Even if Apple’s already-divisive iPad doesn’t herald in a new age of laptop computing, it certainly offers a giant leap forward in tablet technology. This Monday, Wednesday and Friday, Weird Things is paying tribute to the fantastic tablets of yesteryear, and the brave tableteers who sculpted them.

Today: The Bembine Tablet

If the all-powerful monster kid from that Twilight Zone episode (“It’s a Good Life”) decided to trap Dan Brown and Alan Moore in a sealed elevator, the Bembine Tablet is one of the few viable conversation topics on which both could probably agree to waste the precious, dwindling oxygen.

Brown would be entranced by the artifact’s namesake, Cardinal Bembo, a Catholic antiquarian who originally purchased the mysterious hieroglyph-spangled Egyptian relic from a Roman locksmith sometime after the city’s famous sacking. Brown would revel in the tablet’s subsequent crisscrossing of Italy, as monarchs and papal officers swapped it from Mantua to Rome to Savoy to Sardinia to Paris, France, before returning it to Turin, Italy, where it still resides.

I imagine the cryptology-obsessed author would also drool over the tablet’s history as an almost-was Egyptian Rosetta Stone, although he might change some key details about 17th century Hermeticist Athanasius Kircher, who, with all the neurotic bravado of a Tom Hanks character, attempted to decode the Bembine tablet and create a translation key for Egyptian hieroglyphics. See, Kircher’s translation was ultimately ruled a complete fabrication – the bronze and silver tablet’s apparent hieroglyph’s were actually just decorative pictures of peasants, kings and deities, including the god Isis, for whom the tablet was most likely created. It’s like if you tried to translate English from a Where’s Waldo illustration. (Even Kircher’s published decipherments of actual hieroglyphs have since proved utterly fallacious. In one famous instance, he translated what amounts to “Osiris says” as “The treachery of Typhon ends at the throne of Isis; the moisture of nature is guarded by the vigilance of Anubis.”) I’m sure in Brown’s version, Kircher would be discredited by the Catholic Church after discovering that the Bembine tablet really did contain what a continent’s worth of occultists predicted – the language of Adam and Eve.

Here’s where Moore’s eyes would lose their opium glaze. European occultists had little anthropological interest in the tablet, and what linguistic interest they had came from their belief in a legendary grimoire called the Book of Thoth. The theory was that the tablet revealed a code for translating the book, which was written in some proto-civilized god tongue and then buried in the City of the Dead with the Egyptian Prince Neferkaptah. A person who possessed, and could translate, the document would have the ability to talk to animals, cast incomparably powerful spells and control nature itself.

Also, the book is locked in a gold box that’s locked in a silver box that’s locked in an ivory and ebony box that’s locked in a sycamore box that’s locked in a bronze box. All of those boxes are locked in an iron box. The keys to the boxes are spread out across Egypt, with some hidden in treacherous natural formations, others entrusted to earthbound spirits and still others under the watchful eyes of ferocious beasts. On top of all that, the book is cursed, such that its master’s power comes at a terrible price – the death of all those close to him. Oh, the wet dreams and acid trips Moore has surely had about the Book of Thoth.

Too bad the tablet turned out to be the equivalent of a thousand-pound Hummel.

Still, before they suffocated, both authors would carefully list and map out the cities to which the tablet traveled – after all, the pattern is bound to form some sort of Masonic icon or runic sigil. Add Stephen King and John Grisham into the mix and you’ve got a pulpy religious conspiracy court drama with post-modern overtones and a shocking third-act revelation that it was aliens.

Wait. That what was aliens?

“You know. Everything.” replies Stephen King.