Free The Tiger Warrior by David Gibbins

writing surface. In the ancient world, papyrus was a fairly valuable commodity, used only for top copies. If you wanted a writing surface for day-to-day use, for jotting notes, writing letters, composing rough drafts, you just found the nearest old amphora and smashed it up.”
    Jack circled the table, staring at the sherds, his mind racing. “They’re Roman amphora fragments, Italian, first century BC or first century AD. It’s the same type as the wine amphora we saw at Berenikê. And the writing’s Greek, as you’d expect in Egypt at that time. Greek was the lingua franca ever since Alexander conquered Egypt. The writing all looks as if it’s in the same hand. I’m assuming you found all of these sherds in the merchant’s house you were excavating?”
    Hiebermeyer’s face gleamed. “It’s an astonishing find. I still can’t believe it.” He paused, looking Jack steadily in the eye. “You ready for this? Okay. What you’re looking at is the only known ancient text of the Periplus Maris Erythraei . The only one actually to date from the Roman period when it was first written.”
    Jack gasped. The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea. The greatest travel book to survive from antiquity . It was exactly what you might find at Berenikê, in an outpost on the edge of the empire. Not a great work of literature, not a lost history or a volume of poetry, but a travel guide, an itinerary for sea captains and merchants. He cleared his throat. “Copy, or draft?” he said.
    “Draft.”
    Jack exhaled forcefully. Draft . This was even more extraordinary. A draft could mean emendations, material deleted from the polished version. All the rough notes that get edited out. Precious words and phrases. He peered at Hiebermeyer. “I hardly dare ask. Have you seen anything new?”
    Hiebermeyer was bursting with excitement. “I saw it within days of starting the excavation at Berenikê. You remember when I tried to speak to you in Istanbul? Little did I know then how many more sherds we’d find, and how long it would take. This has been an exercise in patience. I couldn’t have done it without Aysha.” He turned and looked at Aysha, who nodded. He reached over and clicked a control panel. The plasma screen on the wall beside the table showed a CGI of the sherds in 3-D, jumbled together. “This is how they looked in the excavation. We call it the archive room, but really it was more like a study. After drafting each sentence on a large amphora sherd, we believe the author transferred it to papyrus and then tossed the sherds in a corner. Some sherds survived almost intact, others broke into pieces. I realized we were going to have to record all the spatial relationships in situ if we were going to stand any hope of piecing it all back together. That’s been Aysha’s job. She’s been wonderful.”
    “Somebody had better fill me in,” Costas said.
    “Maris Erythraea , the Erythraean Sea, translates as Red Sea,” Aysha said. “Which to the ancients meant all the seas east of Egypt—the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean, what lay beyond. Periplus means to sail around, and was the term for a nautical guide, an itinerary.”
    “The nautical guide of the Erythraean Sea,” Costas murmured.
    “It’s truly one of the most amazing documents to survive from antiquity,” Jack said. “The Periplus wasn’t written by an aristocrat, by a Claudius or a Pliny the Elder, but by a working man with his feet on the ground. Yet it tells of a journey far greater than any fantasy of Odysseus or Aeneas, a true-life account of exploration and trade to the nether regions of the ancient world. The whole text seemed hard to believe until archaeologists began to find Greek and Roman remains where we are now, in southern India.”
    “So the guy who lived in the villa, the merchant, was the author?” Costas said.
    “I’m absolutely convinced of it.” Hiebermeyer clicked the console again, revealing an aerial shot of the excavated house in Berenikê