Fingerprints of the Gods

  1991, p. 7ff.

  29 Ibid., pp. 9-10.

  30 Sent to me by fax 27 January 1993.

  31 David O’Connor, ‘Boat Graves and Pyramid Origins’, p. 12.

  32 Ibid., p. 11-12 .

  33 Guardian, 21 December 1991.

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  of seafaring had been present in Egypt from the very beginning of its

  3000 year history. Moreover I knew that the earliest wall paintings found

  in the Nile Valley, dating back perhaps as much as 1500 years before the

  burial of the Abydos fleet (to around 4500 BC) showed the same long,

  sleek, high-prowed vessels in action.34

  Could an experienced race of ancient seafarers have become involved

  with the indigenous inhabitants of the Nile Valley at some indeterminate

  period before the official beginning of history at around 3000 BC?

  Wouldn’t this explain Egypt’s curious and paradoxical—but nonetheless

  enduring—obsession with ships in the desert (and references to what

  sounded like sophisticated ships in the Pyramid Texts, including one said

  to have been more than 2000 feet long)?35

  In raising these conjectures, I did not doubt that religious symbolism

  had existed in Ancient Egypt in which, as scholars endlessly pointed out,

  ships had been designated as vessels for the pharaoh’s soul.

  Nevertheless that symbolism did not solve the problem posed by the high

  level of technological achievement of the buried ships; such evolved and

  sophisticated designs called for a long period of development. Wasn’t it

  worth looking into the possibility—even if only to rule it out—that the

  Giza and Abydos vessels could have been parts of a cultural legacy, not

  of a land-loving, riverside-dwelling, agricultural people like the

  indigenous Ancient Egyptians but of an advanced seafaring nation?

  Such seafarers could have been expected to be navigators who would

  have known how to set a course by the stars and who would perhaps also

  have developed the skills necessary to draw up accurate maps and charts

  of the oceans they had traversed.

  Might they also have been architects and stonemasons whose

  characteristic medium had been polygonal, megalithic blocks like those

  of the Valley Temple and the Osireion?

  And might they have been associated in some way with the legendary

  gods of the First Time, said to have brought to Egypt not only civilization

  and astronomy and architecture, and the knowledge of mathematics and

  writing, but a host of other useful skills and gifts, by far the most notable

  and the most significant of which had been the gift of agriculture?

  There is evidence of an astonishingly early period of agricultural

  advance and experimentation in the Nile Valley at about the end of the

  last Ice Age in the northern hemisphere. The characteristics of this great

  34 See Cairo Museum, Gallery 54, wall-painting of ships from Badarian period c. 4500 BC.

  35 The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, p. 192, Utt. 519: ‘O Morning Star, Horus of the

  Netherworld ... you having a soul and appearing in front of your boat of 770 cubits ...

  Take me with you in the cabin of your boat.’

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  Egyptian ‘leap forward’ suggest that it could only have resulted from an

  influx of new ideas from some as yet unidentified source.

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  Chapter 46

  The Eleventh Millennium BC

  If it were not for the powerful mythology of Osiris, and if this civilizing,

  scientific, law-making deity was not remembered in particular for having

  introduced domesticated crops into the Nile Valley in the remote and

  fabled epoch known as the First Time, it would probably not be a matter

  of any great interest that at some point between 13,000 BC and 10,000 BC

  Egypt enjoyed a period of what has been described as ‘precocious

  agricultural development’—possibly the earliest agricultural revolution

  anywhere in the world identified with certainty by historians.1

  As we saw in recent chapters, sources such as the Palermo Stone,

  Manetho and the Turin Papyrus contain several different and at times

  contradictory chronologies. All these chronologies nevertheless agree on

  a very ancient date for the First Time of Osiris: the golden age when the

  gods were believed to have ruled in Egypt. In addition, the sources

  demonstrate a striking convergence over the importance they accord to

  the eleventh millennium BC in particular,2 the precessional Age of Leo

  when the great ice sheets of the northern hemisphere were undergoing

  their final, ferocious meltdown.

  Perhaps coincidentally, evidence unearthed since the 1970s by

  geologists, archaeologists and prehistorians like Michael Hoffman, Fekri

  Hassan and Professor Fred Wendorff has confirmed that the eleventh

  millennium BC was indeed an important period in Egyptian prehistory,

  during which immense and devastating floods swept repeatedly down the

  Nile Valley.3 Fekri Hassan has speculated that this prolonged series of

  natural disasters, which reached a crescendo around or just after 10,500

  BC (and continued to recur periodically until about 9000 BC) might have

  been responsible for snuffing out the early agricultural experiment.4

  At any rate, that experiment did come to an end (for whatever reason),

  and appears not to have been attempted again for at least another 5000

  years.5

  1 Egypt before the Pharaohs., pp. 29, 88.

  2 To give yet another example, here is Diodorus Siculus (first century BC) passing on

  what he was told by Egyptian priests: ‘The number of years from Osiris and Isis, they

  say, to the reign of Alexander, who founded the city which bears his name in Egypt

  [fourth century BC], is over ten thousand ...’ Diodorus Siculus, volume I, p. 73.

  3 Egypt before The Pharaohs, p. 85.

  4 Ibid., p. 90.

  5 A History of Ancient Egypt, p. 21.

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  Kick-start

  There is something mysterious about Egypt’s so-called ‘palaeolithic

  agricultural revolution’. Here, quoted from the standard texts (Hoffman’s

  Egypt before The Pharaohs and Wendorff and Schild’s Prehistory of the

  Nile Valley) are some key facts from the little that is known about this

  great leap forward that occurred so inexplicably towards the end of the

  last Ice Age:

  1 ‘Shortly after 13,000 BC, grinding stones and sickle blades with a

  glossy sheen on their bits (the result of silica from cut stems adhering

  to a sickle’s cutting edge) appear in late Palaeolithic tool kits ... It is

  clear that the grinding stones were used in preparing plant food.’6

  2 At many riverside sites, at exactly this time, fish stopped being a

  significant food source and became a negligible one, as evidenced by

  the absence of fish remains: ‘The decline in fishing as a source of food

  is related to the appearance of a new food resource represented by

  ground grain. The associated pollen strongly suggests that this grain

  was barley, and significantly, this large gras
s-pollen, tentatively

  identified as barley, makes a sudden appearance in the pollen profile

  just before the time when the first settlements were established in this

  area ...’7

  3 ‘As apparently spectacular as the rise of protoagriculture in the late

  Palaeolithic Nile Valley was its precipitous decline. No one knows

  exactly why, but after about 10,500 BC the early sickle blades and

  grinding disappear to be replaced throughout Egypt by Epipalaeolithic

  hunting, fishing and gathering peoples who use stone tools.’8

  Scanty though the evidence may be, it is clear in its general

  implications: Egypt enjoyed a golden age of agricultural plenty which

  began around 13,000 BC and was brought to an abrupt halt around the

  middle of the eleventh millennium BC. A kick-start to the process appears

  to have been given by the introduction of already domesticated barley

  into the Nile Valley, immediately followed by the establishment of a

  number of farming settlements which exploited the new resource. The

  settlements were equipped with simple but extremely effective

  agricultural tools and accessories. After the eleventh millennium BC,

  however, there was a prolonged relapse to more primitive ways of life.

  The imagination is inclined to roam freely over such data in search of

  an explanation—and all such explanations can only be guesswork. What

  6 Egypt before The Pharaohs, p. 88.

  7 Fred Wendorff and Romuald Schild, Prehistory of the Nile Valley, Academic Press, New

  York, 1976, p. 291.

  8 Egypt before the Pharaohs, pp. 89-90.

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  is certain is that the none of the evidence suggests that palaeolithic

  Egypt’s ‘agricultural revolution’ could have been a local initiative. On the

  contrary it feels in every way like a transplant. A transplant appears

  suddenly, after all, and can be rejected equally fast if conditions change,

  just as settled agriculture seems to have been rejected in ancient Egypt

  after the great Nile floods of the eleventh millennium BC.

  Climate Change

  What was the weather like then?

  We’ve noted in earlier chapters that the Sahara, a relatively young

  desert, was green savannah until about the tenth millennium BC; this

  savannah, brightened by lakes, boiling with game, extended across much

  of upper Egypt. Farther north, the Delta area was marshy but dotted with

  many large and fertile islands. Overall the climate was significantly

  cooler, cloudier and rainier than it is today.9 Indeed, for two or three

  thousand years before and about a thousand years after 10,500 BC it

  rained and rained and rained. Then, as though marking an ecological

  turning-point, the floods came. When they were over, increasingly arid

  conditions set in.10 This period of desiccation lasted until approximately

  7000 BC when the ‘Neolithic Subpluvial’ began with a thousand years of

  heavy rains, followed by 3000 years of moderate rainfall which once

  again proved ideal for agriculture: ‘For a time the deserts bloomed and

  human societies colonized areas that have been unable to support such

  dense populations since.’11

  By the birth of dynastic Egypt around 3000 BC, however, the climate had

  turned around again and a new period of desiccation had begun—one

  that has continued until the present day.

  This, then, in broad outline, is the environmental stage upon which the

  mysteries of Egyptian civilization have been played out: rain and floods

  between 13,000 BC and 9500 BC; a dry period until 7000 BC; rain again

  (though increasingly less frequent) until about 3000 BC; thereafter a

  renewed and enduring dry period.

  The expanse of years is great, but if one is looking for a First Time

  within it which might accord with the golden age of the gods, one’s

  thoughts turn naturally to the mysterious epoch of early agricultural

  experimentation that shadowed the great rains and floods between

  13,000 BC and 10,500 BC.

  9 Ibid., p. 86.

  10 Ibid., pp. 97-8.

  11 Ibid., p. 161.

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  Unseen connections?

  This epoch was crucial not only for the Ancient Egyptians but for many

  peoples in other areas. Indeed, as we saw in Part IV, it was the epoch of

  dramatic climate shifts, rapidly rising sea levels, earth movements,

  floods, volcanic eruptions, bituminous rains and darkened skies that was

  the most probable source of many of the great worldwide myths of

  universal cataclysm.

  Could it also have been an epoch in which ‘gods’ really did walk among

  men, as the legends said?

  On the Bolivian Altiplano those gods were known as the Viracochas and

  were linked to the astonishing megalithic city of Tiahuanaco, which may

  have pre-existed the immense floods in the Andes in the eleventh

  millennium BC. Thereafter, according to Professor Arthur Posnansky,

  though the flood-waters subsided, ‘the culture of the Altiplano did not

  again attain a high point of development but rather fell into a total and

  definitive decadence.’12

  Of course, Posnansky’s conclusions are controversial and must be

  evaluated on their own merits. Nevertheless, it is interesting that both the

  Bolivian Altiplano and Egypt should have been scoured by immense

  floods in the eleventh millennium BC. In both areas too, there are signs

  that extraordinarily early agricultural experiments—apparently based on

  introduced techniques—were attempted and then abandoned.13 And in

  both areas important question-marks have been raised over the dating of

  monuments: the Puma Punku and the Kalasasaya in Tiahuanaco, for

  example, which Posnansky argued might have been built as early as

  15,000 BC,14 and, in Egypt, megalithic structures like the Osireion, the

  Great Sphinx and the Valley Temple of Khafre at Giza, which John West

  and the Boston University geologist Robert Schoch have dated on

  geological grounds to earlier than 10,000 BC.

  Could there be an unseen connection linking all these beautiful,

  enigmatic monuments, the anomalous agricultural experiments of

  13,000-10,000 BC, and the legends of civilizer gods like Osiris and

  Viracocha?

  ‘Where is the rest of this civilization?’

  As we set out on the road from Abydos to Luxor, where we were to meet

  John West, I realized that there was a sense in which all the connections

  would look after themselves if the central issue of the antiquity of the

  monuments could be settled. In other words, if West’s geological

  12 See Chapter Twelve.

  13 Ibid.

  14 Ibid.

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  evidence proved that the Sphinx was more than 12,000 years old, the

  history of human civilization was going to have to be rewritten. As part of

  that exciting process, all the other strange, anachronistic ‘fingerprints of

  the gods’ that kept appearing around the world, and the sense of an

  undercurrent of ancient connections linking apparently unrelated

  civi
lizations, would begin to make sense ...

  When West’s evidence was presented in 1992 at the annual meeting of

  the American Association for the Advancement of Science it had been

  taken seriously enough to be publicly debated by the Chicago University

  Egyptologist Mark Lehner, director of the Giza Mapping Project, who—to

  the astonishment of almost everybody present—had been unable to come

  up with a convincing refutation. ‘When you say something as complex as

  the Sphinx dates to 9000 or 10,000 BC,’ Lehner had concluded:

  it implies, of course, that there was a very high civilization that was capable of

  producing the Sphinx at that period. The question an archaeologist has to ask,

  therefore, is this: if the Sphinx was made at that time then where is the rest of this

  civilization, where is the rest of this culture?15

  Lehner, however, was missing the point.

  If the Sphinx did date to 9000 or 10,000 BC, the onus was not on West

  to produce other evidence for the existence of the civilization which

  produced it, but on Egyptologists and archaeologists to explain how they

  had got things so wrong, so consistently, for so long. So could West

  prove the antiquity of the Sphinx?

  15 AAAS Annual Meeting, 1992, Debate: How Old is the Sphinx?

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  Chapter 47

  Sphinx

  ‘Egyptologists,’ said John West, ‘are the last people in the world to

  address any anomaly.’

  Of course, there are many anomalies in Egypt. The one West was

  referring to at that moment, however, was the anomaly of the Fourth

  Dynasty pyramids: an anomaly because of what had happened during the

  Third, Fifth and Sixth Dynasties. Zoser’s Step Pyramid at Saqqara (Third

  Dynasty) was an imposing edifice, but it was built with relatively small,

  manageable blocks that five or six men working together could carry, and

  its internal chambers were structurally unsound. The pyramids of the

  Fifth and Sixth Dynasties (although adorned inside with the beautiful

  Pyramid Texts) were so poorly built and had collapsed so completely that

  today most of them amount to little more than mounds of rubble. The

  Fourth Dynasty pyramids at Giza, however, were wonderfully well made

  and had endured the passage of thousands of years more or less intact.