The Exodus Scrolls

By Stephen C Norton

The second Jeanne-Marie DeNord Suspense Novel

Jeanne thought she was traveling to Egypt to re-translate the hieroglyphs in the tomb of Seti I, circa 1300 BC, but climate change rains out those plans. Instead she finds herself in the middle of an earthquake disaster zone, re-enacting a modern-day version of the Exodus plagues. But this time the tenth plague won't just take just the firstborn child. This time around it threatens to become a world wide pandemic of devastating proportions. The only possible salvation seems to lie in the scrolls found in a newly discovered tomb, a tomb with a deadly curse on it. Now Jeanne is in a race to find the answer before the plague kills her, and everyone around her.

This is the second Jeanne-Marie DeNord suspense / mystery novel. Each book is written as a stand-alone book and can be enjoyed independent of earlier books. However, reading the earlier books provides a more fulfilling experience as background events appear in more detail.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stephen C Norton
• Release date: Sep 3, 2013
• ISBN: 9781927343432

Stephen C Norton

Stephen started his career as a marine biologist, later switched to managing computer support and development teams, and is now a full time author and artist. He lives on the West Coast of Canada with his wife and one crazy cat. He has sixteen books currently available in both paperback and e-book formats, including four novels, two guides on Soapstone Carving, one on Stained Glass Art, and multiple guides to various self-publishing topics. While currently working on a forth novel he has at least five other books planned for the next few years. An artist for most of his life, he's worked in many mediums, from oil painting to blown glass. For the last 20 years he's focused on carving soapstone sculptures and writing.He can be reached via his web site at www.stephencnorton.comTo purchase any of his books please go to his author pages atwww.amazon.com/author/stephencnorton on Amazon and www.smashwords.com/profile/view/northwind on Smashwords. His books are also available on Apple iBooks, Barnes & Noble, Kobo and other resellers.

Book preview

Prologue

As the crow flies, it began fifteen hundred kilometers away from Thebes and the tombs that lay in the Valley of Kings. It began with the annual rains, as it had always begun, for thousands of years, time unending.

The sun was setting behind the blue mountains when the rains began to fall on Eden. As dusk fell, the rain fell too, lightly at first, just a soft drizzle, but by nightfall the rain was pouring out of the sky, an endless torrent of water that only an angry god could deliver. Drenching the trees, running off onto the ground below. Far too fast for dripping, the water gurgled as it ran off the branches and leaves. Falling on an earth that had been broiled hard and dry by months of blazing sun, the water could not be absorbed. Rivulets quickly formed and began to flow across the cracked soil. The rivulets joined, rapidly becoming streams. Within minutes the streams had carved shallow channels into the earth. Mud started to form as the water began to penetrate the sun baked earth and the channels deepened swiftly. Moving only a few tiny pebbles at first, the torrents were soon gouging small stones out of the ground. The topsoil was swept up and carried along by the flow of the water. Tumbling down the hillside, the streams surged, racing towards the rapidly swelling river that led to the heart of the valley.

By the end of the first day the river was dark brown, thick with muddy run-off. Where it entered the sapphire blue lake cradled in the valley the waters quickly turned a deep coffee brown. The stain spread across the lake, driving the fish down into the depths to escape the debris. Spreading over the surface, the muddy water moved across the lake, pushed steadily towards the only outlet, a waterfall to the southeast, the one the locals called 'Smoke of the Fire', where it cascaded down into the rocky gorges below.

Within mere days of the beginning of the rain, the gorges below Eden were a cataclysm of turbulent water, spray, mud and moving stone. Boulders bigger than a man were tossed down the gorge, smashing into the rock walls, tearing out huge chunks of rock and earth, hammering and pounding as the waters tore their way down river. The spray rose high into the air, and from far off it could easily be mistaken for a plume of smoke, perhaps heralding the end of the world. The rains fell. This year they would continue to fall for a long, long time. The lands far below lay exposed, at the mercy of the onrushing deluge. The legends say the gods had once condemned the world to death by water. It seemed that they had decided to repeat the punishment.

And the rains fell.

Arriving in Egypt

At the end of the disaster at Marseille I retreated (more like fled) back to Canada, to lay low and lick my wounds. After almost a year of hiding out from a threat that never actually materialized, I finally accepted the fact that the Magdalene scrolls had disappeared into a black hole. My world showed no signs whatsoever of coming to an end. The Church I'd feared seemed quite happy to ignore me completely, much like a giant ignoring a mosquito. Along with that realization I knew that I had to get back into the world and carry on. It needed to be sooner rather than later, because I was rapidly running out of money. Perhaps my paranoia would settle for the occasional look over my shoulder.

During my self imposed exile, I'd continued my archeological and language studies, more to keep myself occupied than anything else. There's really not much to do when you're living the quiet life in a cabin buried away in the Canadian backwoods. Even over an incredibly slow 14.4 modem dial-up link, the Internet proved to be my sole lifeline, all that stood between me and a world class case of cabin fever.

I’ve always been good with languages. Born in Quebec, to French Canadian parents, I spoke French at home and English at school. Being Catholic, as most French Canadians were then, the church services always had some sections in Latin, and by the time I was eight I spoke Latin fairly well, certainly better than most of the priests.

I went to high school in a suburb of Montreal called Chomedey, where probably two thirds of the population was Jewish. My high-school was great. Officially an English Protestant school, it took all the standard Christian holidays. However, on Jewish holidays, three quarters of the student body took off to observe the Jewish rituals, so most of us non-Jews took the day off too, as classes were basically nothing more than barely monitored study sessions. Most of my friends were Jewish and it really annoyed me the way they dropped into Hebrew when they wanted to keep a secret from me. By fifteen I was fluent in Hebrew, though it was a year or more after that before my friends finally caught on to the fact. Drove them nuts that a Quebecois kid could keep up with them!

College was Dawson CEGEP, in downtown Montreal. Still lots of Jewish kids, but added to that was a good sprinkling of Arabs and Italians. By the time I completed my two year diploma I had them all down pat, plus a bit of Swahili and German. I found that once I developed ‘the knack’, a weird little ability to flip a mental switch somewhere in my head, I could switch languages in mid-sentence. It seemed the more languages I learned the easier it became to learn another.

While I was hiding in the backwoods I discovered Egyptian. That presented a wonderful challenge. How do you learn to speak a language which has been dead for more than two thousand years? When Alexander the Great conquered Egypt in 332 BC, he made Greek the official language of the country. Five hundred years later the Egyptian language was completely dead and forgotten. The last written record we have is a nearly meaningless hieroglyphic inscription on the walls of the Temple of Isis on Philae Island, dated to 192 AD.

To make matters worse, or more interesting if you were so inclined, both the written language of hieroglyphs and the more script-like hieratics are like Hebrew and Arabic. When written, vowels are never used, only consonants. The word for beauty is ‘nfr’. How it was actually pronounced we’ll probably never know. There are a few hints though. Coptic is a bastard language, verbal Egyptian written down using the Greek alphabet. Greek does use vowels, so some words can be said using a pronunciation rooted in ancient Greek. Trouble is, Coptic is to ancient Egyptian what modern English is to the English spoken by the Angles and Saxons of 500 AD. Languages constantly evolve and change over time, and across a thousand years can become unintelligible to the original tongue.

By general agreement, linguists have decided to insert an ‘e’ as the vowel where it seemed to make sense, so ‘nfr’ became ‘nefer’. It could just as easily have been pronounced ‘nafor’ or 'nofar’. Did I tell you you’re beautiful, or did I just call you a goat? Who really knows?

To make things even worse, a vowel isn't just a single sound. In modern English we have only five vowels, 'a, e, i, o, u'. Simple, right? Five vowels, so five vowel sounds. Wrong! In British English there are over twenty vowel sounds, based on accent and inflections. Add another twenty or so for American English, especially for accents coming from the US deep south. Add some more for Canadian English, Australian, etc. You can see where this goes. While it's doubtful Egypt ever had so many regional variations in accent, intonation and inflection, they definitely would have had a few. So even if the word was truly spelled 'nofar', there could still have been several different ways of pronouncing it. Coptic Egyptian simply doesn't provide enough reliable clues.

It gave me the best challenge I’d had with a language in years, and in some respects learning Egyptian made my exile pass a lot faster than it would have otherwise. Learning to read hieroglyphs was only the first half of the battle. An Egyptian scribe of the New Kingdoms of Egypt, around 1550 to 1077 BC, was among the most educated of the population, and very well respected. His education started as a child. First he’d have to memorize at least two hundred hieroglyphs, which are basically unique symbols which each had a specific meaning. A junior apprentice would know four hundred and fifty to five hundred symbols, while a senior would know around seven hundred and fifty. A reasonably comprehensive knowledge of the language requires you to know over three thousand symbols. Not only that, but in order to write in Egyptian you had to be half linguist and half artist, as many of the hieroglyphs were fairly detailed pictures. To read aloud I’d have to have half my head in Egyptian, with the other half in Greek or Coptic, while my mouth ran along in English doing simultaneous two or three-way translations to check that what I was saying actually made sense.

To top it off, Egyptian can be written from left to right, right to left or top to bottom. When carved onto temple walls, hieroglyphs became art, so scribes would sometimes modify a symbol or the direction it should be read to enhance the visual beauty of the carving. Doorways and arches are great learning tools, because the same text is often used on both sides, but in mirror image form to enhance the visual beauty.

Once I figured out hieroglyphs I started in on the second half of the battle, hieratics. They're a more script-like and less artistic version of hieroglyphs which are faster to write and use less space on a scroll. It was great, two variations of a long dead language, neither of which anyone knows how to pronounce properly, written in a manner where almost anything goes. I loved it!

By the end of my year in exile, reasonably sure by then that the Catholic Church really had absolutely no interest in pursuing or harassing me, I started re-connecting with friends and associates in the real world. It was a friend from University who mentioned a new project starting in Egypt. They were looking for a good linguist and translator, and after a short exchange of emails, a resume and one very long video conference call, I was offered the job. To be honest, I took it because I was, by then, flat broke and needed a job, any job. The challenge of the Egyptian language held my enthusiasm, but the thought of spending months inside a tomb in the desert didn't exactly excite me. My idea of heaven was still southern France. The idea of spending twelve to eighteen months in Egypt, working in the desert at a hundred degrees Fahrenheit or more failed to thrill. Still, I was fascinated with the Egyptian hieroglyphic language, it was a job, it would pay the bills and it did sound kind of interesting.

The main problem with a lot of Egyptian history and art is that it’s in Egypt, and while millions of tourists do indeed make the pilgrimage to see the pyramids, they only see a very small sliver of the incredible history that is Egypt. Many more millions never make the trip, especially since the democratic uprising of 2011, the one they called the Arab Spring, with the resulting years of turmoil and violence. For most, their only view of Egypt is from National Geographic TV specials and perhaps the occasional local museum display. So, some bright lad came up with the idea of creating a virtual tomb, and then taking the entire tomb on tour. In creating the virtual tomb, the project directors had decided to have a completely fresh translation made of all the hieroglyphs found inside the tomb, which is where I came in. They seemed to have money, as the salary was very good and the plane tickets they sent me, Montreal to Luxor, were first class all the way. I packed my bags and headed east, and so walked blindly and innocently into a nightmare beyond my wildest imaginings.

A Short History

The Middle East in general, and Egypt specifically, probably has the oldest continuous recorded history on the planet. The oldest non-continuous record is probably the civilization of Sumeria, which existed in Mesopotamia, along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers as long ago as 5,300 BC. Archeologists have recently found even older ruins in Turkey, dating to somewhere between 9,000 and 10,000 BC, called Göbekli Tepe, but so far, no sign of writing has been found there. Sumeria on the other hand possessed a written language which they carved into clay tablets. They had gods and goddesses, heroes and legends and they recorded their tales in clay. They built great ziggurats, which are essentially step pyramids, to their gods. Detailed accounts of both their history and their legendary tales have been found, and, miraculously, translated. The mythical tales are so similar to those of the Bible and other holy books, including Adam and Eve, Eden, the flood and others, that I suspect that the later cultures, including the Hebrew priests, simply lifted the tales from Sumeria and claimed them as their own. The biblical tale of Noah is indistinguishable from the Sumerian tale of Utnapishtim, the only difference being that Utnapishtim sailed around 4,000 BC, two thousand years before the best guesstimates for Noah's flood.

However, the Sumerian civilization has left only minor traces behind, as have most of the other ancient cultures. Göbekli Tepe left a few huge stone constructions, but only a few pictorial images, providing no written record. No libraries, no writings, no history. Egypt, on the other hand, has left thousands of monuments, temples, tombs and pyramids, almost all of them covered in detailed writings, all undeniable proof of their existence, power and magnificence. Only one small problem exists. Egypt was, for thousands of years, her own worst enemy. No sooner was a Pharaoh committed to his or her tomb, surrounded by their magnificent burial offerings, than Egyptian tomb robbers appeared, eager to relieve the dead of all their treasures.

For thousands of years, Egyptians built tombs for their Pharaohs and their rich elites, ranging from simple mastabas to massive, million ton pyramids, and everything in between. And for thousands of years, tomb robbers helped themselves to the burial gifts.

A mastaba is basically a two story house of two to three rooms, dug down into the bedrock and covered with a low square building. The dead were placed in the burial chamber below, and descendants could make offerings to their ancestors in a shine room in the building above. A ladder and a lack of fear of the dead was all the robbers required.

As time passed, the mastabas got bigger, culminating around 2,650 BC with Djoser’s Step Pyramid. His head vizier, Imhotep, designed it, making it both deeper and taller than a regular mastaba. The burial chamber was dug deeper than ever before and the upper building constructed higher and grander than ever before. Instead of a single square building above, Imhotep created a series of layers, each sitting atop the one below, going up in steps like a wedding cake. Thus the very first pyramid, called Djoser's Step Pyramid, was built. No-one knows if it provided any greater deterrent to robbers, but subsequent Pharaohs, each seeking to outdo his predecessor, built ever bigger and grander than the one before.

The downside was that all the tomb robbers now had these huge sign-posts stating ‘here there be treasure, come and get it’. All they had to do was solve the maze of the pyramid to reach the treasure rooms. In spite of horrific punishments if caught, most tombs were pillaged within a few years of being sealed. In many cases it was the tomb builders themselves who did the pillaging, as the artisans were by no means rich.

Finally the Pharaohs wised up and started to hide their tombs, thus creating the Valley of Kings, a rocky valley filled with tunnels hand carved deep into solid bedrock, accessible from only a single small entrance. Sadly, even this failed to stop the tomb-robbers, as often the workers hired to dig the tombs simply came back later to collect the funeral treasures. These thefts became such a problem that at one point a high priest collected up many of the royal mummies and secretly reburied them in a tomb which had already been stripped clean. The treasures were gone but at least the eternal bodies of the Pharaohs were safe.

So, for thousands of years, Egypt spent incredible amounts of time, effort and money, interring their greatest treasures, and then digging them up again. Happily for archeologists, not all the treasures were portable. The temples and tombs were themselves works of art and literature. In most cases the tomb walls were covered in pictures, texts, statues and carvings. Sarcophaguses and coffins were hand carved with scenes of the life to come in all its glory. Mona Lisa’s by the score, buried in buildings of stone and rock. For the most part, the buildings themselves were not touched by the ancient grave robbers. After all, how would you steal a twenty ton statue, and who could you sell it to?  So for thousands of years, Egypt’s art works lay beneath the blowing sands, where the heat, dryness and sand served to protect them. That is, until the nineteenth century, when Europeans discovered ancient Egypt and went collectively mad.

With all that rattling around my mind I stepped off the plane and into a solid wall of early morning heat and humidity. Dr. Hamilton Mendes was waiting just across from the customs desk. A handsome older man, mid fifties perhaps, with thinning salt and pepper hair. He stood with a military posture, but the smile on his tanned faced was friendly and welcoming.

Welcome to Egypt, Ms. DeNord. I'm Hamilton, the project team leader. Let's collect your bags and I'll take you over to your hotel. We can drop the bags there and then, if you're up to it today, I'll take you out to the worksite.

Hi, Hamilton, I'm Jeanne and I'm definitely up to stretching my legs. I've been sitting in planes and boarding lounges for far too long.

And with that my new project began.

The Tomb of Seti I

The Valley of Kings was scorching hot, a bowl of a valley surrounded by towering hills almost as if designed to capture and trap the heat of the sun. From the blazing oven we walked into the shade of a stone doorway, cut into the side of the hill. The temperature must have dropped ten or fifteen degrees, just from moving into the shade. We entered the tomb carefully, stepping down steps that were carved into the bedrock thirty-five hundred years ago. Seti's tomb literally took your breath away. One of the largest ever found, it was also one of the best preserved, and yet entering it almost immediately brought on a shortness of breath.

Heading down the stairs, the stuffiness intensified. Too much heat, too many people in the tomb, too little air flow. For a brief moment I saw, not the electric lights lining the stairway, but flickering papyrus torches, their guttering light flaring and fading. I shook off my imagination and continued carefully down the stairs.

The walls were beautiful, covered in artwork, just as breathtaking as the air I fought to pull into my lungs.

You'll get used to it fairly quickly. Hamilton's voice came from behind me. The ventilation system is going full bore, but with this many people inside it does tend to get stuffy. Once you acclimatize to the heat the breathing gets easier.

I stopped, gazing at a section of wall. A male figure adorned it. Carved into the plaster and beautifully colored. Strong legs, covered in the finest, almost translucent linen of the rich. Strong arms held akimbo, each sporting several bracelets and armbands; gold, turquoise, ruby, emerald and amethyst. A bare chest, half covered by a chest emblem of intricate design and coloring. Where the head and face should have been was a raggedly cut hole in the wall. The wanton vandalism was shocking.

Welcome to the real world of nineteenth century archaeology. Hamilton's voice was heavy with sarcasm.

What do you mean?

"You're familiar with Jean-Francois Champollion of course, the young Frenchmen who first translated the Rosetta Stone? After the British researcher Thomas Young got the Greek and Demotic on the stone translated in 1814, Champollion built on that and finally deciphered the first hieroglyphs around 1822. He completed the translation in 1824 and published to great acclaim. He became France's overnight hero, master of all things Egyptian. What is not quite so well known is that in 1828 he traveled to Egypt and spent seventeen months in the country.

During those months he collected a few souvenirs for himself and his friends, something on the order of a hundred pieces. He was so taken by the beauty of the wall frescos here in Seti's tomb that he had two large sections hacked out and took them home with him. He gestured at the ugly hole in the fresco. A personal souvenir of his visit to the tomb, you might say."

Hamilton's voice was harsh, tight with anger. He obviously took the careless destruction quite personally.

"One section is now in the Louvre, the other is in a museum in Florence. Later, as the first curator of Egyptian art at the Louvre, he bought over seven thousand pieces of ancient Egyptian tomb and temple treasures from various other ‘archaeologists’ and collectors of the era.

Because of issues like that we had to begin this project very quietly, filming and videoing the missing pieces first, under the pretext of doing a documentary on the pieces alone. We had to do all the bits and pieces that are in various personal collections before anyone understood that we were actually doing the entire tomb and all its contents. Can you imagine what some of the more mercenary collectors would have charged us to photograph a missing piece, if they knew it could be the last piece needed to complete the entire project? So we quietly did all the stolen, or should I say 'collected' pieces first. We’re reasonably certain that the Egyptian government wants this project completed, so they're not likely to hold us up for ransom now we've started on the tomb itself."

I was surprised. I hadn't realized that Egyptian collectables generated such greed.

So much for the glories of Western civilization. You sometimes wonder if we're mature adults or just a bunch of kids grabbing as many toys as possible. The one with the most toys wins.

Hamilton smiled sadly at my ignorance.

"The looting of Egypt has a long and tarnished history. Sadly, it's been going on for at least two thousand years, long before the west got so enamored with the place. Egyptian antiquities have always attracted their admirers. Obelisks especially have always been a big item in the trade, if you'll excuse the pun. Constantine the Great took one back for his new capital of Constantinople, and it's been there ever since. Roman emperors loved them too, as did the Catholic popes when they came on the scene. The city of Rome has eight Egyptian obelisks, while the entire country of Egypt herself has only seven. Down the centuries even the Popes took possession of a few. One still stands in Saint Peter's Square. A rather odd juxtaposition, an ancient 'heretical' monument from a culture which worshipped many gods, images and idols, in the very heart of the orthodox Catholic faith which has always condemned idolatry.

Even into the modern-day era, other countries coveted the obelisks. One from Thutmose III's Temple at Heliopolis, erected there around 1450 BC, currently stands instead on the Victoria Embankments in Britain. A small gift from the Pasha Ali to the Earl of Cavon. In 1835 Ali gave one made in the time of Ramses II to France, where it now stands in the Place de la Concorde in Paris.

Archaeological looting became a major industry during the 1800s and early 1900s. An Italian circus strongman named Giovanni Belzoni stole Seti's sarcophagus from his tomb. Belzoni was an ardent amateur archaeologist, though with much more interest in collecting and selling than in preserving or studying. When looting a large stone head from Ramses mortuary temple, he ended up demolishing part of the Temple so he could get the head out of the building!

In 1803 Napoleon appointed an Italian lawyer named Bernardino Drovetti as the French Consul to Egypt. In 1815 Henry Salt was appointed British Consul to Egypt. It would seem that the two of them sat down over brandy one night and decided to divide Egypt between them. They both went on massive archaeological rampages, collecting huge numbers of antiquities, while at the same time causing massive destruction to many archaeological sites. If Drovetti found a site with forty amphorae, he would order twenty destroyed to drive up the price on the remaining vessels. Both Salt and Drovetti amassed huge collections which they then sold to museums across Britain and France.

The Ottoman Pasha Mehmet Muhammad Ali, then ruler of Egypt, was quite happy to assist both the English and the French in