It is the moment of dawn on the summer solstice in the epoch of 2500 bc, with Leo rising at 28 degrees north of due east, and we immediately notice that something is wrong with the sky-ground pattern.
The Sphinx gazes due east, i.e. he does not gaze at Leo, his celestial counterpart.
50. Epoch of 2500 bc, the Pyramid Age: the rising of Leo at the summer solstice. Note that in this epoch the gaze of Hor-em-Akhet, ‘Horus-in-the-Horizon’—i.e. the Great Sphinx—is not in alignment with Horakhti, ‘Horus-of-the-Horizon’, i.e. the constellation of Leo. The reader will recall that this same sense of a curious ‘dislocation’ of the sky-ground images at the summer solstice in 2500 bc also applies to the three great Pyramids and the three stars of Orion’s belt.
51. Summer solstice in the epoch of 2500 bc. Artist’s impression of the Duat region as viewed from the Horizon of Giza.
And the causeway connecting the central Pyramid to the Sphinx complex is directed 14 degrees south of due east—i.e. far to the right of the spot where the cosmic Horus-King is supposedly at his station between the paws of Leo and ready to travel to Rostau.
So why is the sky-image in the ‘wrong place’ on the eastern horizon? Or to express the problem the right way round, and in the correct dualistic terminology, why is Hor-em-Akhet, Horus-in-the-Horizon—i.e. the Great Sphinx—not in alignment with Horakhti, Horus-of-the-Horizon, i.e. the constellation of Leo? Why, too, is the causeway of the Sphinx not directed to the rising sun so as to ‘link-up’ the Horus-King with his cosmic solar counterpart?
There is, it seems, a curious ‘dislocation’ between the ground and the sky at the summer solstice in the epoch of 2500 bc. Moreover, as the reader will recall from Chapter 8, this sense of the entire arrangement being out of kilter is not confined to the Sphinx and Leo in that epoch but involves the three great Pyramids of Giza as well.
It may be the case that the solution to the riddle has all along been staring us in the face. Inscribed on the granite stela that the Sphinx holds between its own heavily eroded paws—a stela that was placed there in honour of Thutmosis IV, a mighty Horus-King of Egypt—we read the following impressive royal titulary:
The Majesty of Horus, Mighty Bull Begetting Radiance, Favourite of the Two Goddesses, Enduring in Kingship like Atum, Golden Horus, Mighty of Sword, Repelling the Nine Bows, King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Son of Re, Thutmosis ... given life, stability, satisfaction ... for ever. Live the Good God, Son of Atum, Protector of Horakhti, Living Image of the All-Lord, Sovereign ..., beautiful of Face like His Father, who came forth equipped with the form of Horus upon him ... Son of Atum, of his body, Thutmosis ... Heir of Horus Upon His Throne ...[471]
Does this sound like a man who did not have a clue, as some Egyptologists suggest,[472] as to what the great Sphinx and the other monuments of Giza really represented? Surely not. So what, then, did the majestic Horus-King declare this sacred domain to be?
In one simple, powerful phrase, as the reader will recall, he stated that it was ‘The Splendid Place of the “First Time” ’.[473]
Is it not likely, when he uttered these words, that Thutmosis, ‘Heir of Horus Upon His Throne’, was repeating what every Horus-King before him had declared the Giza plateau to be?
52. Artist’s impression of ‘reconstructed’ Sphinx showing the statue of a Horus-King, which is known to have once stood between its paws, gazing at the celestial counterpart of the ‘Splendid Place of the First Time’ in the eastern horizon.
Is it not likely that he called it ‘The Splendid Place of the “First Time” ’ because that is exactly what it was remembered to be in traditions that had been handed down from remotest, almost incomprehensible, antiquity?
Could this be why the sky of 2500 bc seems to be so badly out of kilter, somehow skewed and twisted, i.e. ‘in the wrong place’? Could it be not so much in the wrong place as at the wrong time?
Should we set our computer to search for another time that might match the monuments to the sky, a time long before Thutmosis, long before Khafre and Khufu, the ‘time’ when Osiris established his kingdom on earth—in other words, the ‘First Time’?
When was the ‘First Time’?
Part IV
Map
Chapter 11
The Unseen Academy
‘The Egyptians believed that in the beginning their land was ruled by a dynasty of great gods, of whom Horus, the son of Isis and Osiris, was the last. He was succeeded by a dynasty of semi-divine beings known as the “followers of Horus”, who, in turn, gave place to the historical kings of Egypt.’
Selim Hassan, The Sphinx, Cairo, 1949
When was the ‘genesis’ of civilization in Egypt? When did ‘history’ begin?
According to T. G. H. James, formerly Keeper of Egyptian Antiquities at the British Museum, and a representative voice of orthodox opinion on these matters: ‘The first truly historical period is that which begins with the invention of writing and it is generally known as the Dynastic Period. It is a period extending from about 3100 bc to 332 bc and it derives its name from the thirty-one dynasties into which the successive kings of Egypt were divided in a scheme preserved in the work of Manetho, a priestly historian who lived during the [third century bc]. The unlettered cultures which flourished in Egypt before the beginning of the Dynastic Period, and which exhibit some of the characteristics which mark the earliest phases of Egyptian culture in the Dynastic Period, are known as Predynastic ... Such traces of human life as are found in the Nile Valley dating from before the Predynastic Period are usually described in the terms used for European Prehistory—Palaeolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic.’[474]
So there we have it. Egyptian history—and civilization with it—began at around 3100 bc. Before that there were merely ‘unlettered cultures’ (admittedly with some ‘civilized’ characteristics), which were in turn preceded by ‘Stone Age’ savages (‘Palaeolithic’ means literally ‘Old Stone Age’).
The way James puts it, the whole picture seems very clear-cut, orderly and precise. He really makes it sound as though all the facts are now in hand concerning the Predynastic Egyptians and their forebears, and that nothing more remains to be discovered about any of them.
Such anodyne notions of the past are widespread amongst Egyptologists who again and again in their textbooks, and also in mass-market publications like National Geographic and Time-Life’s misleadingly named Lost Civilizations series, convey the comforting impression that the prehistory of Egypt is well understood, organized, categorized and safely put in its place (James even refers us to one specific place in the British Museum where particular enlightenment apparently awaits us: the ‘Sixth Egyptian Room’ with its definitive display of ‘primitive tools made by the Palaeolithic inhabitants of Egypt’).[475] Likewise, on the other side of the Atlantic as we saw in Part I, Dr. Peter Lecovara, Curator of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, assures us that ‘thousands of Egyptologists working for hundreds of years have studied this problem [the prehistory of Egypt] and the chronology is pretty much worked out. There is no big surprise in store for us.’[476]
But is everything really as orderly and as well worked out as the ‘experts’ say? And can we really be so sure that there is ‘no big surprise in store for us’?
In our view Lecovara, James, and the many other scholars who share their opinions, would do well to remember the advice of the late Labib Habachi, formerly the Egyptian government’s Chief Inspector of Antiquities, who warned in 1984 that ‘Egyptology is a field in which chance discovery may disprove an established theory’.[477] In the light of this possibility, Habachi’s suggestion was that Egyptologists should avoid making ‘unqualified statements’ and be honest enough to ‘salt their comments with “probably” and “perhaps”.’[478]
Certainly a little more ‘probably’ and ‘perhaps’ would be in order where the Predynastic and earlier periods of Egyptian history are concerned. Far from the impression conveyed to the public, the truth, as some scholars are prepared to
admit, is that ‘The state of knowledge of Egyptian prehistory in the late twentieth century is still fragmentary’.[479]
These are the words of Nicholas Grimal, Professor of Egyptology at the Sorbonne University in Paris, who also concedes:
It has been clear since the Second World War not only that ‘prehistory’ before the Pharaohs was expanding on a hitherto unsuspected scale, but also that it appeared to be so diverse and self-contained that it was difficult to regard it simply as a ‘preparatory’ stage for the Dynastic Period ...[480]
The prevailing Egyptological consensus (to which Grimal in this respect at least is an exception) is unable to offer any coherent theory which explains these ‘diverse’ and ‘self-contained’ characteristics of Egyptian prehistory, or that account for the very serious problems of apparent non-continuity between the Predynastic and the Dynastic Periods. The ancient Egyptians themselves, however, passed down records to us which may contain the answer to the whole mystery. These records provide detailed information concerning a period that extends back many thousands of years before the sudden emergence of the Pharaonic state in the epoch of 3000 bc.
The only problem is that no one is prepared to take these records seriously. Could this be because they conflict with the modern scholarly consensus on Egyptian chronology? Readers must make up their own minds but, as we shall see below, elements of the same records which do conform to the current theory are accepted and taken seriously by Egyptologists.
Three eras
As T. G. H. James tells us in his remarks quoted earlier, modern study of ancient Egyptian chronology is largely based on Manetho’s History of Egypt. The respected Professor Walter Emery puts things much the same way when he reports that the writings of Manetho are of ‘immense importance and form the framework on which Egyptian history has been built’.[481]
One of the reasons that Manetho’s system is so durable and remains in use by Egyptologists today is that it has again and again proved itself to be accurate. He is known to have based it on ‘much older documents, or king-lists, to which, as a learned priest he had access’.[482] Furthermore a number of documents in this category—notably the Palermo Stone, the Turin Papyrus and the Abydos King-List—have been found and translated. In the words of the late Professor Michael Hoffman, a leading expert on Egypt before the Pharaohs: ‘Archaeologists and Egyptologists have discovered five such lists which, despite some discrepancies, support Manetho in general.’[483]
Looking at all the surviving sources, it is clear that three distinct eras of kingship were remembered:
• The first era was when the Neteru, (‘Neters’ or ‘Gods’) ruled the land of Egypt—an epoch that culminated with the kingship of Horus, the son of Osiris and Isis.
• Then came the era of the ‘Followers of Horus’, the Shemsu Hor, (also known by numerous other titles and epithets) which took the divine Horian lineage across the ages and up to a human Pharaoh named Menes (also known as Narmer or ‘King Scorpion’), the legendary ‘Unifier of the Two Lands of Upper and Lower Egypt’.
• After Menes came the so-called ‘Dynastic’ Kings, whose names are individually catalogued in the king-lists.
Egyptologists place the reign of Menes in circa 3000 bc and regard him as the first ‘historical’ king of ‘Dynastic’ Egypt.[484] They concede that a few Predynastic ‘chieftains’ must have preceded him in both the north and south of the country but they emphatically reject any suggestion that the ‘Neters’ and the ‘Followers of Horus’ catalogued in the king-lists (and referred to with some prominence by Manetho) could have been historical individuals. On the contrary, the consensus view is that the Neters, being ‘Gods’, are obvious religious fictions and that the Shemsu Hor are to be regarded as nothing more than ‘mythical kings’ who ruled in an equally ‘mythical kingdom’.
So, scholars accept as history only the bits of Manetho and the surviving king-lists that fit their theory—i.e. the records of the Dynastic Period from Menes on—and devalue all references in those same records to earlier and more mysterious times.
Writing in the Cambridge Ancient History, for example, Professor T. E. Peet groups together all the ancient Egyptian sources concerning the chronology of the ‘Gods’ and the ‘Followers of Horus’ and then dismisses the entire corpus of material with the following throwaway remark: ‘From the historical point of view there is little to be made of this.’[485]
Likewise, in Kingship and the Gods, his detailed study of the Pharaonic state, the eminent Henri Frankfort, Professor of Preclassical Antiquity at the University of London, had this to say about the ‘Followers of Horus’:
... it appears that ‘Followers of Horus’ is a vague designation for the kings of a distant past ... but it would seem unwise to treat the term as primarily of a historical nature. For each king became at death one of the corporation of ‘transfigured spirits’ ... [and] merged with that nebulous spiritual force which had supported the living rulers and descendents of the Throne of Horus since time immemorial.[486]
High initiates
We feel obliged to point out that this was not at all how the ancient Egyptians viewed their own history. For them there was never any question of mythical epochs or ‘nebulous spiritual forces’ lurking in the distant past. For them, to state matters plainly, the ‘Followers of Horus’, and the geographical landscape in which they had ‘ruled’, were unquestionable realities to which they were directly and inseverably connected. Indeed, if one takes the Egyptian accounts and traditions seriously what the ‘Followers of Horus’ begin to sound like is a lineage of real, although ‘unnamed’ individuals whose function and duty, as Henri Frankfort himself suggested, was to provide the ‘spiritual force’ behind the monarchy (though by no means in a ‘vague’ or ‘nebulous’ manner). The Egyptians’ own accounts also invite the conclusion that the role of these ‘Followers’ may have been to carry down the ages a body of extraordinary knowledge harking back to the even more mysterious ‘time of the Neteru’—i.e. the ‘Gods’.
From available primary sources, in other words, the overall picture that emerges is that the ‘Followers of Horus’ may not have been ‘kings’ in the usual sense of the word but rather immensely powerful and enlightened individuals—high initiates who were carefully selected by an élite academy that established itself at the sacred site of Heliopolis-Giza thousands of years before history began. There is much to suggest, too, that the ancient Egyptian texts are right and that Pharaonic civilization may indeed have owed its unique spark of genius to just such a ‘brotherhood’ linked to just such an archaic and élite academy.
So who might the Shemsu Hor really have been? And what were they ‘following’?
Following the Way of Horus
Heliopolis—ancient On or Innu—was the oldest organized religious centre in Egypt and most probably in the world. Situated some 12 miles northeast of the Giza plateau, and already hoary with age at the dawn of the Pharaonic epoch, it is identified by tradition as the source of the secrets of astral immortality which the Pyramid builders claimed to have inherited. Indeed the title of the High Priest of Heliopolis, as Professor I. E. S. Edwards has recently demonstrated, was ‘Chief of the Astronomers’, and the regalia of this notable was a ceremonial robe spangled with five-pointed stars.[487]
53. Osiris-Orion showing the way to his ‘Followers’, the Horus-Kings, who are the custodians of his dual kingdom in the Duat.
As we have already hinted in Part III, the dominant concerns of the elitist, ‘scientific’ priests of Heliopolis were with recording the motions of the stars, measuring and commemorating the passage of time, and peering into the mysteries of the epochs. It has long been known, too, that they carefully studied the cycle of the sun in its perceived yearly circuit along the zodiacal path. And more recently, compelling evidence has emerged that they also followed the far longer cosmic cycle of the ‘Great Year’—namely the precessional ‘drift’ of the stars caused by the earth’s axial ‘wobble’. The reader will recall that t
his vast cycle of 25,920 years was measured by the slow rotation of the twelve zodiacal constellations in relation to the point of sunrise on the vernal equinox—in short, the ‘precession of the equinoxes’ in which a succession of astrological ‘Ages’, each 2160 years in duration, was believed to have begun to unfold after a kind of spiritual and cultural ‘Big Bang’ known as Zep Tepi—the ‘First Time’ of the Gods.
To observe and accurately measure the rate of the precession of the equinoxes is a feat that could only have been achieved by scientifically minded, intellectually advanced and highly organized people with a long tradition of precise observational astronomy. Similarly, the building of the three great Pyramids of Giza was not the work of technological primitives only recently emerged from the Stone Age. On the contrary, as historians of science Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend have pointed out, such accomplishments ‘should be a cogent reason for concluding that serious and intelligent men were at work behind the stage, men who were bound to have used a technical terminology’.[488]
We shall argue that ‘serious and intelligent men’—and apparently women too—were indeed at work behind the stage of prehistory in Egypt and propose that one of the many names by which they were known was the ‘Followers of Horus’. We propose, too, that their purpose, to which their generations adhered for thousands of years with the rigour of a messianic cult, may have been to bring to fruition a great cosmic blueprint. And we have evidence that the slow unfolding and implementation of this plan somehow entailed tracking two observable ‘ways’ taken by the celestial bodies across the ages—‘ways’ which are both consequences of the earth’s axial precession: