The Babylon Idol

Author:Scott Mariani
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Action & Adventure, Mystery & Detective, General, Suspense, Thrillers, Fiction, Espionage
ISBN: 9780007486410
Publisher: Avon
Published: 2017-05-04T04:00:00+00:00

‘This is strange,’ Anna muttered from the desk.

‘Make anything of it?’ he asked, glancing over.

She shook her head, not looking up from the papers she’d carefully arranged on the desktop. ‘I thought Ercan was working on the Muranu tablet, but instead he seems to have been going into a whole other set of historical archives. Nearly all this material is sourced from the PFA.’

‘The what?’

‘The Persepolis Fortification Archive,’ Anna explained, fluttering a sheet of paper at him as though scolding him for not being informed on such elementary stuff.

‘That makes everything so clear to me.’

She frowned. ‘Persepolis, literally “City of the Persians”, was the seat of the Achaemenid Empire in what is now Iran, founded in 518 BC by Darius the First, grandson of Cyrus the Great who overthrew Babylon. The archive was set up in 1933 after a team of archaeologists from the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, who were excavating the ruins of palaces of the Persian kings, came across a fantastic cache of clay tablets hidden in two rooms in a bastion of a fortification wall. Hence its name, the Fortification Archive.’

More excavations, more tablets. Ben was scarcely in the mood for another lecture on the history of archaeology. ‘I get it. Or maybe I don’t. What about it?’

‘They found tens of thousands of tablets, which to this day haven’t all been deciphered. It’s a monumental task that will take many more years to complete. The archive mostly comprises administrative and bureaucratic records dealing with matters of local government, transport, trade, food distribution and so on. It’s been a really important source of our knowledge of everyday life during the Achaemenid period.’

‘I’m sure that’s all spellbindingly fascinating,’ Ben said, ‘but I fail to see what it has to do with us.’

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