The Dig at Tell el-Amarna
A Novel of the 1956 Season

About this book:

In the blistering heat of the Jordan Valley, 1956, a British excavation uncovers a find that rewrites history: a cedar chest bearing the solar disc of Akhenaten, the heretic pharaoh, buried forty miles from the Nile in a stratum that shouldn't exist. As Arthur Pendelton and his team race to document the seal of the Aten, the modern world collapses around them—Israeli tanks cross the Sinai, British and French ultimatums expire, and the Arab Legion mobilizes on the hills above their trench. With the valley about to become a war zone, the archaeologists face an impossible choice: abandon a discovery that could illuminate the Amarna age's darkest secrets, or stay and risk becoming casualties of a conflict that has nothing to do with the Bronze Age.

Pendelton, a veteran who measures his career in dysentery and disputed mule prices, finds his scholarly detachment shattered by the emergence of a wine jar inscribed to Yanhamu, Egypt's imperial commissioner to Canaan—proof that the chest belonged to the man who once commanded the region's garrisons from Beth-Shan. But why was his baggage abandoned in a mudbrick village on the wrong side of the Jordan? As Margaret Hughes deciphers the hieratic script revealing a desperate delivery order to the "Ford of the Sun," and young Julian Gray wrestles with the ethics of preservation versus survival, the past and present collide with the force of the jet fighters screaming overhead.

*The Dig at Tell el-Amarna* is a masterful archaeological thriller that braids the intrigue of Akhenaten's enigmatic reign with the high-stakes drama of the Suez Crisis. From the microscopic examination of Nile-silt pottery to the macropolitics redrawing the Middle East, this novel captures the moment when history's buried truths surface just as the world above ground erupts into flames. For readers who love the intellectual tension of *The Name of the Rose* and the geopolitical urgency of *The English Patient*, here is a story where every potsherd matters—and every second counts.