Seven Wonders Read Online Free Page B

the rod of Asclepius, the god of healing, although in America, the image was just as often—and erroneously—a Caduceus, the staff of the god Mercury, which had two snakes wrapped together in the shape of a double helix. The confusiondated back to 1902, when a US Army officer adopted the Caduceus instead of the rod of Asclepius as the symbol of the Army Medical Core because he thought it looked cooler as a patch on his uniform. Jack guessed that the officer hadn’t realized the irony of his act; the Caduceus was actually the symbol of the Greek and Roman god of thieves, deceivers, and murderers.
    Still, no matter how popular the snake was as a symbol in the ancient world, the image in the mural was intriguing, like nothing Jack had ever seen before. Female warriors carrying a stone tablet with a seven-segmented golden snake out of a vibrant forest—it was the sort of picture that an archaeologist could spend years, perhaps a lifetime, studying.
    Jack didn’t need a lifetime to know that the mural—as mysterious as its details may have been—was further evidence that the Temple of Artemis wasn’t built by Greeks to worship a goddess. And with that, he was one step closer to proving that the culture he had become obsessed with—the culture most historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists believed was more myth than real—had actually once existed.
    “Amazons,” Jack said, shooting picture after picture with the digital camera. “The women in this mural are Amazons.”
    The weight of what he was saying reverberated through his chest. The Amazons, a fierce tribe of women warriors dating all the way back to the beginnings of mythology and history, had been the subject of Jack’s research for nearly half a decade. He had written a dozen papers about various relics and ancient documents that pointed to an incredibly advanced culture. Though nobody was certain who the Amazons were, where they had come from, or why they had eventually disappeared, there was much evidence, in Jack’s opinion, that they had once built themselves into a powerful civilization. The individual warriors themselves were so fierce that, according to legend, each woman would cut off her own right breast to better enable her to throw a javelin. With a religion dedicated to serving an all-powerful female goddess—referred to as Diana, Artemis, and even Eve, the originalfirst woman, borrowed by Judeo-Christian theology—Amazons featured in stories that crossed cultural and geographical boundaries. They seemed to be everywhere, from the Bronze Age to Alexander the Great through the Romans and Greeks all the way into Medieval times.
    When Jack had learned of a possible connection to one of the Seven Wonders of the World and heard about the discovery of the mantle beneath the dig site, he had quickly used his connections at Princeton to insert his team into the archaeology project. All they’d needed was the help of three of the sites’ local workers to unload the equipment Jack had sent ahead of their arrival, assist in cutting through the mantle with a rock drill, and set up the winch and pulley for Jack’s harness.
    Jack had known he was pushing the boundaries of academic ethics by taking advantage of the Brits, but he wasn’t going to wait for the archaeologists; archaeology moved at a snail’s pace, with brushes and combs. Field anthropologists dove in head first.
    And now Jack had made what might very well be the discovery of his career. A mural depicting Amazons carrying some sort of golden snake out of a forest, painted deep within one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.
    He was still taking photos, his head swimming with images of female warriors and war javelins, when he heard Dashia’s voice crackling over the speaker in his helmet.
    “Dr. Grady.”
    “What is it?” Jack responded, leaning closer to a spot on the mural to get a good picture of one of the warrior’s armor.
    “It’s your cell phone. I wasn’t going to