The Aleppo Code (The Jerusalem Prophecies) (67 page)

Spurgeon’s London publication,
The Sword and the Trowel,
was replicated in New York City in 1878 by his cousin, Joseph Spurgeon, as
The Christian Herald and Signs of Our Times.
Dr. Louis Klopsch purchased the magazine in 1890 and was instrumental in preventing the Bowery Mission from closing its doors by purchasing the rescue mission from the Rev. A. G. Ruliffson in 1895 after its original superintendent passed away.

Now extinct, Demotic is the third language inscribed on the Rosetta Stone. First a spoken language then a written language it was extensively used in Egypt for more than one thousand years, from 660 BC to 425 AD. University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute recently completed its nearly forty-year Demotic Dictionary Project (
http://oi.uchicago.edu/research/projects/dem
), cataloguing and deciphering the twenty-seven Demotic letters. As noted in the book, because Demotic was first a spoken language, each of its letters carries hundreds—if not thousands—of potential definitions. The current Demotic Dictionary contains more than two thousand pages of possible meanings for words associated with those letters or combinations of those letters.

In 2012, the
New York Times
wrote an article about the completion of the Institute’s Demotic Dictionary Project:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/18/science/new-demotic-dictionary-translates-lives-of-ancient-egyptians.html
.

Sir Edward Elgar (1857–1934) was an English romantic composer most notable for his many compositions of
Pomp and Circumstance
and his orchestral work the “Enigma” Variations. Elgar was also a devotee of codes, puzzles, and ciphers. On July 14, 1897, Elgar sent a letter to a young friend, Miss Dora Penny, the twenty-two-year-old daughter of the Rev. Alfred Penny, rector of St Peter’s, Wolverhampton—the now famous Dorabella Cipher.

The cipher consists of eighty-seven characters, apparently constructed from an alphabet of twenty-four symbols. The symbols are arranged in three lines, contain one, two, or three semicircles, and are oriented in one of eight directions. A small dot appears after the fifth character on the third line. No one has yet deciphered its meaning. Dora Penny died in 1964.

Temple Mount in Jerusalem is a platform supported by a series of arches built by Herod the Great. The Mount is a formation of karstic limestone, which has been eroded over time by water, creating a honeycomb of cisterns, tunnels, and caverns. Other than the unofficial diggings of Charles Warren in the nineteenth century, there has been virtually no archaeological study of the space under the Temple Mount platform.

St. Antony’s Monastery actually exists. St. Antony was a Coptic Christian monk and the father of monasticism. The monastery is, in fact, the oldest inhabited Christian monastery in the world, being continually occupied by monks since its founding in AD 356. The monastery itself was plundered a number of times by the Bedouins. In response to these attacks, a fortress-like structure was built around the monastery for its protection.

The modern monastery (
http://stantonymonastery.com/
) is a self-contained village in the Oasis Dayr al Qiddis deep in the Red Sea wilderness with gardens, a mill, a bakery, and five churches. The walls are adorned with paintings of knights in bright colors and hermits in more subdued colors, and the oldest date to the seventh and eighth centuries. The monastery also has a library with more than seventeen hundred handwritten manuscripts. The library probably contained many more volumes but was significantly reduced by the plundering.

Other than the basic facts and associated research listed above, the rest of
The Aleppo Code
is a result of the author’s imagination. Any “errors of fact” are a result of that imagination.

Terry Brennan’s twenty-two-year career in journalism included leading
The Mercury
of Pottstown, Pennsylvania, as its editor, to a Pulitzer Prize in Editorial Writing; serving as executive editor of a multinational newspaper firm—Ingersoll Publications—with papers in the United States, England, and Ireland; and earning the Valley Forge Award for editorial writing from the Freedoms Foundation.

In 1996 Brennan transferred to the nonprofit sector and served for twelve yeas as vice president of operations for the Christian Herald Association, Inc., the parent organization of four New York City ministries, including the Bowery Mission.

He now serves as chief administrative officer for Care for the Homeless, a New York City nonprofit that delivers medical teams to serve homeless people in shelters, soup kitchens, and drop-in centers. Two of his adult sons and their families live in Pennsylvania. Terry and his wife, Andrea, their two adult children, son-in-law, and a precious granddaughter live in the New York City area.