Part 5 : Magicians of the Gods...Island of the Ka..Monastery of the Seven Sages

Magicians of the Gods

by Graham Hancock

Chapter 9 

Island of the Ka

The banks of the Nile are lush, lined with palms and green fields, but they are narrow, won from the surrounding deserts thanks only to the gift of fertility bestowed upon them by the eternal river. It’s the same story all the way from Cairo to Aswan, where the High Dam has permanently changed the divine landscape of the pharaohs by creating Lake Nasser, one of the largest man-made bodies of water in the world, which continues south to cross the border with the Sudan. As the level of the lake rose during the 1960s many Ancient Egyptian sites, such as the Fortress of Buhen, were submerged. Others such as world-famous Abu Simbel, and the stunningly beautiful little Temple of Isis at Philae, were rescued by being moved block by block and re-erected on higher ground. 

Others still were dismantled and shipped overseas—for example the Temple of Dendur, now in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Temple of Debod, now in the Parque del Oeste in Madrid, and the Temple of Taffeh, now in the Rijksmuseum Van Oudheden in Leiden, in the Netherlands. By such means, the sacred realm of the gods that continuously remade and re-manifested itself in Egypt over untold thousands of years in antiquity can be said still to undergo resurrection and rebirth in far-off lands even today. 

So it was, too, according to its own inscriptions, with the Temple of Horus at Edfu. Known as Behdet in ancient times (hence its patron, the falcon god Horus, is often referred to as Horus the Behdetite) Edfu stands on the west bank of the Nile 110 kilometers (68 miles) north of Aswan and was thus spared from flooding by Lake Nasser. The temple as we see it today, its golden sandstone blocks radiant and graceful beneath the fierce sun of Upper Egypt, is relatively young, the whole complex having been completed during the Ptolemaic period in a series of stages between 237 BC and 57 BC. 1 In every meaningful sense, however, what confronts us here is merely the latest incarnation of much older temples that previously occupied this site dating at least to the Old Kingdom (2575-2134 BC) 2

Of the greatest interest, at any rate, is the temple’s idea of itself expressed in the acres of enigmatic inscriptions that cover its walls. These inscriptions, the so-called Edfu Building Texts, take us back to a very remote period called the “Early Primeval Age of the Gods” 3—and these gods, it transpires, were not originally Egyptian, 4 but lived on a sacred island, the “Homeland of the Primeval Ones,” in the midst of a great ocean. 5 Then, at some unspecified time in the past, a terrible disaster—a true cataclysm of flood and fire as we shall see—overtook this island, where “the earliest mansions of the gods” had been founded, 6 destroying it utterly, inundating all its holy places and killing most of its divine inhabitants. 7 Some survived, however, and we are told that this remnant set sail in their ships (for the texts leave us in no doubt these gods of the early primeval age were navigators 8 ) to “wander” the world. 9 

Their purpose in doing so was nothing less than to recreate and revivify the essence of their lost homeland, 10 to bring about, in short: 

The resurrection of the former world of the gods …11 The re-creation of a destroyed world. 12 

The general tone, as Egyptologist Eve Anne Elizabeth Reymond confirms in her masterful study of the Edfu Building Texts, conveys the view that “an ancient world, having been constituted, was destroyed and as a dead world it came to be the basis of a new period of creation which at first was the recreation and resurrection of what once had existed in the past.” 13 

Important in the evaluation of the texts is the realization that they were not composed in the historical temple. On the contrary, as Reymond informs us, the priests and scribes of Edfu merely copied what they regarded as the more important extracts from a vast archive of ancient documents that they had at their disposal. 14 By the fifth century AD the weight of Roman and Christian fanaticism had brought about the final collapse of Ancient Egyptian civilization. 15 Thereafter (with Islamic hatred of the past soon making things even worse) care ceased to be taken of the temples which were used as storerooms, stables and homes by local people who no longer venerated the ancient gods. In 1837 the English explorer Howard Vyse visited Edfu and described the mess that he found inside: 

The temple itself, one of the most imposing in Egypt, affords a striking contrast to the miserable hovels, many of which are built upon it, and others on vast mounds of rubbish with which it is surrounded. The interior, covered with painted hieroglyphics, has been divided by earthen walls to form a magazine for corn, and beneath it are enormous substructions which I entered by a hole from an Arab house. They were full of dirt and filth of every description, but had been built in the most solid manner …16

Fortunate for us, then, when Edfu still thrived, that priests and scribes who could read the mysterious texts in the temple’s library committed themselves to the project of selecting extracts and carving them deeply into the “solid” and “imposing” walls of the temple itself. In so doing, whether by accident or design, they ensured that at least these fragments have survived to the present day, whereas the original source documents—looted, used as kindling, thrown into the Nile during the centuries of neglect and mistreatment—have long gone. 

Inevitably, since they lack their original context, the fragments are often confusing and deeply tantalizing. Even so, they give us a glimpse into wonders and secrets of our past that the source documents—if only we had them!—might have revealed to us much more completely. 

Atlantis in Egypt 

The famed Greek philosopher Plato, who passed down to us the extraordinary story of Atlantis destroyed in a terrible cataclysm of flood and fire 9,000 years before the time of Solon—i.e. in 9600 BC in our calendar—is generally regarded by archaeologists as having made up the whole tale of the lost Ice Age civilization. The fallback position, among those grudgingly willing to admit some veracity to the information conveyed in the Timaeus and Critias, is that Plato had perhaps based his account on a much more recent cataclysm centered on the Mediterranean—for example the eruption of Thera (Santorini) in the mid-second millenium BC. The notion of a global disaster more than 11,000 years ago, and particularly the heretical idea that it could have wiped out a high civilization of that epoch, is strenuously resisted and indeed ridiculed by the archaeological establishment because, of course, archaeologists claim to “know” that there was not, and never under any circumstances could have been, a high civilization at that time. 

They “know” this not because of any hard evidence which absolutely rules out the existence of an Atlantis-type civilization in the Upper Paleolithic, but rather on the general principle that the result of less than two hundred years of “scientific” archaeology is an agreed time-line for civilization that sees our ancestors moving smoothly out of the Upper Palaeolithic, into the Neolithic (both, by definition, Stone Age cultures) at around 9600 BC, and thence onward through the development and perfection of agriculture in the millennia that followed—a process that also witnessed the founding of some very large permanent settlements such as Catalhoyuk in Turkey around 7500 BC. 

By about 4000 BC the increasing sophistication of economic and social structures, and growing organizational abilities, made possible the creation of the earliest megalithic sites (such as Gargantia on the Maltese island of Gozo, for example) while the first city-states emerged around 3500 BC in Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley and soon afterward in Egypt and on the other side of the world in Peru. 17 The Pyramids of Giza are megalithic monuments; so too the Great Sphinx. In the British Isles, Callanish in the Outer Hebrides and Avebury in southwest England, both dated to around 3000 BC, are the oldest examples of true megalithic sites. The megalithic phase of Stonehenge is thought to have begun around 2400 BC and to have continued to around 1800 BC. 

Within this well-worked-out and long-established chronology there is simply no room for any prehistoric civilization such as Atlantis, hence the wish of the mainstream to dismiss Plato’s “outlandish” story by any and every possible means. These means include ridicule of the supposed “Egyptian” basis for the tale—specifically, of the claim, made in the Timaeus, that priests of Sais in the Delta said Atlantis, and its cruel fate, were described in “sacred records” 18 in their Temple going back thousands of years before the established beginning of Egyptian civilization in the late fourth millennium BC. 19 To those wedded to the orthodox chronology, the very idea that the priests of Sais might have given Solon a true account of such “impossible” records, which in due course reached Plato, seems preposterous—an obvious historical oxymoron which deserves only to be ignored. Furthermore the claim is frequently made that there are no references to Atlantis anywhere in surviving Ancient Egyptian papyri and inscriptions. 

Only one Egyptologist, the late Professor John Gwyn Griffiths of the University of Wales at Swansea (who passed away in 2004) had the courage to challenge the consensus. The challenge he presented, however, had nothing to do with the fundamental point of whether Atlantis existed and was destroyed in the tenth millennium BC, but rather with the lesser point of whether Plato, through his ancestor Solon, could indeed have been influenced by genuine Ancient Egyptian traditions. 20 Oddly enough for so learned a man, Griffiths seems to have known nothing of Edfu with its tempting account of a sacred island inhabited by “gods” and destroyed by flood and fire in primeval times—an obvious prototype for Plato’s Atlantis, as we shall see. The Professor’s focus, instead, was on a papyrus, catalogued as P. Leningrad 1115 and now kept in Moscow, which contains an intriguing prose story known as the Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor. In this “fairytale,” dating to Egypt’s Middle Kingdom between 2000 BC and 1700 BC, Griffiths—quite correctly in my view—did find convincing resemblances to Plato’s account of Atlantis. 

The eponymous “shipwrecked sailor” in the papyrus tells us of a time when he made a voyage in a great ocean-going vessel that was struck by a giant wave: 

Then the ship died. Of those in it not one remained. I was cast on an island by the sea. I spent three days alone … Lying in the shelter of trees, I hugged the shade … Then I stretched my legs to discover what I might put in my mouth. I found figs and grapes there, all sorts of fine vegetables, sycamore figs … and cucumbers that were as if tended. Fish there were and fowl; there is nothing that was not there. I stuffed myself and put some down, because I had too much in my arms. 21 

The shipwrecked sailor cuts a fire drill, makes fire and gives a burned offering to the gods: 

Then I heard a thundering noise … Trees splintered, the ground trembled. Uncovering my face, I found it was a snake that was coming. He was of thirty cubits [15 meters or 50 feet] … His body was overlaid with gold; his eyebrows were of real lapis lazuli … Then he took me in his mouth and carried me to the place where he lived, and set me down unhurt …22 

The serpent questions the sailor on how he came to be on the island and on hearing his reply, tells him not to be afraid: 

It is a god who has let you live and brought you to this Island of the Ka. There is nothing that is not upon it; it is full of good things … 

The name “Island of the Ka” is “curious” notes Miriam Lichtheim, the translator of the tale. She adds that the renowned Egyptologist Sir Alan Gardiner “rendered it as ‘phantom island.’” 23 It is beyond the scope of this book to present a detailed treatise on the concept of the Ka—the “double,” the astral or spiritual essence of a person or thing. It existed with the human being during his or her mortal life but was “the superior power in the realms beyond the grave.” Indeed, the term for death in the Ancient Egyptian language meant “Going to one’s ka,” or “Going to one’s ka in the sky.” 24 The gods were also believed to have their kas and so, too, were the great monuments of Egypt. Of particular relevance here is that the high god Osiris, lord of the celestial afterlife kingdom known as the Duat, was always referred to as “the Ka of the Pyramids” of Giza: 25 

The Ka entered eternity before its human host, having served its function by walking at the human’s side to urge kindness, quietude, honor and compassion. Throughout the life of the human, the Ka was the conscience, the guardian, the guide. After death, however, the Ka became supreme …26 

With this in mind, Gardiner’s suggestion that a “phantom island” is implicated in the Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor, makes sense. The sailor has set out in a boat from the physical realm of Middle Kingdom Egypt, but he has been cast ashore on “the Island of the Ka,” a ghost realm—a place that no longer exists in this world except in the form of its spiritual essence. 

The same theme continues as the huge snake that rules the island tells the sailor his sad story: 

I was here with my brothers and there were children with them. In all we were seventy-five serpents, children and brothers without mentioning a little daughter whom I had obtained through prayer. Then a star fell, and they went up in flames through it. It so happened that I was not with them in the fire. I was not among them. I could have died for their sake when I found them as one heap of corpses. 27 

In due course a ship passes by and the sailor is rescued. The snake-king of the island sends him away with rich presents—myrrh, oils, laudanum, spices, “perfume, eye-paint, giraffe’s tails, great lumps of incense, elephant’s tusks, greyhounds, monkeys, baboons, and all kinds of precious things.” 28 The sailor, filled with gratitude, wants to return with gifts from Egypt, but before he boards the ship the serpent takes him aside and tells him: 

When you have left this place, you will not see this island again; it will have become water. 29 

The comparisons with Plato’s story of Atlantis that John Gwyn Griffiths draws relate primarily to the rich variety of plant and animal life, including the elephants said to be found on both islands. Here’s Plato on Atlantis: 

There were a great number of elephants in the island; for as there was provision for all other sorts of animals, both for those which live in lakes and marshes and rivers, and also for those which live in mountains and on plains, so there was for the animal which is the largest and most voracious of all. Also whatever fragrant things there now are in the earth, whether roots, or herbage, or woods, or essences which distil from fruit and flower, grew and thrived in that land; also the fruit which admits of cultivation, both the dry sort, which is given us for nourishment and any other which we use for food—we call them all by the common name “pulse”—and the fruits having a hard rind, affording drinks and meats and ointments … all these that sacred island which then beheld the light of the sun, brought forth fair and wondrous and in infinite abundance. With such blessings the earth freely furnished them …30 

In addition there is the fact that Atlantis is a sacred island and so, too, of course, is the Island of the Ka, to which the shipwrecked sailor has been brought by a god. The closest resemblance by far, however, is in the fate of Atlantis which was “swallowed up by the sea and vanished,” 31 just as the Island of the Ka would never be seen again because it had “become water.” 

Taking such elements into account Griffiths concludes that although Plato’s story may “not derive from Egypt in toto,” it nonetheless, most certainly owes a “conceptual debt to Egypt.” 32 His argument is well made, but if he had been familiar with the Edfu Building Texts he might, I think, have stated his case more strongly. 

Bringing some threads together 

We no longer have access to the sacred records once kept at the Temple of Sais in the Delta that Plato tells us contained the story of Atlantis. That temple, which Solon visited around 600 BC, was dedicated to the goddess Neith and was extremely ancient, dating back at least as far as the First Dynasty, circa 3200 BC. 33 Unfortunately it had been completely destroyed by AD 1400, leaving only rubbish heaps and a few scattered blocks on the site that is today occupied by the village of Sa el Hagar. 34 At Edfu, on the other hand, although the original sacred records are also gone, the extracts preserved in the Building Texts do seem to tell essentially the same story that Solon heard and passed on to Plato and that Griffiths argues also reaches us, albeit in a more fragmentary and literary form, in the Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor. 

We’ve already seen that the Homeland of the Primeval Ones in the Edfu texts is described as a sacred island in the midst of a great ocean, so a comparison to the Island of the Ka in the Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor is obvious at the level of the basic geographical setting. The resemblance goes deeper than this, however, since there are many passages in the Building Texts which make it clear that the first and original god who presided over the Homeland of the Primeval Ones was “a dead deity, the Ka.” 35 Indeed, we read that the island was also known as the “Home of the Ka” 36 and that “the Ka ruled therein” 37—“this Ka who dwelt among the reeds of the island.” 38 In other words, the Homeland of the Primeval Ones in the Edfu texts is nothing more nor less than the Island of the Ka and, to the extent that Griffiths is correct to see a prototype for Plato’s Atlantis in the Island of the Ka, then the Homeland of the Primeval Ones is also a prototype. 

What helps to firm up the comparison are certain details given in the Building Texts that do not appear in the Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor. Of particular interest is a passage at Edfu in which we read of a circular, water-filled “channel” surrounding the original sacred domain that lay at the heart of the island of the Primeval Ones—a ring of water that was intended to fortify and protect that domain. 39 In this there is, of course, a direct parallel to Atlantis, where the sacred domain on which stood the temple and palace of the god, whom Plato names as “Poseidon,” was likewise surrounded by a ring of water, itself placed in the midst of further such concentric rings separated by rings of land, again with the purpose of fortification and protection. 40 

Other details are found in all three stories. For example, the striking parallel between the inundation of the island of Atlantis as Plato recounts it, and the inundation of the Island of the Ka in the Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor, is eerily duplicated in the inundation of the Homeland of the Primeval Ones as described in the Edfu texts where we read of an upheaval: 

so violent that it destroyed the sacred land …41 The primeval water … submerged the island … and the island became the tomb of the original divine inhabitants …42 the Homeland ended in darkness beneath the primeval waters. 43 

Compare this with Plato who tells us of “earthquakes and floods of extraordinary violence” 44 as a result of which: 

in a single terrible day and night … the island of Atlantis was … swallowed up by the sea and vanished. 45 

Intriguingly, Plato also hints at the immediate cause of the earthquakes and floods that destroyed Atlantis. In the Timaeus, as a prelude to his account of the lost civilization and its demise, he reports that the Egyptian priests from whom Solon received the story began by speaking of a celestial cataclysm: 

There have been and will be many different calamities to destroy mankind, the greatest of them being by fire and water, lesser ones by countless other means. Your own [i.e. the Greeks’] story of how Phaethon, child of the sun, harnessed his father’s chariot, but was unable to guide it along his father’s course and so burned up things on earth and was himself destroyed by a thunderbolt, is a mythical version of the truth that there is at long intervals a variation in the course of the heavenly bodies and a consequent widespread destruction by fire of things on earth. 46 

In the Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor, too, we find that a celestial cataclysm plays a part. As the reader will recall, the serpent king speaks of the destruction of his race when “a star fell, and they went up in flames through it.” The same ominous agency turns up in the Edfu Building Texts where a serpent is again invoked, but with the significant twist that here it is not the sad and wise ruler of the island but rather the fatal “enemy” of the island and its divine inhabitants. 47 To place what the Edfu texts have to say about this in a wider context, let us first revisit the Zoroastrian tradition of an “evil spirit” that: 

sprang like a snake out of the sky down to the earth … He rushed in at noon, and thereby the sky was as shattered and frightened by him as a sheep by a wolf. He came onto the water which was arranged below the earth, and then the middle of this earth was pierced and entered by him … He rushed out upon the whole creation and he made the world quite as injured and dark at midday as though it were dark night. 48 

To my mind, as I argued in Chapter Seven, what we have here is “a mythical version of the truth”— with the underlying truth being a cataclysmic encounter with a comet. Now let’s look at the relevant passages from the Edfu Building Texts where a snake called the nhp-wer, the “Great Leaping One,” is described as “the chief enemy of the god.” 49 It is his “assault” that causes the Homeland of the Primeval Ones to be swallowed up by the sea, but first the feet of the deity of the island—the Ka, here explicitly described as the “Earth God” 50—are “pierced, and the domain was split.” 51 

This, as Reymond comments: 

is a clear picture of a disaster … It destroyed the sacred land with the result that its divine inhabitants died. This interpretation accords with other parts of the first Edfu record which allude to the death of the “Company” [a group of divine beings] and to the darkness that covered the primeval island. 52

Multiple threads seem to come together here: Plato’s variation in the course of heavenly bodies leading to widespread destruction on earth, the murderous falling star in the Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor, the snake of Zoroastrian tradition that springs out of the sky, pierces the earth and makes the world dark, and the Great Leaping Serpent of the Edfu texts whose assault pierces the feet of the Earth God, leads to death for the divine Company and cloaks the primeval island in darkness. I’m reminded, too, of the Ojibwa “myth” reported in Chapter Three of the “star with the long wide tail that came down here once, thousands of years ago”—a “star” specifically recognized as a comet, 53 that caused “the first flooding of the earth.” 54 

Comet and asteroid impacts not only cause floods but can also impose huge stresses on the crust of the earth resulting in increased earthquake and volcanic activity. How likely, therefore, is it to be an accident that Plato, who was at pains to preface his story with the “thunderbolts” of Phaethon, implicated both earthquakes and floods in the demise of Atlantis and carefully dated the whole episode to 9,000 years before the time of Solon, i.e. 9600 BC? I suggest there’s a real possibility that all these traditions are pointing to the same horrific epoch of prehistory. 

This epoch, as I’ve argued in earlier chapters, is the Younger Dryas which began cataclysmically 12,800 years ago and ended equally cataclysmically 11,600 years ago with large-scale floods— associated with the cascading collapse of the North American and northern European ice caps— occurring at both dates. The case for multiple impacts from a large, fragmented comet initiating the Younger Dryas is, I believe, a very strong one. In the light of the mythological evidence, the possibility must also be considered that it was further encounters with the orbiting debris stream of the same giant comet that brought the Younger Dryas to an end. 

In the process, I suggest, as so many myths and traditions from all around the world maintain, an advanced civilization was lost to history. 

Mystery of the Sound Eye 

Archaeology is not wrong when it tells us that most of the world in the epoch of 12,800 to 11,600 years ago, was populated by hunter-gatherers, locked in the Stone Age and lacking even the beginnings of agriculture. But Plato, to the eternal frustration of archaeologists, leaves us in no doubt that Atlantis was very different. In brief, it was a great and wonderful empire commanding a large navy of ocean-going ships that gave it the ability to project its power into Africa as far as Egypt, into Europe as far as Italy, 55 and onto the mainland of what Plato calls “the whole opposite continent”— by which many believe he meant the Americas 56—“which surrounds what can truly be called the ocean.” 57 Atlantis was a fully-developed city-state, drawing its wealth from a mature and prosperous agricultural economy and boasting advanced metallurgy and sophisticated architectural and engineering works, all enhanced by an immense wealth of natural resources: 

With such blessings the earth freely furnished them; meanwhile they went on constructing their temples and palaces and harbors and docks. And they arranged the whole country in the following manner: First of all they bridged over the zones of sea which surrounded the ancient metropolis, making a road to and from the royal palace … which they continued to ornament in successive generations … until they made the building a marvel to behold for size and for beauty. 

And beginning from the sea they bored a canal of three hundred feet in width and one hundred feet in depth and fifty stadia in length, which they carried through to the outermost zone, making a passage from the sea up to this, which became a harbor, and leaving an opening sufficient to enable the largest vessels to find ingress. Moreover, they divided at the bridges the zones of land which parted the zones of sea, leaving room for a single trireme to pass out of one zone into another, and they covered over the channels so as to leave a way underneath for the ships; for the banks were raised considerably above the water. 

Now the largest of the zones into which a passage was cut from the sea was three stadia in breadth, and the zone of land which came next of equal breadth; but the next two zones, the one of water, the other of land, were two stadia, and the one which surrounded the central island was a stadium only in width. The island in which the palace was situated had a diameter of five stadia. All this including the zones and the bridge, which was the sixth part of a stadium in width, they surrounded by a stone wall on every side, placing towers and gates on the bridges where the sea passed in. 

The stone which was used in the work they quarried from underneath the center island, and from underneath the zones, on the outer as well as the inner side. One kind was white, another black, and a third red, and as they quarried, they at the same time hollowed out double docks, having roofs formed out of the native rock. Some of their buildings were simple, but in others they put together different stones, varying the color to please the eye, and to be a natural source of delight. The entire circuit of the wall, which went round the outermost zone, they covered with a coating of brass, and the circuit of the next wall they coated with tin, and the third, which encompassed the citadel, flashed with the red light of orichalcum. 58 

Nobody now knows exactly what metal the fabled orichalcum of Atlantis was, since Plato tells us that it survived in his day “only in name,” 59 but it adds to the aura of technological mastery that still surrounds the fabled lost civilization. 

Seagoing navigation, advanced agriculture and large-scale architectural and engineering works are also among the notable characteristics of the Homeland of the Primeval Ones described in the Edfu texts. We have already seen how the ring system of canals is prefigured there but so too are the grand temples of Atlantis. We read, for example, of a chapel “measuring 90 by 20 cubits” (approximately 45 by 10 meters or 150 by 35 feet): 

At its front was erected a large forecourt of 90 by 90 cubits … Then a hypostyle hall of 50 by 30 cubits was constructed … then another hall of 20 by 30 cubits and two consecutive halls, each 45 by 20 cubits were added at the front of the first hypostyle hall. 60 

An enclosure is described measuring 300 cubits (150 meters or 500 feet) from west to east and 400 cubits from north to south. Within it is a temple, the “Mansion of the God” and within that a Holy of Holies measuring 90 cubits from east to west. 61 

We also read of a third enclosure on the same grand scale of 300 by 400 cubits. It too contains an inner sanctuary measuring 90 cubits from west to east and 20 cubits from north to south, subdivided into three rooms each of which was 30 cubits by 20 cubits. 62 

But the strongest hint of high technology in the Homeland of the Primeval Ones is given in one of the Edfu extracts that describes the cataclysmic demise of the island following the assault of the celestial “snake” called “the Great Leaping One” that “pierces” the Earth God and “splits” the domain. Then we read—and it is most mysterious—that “the Sound Eye fell.” 63 

“The mention of the Sound Eye … appears a little strange,” admits Reymond. But she explains, though the texts are obscure on the point, that it seems to be: 

the name of the center of the light which illumined the island. 64 

We are, in short, to envisage some artificial system of illumination which lights up the primeval island of the gods. Beyond that: 

All that can be said, with due reserve, is that it looks as though there is an allusion to a disaster which caused the fall of the Sound Eye, with the result that complete darkness fell upon the domain of the Creator. 65 

The gods sailed … 

What happened after the disaster that struck Atlantis? Were there survivors? If there were, what did they do with the advanced knowledge that they possessed? 

Plato’s Timaeus and Critias provide no answers to these questions, but the Edfu Building Texts do, making it clear that there were survivors of the disaster that struck the Homeland of the Primeval Ones—“companies of gods” who were already at sea when the sacred island was flooded. They sailed back to the former location of the island after the cataclysm but: 

saw only reeds on the surface of the water. 66 

There was a great deal of mud there also, 67 a scene reminiscent of Plato’s description of the vicinity of Atlantis after the flood: 

the sea in that area is impassable to navigation, which is hindered by mud just below the surface, the remains of the sunken island. 68 

In the case of the Homeland of the Primeval Ones it seems that enough of the sunken island remained close to the surface for the survivors to attempt to win some of it back from the sea—an endeavor referred to in the Edfu texts as the “creation of the pãy-lands,” where the term “pãy-land” clearly means lands reclaimed from the sea. 69 Thus we read how “the Shebtiw recited sacred spells, the water gradually receded from the edge of the island, and the actual land of the pãy-land was brought out.” 70 The texts then describe: 

a process of … continuous creation by the emergence of a progressive series of plots of land …71 The creation of these … sacred domains was, in fact, a resurrection and restoration of what had been in the past but had vanished …72 At the end there appeared further pãy-lands which brought to a new life the former homeland. 73 

Nonetheless, despite these efforts, the fact remained that the cataclysm had so utterly devastated the primeval island that no amount of reclamation could restore it to its former glory. The only solution for the survivors, therefore, was to attempt to recreate it elsewhere in regions that had not been as badly affected by the catastrophe. The result saw the beginning of a great project of which the world we live in today is the result. What the Edfu texts say, explains Reymond, is: 

that the gods left the original pãy-lands …74 They … sailed to another part of the primeval world …75 [and] journeyed through the … lands of the primeval age …76 In any place in which they settled they founded new sacred domains. 77  138s

Their mission, in short, was to promulgate the lost civilization and the lost religion of the days before the flood. As Reymond puts it, this “second era of the primeval age” saw “the development of the domains that survived in historical times.” 78 

Begin again like children 

The Edfu texts make allusion to the smd, “wandering,” of the “company of gods” 79 who initiated the civilizing project. Their leader was the Falcon Horus, after whom the temple at Edfu was much later dedicated, but present, also, was Thoth, the god of wisdom. 80 Accompanying Horus and Thoth were the Shebtiw, a group of deities charged with a specific responsibility for “creation,” 81 the “Builder Gods” who accomplished “the actual work of building,” 82 and the “Seven Sages.” 83 This is a matter of interest in the light of the Mesopotamian traditions of the Apkallus explored in Chapter Eight and it seems that something more than coincidence is involved. 

The reader will recall that the Apkallus were often depicted as hybrid creatures, part bird of prey, part human in appearance. Similarly, the Seven Sages of the Edfu texts are described as primeval deities who were capable of assuming “the form of falcons” and of “resembling falcons.” 84 

Also exactly like the antediluvian Apkallus, the Seven Sages of the Edfu texts (who are not mentioned elsewhere in Ancient Egyptian inscriptions) were the magicians among the gods. They were seers who could foretell the future, 85 and they could swr iht ti—“endue with power the substances of the earth” 86—a process of creation “by the word of the creators” 87 that, Reymond notes, “has no equivalent.” 88 They were, in addition, believed to have the ability “to magnify things,” and thus to provide magical protection. 89 On this point, the best sense Reymond is able to make of what she describes as an “unusually obscure” text, is that “the protection was constituted by means of symbols. The magical power of protecting was conferred by a giving of names.” 90 

The Apkallus mingled their magic with practical skills—such as laying the foundations of cities and temples. Similarly, the Seven Sages of the Edfu texts also had their practical, architectural side and many passages testify to their involvement in the setting out and construction of buildings and in the laying of foundations. 91 Moreover, the Egyptians believed that “the ground plans of the historical temples were established according to what the Sages of the primeval age revealed to Thoth.” 92 

This hint of a special connection between the Sages and Thoth is, of course, a further parallel for, as we’ve seen, the Apkallus were linked to Enki, the Mesopotamian god of wisdom. In the Mesopotamian inscriptions, however, Enki is clearly superior to the Sages—indeed, he is their maker. But in the Edfu texts, strangely, it appears that the knowledge of the Sages is regarded as superior to that of the wisdom-god Thoth. Indeed, it was the tradition at Edfu that the original records and archives from which the texts were extracted were nothing less than “the words of the Sages” given as dictation to Thoth, who had then consigned them to writing. 93 The texts further disclose that the Sages of the mythical age were believed to be “the only divine beings who knew how the temples and sacred places were created” 94 and were themselves the very creators of knowledge, 95 which thereafter could only be passed on but not invented anew. This finds parallels in the Mesopotamian notion that since the time of the antediluvian Apkallus nothing new had been invented—with the original revelation simply being retransmitted and unfolded in later epochs. 

Without laboring the point further, therefore, it seems to me that the idea conveyed so strongly in the cuneiform inscriptions of ancient Mesopotamia of a project to recover and repromulgate antediluvian knowledge after a global cataclysm is, rather exactly, the same project that is set out in the Edfu Building Texts, which in turn bear uncanny and troubling resemblances to Plato’s report of the destroyed Ice Age civilization of Atlantis. 

More than that, the Edfu texts invite us to consider the possibility that the survivors of the lost civilization, thought of as “gods” but manifestly human—albeit with mysterious “powers”—set about “wandering” the world after the flood. By happenstance it was only hunter-gatherer populations, the peoples of the mountains and the deserts—“the unlettered and the uncultured,” as Plato so eloquently put it in his Timaeus—who had been “spared the scourge of the deluge.” 96 But the civilizers entertained the desperate hope, if their mission would succeed, that mankind might not have to “begin again like children, in complete ignorance of what happened in early times.” 97 

The evidence of the Mesopotamian inscriptions, and of Göbekli Tepe to which we will return, is that the mountain lands of ancient Armenia and eastern Turkey were among the primal wildernesses to which the civilizers made their way after the flood. But the testimony of Edfu is that they also came to the Nile flowing in its fertile valley through the deserts of Egypt. 

Moreover the Building Texts say very clearly which part of Egypt they came to first—and it was not Edfu, as we’ll see in the next chapter.

10

Monastery of the Seven Sages 

In his Timaeus, we’ve seen how Plato speaks of events, described in Ancient Egyptian temple records, that took place 9,000 years before the time of Solon, i.e. in 9600 BC. Nor is the Timaeus the only place where Plato alludes to such vast antiquity. In his Laws, for example, he says of the Ancient Egyptians: 

If you examine their art on the spot, you will find that ten thousand years ago (and I’m not speaking loosely; I mean literally ten thousand), paintings and reliefs were produced that are no better and no worse than those of today. 1 

It’s interesting how the Greek philosopher makes a point of this “ten thousand years ago,” emphasizing that he’s not speaking loosely—that he really means it. But we live, supposedly, in a more scientific age with the benefit of objective dating techniques, so what are we to make of such a chronology? 

Plato was born around 428 BC, so his reference to “ten thousand years” ago translates to around 10,400 BC in our calendar, within a whisker of the date of 10,450 BC that I proposed in Fingerprints of the Gods for the remote epoch, Zep Tepi—“the First Time”—when the Ancient Egyptians believed that the gods walked the earth and the civilization of the Nile Valley had its true beginnings. 2 

This date, based on findings that arose from research underlying The Orion Mystery, my friend Robert Bauval’s groundbreaking 1994 study of the astronomical aspects of the world-famous pyramids of Giza in Egypt, 3 was developed further by the two of us in 1996 in our co-authored book Keeper of Genesis (titled The Message of the Sphinx in the US). 4 In brief, the date arises from the extraordinarily precise layout of the principal monuments of the Giza plateau and the relationship of these monuments to certain stars in the sky. For full details I refer the reader to Fingerprints of the Gods and to Keeper of Genesis, where this issue is explored in depth, but the heart of the matter lies in the fact that the positions of the stars in the sky are not fixed and finite but change very gradually over a great cycle—known to astronomers as the precessional cycle—that unfolds in a period of 25,920 years. 

Figure 33: The effect of precession is to change the Pole Star over very long periods of time. 

The cycle is the result of a motion of the earth itself, a slow circular wobble of the planet’s axis of rotation unfolding at the rate of one degree every 72 years; since the earth is the viewing platform from which we observe the stars, these changes in orientation inevitably affect the positions and rising times of all stars as viewed from earth. Our Pole Star, for example, around which the remainder of the heavens appear to revolve, is simply the star at which the earth’s extended axis, passing through the geographical north pole, points most directly. Presently it is Polaris (Alpha Ursae Minoris, in the constellation of the Little Bear), but the effect of precession is to change the Pole Star over very long periods of time. Thus around 3000 BC, just before the start of the Pyramid Age in Egypt, the Pole Star was Thuban (Alpha Draconis) in the constellation of Draco. At the time of the Greeks it was Beta Ursae Minoris. In AD 14,000 it will be Vega. 5 Sometimes in this long cyclical journey the extended north pole of the earth will point at empty space and then there will be no useful “Pole Star.” 

The most dramatic, and indeed beautiful and aesthetically pleasing effects of precession, however, are those observed at the horizon on the March equinox, when night and day are of equal length and when the sun rises perfectly due east against the background of the twelve constellations of the zodiac. The rate of change is the same as at the pole, i.e. just one degree every 72 years, so it cannot easily be observed—let alone measured—in a single human lifetime. But if yours is a culture that keeps careful records over very long periods, it will be noted that the zodiacal constellation that “houses” the sun on that special day (marking the beginning of spring in the northern hemisphere) does, indeed, very slowly shift along the horizon until eventually, the next constellation takes its place. 

Broadly speaking the sun spends 2,160 years “in” each house of the zodiac (30 degrees x 72 years) and, since there are twelve zodiacal houses, the result is that “the Great Year”—the full precessional cycle—unfolds in 12 x 2,160 years, i.e. 25,920 years, at which point the cycle is back at its starting point and a new Great Year begins. In the sun’s annual path through the zodiac, spending approximately one month in each sign as all of us who check our horoscopes are aware, Aquarius is followed by Pisces, which in turn is followed by Aries, which is followed by Taurus, then Gemini, then Cancer, then Leo, etc, etc, etc. But the slow, majestic precessional course of the sun through the Great Year is a backward motion that unfolds in exactly the opposite direction—thus Leo → Cancer → Gemini → Taurus → Aries → Pisces → Aquarius—with each “month” being 2,160 years in length. 

So, to give some specific examples, it is not an accident that the early Christians used the fish as their symbol, since the constellation of Pisces housed the sun on the spring equinox from the very beginning of the Christian era until today. Nor is the famous song wrong to state that “we live in the dawning of the Age of Aquarius,” for the early twenty-first century does indeed stand in the astrological no-man’s land near the end of the “Age of Pisces” and on the threshold of the “New Age” of Aquarius. Going back before the Age of Pisces we come to the age of Aries (2330 BC–170 BC) when, in Ancient Egypt, rams were the dominant symbolic motif (for example, the ram-headed sphinxes at the temple of Karnak in Luxor), and before that to the Age of Taurus (4490 BC–2330 BC) when the cult of the Apis Bull was initiated as early as the First Dynasty, or perhaps before. 

Different astrologers and astronomers might choose to move the constellation boundaries a few degrees (and thus a century or two) in one direction or another, but the general schema is well understood and the dates given above stand as a good approximation to the facts. Moving back in time further, as it is easy to do with modern computer programs that simulate ancient skies, we come eventually to the Age of Leo when the constellation of Leo, the lion, housed the sun on the spring equinox. This astrological age spans the period between 10,970 BC and 8810 BC—although, again, depending on where one sets the constellation boundaries, the dates might be pushed back or forward by a couple of centuries. What is clear, however, even with a little boundary juggling, is that the Age of Leo pretty much perfectly encloses the Younger Dryas (10,800 BC to 9600 BC), something that I was unaware of when I wrote Fingerprints of the Gods. And, of course, it was also the Age of Leo that I signaled in Fingerprints as the most likely candidate for the remote epoch that the Ancient Egyptians called Zep Tepi, the “First Time.”  

Again, I refer readers to Fingerprints and to Keeper of Genesis, and to my later book Heaven’s Mirror, 6 for more detailed discussions of the astronomical facts, and of the ideas behind them. The essence of the argument, however, is that there was an ancient globally-distributed doctrine—“as above so below”—that set out quite deliberately to create monuments on the ground that copied the patterns of certain significant constellations in the sky. Moreover, since the positions of all stars change slowly but continuously as a result of the precession, it is possible to use particular configurations of astronomically aligned monuments to deduce the dates that they represent—i.e. the dates when the stars were last in the positions depicted by the monuments on the ground. 

The Giza plateau contains the world’s most striking array of astronomically aligned monuments and, for purposes of clarity, let me emphasize that these alignments have nothing to do with compass directions. The “north” indicated by a compass is magnetic north which can vary by 10 degrees or more from true north and wanders constantly because of magnetic changes in the earth’s core. True north is the geographical north pole of the earth, in other words the pivot of our planet’s axis of rotation; from it true south, east and west are derived. It is therefore significant that the gaze of the Great Sphinx is perfectly targeted on true east, while the three great pyramids are aligned with uncanny precision to true north and south—indeed, the error in the case of the Great Pyramid is just 3/60ths of a single degree. 

What this tells us is that all these monuments were set out using astronomy, for it is not possible to achieve such precision by any other means. In other words, even if there were no additional astronomical characteristics present, we would have to say, on grounds of accuracy of alignment alone, that astronomers had been at work here. But in fact there are many other astronomical characteristics—not only in the monuments themselves but also in Ancient Egyptian scriptures such as the Pyramid Texts—and for these, since I wish to avoid unnecessary repetition, I again refer the reader to my earlier books. 

The heart of the matter, however, involves two constellations—the constellation of Leo, rising due east above the sun at dawn on the spring equinox in the epoch of 10,500 BC, and the constellation of Orion, which the Ancient Egyptians visualized as the celestial figure of the god Osiris, the deceased god-king who ruled over the afterlife kingdom known as the Duat. As we saw in Chapter Nine, Osiris was also believed in some way to be the Ka—the “double,” or spiritual essence—of the Pyramids of Giza. 

I will not vex the reader with lengthy substantiations of the assertions that follow since they are fully backed up, referenced and documented in my earlier books, but an uncanny sky-ground “lock” occurs at Giza in the epoch of 10,500 BC. I had opted for a date fifty years later—10,450 BC—in Fingerprints, but such minor details are not really significant since the stellar changes are so slow, even within a single astrological age, that the same general configuration holds good for many centuries. Indeed, it is true to say that the Giza sky-ground lock stays in place throughout most, if not all, of the Younger Dryas from 10,800 BC down to 9600 BC. 

Effectively, therefore, the epoch of the “First Time,” which I will continue, for ease of reference, to refer to as the epoch of 10,500 BC, is the epoch of the Younger Dryas. And while it was a time of freezing temperatures further north—particularly in North America and northern Europe—indications are that the climate in Egypt would have been much more comfortable and conducive and much wetter and more fertile than it is today. This is not to say that Egypt was entirely spared the cataclysms of the Younger Dryas—there were powerful and destructive Nile floods as we shall see—but by comparison with many other parts of the world it would have stood out as an inviting refuge. 

Figure 37: Looking east in the dawn, about an hour before sunrise on the morning of the spring equinox in the epoch of 10,500 BC, we see the constellation of Leo lying with its belly on the horizon, directly in line with the gaze of the Sphinx. 

As above, so below … To return to the matter of the sky-ground lock at Giza in the epoch of 10,500 BC, let us consider first the lion-bodied (and very likely once lion-headed) monument, oriented perfectly due east, that we call the Great Sphinx. It looks not only at the rising sun on the spring equinox but also at the constellation that houses the sun on the equinox. Today, therefore, this monument gazes at the cusp between Pisces and Aquarius. At the time of the building of the Temple of Karnak it gazed at the constellation of Aries, and in the Old Kingdom, when the Sphinx was supposedly built, it gazed at the constellation of Taurus, the Bull—clearly not a perfect sky-ground match. 

Indeed, only in one epoch in the last 25,920 years has the lion-bodied Sphinx looked out at its own celestial counterpart, the constellation of Leo, in the predawn on the spring equinox, and that was in the epoch of 10,500 BC.

Figure 38: On the spring equinox in the epoch of 10,500 BC, at the exact moment that the sun bisected the horizon due east, the three belt stars of the constellation of Orion lay due south on the meridian—in a pattern that very precisely matches the pattern of the three Great Pyramids on the ground.

But there is more. In that same epoch, at the exact moment that the sun bisected the horizon due east, the three belt stars of the constellation of Orion lay due south on the meridian—and they did so in a pattern that very precisely matches the pattern of the three Great Pyramids on the ground, thus making sublime sense of the image of Osiris/Orion as the Ka, or “double,” of the Pyramids. 

After Robert Bauval presented the Orion correlation to a global readership in his 1994 book The Orion Mystery, and after the further work I did on the subject in Fingerprints of the Gods, and that Robert and I did together in Keeper of Genesis, the hypothesis came in for a great deal of criticism from the mainstream archaeoastronomer Ed Krupp of the Griffiths Observatory of Los Angeles. 

Krupp claimed that the correlation was “upside down,” an argument of some sophistry based on the apparent curvature of the sky which means that the highest of the three stars of Orion’s belt (matched, in the Orion correlation, by the southernmost of the three pyramids), is effectively the northernmost star. Refuting this, we were able to demonstrate that laying the pyramids out on the ground in the way that would satisfy Krupp might be technically “correct” in terms of modern astronomical conventions, but would not produce an immediately recognizable and visually pleasing similitude between what is seen in the sky and what is seen on the ground. If, on the other hand, one steers clear of twenty-first century astronomical conventions (in which north is “up”), and simply models on the ground—rather as an artist or a sculptor would—what would have been seen in the sky at dawn on the spring equinox in the epoch of 10,500 BC, then the result is indeed a very good match, as Robert Bauval always claimed, between the three great pyramids and the three stars of Orion’s Belt (see Appendix, The Orion correlation is not upside down, for further details). 

Moreover, as noted above, the particularly striking feature of this match is its lock with the Sphinx/Leo. The point is worth re-emphasizing. Looking east in the predawn, about an hour before sunrise on the morning of the spring equinox in the epoch of 10,500 BC, we see the constellation of Leo lying with its belly on the horizon, directly in line with the gaze of the Sphinx. There is an unmissable sky/ground correlation here—for the constellation of Leo, in profile as seen at this moment, does very closely resemble the profile of the leonine Sphinx. 

The earth turns, the stars and the sun rise, light floods the sky, and in due course—after about an hour—the solar disc bisects the horizon precisely due east, again exactly in line with the gaze of the Sphinx. At the precise moment it does so, the three stars of Orion’s belt fall into place centered due south over the meridian. This is confirmed absolutely by modern astronomical software and it would have been known absolutely by anyone with sophisticated knowledge of the motions of the heavens, should such a person have been present at Giza in the epoch of 10,500 BC. Indeed, one can almost feel the ponderous gears of the sky at work, like a huge clock: the hour hand is the Sphinx/Leo correlation and the minute hand is the pyramids/Orion’s belt correlation, and both work together to point unmistakably to the epoch of 10,500 BC. This is the epoch that I long ago suggested was the mysterious Ancient Egyptian “First Time,” but that I now understand was significant for the worldchanging cataclysm of the Younger Dryas as well. 

Dating with stars 

The use of combinations of stars in the sky and large-scale constructions on the ground to point symbolically to significant moments in history was a practice widely pursued in antiquity, as extensively documented in my 1998 book Heaven’s Mirror. 7 Indeed, examples of such sky-ground mirroring, once they are properly understood, frequently shed new light on archaeological inquiries. For example, in 2014 an ancient mound in the Republic of Macedonia was identified as man-made by archaeo acoustic analysis. The mound’s dimensions are 85 meters x 45 meters, it is very precisely oriented north–south and at its summit, placed within an oval ditch, a giant earthwork has been identified by researchers from the University of Trieste as a representation of the constellation of Cassiopeia, as it would have appeared from the site at dawn on July 21, 356 BC, the birthday of the famed Macedonian ruler Alexander the Great. “Cassiopeia, lies directly to the north,” the researchers conclude: 

and stands vertically above the geoglyph in the sky’s zenith, forming a perfect picture of the sky on the earth. 8 

Nor are such sky-ground endeavors confined to the ancient world. A relatively recent example is the Hoover Dam in the United States. There at the base of the towering Monument of Dedication with its black diorite pedestals supporting two colossal and imposing winged figures—themselves reminiscent of Mesopotamian and Ancient Egyptian deities—the sculptor Oscar Hansen created a spectacular terrazzo floor with an inbuilt star chart. Here’s how the US Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Reclamation describes the artwork, and its purpose: 

The chart preserves for future generations the date on which President Franklin D. Roosevelt dedicated Hoover Dam, September 30, 1935 … 

In this celestial map, the bodies of the solar system are placed so exactly that those versed in astronomy could calculate the precession (progressively earlier occurrence) of the Pole Star for approximately the next 14,000 years. Conversely, future generations could look upon this monument and determine, if no other means were available, the exact date on which Hoover Dam was dedicated. 9 

Hansen, who explicitly compared the dam to the Great Pyramid as “a monument to collective genius exerting itself in community efforts around a common need or ideal,” 10 also incorporated the signs of the zodiac into his design. 11 Such elements, he said, were all put there as clues and pointers, so that “in remote ages to come, intelligent people” would be able to discern “the astronomical time of the dam’s dedication.” 12 

It so happens that the Hoover Dam and its monumental sculptures were completed in the same year, 1935, but it is, of course, possible to use symbolic architecture and astronomical alignments to make a permanent statement about significant moments in the past at any time. A parallel might be the great Gothic cathedrals of Europe built in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries of our era but referring in every symbolic detail and in the sacred astronomy built into their stones and stained glass, 13 to much earlier periods—notably to the time of Christ and the time of the Old Testament patriarchs. 

From a purely astronomical point of view, what can be said about the huge effort and endeavor of the Giza monuments is that the ground-plan of the pyramids and the Sphinx does speak clearly of the epoch of 10,500 BC. But as readers of my previous books will be aware, the monuments also include features, such as the four narrow shafts angled up through the body of the Great Pyramid, that target significant stars in the epoch of 2500 BC when Egyptologists believe the pyramids were built. 14 

In other words both epochs are symbolized—2500 BC by the shafts and 10,500 BC by the ground plan. 

Long-lived cult of the Sages 

The hypothesis I derive from this is that Giza was one of several sites around the world—Göbekli Tepe was another—where survivors of a great prehistoric civilization that had been all but destroyed in the global cataclysm at the onset of the Younger Dryas chose to settle, and where their sages set in motion a long-term plan to bring about “the resurrection of the former world of the gods … The recreation of the destroyed world.” 15 Perhaps they felt that their own civilization had made some terrible error, some ghastly mistake, that had brought down the punishment of the universe upon them in the form of the Younger Dryas comet, and that it would therefore be impious or unwise to seek to refashion the destroyed world all at once and straight away. Indeed, perhaps it proved impossible for them to do so. Though its climate would have been attractive, at a time when much of the world was in the midst of a sudden deep freeze, the Nile Valley, like so many other places, did suffer cataclysmic events both at the beginning and at the end of the Younger Dryas. These events included episodes of extreme river floods, the so-called “Wild Nile,” that recurred several times in the epoch of 10,500 BC, with calmer and more predictable conditions not being restored until about 9000 BC. 16

Located on higher ground, well above the valley floor, there is no evidence to suggest that Giza itself was ever scoured by those floods and it would, therefore, have been an obvious choice in Egypt for the survivors to have established a base and begun work on an architectural project, perhaps focused around certain natural features of the plateau itself. Among these I would draw particular attention to the rocky hill more than thirty feet high—an excellent contender for the “Great Primeval Mound” described in the Edfu texts, as we shall see—that would much later be incorporated into the core of the Great Pyramid. 

I suggest that a shaft was cut down into this hill and deep into the bedrock beneath it to create the rectangular cavity that is now nominated as the Subterranean Chamber—which can still only be accessed today through that same 300-foot-long shaft (now known as “the Descending Corridor”) that dives deeply into the bowels of the earth at an angle of 26 degrees. In my view, it is probably only one of several underground features that were created at that time, with others—far more extensive— still awaiting discovery. 

Likewise these visitors to primeval Giza of the epoch of 10,500 BC would also have found a crest or ridge of rock (the technical term for such a feature is a “yardang”), protruding downslope that had perhaps already been sculpted by the prevailing winds into something resembling the head of a lion. It faced east and overlooked the Nile Valley and it would, in due course, be extensively excavated and carved to form the Great Sphinx. It is likely that some substantial work was done in the epoch of 10,500 BC to free at least the front quarters of the core body of the Sphinx from its surrounding bedrock. But my view, unchanged since I wrote Fingerprints of the Gods, is that the majority of the work on this project, as on the pyramids themselves, was done later and finally completed in the epoch of 2500 BC when the original leonine head of the Sphinx, perhaps heavily eroded, was re-carved into the disproportionately small human head that it still has today. My hypothesis, then and now, is that the same sacred “cult,” housed in something perhaps like a monastery, with a very small, even negligible, archaeological footprint—let us call it the Monastery of the Seven Sages—was involved in both major phases of the work and in everything that happened at Giza in between. As I wrote in 1995, this hypothesis resolves the anomaly of the “missing” 8,000 years between the two epochs: 

by supposing the star shafts [of the Great Pyramid] to be merely the later work of the same long-lived cult that originally laid out the Giza ground plan in 10,450 BC. Naturally the hypothesis also suggests that it was this same cult, toward the end of those 8,000 missing years, that provided the initiating spark for the sudden and “fully formed” emergence of the literate and accomplished historical civilization of dynastic Egypt. 17 

Dating with light 

Since the publication of Fingerprints of the Gods I have had many years to reflect on the mysteries of Giza. It remains my view that the role of the historical pharaohs of the Fourth Dynasty was to complete, and finally fulfill, a much more ancient plan first brought to Egypt in the epoch of 10,500 BC. As noted above, however, the subterranean elements of the Giza plateau, and the earliest work on the Sphinx, may actually date back to the epoch of 10,500 BC. By virtue of the distinctive weathering patterns on that monument’s flanks and on sections of the trench that surrounds it—highlighted in the analysis of geology professor Robert Schoch of Boston University—a proto-Sphinx does appear to have existed when heavy rains fell across Egypt at the end of the Ice Age, 18 perhaps even as early as the Wild Nile period. 

I have long been convinced by the geological evidence that the Sphinx does in fact date back in some form to the epoch of 10,500 BC. But there is a gray area to do with events between 10,500 BC and 2500 BC and this concerns the megalithic temples of the plateau, particularly the Sphinx Temple (directly in front, i.e. to the east, of the Sphinx itself) and the Valley Temple which lies immediately southeast of the Sphinx, both of which are built for the most part of limestone blocks excavated from around the core body of the Sphinx, although in many cases the limestone blocks are surfaced with a veneer of granite. The orthodox archaeological dating of these structures (both of their limestone and of their granite elements) is to the Old Kingdom—specifically to the Fourth Dynasty, approximately 2613 BC to 2494 BC 19—i.e. to the epoch of 2500 BC. 

When I wrote Fingerprints of the Gods, however, I was open to the possibility that they might date back to the epoch of 10,500 BC. I remain so, but in the light of recent evidence some careful consideration is required. This is the case because an advanced scientific technique known as surface luminescence dating (which measures light energy stored in stone) has been applied to these temples. This technique seems, on the face of things, to rule out rather conclusively any possibility that the temples were created in the form we see them now in the epoch of 10,500 BC. 20 

I say “on the face of things” because there are certain problems with the new technique which mean that any conclusions drawn from it must be carefully thought through. Most significantly, as the researchers themselves admit, surface luminescence dating relies upon the assumption that the sample being tested has not been exposed to sunlight since it was set into place in the building of which it is a part. Should there have been exposure to sunlight, even if “just minutes” in duration—as would happen, for example, if any later reworking of the sampled area had been undertaken without cover of a roof—then “the latent luminescence is released … setting the signal to zero or near zero,” and thus yielding a date that reflects the most recent reworking rather than the original date at which the building was constructed. 21 

The Giza Surface Luminescence Dating study was conducted by nuclear physicist Professor Ioannis Liritzis and his colleague Asimina Vafiadou, both of the Laboratory of Archaeometry at the University of the Aegean. They reported their results in detail in 2015 in the Journal of Cultural Heritage. 22 Conclusive indications that at least some of the structures they sampled had indeed been reworked, with their latent luminescence zeroed and the clock set ticking again at the time of the reworking, are provided by Sample No. 4 (Valley Temple limestone) and Sample No. 6 (Sphinx Temple granite). The former yielded a very young surface luminescence date of 1050 BC, plus or minus 540 years, while the latter yielded a surface luminescence date of 1190 BC, plus or minus 340 years. 23 These are, effectively, dates from Ancient Egypt’s New Kingdom (Eighteenth Dynasty and later) and we have firm archaeological and epigraphic evidence that both the Sphinx Temple and the Valley Temple were already very ancient by New Kingdom times. 

Since this is so, the other dates yielded by the study must also be regarded with caution and certainly cannot be taken as firm evidence of the date of construction of the temples—particularly in the case of Sample No. 3 (Valley Temple granite), and Samples No. 7 and 8 (both Sphinx Temple granite). These yielded surface luminescence dates, respectively, of 3060 BC, plus or minus 470 years; 2740 BC, plus or minus 640 years; and 3100 BC, plus or minus 540 years. 24 These dates are broadly compatible with the Old Kingdom—although with some reservations which we will explore below—but they do not under any circumstance rule out a much more ancient date of construction for the limestone core masonry of the temples, since it has always been Robert Schoch’s contention that: 152s

this granite sheathing was added in the Old Kingdom to repair and restore the earlier (much earlier—“Sphinx Age”) limestone temples. 25 

We are left, then, with only a single sample (Sample No. 5) which was taken from the original limestone core masonry of the Sphinx Temple. It yielded a surface luminescence date of 2220 BC, plus or minus 220 years, 26 but really nothing very conclusive can be said about it or deduced from it since its location does not rule out the possibility, as Schoch observed when I asked him to comment on these findings, that it “may also have been exposed or reworked during repairs to the structure during the Old Kingdom.” 27 

In summary, the new study does not provide any evidence to confirm beyond doubt that the original limestone megalithic elements of the Sphinx and Valley Temples were built by the Fourth Dynasty Pharaoh Khafre, as archaeologists maintain. On the contrary, the only thing the study seems to demonstrate for sure is that these temples were reworked during the New Kingdom. More alarming for the mainstream chronology, the surface luminescence dating raises the possibility that the granite sheathing on the temples (with the exception of Sample No. 6 with its New Kingdom date) was not added in the Fourth Dynasty at all but many centuries earlier—indeed as early as 3380 BC at the extreme end of the dating range for Sample No. 7, as early as 3530 BC for Sample No. 3, and as early as 3640 BC for Sample No. 8. 28 

This potentially pushes what Robert Schoch has always regarded as restoration work on the Sphinx Temple (the adding of a granite veneer on top of much older and extensively eroded megalithic limestone blocks) far back into the pre-dynastic period, i.e. long before any large-scale construction is supposed to have been undertaken in Egypt. And needless to say if these temples were in need of such radical restoration in the pre-dynastic period then their core masonry is likely to be very ancient indeed, perhaps even going back as far as the epoch of 10,500 BC. 

So much then for the Sphinx Temple and the Valley Temple, but what of the enigmatic pyramids that loom over them? 

The researchers were not able to study the second pyramid at Giza, conventionally attributed (like the Sphinx and its temples) to Khafre. Nor did they investigate the Great Pyramid, attributed to Khufu. But they did test a single sample from the smallest of the three pyramids, which Egyptology attributes to Menkaure, the Pharaoh who succeeded Khafre to the throne. Taken from the granite facing stones of the pyramid, and not from its core masonry, this sample produced yet another strikingly anomalous date—3450 BC, plus or minus 950 years—when assayed for surface luminescence. 29 Only at the youngest end of the range (3450 minus 950 = 2500 BC) does this date approximate to the reign of Menkaure—although many authorities do not see that pharaoh taking the throne until 2490 BC, 30 and thus after “his” pyramid was completed even at the most recent date offered by the surface luminescence spectrum. But what is more disturbing are the other possibilities raised by the dating, i.e. that the facing stones of the so-called “Pyramid of Menkaure” could have been put in place as early as 3450 BC or even, perhaps, 950 years before that, i.e. in 4400 BC and thus deep in the predynastic period almost two thousand years prior to the Old Kingdom. 

More work needs to be done to settle all this. As I’ve said, I remain willing, for the moment, to accept the still prevailing mainstream view that dates the pyramids to the Old Kingdom. But what is in the process of emerging, I think, is recognition of the need for a more nuanced view of the whole site with strong indications from geology, from astronomy, and now from surface luminescence dating as well, that it can no longer be attributed exclusively to the epoch of 2500 BC, but rather appears to be the result of a series of developments over an immensely long time-frame going back more than 12,000 years. As Professor Ioannis Liritzis of the University of the Aegean, lead author of the surface luminescence study, concludes, parts of the site appear to have been reused and: 

it is a reasonable assumption that some of the structures were already present at Giza when the large-scale works of the Fourth Dynasty began. 31 

Nor is the question of the age of the site the only open one. Its function, too, is up for grabs. Egyptologists like to define the pyramids as “tombs and tombs only,” but as Professor Liritzis notes: 

The lack of contemporary human funerary remains from any Egyptian pyramid, and the obvious astronomical and geometric nature of the site, that prove their orientation was not by chance but inhere knowledge and star configuration patterns at the period of construction, imply that the “pyramids as tombs” theory is no longer sufficient and a broader determination of age, function and re-use of both pyramids and Giza is required …32 

“This book which descended from the sky…” 

We’ve seen that there are many passages in the Edfu Building Texts which tell us that those among the “gods” of the Early Primeval Age who survived the flood that destroyed their former Homeland set about “wandering” the world with the purpose of establishing new sacred domains in suitable locations. One passage names a specific location that some of these “gods” found their way to, the first place they settled in Egypt. This turns out not to have been Edfu in Upper (southern) Egypt but rather the city that the Greeks later came to know as Heracleopolis, 33 which is located in Lower (northern) Egypt and which the Egyptians themselves named Henen-nesut, meaning “the house of the royal child.” Archaeologists do not know when Henen-nesut was established, but a reference to it on the Palermo Stone (so-called because it is now kept in the Archaeological Museum of the city of Palermo in Italy) sheds some light on the matter. An ancient fragment of inscribed diorite, the Palermo Stone provides information (dismissed as “mythological” by Egyptologists) of some 120 predynastic kings said to have ruled in Egypt prior to 3000 BC. But it also gives details of the early Dynastic period which Egyptologists accept as “historical.” An entry on the Stone dating to the reign of Den, the second King of the First Dynasty, suggests strongly that the origins of Heracleopolis/Henen-nesut go very far back into the predynastic period. 34 

But Henen-nesut is just where the trail begins, because it turns out it was closely associated with the ancient religious center of Memphis, Inbu-Hedj (later Mn-nfr), which stands about 60 miles (100 kilometers) further north and was, according to legend, established by Menes, the first king of the First Dynasty—although again its origins are likely to be far earlier. It is therefore of interest, as Eve Reymond, the translator of the Edfu Building Texts, observes, that: 

It is impossible to read the principal Edfu records and not be struck by the very pronounced Memphite background and tone that is still preserved in them. 35 

In her view the Edfu texts “preserve the memory of a pre-dynastic religious center which once existed near Memphis”—a center which “the Egyptians looked on as the homeland of the Egyptian temple.” 36 Note, she is not saying “which once existed in Henen-nesut,” nor even “in Memphis” itself, but rather “near Memphis.” In short, the location is a bit of a mystery; Reymond supposes that archaeology has not yet identified it. 37 But wherever it was, it was believed to be a place carefully selected by the gods for the foundation of the first of the new generation of temples dedicated to the god Horus—the essential opening gambit in the long-term project to recreate the destroyed former world. 38 A text on the inner face of the enclosure wall at Edfu was recognized as an important clue by Reymond in her own search for the mystery location, since it tells us that the primordial Temple of Horus was: 

built at the dictates of the ancestors according to what was written in this book which descended from the sky to the north of Memphis. 39 

An extensive burial ground for the ancient kings of Memphis, known to Egyptologists as the “Memphite Necropolis,” rose to particular prominence during the Fourth Dynasty, 2613 BC to 2492 BC, when, according to orthodox chronology, both the Great Pyramid and the Great Sphinx are supposed to have been built. The pyramid fields of Dhashur, Saqqara and Giza were all integral parts of the Necropolis—so in theory all might be candidates. 40 But at Giza, as we’ve seen, the Sphinx models the constellation of Leo in 10,500 BC, the three pyramids model the Belt of Orion in the same epoch, and the four shafts of the Great Pyramid lock on to specific stars in the later epoch of 2500 BC. Far more obviously than Dhashur and Saqqara, therefore, it seems to me that Giza absolutely merits description as “book which descended from the sky”—a book written with the “pen” of megalithic architecture in the “script” of precession. 

There is something else. The god Horus, for whom the primordial temple was built, is a complex figure who manifests in many different symbolic forms, notably the falcon; indeed, an imposing granite statue of Horus the Falcon stands in the forecourt at the Temple of Edfu to this day. Horus was likewise frequently depicted as a man with the head of a falcon—a classic therianthrope in other words, like the Apkallu sages of Mesopotamia. But Horus had another prominent avatar and that was as a lion. 41 Moreover this Horus lion was sometimes depicted as a therianthrope with a human head and there is a specific inscription in the Edfu Temple which tells us that: 

Horus of Edfu transformed himself into a lion which had the face of a man …42 

Mystery of the Sphinx 

Given the connection that the Edfu texts draw with the Giza area, and with that mysterious “book descended from the sky,” it is therefore impossible to ignore the fact that the Ancient Egyptians closely identified Horus with the Great Sphinx of Giza. In this capacity the lion-bodied (and probably once lion-headed) Sphinx was known both as Hor-em-Akhet—“Horus in the Horizon”—and also as Horakhti which, with a subtle difference of emphasis, means “Horus of the Horizon.” 43 

However, there is a very odd thing about the Sphinx. With the exception of Dr. Rainer Stadelmann, who believes that it was the work of the Fourth Dynasty Pharaoh Khufu, all other modern Egyptologists are united in the opinion that the Sphinx was made by Khufu’s son Khafre. 44 I use the word “opinion” deliberately, because it is important to be clear at the outset that we are not dealing here with an established empirical “fact” about the Sphinx, but rather with a received body of Egyptological conjecture which has gradually, through lack of opposition, begun to be treated as though it were a proven fact. “As very often in our discipline, old and seemingly certain statements rest forever without further verification,” comments Dr. Stadelmann, 45 who should know what he’s talking about since he was Director of the German Archaeological Institute in Cairo from 1989 to 1998. 

When we confine ourselves to the facts about the Sphinx rather than the opinions of Egyptologists, the first thing we discover is that no inscriptions have survived from the Old Kingdom which refer to this stupendous and imposing monument. Even the great Egyptologist Selim Hassan, who conducted extensive excavations at Giza in the 1930s, was therefore obliged to admit: 

As to the exact age of the Sphinx, and to whom we should attribute its erection, no definite facts are known, and we have not one single contemporary inscription to enlighten us on this point. 46 

Neither, for that matter, are there any inscriptions from the First Intermediate Period, or from the Middle Kingdom, or from the Second Intermediate Period. Indeed, it is not until we come to the New Kingdom, roughly 1550 BC onward, supposedly about a thousand years after it was carved out of the bedrock of the Giza plateau, that the pharaohs of Ancient Egypt suddenly start talking about the Sphinx. 

What Selim Hassan rightly describes as “the earliest authentic opinion” is given by Amenhotep II (1427-1401 BC) who built a small temple that can still be seen today on the north side of the Sphinx enclosure. 47 There on a limestone stela, this New Kingdom pharaoh refers to the Sphinx under the names Hor-em-Akhet and Horakhti, 48 and also makes a direct reference to the Giza pyramids which —to the annoyance of Egyptologists—he does not ascribe to his Fourth Dynasty predecessors Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure, but rather nominates as “the Pyramids of Hor-em-akhet.” 49 The clear implication is that in Amenhotep’s time—far closer to the Fourth Dynasty than our own—there existed no historical archives, nor even any tradition, that linked the pyramids with the three pharaohs whom modern Egyptologists now insist were their builders. On the contrary, as Selim Hassan explains, the use of the epithet “Pyramids of Hor-em-Akhet” suggests (since Hor-em-Akhet was one of the names by which the Sphinx was known) that Amenhotep: 

considered the Sphinx to be older than the Pyramids. 50 

Chronologically, the next inscription referring to the Sphinx occurs on the famous “Dream Stela” of Thutmose IV. The story goes that before he ascended to the throne the future pharaoh was out hunting one day around Giza where the Sphinx lay forgotten, buried up to its neck in sand. Thutmosis took a siesta in the shade of the giant head at which point: 

A vision of sleep seized him at the hour when the sun was in the zenith, and he found the majesty of this revered god speaking with his own mouth, as a father speaks with his son, saying: “Behold thou me! See thou me my son Thutmosis! I am … Hor-em-Akhet … who will give thee my kingdom on earth” …51

However, there was a condition for, the Sphinx said, “the sand of this desert upon which I am has reached me … My manner is as if I were ailing in my limbs … Thou shalt be to me a protector…” 52 

To cut a long story short, Thutmosis understood that if he were to clear the Sphinx of sand and restore it to its former glory he would become pharaoh. Accordingly he did as he was instructed and, when the restoration was complete, and the throne was his as prophesied, he erected the Dream Stela in commemoration. 

If you visit the site today you can still see the huge stela—it’s nearly 12 feet high and more than 7 feet wide—standing between the paws of the Sphinx directly in front of the monument’s chest, but much of the original inscription, from the thirteenth line onward, has flaked away. In the 1830s, however, a cast was taken of it, at which time some—though unfortunately not all—of the thirteenth line was still intact. There the single syllable Khaf (no longer present today) was noted and from this, as the American Egyptologist James Henry Breasted comments in his authoritative translation of the stela, many have been inclined to conclude that the Sphinx was the work of Khafre. Such a conclusion, Breasted adds dryly, “does not follow.” He points out that there is in fact “no trace of a cartouche” (the oval sign that normally enclosed royal names) on the copies and casts of the stela that were made in the nineteenth century—which suggests strongly that the syllable Khaf did not refer at all to the Fourth Dynasty Pharaoh Khafre. 53 

Moreover, as Selim Hassan later added, even if the cartouche had been there, we are not at liberty to conclude from the damaged line that Khafre made the Sphinx. At the most it would tell us that “Thutmosis in some way connected the Sphinx with Khafre.” 54 Even Gaston Maspero, who was the Director of the Department of Antiquities at the Cairo Museum in the late nineteenth century, and who did believe the cartouche had once been present, saw no reason to deduce from such flimsy evidence that the Sphinx was Khafre’s work. On the contrary, his preferred interpretation was that the purpose of Thutmosis in this part of the inscription was to recognize a former renovation and clearance of the Sphinx undertaken by Khafre. “Consequently,” Maspero wrote, “we have here almost certain proof that the Sphinx was already buried in sand in the time of Khufu [Khafre’s father] and his predecessors.” 55 

Maspero would later change his view, grudgingly stating that the Sphinx “probably represents Khafre himself” 56 and thus falling in line with the growing consensus among Egyptologists of the twentieth century. His initial opinion that the monument was older than Khafre, and indeed had been buried in sand in the time of Khufu, had in part been based on information contained in yet another stela, the so-called Inventory Stela, discovered at Giza in the 1850s by the French archaeologist, Auguste Mariette. The gist of the Inventory Stela, once also referred to as the Stela of Khufu’s Daughter, 57 was that the Great Sphinx and the Valley Temple, as well as a number of other structures on the plateau, were already in existence long before Khufu came to the throne. 58 

What apparently “debunked” it, however, and no doubt contributed to Maspero’s change of mind, was firm evidence that the hieroglyphic writing system used in the inscription was not consistent with the style of the Fourth Dynasty, but belonged to a much more recent period—Selim Hassan suggests the Twenty-sixth Dynasty. 59 This interesting little stela has therefore subsequently come to be regarded as a work of fiction, most likely fabricated by a group of priests who wished to magnify the name of the goddess Isis (who was popular in the Twenty-sixth Dynasty, 664-525 BC) and thus of no value in our attempts to determine what happened at Giza nearly 2000 years earlier in the Fourth Dynasty—or perhaps long before. 

That is certainly how things look when viewed through the prism of “Egyptologic”—i.e. that special form of reasoning, with a built-in double standard, deployed only by Egyptologists. According to Egyptologic, if evidence supports established theories then that evidence will be accepted. But if evidence undermines established theories, then that evidence must be rejected. Thus Egyptology uses entirely circumstantial and non-contemporary data to support its present claim that the Sphinx and its megalithic temples were the work of the Pharaoh Khafre of the Fourth Dynasty (as we’ve seen, Selim Hassan admits that “we have not one single contemporary inscription” to enlighten us as to the exact age of the Sphinx). So the dating of the monument to the Fourth Dynasty—something that Egyptologists tout as a “fact,” that is taught as such in universities and that is widely disseminated by the media—rests entirely on its “context” (the nearby pyramids and megalithic temples) and on that single syllable Khaf, which was once present on the Eighteenth Dynasty Dream Stela. 

The flimsy case of Egyptology 

As to context, even if the pyramids were exclusively the work of the Fourth Dynasty—which is called into question, as we’ve seen, by the surface luminescence dating of the pyramid attributed to Menkaure—we could still not safely deduce that the Sphinx is also Fourth Dynasty work. Indeed, it could be the case that the pyramids were built where they are precisely because the Sphinx was already there, bestowing an air of ancient sanctity on the site. 

Neither do the megalithic temples really prove anything about the Sphinx since there is no evidence that unequivocally dates their own construction to the Fourth Dynasty. The most that can be said is that a black diorite statue of Khafre (now in the Cairo Museum) was found dumped upside down in a deep pit in the Valley Temple. However, this tells us only that Khafre at some point required his statue to be placed in the temple and that he therefore identified with the temple in some way, not that he built it. 

Superficially more persuasive is the claim made by some Egyptologists that Khafre’s name was found inscribed at the Valley Temple. On his “Guardians” website, National Geographic Explorer in Residence Dr. Zahi Hawass, the former Director of the Giza Plateau and Secretary General of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, has this to say about the Valley Temple: 

inscriptions in the building are around the entrance doorways; they list the King’s names and titles, those of the goddess Bastet (north doorway) and those of Hathor (south doorway). 60 

Wikipedia, which is influential in shaping public perceptions of Giza, and which routinely labels non-mainstream approaches as “pseudoscience,” goes even further than Hawass when it says of the Valley Temple that: 

Blocks have been found showing the partial remains of an inscription with the Horus name of Khafre (Weser-ib). 61 

On closer examination, however, Wikipedia turns out to be misinformed. Stephen Quirke, Professor of Egyptian Archaeology at University College London, was kind enough to look into this for me when I raised it with him and in due course reported the results of his investigation. The partial inscription with the Horus name of Khafre does not in fact appear on blocks from the Valley Temple, but rather on blocks from an entirely different building at Giza. 62 

What, then, of Dr. Hawass’s statement about “the King’s names and titles.” It is clear, at any rate, what his source is because in the first (1947) edition of his classic study The Pyramids of Egypt, I.E.S. Edwards, formerly Keeper of Egyptian Antiquities at the British Museum, wrote several pages about the Valley Temple which, along with the rest of the Egyptological profession by this time, he identified as being the work of Khafre. 63 “Around each doorway,” he stated: 

is a band of hieroglyphic inscription giving the name and titles of the King; no other inscriptions or reliefs occur anywhere else in the building. 64 

That would seem to settle the matter were it not for the fact that many years later, when Edwards produced the definitive final edition of his book, he revised the above passage with important information that he did not present in 1947. “Around each doorway,” we now read: 

was carved a band of hieroglyphic inscriptions giving the name and titles of the King, but only the last words “Beloved [of the goddess] Bastet” and “Beloved [of the goddess] Hathor” are preserved. No other inscriptions occur anywhere else in the building. 65 

Needless to say the words “Beloved of Bastet” and “Beloved of Hathor” do not, in isolation like this, prove that Khafre was the King referred to as being the “beloved” of these deities. They could apply to anybody and therefore cannot legitimately be used to support the claim that the Valley Temple was the work of Khafre.

Is there anything else to support that claim? The obscure and eye-wateringly expensive Encyclopedia of the Archaeology of Ancient Egypt contains an entry on the “Khafre pyramid complex.” Written again by Zahi Hawass, the entry informs us that the Valley Temple: 

is identified with Khafre from inscriptions on granite casing blocks from the western end of the Valley Temple. Reliefs from this complex were discovered at el-Lisht, where they were used as fill for the pyramid of Amenemhat I (Twelfth Dynasty). 66 

Now this is really clutching at straws! Since they are miles away at el-Lisht, cannibalized as filler material for a later monarch’s pyramid, the reality is that these blocks tell us nothing reliable at all about the Valley Temple. Perhaps they were taken from there, but then again, perhaps they came from somewhere else entirely. 

Besides, nobody is claiming that any of the inscriptions were made on the limestone core masonry of the Valley Temple. All of them appear on “granite casing blocks” and as we’ve seen, the granite casing blocks of the Valley Temple give every appearance of being a veneer that was applied long after the core limestone blocks were set in place—in some cases perhaps as early as 3640 BC and in others perhaps as late as 1190 BC. That Khafre may well have been one of several pharaohs who carried out restoration work on the Valley Temple during this long period, and that he commemorated his good deeds with an official inscription and some statues of himself—perhaps at the same time as he also appears to have carried out a restoration project on the Sphinx—does not mean that he was the original builder either of the Sphinx or the Temple. 

So we are left, then, with that single syllable Khaf on the Eighteenth Dynasty Dream Stela, which modern Egyptologists (unlike their nineteenth-century predecessors) have eagerly grasped as “proof” that Khafre built the Sphinx. Needless to say the Eighteenth Dynasty and the Fourth Dynasty are not contemporary with one another. Moreover, there is a strong case to be made that even the Eighteenth Dynasty attribution of the stela is questionable. Breasted, for example, points to “errors and striking irregularities in orthography” and to a number of other “suspicious peculiarities” leading him to conclude that the inscription was not in fact the work of Thutmosis IV but was a “late restoration” dating to between the Twenty-first Dynasty and the Twenty-sixth (Saitic) Dynasty. 67 

In other words, it is quite possible that the Dream Stela is as young as the Inventory Stela. Yet “Egyptologic” requires the shaky evidence of the Khaf syllable on the former to be accepted as proof that Khafre made the Sphinx, whereas the several clear statements on the latter that absolutely contradict the attribution to Khafre are rejected as “preposterous fictions.” 

Dynamite revelations 

Here are some extracts from the text of the Inventory Stela. Note before reading that all the pharaohs of Egypt were regarded as incarnations of the god Horus 68 and the name Horus was therefore routinely included in their titles. Each King also had a “Horus name,” which in Khufu’s case was Mezer: 69 

Live Horus, the Mezer, the King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Khufu, given life. He found the House of Isis, Mistress of the Pyramid, by the side of cavity of the Sphinx, on the northwest of the House of Osiris, Lord of Rostau … The plans of the Image of Hor-em-akhet were brought in order to bring to revision the sayings of the disposition of the Image … He restored the statue all covered in painting … He made to quarry the hind part of the nemes headdress, which was lacking, from gilded stone, and which had a length of about 7 ells (3.7 meters or 12 feet). He came to make a tour, in order to see the thunderbolt, which stands in the Place of the Sycamore, so named because of a great sycamore, whose branches were struck when the Lord of Heaven descended upon the place of Hor-em-akhet … The figure of this God, being cut in stone, is solid, and will exist to eternity, having always its face regarding the East. 70 

The language of the Inventory Stela is obscure, but Selim Hassan’s analysis brings some clarity. “If we could believe its inscriptions,” he writes: 

we should have to credit Khufu with having repaired the Sphinx, apparently after it had been damaged by a thunderbolt. As a matter of fact, there may be a grain of truth in this story, for the tail of the nemes headdress of the Sphinx is certainly missing, and it is not a part, which, by reason of its shape and position, could be easily broken off, except by a direct blow from some heavy object, delivered with terrific force. There is actually to be seen on the back of the Sphinx the scar of this breakage, and traces of the old mortar with which it was repaired. This scar measures about 4 meters which accords with the measurements recorded on the stela … Therefore, it is perhaps likely that the Sphinx was struck by lightning, but there is not a particle of evidence to show that this accident happened in the reign of Khufu. 71 

Neither, however, is there any evidence to prove that the “accident” to the Sphinx did not happen in the reign of Khufu. All we have is the Egyptological bias that it could not have happened then, because the Sphinx is supposed to be the work of Khafre, undertaken after Khufu’s death, and therefore—obviously—should not have existed in Khufu’s time. 

Figure 39: The Inventory Stela. The gist of the inscriptions, which Egyptologists reject, is that the Great Sphinx and the Valley Temple, as well as a number of other structures on the Giza plateau, were already in existence long before Khufu came to the throne. 

The same goes for the second dynamite revelation of the Inventory Stela, namely the mention of “the House of Osiris, Lord of Rostau.” 72 We can gather the location of this structure because “the cavity of the Sphinx” is said to lie on its “northwest” 73—which means, to put things the other way round, that “the House of Osiris, Lord of Rostau” is located immediately southeast of the Sphinx. The only structure which fits these coordinates is the Valley Temple which does indeed lie immediately southeast of the Sphinx. As with the references to the Sphinx itself, therefore, the testimony of the Inventory Stela is that the Valley Temple was not made by Khafre since it was already in existence in the time of his predecessor Khufu. 

These, then, are the real reasons why the Inventory Stela has been rejected by Egyptologists as a preposterous fiction—rather, say, than as an inscription that preserves and transmits to a later age, using language and terminology suitable to that age, a much older but genuine tradition. Certainly the rejection cannot be because the Inventory Stela is not contemporary with the reign of Khufu, or because of its Twenty-sixth Dynasty “orthography”—since such factors do not prevent Egyptologists from accepting the Dream Stela, which suffers from the same non-contemporaneity and the same “striking irregularities in orthography.” In short, is it not obvious that the Inventory Stela has been rejected and ignored, while the Dream Stela has been accepted and embraced, because the former blows the established theory of Egyptian history completely out of the water, while the latter can be conveniently “spun” to support the established theory? 

A bolt from heaven and an ancient archive 

Quite apart from its implications of a much older Sphinx, there are two other aspects of the Inventory Stela that merit further investigation. 

The first is the information that the Sphinx had been damaged by a “thunderbolt.” Selim Hassan is willing to accept there might be some truth to that, but we cannot be sure that a thunderbolt means a lightning strike as he assumes. The thunderbolt in question is said in the inscription still to have been present for Khufu to “see” when he made his “tour.” This would not be the case with lightning, which would leave damage but not a physical object that could be viewed. On the other hand a meteorite, after striking and damaging the Sphinx, would have been there, on the spot, for inspection by the King —and descending in fire from the sky amidst awesome noise, burning a great old tree in its passage, a meteorite might easily be described as a thunderbolt (indeed in a number of cultures that was exactly how meteorites were described). 74 

Equally intriguing is the Inventory Stela’s statement that “the plans of the Image of Hor-emakhet”—i.e. of the Sphinx—were brought to the site by Khufu, presumably for reference purposes while the repair of the monument was undertaken. This very obviously implies the existence of an ancient “archive” pertaining to Giza, perhaps a “Hall of Records” reminiscent of the lost records in the temple library at Edfu from which we know the Building Texts were extracted. 

These, as we’ve seen, were said to be the words of the Seven Sages, taken down in writing by no lesser personage than the wisdom god Thoth himself. Reymond even suggests that there may once have existed a Sacred Book of the Early Primeval Age of the Gods, in which the whole “divine” plan in Egypt was set out. 75 And the indications are, she says, that this was linked to a second ancient book, The Specifications of the Mounds of the Early Primeval Age, which was believed to contain records not only of all the lesser “mounds” and the temples that would ultimately be built upon them as part of the project to bring about the rebirth of the destroyed world of the “gods,” but also of the Great Primeval Mound itself. 76 

Unfortunately nothing more is known about either of these lost “books” than the few very brief and tantalizing references to them at Edfu. Nonetheless, as I suggested earlier, there is every possibility that this Great Primeval Mound, where the time of the present age of the earth supposedly began, was the rocky hill at Giza around which the Great Pyramid would in due course be built. There is, too, an extraordinary text, preserved on papyrus from Egypt’s Middle Kingdom, which speaks of a search for “the secret chambers of the sanctuary of Thoth”—secret chambers that Khufu wished to “copy” for his temple. A deep and ancient mystery that we’ll explore in the next chapter lies concealed in these strange references.

next

https://exploringrealhistory.blogspot.com/2021/07/part-6-magicians-of-gods-books-of-thoth.html

The Books of Thoth

notes

Chapter 9 

1. John Baines and Jaromir Malek, Atlas of Ancient Egypt, Time-Life Books, 1990, p. 76. 

2. Ibid. The inner and outer enclosure walls date from the Old Kingdom, and a later wall running outside the outer one dates from the First Intermediate Period (2134–2040 BC). There are remains of other structures that have been dated to the Second Intermediate Period (1640–1532 BC) and to the New Kingdom (1550–1070 BC). 

3. E.A.E. Reymond, The Mythical Origin of the Egyptian Temple, Manchester University Press, 1969, p. 8. 

4. Ibid., p. 151: “The mythological situation which we have been analyzing discloses a tradition which originated in another place…” 

5. Ibid., pp. 55, 90, 105, 274. 

6. Ibid., p. 55. 

7. Ibid., pp. 109, 113–14, 127. 

8. E.g. see p. 19 “the crew of the Falcon.” See also pp. 27, 177, 180, 181, 187, 202. There are repeated references throughout the Edfu texts to the crews of ships and to sailing. Thus, p. 180: “The Shebtiw sailed…” p. 187: “They were believed to have sailed to another part of the primeval world.” 

9. Ibid., p. 190. 

10. Ibid., p. 274: “They journeyed through the unoccupied lands of the primeval age and founded other sacred domains.” 

11. Ibid., p. 122. 

12. Ibid., p. 134. 

13. Ibid., pp. 106–7. 

14. E.g. Ibid., pp. 44, 258: “At Edfu we have only fragments. A selected number of accounts, from a great and important history of the Egyptian temples.” 

15. The last known inscription in the sacred hieroglyphs of Ancient Egypt was made at the Temple of Isis at Philae in AD 394 and the last known example of demotic graffiti was also found there, dated to AD 425. “If knowledge of the hieroglyphs persisted beyond this time, no record of it has been found.” John Anthony West, The Traveler’s Key to Ancient Egypt, Harrap Columbus, London, 1987, p. 426. 

16. Howard Vyse, Operations Carried on at the Pyramids of Gizeh in 1837, with an Account of a Voyage into Upper Egypt, James Fraser, Regent Street, London, 1840, Vol. I, pp. 67–8. 

17. The Mesopotamian and Egyptian chronologies are well known. For Peru see Ruth Shady Solis et al, Caral: The Oldest Civilization in the Americas, Proyecto Especial Arqueologico Caral-Supe/INC, 2009. 

18. Plato, Timaeus and Critias, Penguin Classics, 1977, p. 36. 

19. Ibid., pp. 34–8. 

20. J. Gwynn Griffiths, Atlantis and Egypt With Other Selected Essays, Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 1991, pp. 3–30. 

21. Miriam Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, Vol. I: the Old and Middle Kingdoms, University of California Press, 1975, p. 211. 

22. Ibid., pp. 212–13. 

23. Ibid., p. 215, note 3. 

24. Margaret Buson, The Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt, Facts on File, New York, Oxford, 1991, p. 130. 

25. Ibid. 

26. Ibid. 

27. Miriam Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, op. cit., p. 213. 

28. Ibid., p. 214. 

29. Ibid. 

30. Plato, Critias, Benjamin Jowett Translation, Internet Classics Archive, http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/critias.html. 

31. Plato, Timaeus and Critias, Penguin Classics Edition, op. cit., p. 38. 

32. J. Gwynn Griffiths, Atlantis and Egypt, op. cit., p. 23. 

33. https://egyptsites.wordpress.com/2009/03/03/sa-el-hagar/. 

34. Ibid. 

35. E.A.E. Reymond, The Mythical Origin of the Egyptian Temple, op. cit., p. 324. 

36. Ibid., p. 213. 

37. Ibid., p. 31. 

38. Ibid., p. 111. 

39. Ibid., p. 142. 

40. Plato, Timaeus and Critias, op. cit., Critias, p. 136. 

41. E.A.E. Reymond, The Mythical Origin of the Egyptian Temple, op. cit., p. 113. 42. Ibid., p. 109. 

43. Ibid., p. 127. 

44. Plato, Timaeus and Critias, op. cit., Timaeus, p. 38. 

45. Ibid. 

46. Ibid., p. 35. 

47. E.A.E. Reymond, The Mythical Origin of the Egyptian Temple, op. cit., p. 19. 

48. E.W. West, Trans., F. Max Muller, Ed., Pahlavi Texts, Part I, Reprint Edition, Atlantic Publishers and Distributors, New Delhi, 1990, p. 17. 

49. E.A.E. Reymond, The Mythical Origin of the Egyptian Temple, op. cit., p. 113. 

50. Ibid., p. 279. 

51. Ibid., p. 113. 

52. Ibid. 

53. Archaeoastronomy: The Journal of the Center for Archaeoastronomy, Vol. VIII, Nos. 1–4, January–December 1985, p. 99. 

54. Thor Conway in Ray A. Williamson and Claire R. Farrer (Eds.) Earth and Sky, op. cit, p. 246. 

55. Plato, Timaeus and Critias, op. cit., Timaeus, p. 38. 

56. Ignatius Donnelly, Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, Dover Publications Inc., New York, 1976, p. 23. 

57. Plato, Timaeus and Critias, op. cit., Timaeus, p. 37. 

58. Plato, Critias, Benjamin Jowett Translation, Internet Classics Archive, http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/critias.html. 

59. Plato, Timaeus and Critias, op. cit., Critias, p. 138. 

60. E.A.E. Reymond, The Mythical Origin of the Egyptian Temple, op. cit., p. 37. 

61. Ibid., p. 220. 

62. Ibid., p. 240. 63. Ibid., p. 198. 

64. Ibid., p. 108. 

65. Ibid. 

66. Ibid., p. 109. 

67. Ibid., pp. 202, 323–4. 

68. Plato, Timaeus and Critias, op. cit., Timaeus, p. 38. 

69. E.A.E. Reymond, The Mythical Origin of the Egyptian Temple, op. cit., p. 171: “A pãy-land is said to have originated after the Creator dried up the water around his place of origin.” See also p. 172: “The word pãy-land describes a land that emerged from the water…” 

70. Ibid., p. 162. 

71. Ibid., p. 173. 

72. Ibid., p. 324. 

73. Ibid., p. 194. 

74. Ibid., p. 274. 

75. Ibid., p. 187. 

76. Ibid., p. 274. 

77. Ibid., p. 190. 

78. Ibid., p. 274. 

79. Ibid., p. 190. See also p. 33. 

80. Ibid., p. 33. 

81. Ibid., p. 24: “the Shebtiw whose function is described as din iht, to name (= create) the things.” See also p. 180. 

82. Ibid., p. 41. 

83. Ibid., p. 28.

84. Ibid., pp. 95, 96, 108, 110–11. 

85. Ibid., p. 96. 

86. Ibid., p. 91. 

87. Ibid., p. 92. 

88. Ibid. 

89. Ibid., p. 25, 41, 289. 

90. Ibid., p. 159. 

91. Ibid., e.g. pp. 28, 66, 236. 

92. Ibid., pp. 310–11. 

93. Ibid., p. 9. 

94. Ibid., p. 48. 

95. Ibid., p. 273. 

96. Plato, Timaeus and Critias, Penguin Classics, op. cit., Timaeus, p. 36. 

97. Ibid. 

Chapter 10 

1. Plato, Laws II, in John M. Cooper (Ed.) Plato: Complete Works, Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis/Cambridge, 1997, p. 1348. 

2. Graham Hancock, Fingerprints of the Gods, William Heinemann Ltd., London, 1995, e.g. p. 446ff., pp. 456–8. 

3. Robert Bauval and Adrian Gilbert, The Orion Mystery, William Heinemann Ltd., London, 1994. 

4. Robert Bauval and Graham Hancock, Keeper of Genesis, William Heinemann Ltd., London, 1996. 

5. Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend, Hamlet’s Mill: An Essay Investigating the Origins of Human Knowledge and its Transmission through Myth, Nonpareil Books, 1977, reprinted 1999, p. 59. 

6. Graham Hancock and Santha Faiia, Heaven’s Mirror: Quest for the Lost Civilization, Michael Joseph, London, 1998. 

7. See ibid for an extensive discussion. 

8. Paolo Debertolis, Goran Marjanovic et al, Archaeo acoustic analysis of the ancient site of Kanda (Macedonia), Proceedings in the Congress “The 3rd Virtual International Conference on Advanced Research in Scientific Areas” (ARSA-2014) Slovakia, 1–5 December 2014: 237–251. Published by: EDIS-Publishing Institution of the University of Zilina, Univerzitná 1, 01026 Žilina, Slovak Republic. Paper available online here: https://www.academia.edu/9818666/Archaeoacoustic_analysis_of_the_ancient_site_of_Kanda_Macedonia_._Preliminary_results. 

9. http://www.usbr.gov/lc/hooverdam/History/essays/artwork.html. 

10. Ibid. 

11. Ibid. 

12. Richard Guy Wilson, “American Modernism in the West: Hoover Dam.” Images of an American Land, ed. Thomas Carter. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997. P. 10, cited in, The Hoover Dam: Lonely Lands Made Fruitful, http://xroads.virginia.edu/~1930s/display/hoover/modern.html. 

13. E.g. see: https://www.wisdomuniversity.org/ChartresOverview.htm: “This is the magic and mystery of Chartres, site of the ‘queen of the cathedrals.’ This is also the power of ‘Astronomica,’ as it was known among the ancients, which marks the last and highest of the seven liberal arts, the oldest continuously developed learning system known to humanity, which emanated out of Ancient Egypt and was taken to its highest refinement by the Chartrian masters. Sacred astronomy is embedded in the stones and stained glass of Chartres cathedral. It was considered the highest of the liberal arts because it alone contemplates the entire cosmos and seeks to discern ultimate meaning and purpose to all of creation.” 

14. See discussion in Graham Hancock, Fingerprints of the Gods, op. cit., Chapter 49, p. 443ff. 

15. E.A.E. Reymond, The Mythical Origin of the Egyptian Temple, op. cit., p. 134, cited in Chapter Nine. 

16. Michael A. Hoffman, Egypt Before the Pharaohs, Michael O’Mara Books Ltd., 1991, pp. 89–90. See also Karl W. Butzer, Early Hydraulic Civilization in Egypt, The University of Chicago Press, 1876, p. 9. 

17. Graham Hancock, Fingerprints of the Gods, op. cit., Chapter 52, p. 497. 

18. For a discussion of the geological dating of the Sphinx by Professor Robert Schoch of Boston University see ibid., Chapter 46, p. 420ff. 

19. L. Liritzis, A. Vafiadou, “Surface Luminescence Dating of Some Egyptian Monuments,” Journal of Cultural Heritage 16 (2015), Table 1, p. 137. 

20. Ibid., pp. 134–50. 

21. Ibid., p. 134. 

22. Ibid., pp. 134–50. 

23. Ibid., Table 1, p. 137. 

24. Ibid. 

25. Personal communication from Professor Robert Schoch by email dated 20 January 2015. 

26. L. Liritzis, A. Vafiadou, “Surface Luminescence Dating of Some Egyptian Monuments,” Journal of Cultural Heritage, op. cit., Table 1, p. 137. 

27. Personal communication from Professor Robert Schoch by email dated 20 January 2015. 

28. L. Liritzis, A. Vafiadou, “Surface Luminescence Dating of Some Egyptian Monuments,” Journal of Cultural Heritage, op. cit., Table 1, p. 137. 

29. Ibid. 

30. For example see John Baines and Jaromir Malek, Atlas of Ancient Egypt, Time-Life Books, 1990, p. 36. 

31. L. Liritzis, A. Vafiadou, “Surface Luminescence Dating of Some Egyptian Monuments,” Journal of Cultural Heritage, op. cit., p. 147. 

32. Ibid. 

33. E.A.E. Reymond, The Mythical Origin of the Egyptian Temple, op. cit., p. 187. 

34. Toby A.H. Wilkinson, Early Dynastic Egypt, Routledge, London and New York, 1999, p. 325. 

35. E.A.E. Reymond, The Mythical Origin of the Egyptian Temple, op. cit. p. 262 36. Ibid., p. 263. 

37. Ibid. 

38. Ibid. 

39. Ibid., p. 262. 

40. Reymond (The Mythical Origin of the Egyptian Temple, op. cit., p. 263) eventually opts for Saqqara as her favored candidate for “the place to the north of Memphis” where the book was believed to have descended from the sky. Her logic escapes me. Henennesut stands at latitude 29:08, Memphis at latitude 29:84, Saqqara at latitude 29:87, the Great Pyramid of Giza at latitude 29:98, and Dhashur at latitude 29:80. Since the higher the number the further north you are, it is obvious we must rule Henen-nesut and Dhashur out: the former is located 0:76 of a degree south of Memphis and the latter is located 0:04 of a degree south of Memphis. Saqqara is north of Memphis but by just 0:03 of a degree—so close as to be on almost exactly the same latitude. By contrast Giza is 0:14 of a degree north of Memphis and much more obviously fits the bill. 

41. E.A. Wallace Budge, The Gods of the Egyptians, Methuen and Company, Chicago and London, 1904, reprinted by Dover Books, 1969, Vol. I, pp. 467, 468, 473, etc. 

42. Selim Hassan, The Sphinx: Its History in the Light of Recent Excavations, Government Press, Cairo, 1949, p. 80. 

43. See discussion in Robert Bauval and Graham Hancock, Keeper of Genesis, op. cit., pp. 5, 156ff, 160ff, etc. 

44. Rainer Stadelman, “The Great Sphinx of Giza,” in Zahi Hawass (Ed), Egyptology at the Dawn of the Twenty-first Century (Proceedings of the Eighth International Congress of Egyptologists, Cairo, 2000; Vol. I: Archaeology), The American University in Cairo Press, Cairo, New York, 2002, pp. 464–9. 

45. Ibid., p. 465. 

46. Selim Hassan, The Sphinx, op. cit., p. 75. 

47. Ibid., p. 75. 

48. Ibid., p. 76. 

49. Ibid., pp. 76, 185. 

50. Ibid., p. 76. 

51. James Henry Breasted, Ancient Records Of Egypt, University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago, 2001, Vol. 2, p. 323. 

52. Ibid. 

53. Ibid., pp. 320, 324. 

54. Selim Hassan, The Sphinx, op. cit., p. 76. 

55. Gaston Maspero, The Dawn of Civilization, SPCK, London, 1894, p. 366. 

56. Gaston Maspero, A Manual of Egyptian Archaeology, Putnam’s Sons, New York, 1914, p. 74. 

57. Selim Hassan, The Sphinx, op. cit., p. 222. 

58. For a translation of the full text of the Inventory Stela see James Henry Breasted, Ancient Records of Egypt, op. cit., Vol. I, pp. 83– 5. See also Selim Hassan, The Sphinx, op. cit., pp. 222–7. 

59. Selim Hassan, The Sphinx, op. cit., p. 225. 

60. http://www.guardians.net/hawass/khafre.htm. 

61. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khafra#Valley_Temple. 

62. The so-called “Mortuary Temple” attributed to Khafre. Email from Professor Stephen Quirke to Graham Hancock dated 2 April 2015. 

63. I.E.S. Edwards, The Pyramids of Egypt, Pelican Books, 1947, reprinted 1949, p. 107ff. 

64. Ibid., p.109. 

65. I.E.S. Edwards, The Pyramids of Egypt, Penguin, 1993, p. 124. Emphasis added. 

66. Kathryn A. Bard (Ed.), Encyclopedia of The Archaeology of Ancient Egypt, Routledge, 1999, pp. 342–5. 

67. Breasted, Ancient Records of Egypt, op. cit., Vol. II, pp. 320–1, note b. 

68. Henri Frankfort, Kingship and the Gods, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1948, 1978, p. 148. 

69. William Matthew Flinders Petrie, Memphis I, The Palace of Apries (Memphis II), Meydum and Memphis III, Cambridge University Press, 2013, p. 43. 

70. Selim Hassan, The Sphinx, op. cit., pp. 222–4. 

71. Ibid., pp. 224–5. 

72. Ibid., p. 223. 

73. Ibid. 

74. For example, Tibet. Tibetan Thotchkas are made from meteoritic iron: “The word thokcha is composed of two words, thog meaning above, first or thunderbolt and lcags meaning iron or metal. The meaning of thokcha can thus be given as ‘first or original iron’ or ‘thunderbolt iron’” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thokcha.) 

75. E.A.E. Reymond, The Mythical Origin of the Egyptian Temple, op. cit., p. 10. 

76. Ibid., pp. 8–10, 18.

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