Pyramid: A Novel (Jack Howard Series Book 8) by David Gibbins Page A

Egyptian religion on its head and was clearly receptive to outside ideas. Now that I see what Maurice has found, it figures that he might have hadAegean mercenaries too. Akhenaten may have been something of a dreamer, but he was practical enough to survive as pharaoh for more than twenty years, so having a strong force of mercenaries who would not be swayed by the factions against him would have made a lot of sense.”
    Hiebermeyer swivelled his chair and raised his hands in a gesture of surrender to Jack, and then cracked a grin. “You and I have debated it for years, and finally I’m forced to concede. It was a two-way process. Egypt influenced Greece, and now we know it also happened in reverse. And there’s even more. In the sixteenth century BC , the first pharaoh of the eighteenth dynasty, Ahmose I, made an astonishing dynastic marriage. A stone stele in the temple of Amun at Thebes describes his wife, Ahhotep, as Mistress of the Shores of Hau-nebut. That’s the first known use of the word
Hau-nebut
, the term for the Aegean lands, for Crete, that you see in the cartouche here. It goes on to say the following: ‘Her reputation is high over every foreign land.’ This leads me to the most astonishing revelation in our necropolis find.”
    Costas had been peering again at the image of the tomb painting on Hiebermeyer’s screen. He coughed, pointing. “About those cuirasses. Those breastplates. I mean,
breast
-plates.”
    Hiebermeyer swivelled back to the screen and grinned again. “I was wondering when you’d notice.”
    “Not men in skirts.”
    “Not men in skirts.”
    “No,” Costas said, shaking his head. “These are
girl
mercenaries.”
    “Good God,” Jack exclaimed, peering. “You’re right.”
    “Feast your eyes on this, then.” Hiebermeyer swept the mouse, and the next charioteer in the army came into view, an astonishing sight. It was unambiguously a woman, her breasts bare above her cuirass, her head towering above the others. Her long hair was braided down her back, and she held swirling snakes above herhead. Jack gasped. “It’s the Minoan mother goddess, the Mistress of the Animals.”
    “Not quite, Jack. Look at that cartouche above her head. It’s exactly the same as the one for Ahhotep a century and a half earlier. ‘Not Mistress of the Animals, but Mistress of the Shores of Hau-nebut.’ ”
    Jack’s mind raced. “What are you thinking, Maurice?”
    “I’m thinking, forget all that romantic guff about the Minoans being peace-loving idealists. You just didn’t survive in the Bronze Age that way. The term Mistress of the Animals was made up by Sir Arthur Evans when he excavated Knossos and wanted it to be some kind of paradise, an idealized antidote to the ugly modern world of a hundred years ago. You English can be sentimentalists, Jack. Mistress of the Shores of Hau-nebut is undoubtedly a military term, like Count of the Saxon Shore for the late Roman defender of Britain. Crete was an island too, and that’s where her defenses lay. Your Minoan mother goddess was in truth a Boudica or a Valkyrie, a warrior queen.”
    Jack’s mind raced. “Here’s a scenario. The volcano on Thera erupts in the fifteenth century BC , right? Minoan civilization is devastated, leaving Crete vulnerable to Mycenaean takeover. Shortly before that a Minoan queen, Ahhotep, marries an Egyptian pharaoh, Ahmose I. The bloodline of the Minoan rulers passes down not in Crete but through the eighteenth dynasty in Egypt. Maybe that fuels the brilliant mix of genius, military leadership, and iconoclasm that makes the New Kingdom stand out so much, peaking with Akhenaten and his wife, Nefertiti. Meanwhile, the warrior tradition of Minoan Crete, the
female
warrior tradition, survives the Mycenaean takeover, perhaps in the remote mountain fastnesses of the south. For generations those warriors sell themselves to the highest bidder, led by a woman the Egyptians knew by the old title of their first Minoan