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Greek, well known to many archeologists. Carolina and Jack had mastered it during their coursework. A codex was opened on a camp table and Chichester began scanning it.
    "My God," he shouted to the group, "it's about Amazons! It seems to be the record of an Amazon colony."
    All the archeologists, electrified by this apparent breakthrough, hurried to examine other volumes.
    "Yes, yes, yes," Dr. Zotek yelled, looking up from his codex. "It's a scribe's description of Amazon events."
    Jack and Carolina found similar writing in the codex they opened. Elation filled the team a second time. Everyone sensed the unfolding of a major scientific discovery: the first solid evidence of an actual Amazon group.
    Much urgent work needed to be done. After more consultations, Dr. Chichester announced a plan: He would remain at the Consortium camper to supervise a rapid dig for additional findings. Jack and Carolina would return with the Turkish team to Ankara, where they would live in a university dorm and help catalog the marvels of the Thermodon trove. The codex pages would be photographed, translated, and shared with scholarly research journals in every nation.
    It was done. Carolina and Jack entered a new phase of their careers, working daily with experts at Ankara University, improving their language skills, returning happily to their dormitory apartment each night. The project stretched into months. They postponed their return to America and work on their doctorates. Also, they were married: by a government clerk, since neither bushy-bearded Orthodox priests nor Muslim mullahs would perform the holy rite for foreign infidels. The excitement of their landmark work mingled with their joy as newlyweds.
    The codexes were an archeological blockbuster. Carbon dating fixed the parchment before 250 BCE, the oldest ever found. Previously, scholars had concluded that sheepskin hadn't been used as a writing material that early. And it was a breakthrough to find it bound in codex form, a development that didn't become widespread until later. But the greatest impact of the Thermodon find was its documentation that fighting female Amazons truly had existed, that they weren't figments of ancient Greek male imagination. The writings showed that escaping Greek slave women and concubines fled to Amazon life via a clandestine network of "safe houses" similar to the Underground Railroad that helped runaway American slaves flee north in the 1800s.
    Release of the Thermodon news caused a surge of excitement in the public media. Newspaper and magazine reports gushed. Television crews filmed the Ankara researchers at work and also flocked to the Thermodon dig, where the most remarkable additional find was twenty-six more female skeletons lying side-by-side with their arms folded, evidently a mass burial after a massacre.
    When the wave of publicity faded and the flurry of scholarly journal articles ceased, Carolina and Jack undertook a special project. They carefully edited the codex translations into modern language as a book for the general public. Their systematic chronology began with a biography left by the scribe who wrote the ancient documents. The complete story is now offered to the non-academic world. The following chapters contain the two-millennia-old writing of the Thermodon scribe.
     

4
    I am Melos, of the village Aegolus, a day's walk from Kavopolis, northernmost city of the Greeks. My father was a laborer on the great farm of the Octavola family in a wide green valley surrounded by low hills. The rich Octovalas owned our village and all its homes, fields, barns, horse teams, cattle, and even its outdoor shrine with two sacrifice altars, one to Zeus, one to Apollo.
    The Overseer, an Octavola cousin, ruled our village and lived in its largest home. Within his walled domain he had several slaves to serve his wife and children, and he enjoyed two young concubines purchased from a bordello in Kavopolis. The Overseer, a square man with a jutting