Amazon Moon (4 page)

The couple packed quickly, filled the camper's water tank, then loaded canned food and U.S. Army surplus MREs (meals ready to eat, preserved for battlefield consumption). They found Zanos the cop and told him to guard closely until other archeologists returned. Jack and Carolina could decipher ancient Greek writing more easily than they could speak modern conversational Greek, but they coped with Zanos, crudely.

They began the lengthy journey, taking turns at the wheel: down the main highway to Alexandroupolis on the coast, back inland to the Turkish border. Like the Land Rover, the camper was labeled "University Consortium Archeology Team" in three languages, giving them conspicuous credentials wherever they went. After clearing the border station, they traveled down the isthmus to the Bosphorus and proceeded along the Black Sea highway.

At a roadside dinner break, they ate sausage-based MREs and Carolina said she understood why American soldiers call them "meals rejected by Ethiopians." They laughed, hugged, and resumed their trip.

The historic Thermodon River now is named Terme Cayi. From inland hills, it flows north into the Black Sea. Jack and Carolina reached the valley at sunset and headed upstream, but soon decided to halt for the night. At a village parking lot, they locked themselves in the camper and bundled close in the vehicle's small bed.

Next morning, they couldn't face more plastic-sealed military rations, so they breakfasted on canned fruit. Then they continued upriver, finally reaching the highway construction site. Workers and exhaust-belching machines chewed a path through the earth. A foreman scanned the camper labels, examined their archeologist visas, and took them to the roped-off discovery.

The highway excavation was along the side of a narrow valley some distance from the paved road. They drove over a dirt lane created by construction machines. The posted watchman was drowsing in a pickup truck. The bronze shield, caked with residue, had been locked in a tool shed. After photographing it, Jack and Carolina carefully slipped it into a padded box and stowed it in the camper. The foreman and watchman showed them the smallish skeleton in a fresh-dug pit eight feet below ground level. It had been mostly uncovered by highway workers. Both Carolina and Jack snapped photos. They realized that the darkened bones were ancient, and female. The pelvis was too wide and the brow too smooth to be male.

The foreman and watchman departed, leaving them to their work. The parked Consortium camper beside the excavation was like a sign proclaiming that officialdom was on the job. Jack climbed into the pit and tentatively began scooping dirt from under the bones, using his fingers, not a sharp tool. Beneath the rib cage he felt a hard object and excitedly dug more, while Carolina snapped a photo record. Finally, in triumph, he gingerly slid out the pitted remnant of a small, ancient, iron, double-bladed battleaxe. Both he and Carolina stared at each other, aware of the growing significance of the place. Since the shield was bronze and the axe iron, this armed woman evidently had lived during the centuries-long period when Ancient Greece gradually shifted from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age.

"This is too big," Carolina said. "Let's find a phone and get a full team in here. We shouldn't disturb things until the older pros set up a complete operation."

Jack nodded. The cell phone in the camper was useless in this remote locale, and the nearest village was five miles down the road. They photographed the axe, packed it in a slender box, and stored it by the shield in the camper. They decided that Carolina would drive back to the village and phone Dr. Chichester in Athens, so he could make arrangements with Turkish officials. Jack would remain to watch the site.

After she left, he poked around the location, studying the layers of earth. The soil was dry at this elevated edge of the valley. Along one side of the pit, barely perceptible, was the straight edge of a rock, perpendicular. Using a stick, he scraped away dirt—and his pulse pounded. It was the corner of a buried wall. Jack knew it was unprofessional to begin digging alone, but he was too excited to stop. With exceeding care, he removed the packed earth, checking each clod for possible artifacts. Slowly the shape of a stone structure emerged: a small chamber like a burial vault. When Carolina returned in the camper, he leaped from the pit, sweaty and muddy.

"God, you've gotta see what I found. Come on."

She blurted her own report: "Chichester and the Turkish officials can't be here until tomorrow. He wants us to stay in the camper by the site until they arrive."

"Okay, okay—but come look."

Jack pulled her to the pit and pointed to his discovery. She stared intently, sucking in her breath. Then she got the cameras and they snapped photos from every angle, before the light faded. They spread a plastic tarp over the exposed skeleton as a safeguard against the unlikely chance of rain.

That evening they ate more MREs purported to be chow mein, and joked that they were less discriminating than starving Ethiopians. Then they bathed with cloths soaked from the camper's water tank, and made love in the small bed. They worried briefly that local hooligans might find the locked camper in the isolated valley, but they shrugged and slid into sleep.

Next morning they dressed fast, ate fast, and couldn't stay away from the vault. Using buckets, they carefully carried away dirt until the rectangular structure stood by itself, clearly a tomb for a single body. The stones were well-cemented and dry in the elevated location. They took more photos.

"I know what you're thinking," Carolina said. "You're dying to chisel out a stone and peek inside."

"You read my mind. But we can't. Trainees don't grab the action away from the chiefs."

In mid-afternoon, three panel trucks arrived bearing Dr. Chichester and Dr. Kamal Zotek of the Turkish Antiquities Ministry plus a research team. A video cameraman filmed everything as the leaders explored the site and crew members set up gear.

"Wonderful, wonderful," Chichester kept repeating. After consulting Zotek, he announced a plan: Carolina and Jack would remain in the camper to guard the site. He and the Turks would drive back to the coastal town where they had reserved hotel rooms. They would order a mobile field office and more campers brought to the location for a rapid dig before the highway work resumed. First and foremost, they would return in the morning to chisel open the tomb and learn its contents.

Carolina and Jack could barely sleep that night. They speculated about what might be in the vault and how it might affect their careers.

"It's probably full of mud and rotten papyrus," she muttered.

At midnight they made love again and sank into slumber. Next morning, they didn't wake until the roar of motors arrived outside the camper, as the caravan returned. They dressed hastily, grabbed bagels, and joined the assembling team. Dr. Chichester was practically bouncing with excitement. He and Dr. Zotek decreed that removal of the skeleton would wait until after the tomb was opened.

Hammers, chisels, flashlights and storage crates were readied. Cameras, still and video, were poised to record the moment. Selected workers descended into the pit and began chipping. An upper stone forming a corner of the vault roof was first to break loose. It was lifted aside cautiously and lights were shone inside. Glints of gold and jewels reflected. A Turkish worker whooped. Glee spread through the group. More stones were removed. More lights and cameras were brought to the opening.

The find was superb. The tomb was dry and always had been. It contained a female skeleton, still wearing shreds of leather garments, surrounded by adornments collected more than two thousand years ago. In a corner, on a raised shelf, lay the greatest treasure of all: stacks of parchment filled with clear, precise writing. The parchment was folded and stitched into book-like codexes, an improvement that replaced ancient scrolls.

Chichester and Zotek clutched hands and laughed. Jack embraced Carolina intensely. Shouting and congratulations rang around the site.

The opening proceeded and calm returned. Item by item, the contents were lifted out, filmed, and stored in padded boxes. Great care was given to the parchment books, which were lifted delicately into separate containers.

Parchment is the inner layer of sheep hide, stretched tight, rubbed smooth, and dried in the sun. It is sturdy writing material, much more durable than ancient papyrus made from Egyptian reeds. Early scribes sewed parchment sections into long scrolls rolled on two handles. Codexes, or codices, were an advance, a primitive forerunner of modern books. Rectangles of parchment were placed atop each other, laced together down the middle, and folded over, making pages to be lettered on both sides. Two sheets of parchment provided eight pages, three sheets made twelve pages, and so forth.

The first hasty examination of the books revealed that the writing was ancient Attic Greek, well known to many archeologists. Carolina and Jack had mastered it during their coursework. A codex was opened on a camp table and Chichester began scanning it.

"My God," he shouted to the group, "it's about Amazons! It seems to be the record of an Amazon colony."

All the archeologists, electrified by this apparent breakthrough, hurried to examine other volumes.

"Yes, yes, yes," Dr. Zotek yelled, looking up from his codex. "It's a scribe's description of Amazon events."

Jack and Carolina found similar writing in the codex they opened. Elation filled the team a second time. Everyone sensed the unfolding of a major scientific discovery: the first solid evidence of an actual Amazon group.

Much urgent work needed to be done. After more consultations, Dr. Chichester announced a plan: He would remain at the Consortium camper to supervise a rapid dig for additional findings. Jack and Carolina would return with the Turkish team to Ankara, where they would live in a university dorm and help catalog the marvels of the Thermodon trove. The codex pages would be photographed, translated, and shared with scholarly research journals in every nation.

It was done. Carolina and Jack entered a new phase of their careers, working daily with experts at Ankara University, improving their language skills, returning happily to their dormitory apartment each night. The project stretched into months. They postponed their return to America and work on their doctorates. Also, they were married: by a government clerk, since neither bushy-bearded Orthodox priests nor Muslim mullahs would perform the holy rite for foreign infidels. The excitement of their landmark work mingled with their joy as newlyweds.

The codexes were an archeological blockbuster. Carbon dating fixed the parchment before 250 BCE, the oldest ever found. Previously, scholars had concluded that sheepskin hadn't been used as a writing material that early. And it was a breakthrough to find it bound in codex form, a development that didn't become widespread until later. But the greatest impact of the Thermodon find was its documentation that fighting female Amazons truly had existed, that they weren't figments of ancient Greek male imagination. The writings showed that escaping Greek slave women and concubines fled to Amazon life via a clandestine network of "safe houses" similar to the Underground Railroad that helped runaway American slaves flee north in the 1800s.

Release of the Thermodon news caused a surge of excitement in the public media. Newspaper and magazine reports gushed. Television crews filmed the Ankara researchers at work and also flocked to the Thermodon dig, where the most remarkable additional find was twenty-six more female skeletons lying side-by-side with their arms folded, evidently a mass burial after a massacre.

When the wave of publicity faded and the flurry of scholarly journal articles ceased, Carolina and Jack undertook a special project. They carefully edited the codex translations into modern language as a book for the general public. Their systematic chronology began with a biography left by the scribe who wrote the ancient documents. The complete story is now offered to the non-academic world. The following chapters contain the two-millennia-old writing of the Thermodon scribe.

4

I am Melos, of the village Aegolus, a day's walk from Kavopolis, northernmost city of the Greeks. My father was a laborer on the great farm of the Octavola family in a wide green valley surrounded by low hills. The rich Octovalas owned our village and all its homes, fields, barns, horse teams, cattle, and even its outdoor shrine with two sacrifice altars, one to Zeus, one to Apollo.

The Overseer, an Octavola cousin, ruled our village and lived in its largest home. Within his walled domain he had several slaves to serve his wife and children, and he enjoyed two young concubines purchased from a bordello in Kavopolis. The Overseer, a square man with a jutting jaw, governed Aegolus like a king. All townspeople deferred to him.

My home had no slaves. I lived in a mud-straw house with my father, mother, sisters and Aunt Cloethe, whose husband had been killed in the war with the Thessalonians. The women cooked outside our rear doorway and laundered clothing in the creek at the back of our courtyard. They couldn't leave our enclosure unescorted, but we village boys roamed everywhere, swimming in creek pools, catching salamanders, hurling rocks with homemade slings, and exploring where we liked.

On some evenings my father took me to the open-air shrine with its painted wooden statues of the two gods under a decorated roof. The priest, who was also the village's chief plowman, sacrificed goats, sheep, pigs and occasionally dogs on altars beside the shrine, while all the men prayed to Zeus or Apollo for a good harvest, and some prayed for cures for ailments. During the sacrifices, the priest wore an ornate vestment and headdress. Helpers held the bleating animals on the altar. As I watched him ceremoniously plunge a decorated knife into a helpless creature, I cringed. It upset me, even though all the village men nodded and chanted in approval. Sometimes the sacrifices were burned and the men ate parts of the cooked meat.

Our green valley had little contact with the outside world, except when Octavola relatives arrived on horseback to visit the Overseer or when our chief harvester hauled wagonloads of vegetables, wine, cheese, wheat and other produce to Kavopolis for sale. After one trip, the harvester returned with news that the mighty ruler Alexander, who conquered the Persians and all other kingdoms, had died at only thirty-three years of age. But such affairs of state were remote from us, except for the conscription of some village youths as Greek warriors, most of whom never returned.