The order employed experts in a number of different disciplines, but primarily archaeologists—or, to be exact, people who specialized in the interpretation of archaeological information, which wasn’t quite the same thing—and linguists who had impressive skills in understanding and translating texts written in the numerous dead languages of the world, particularly Latin, ancient Greek, and Aramaic. But they could not call on experts in code breaking, because only very rarely did they encounter ciphers of any sort, and when they did, these were usually fairly simple letter substitution codes, such as Atbash, which were generally quite straightforward to unscramble. Roman Benelli, the man in the organization who knew most about encryption systems, actually specialized in the translation of Aramaic and related languages into Italian. For him, codes and ciphers were definitely of secondary importance. The problem the order was currently facing was trying to work out whatever message or other piece of information had been incorporated within the ornate metalwork adorning the lids of the two medieval chests they had recovered from the cave in Cyprus.
