Over time, the more she used it the more complete the dictionary became, and while Gail’s own grasp of ancient Egyptian had improved to the extent of near-fluency over the past ten years, George’s application had evolved such a sophisticated dictionary that it became the envy of her peers. One of her outstanding actions in the Faculty was to wrestle the source code from her husband and hand it over to the Department of Computer Science, so that they could enhance its functionality and distribute it more widely. But before he would let her do that, he had to remove his ‘love-letter’ system, which was what allowed them to hide words in pictures, only to be revealed when a keyword was input.
She highlighted a group of hieroglyphs and read the lines of English text, along with annotations, that appeared in a box below the page.
To conquer | {and} gain dominion {rule?} {wage war?} | leads to no victory {?} | all {we?} shall be judged as one {together?}
She had read the first line of text a thousand times. It was isolated at the top of the page, separated from the rest of the hieroglyphs by the Amarna Stickman.
Gail highlighted the next line of symbols.
A beauty has come {Nefertiti} | with guidance {a message?} of | {???}
She had never wanted to provide a translation for the Stickman symbol. In her mind, to do so was to admit that they would not find the genuine translation of the glyph and with so many texts from the Library unstudied, she looked forward to the day when she would triumphantly give the application its final translation. In the meantime, it simply returned three question marks whenever it occurred.
The religious undertones of the Stickman book were hard to escape. On every page could be found morals, stories, proverbs, and illustrations, all seemingly pointing to an idyllic way of life, a ‘just path’ as it had been dubbed, which she had interpreted as being an unsuccessful ideological movement started by Nefertiti under the reign of her husband Akhenaten. It fitted well with the archaeological evidence of the era: a new capital, a changed foreign policy, changing art, all capped by a worship of an old god, the Sun deity Aten. The movement had clearly failed, and future pharaohs had done everything possible to eradicate its memory.
To Dr Gail Turner, the evidence was quite clear, and her thesis had brought widespread acclaim. Many of the pieces of the puzzle surrounding Amarna and Nefertiti seemed to fall into place.
But that hadn’t stopped other theories cropping up on the Internet. As soon as her research had been published, stories appeared of the ‘first coming of the Lord’, in female form, over twelve centuries before Jesus Christ, passing on his teachings to the most powerful people on Earth. The similes between the Bible and the Stickman book were there if one looked hard, and an increasingly large group of people had made it their sole purpose to look as hard as possible. The Amarna Adventists believed that Nefertiti was the true daughter of God. They had lifted ancient passages word for word from her book, including some of her own translations, and used them to form their own controversial ‘bible.’
Amarna Adventists were not the only people to read more into the Library finds than the Egyptologists. The Internet was full of interpretations of the Stickman figure, from four-legged aliens to strange spaceships. For her part, Gail had felt that the Stickman represented a direction towards the Sun god Aten, its head being the Sun, and the arms, legs and body representing an arrow of some sort. It was an interpretation shared by most serious academics.
Now, however, as Gail read the sentence over to herself, and with the day’s revelations in mind, she wondered whether the Internet theorists hadn’t been more close to the mark.