Decipher by Stel Pavlou

sometimes up to thirty of them.
    â€œIs it possible I could look at the real thing?” Scott ventured.
To say that he was dying to take a look was an understatement. “I’d get a better feel for it, you understand?”
    Pearce and Gant eyed each other closely. “Can you read it?”
    â€œI wouldn’t like to say,” Scott said frankly. “Bits of it, maybe. But this kinda job needs work, and a lot of time.”
    Major Gant looked pensive. “That’s a problem. Time is something we don’t have.”
    â€œWhat do you mean?”
    Pearce interjected, “I suppose the big question is: do you agree that it’s pre -cuneiform and not post -cuneiform?”
    Scott knew what Pearce was getting at and frankly it made him uncomfortable. Cuneiform was the first ever example of the human written word, but the curious thing about it was that the earlier forms were the more complex. The Sumerian and Babylonian alphabets started out with at least 600 characters. Later ones dropped to about 100, and by the time of the Egyptians, the written word had changed to hieroglyphic pictograms before writing evolved into letters again and took the form that was current. The theory was that Sumerian writing evolved from pictograms, but there was very little evidence for this. There were clay tokens and so on, but they were more like early coinage.
    In fact, there was more evidence for the reverse—that cuneiform started out complex and got simpler over time by a process of cultural amnesia. It suggested an advanced pre -Sumerian civilization. And Scott was more inclined to side with that camp. Put simply, no one knew where the Sumerians had come from. There was every reason to suppose that they brought their writing with them.
    Scott gave a nod. This was earth-shattering. A pre- cuneiform text, at last. Pearce seemed pleased with the response, but the big question remained. What on earth was that text doing in the Antarctic? That defied all logic. It had to be a hoax. There were theories that many of the ancient civilizations had had navies that were far more powerful than had at first been assumed. There was increasing evidence that many, like the Phoenicians, Minoans and the Egyptians, had sailed as far as the Americas.
    In Brazil there was a bay known as the Bay of Jars because Roman jars and other pottery kept turning up at intervals,
presumably from a sunken Roman ship. Also in Brazil an unknown Mediterranean language was discovered on clay inscriptions. A picture of a pineapple, an American fruit, was found in Pompeii. Bearded figurines had been found in Mexico when facial and body hair is alien to native Americans. The sweet potato and peanuts over 2,000 years old had been unearthed in China—more American foods. And in India there were drawings of women holding ears of maize.
    Tests on the hair of Egyptian Mummies had shown that they smoked cannabis, tobacco and cocaine. Trouble is, cocaine and tobacco only come from one place—South America. Chinese silk from 1000 B.C.E. also found in mummy hair meant certain trade with China. This was coupled with the fact that dragon’s head lodestones, the stones used to weight down ancient sailing ships, had been found in the Pacific off the coast of Chile. Ancient South American cultures used dragons in their mythology, so it was more than likely they traded with China.
    Curiously, before Columbus, European legend had it that a land known as Hy Brazil existed west of the Atlantic. So when new settlers arrived in South America they named the land Brazil after the legend. The curiosity being that brzl was a Hebrew and Aramaic word meaning “iron.” Sometime later it was discovered that Brazil had one of the richest iron-ore deposits to be found anywhere on earth.
    But as Scott saw it, all this evidence pointed to a global system of trading blocks. Ancient ingenuity meant these blocks traded goods over many thousands of miles. The