By the time I acted there as guide for my first Expedition group in 1994, I had become quite familiar with the Museum, its layout, and its exhibits from previous visits, starting in the 1980s; but my first virtual visit to it took place in 1971—in New York City, when the Metropolitan Museum of Art held the special exhibit “Treasures of Egyptian Art from the Cairo Museum.” It was indeed, as advertised, a unique exhibit, for it was the first time that the most important sculpture artifacts of the Egyptian Museum were sent abroad on such a comprehensive scale.
The exhibit’s catalogue had on its cover a photograph of a famous and precious stone sculpture—that of the Pharaoh Chefren seated on a majestic throne and protected by the falcon-god Horus (fig. 44). It was a choice justified not only by the antiquity and artistic quality of the artifact; since Chefren/Chefra is considered by Egyptologists to have been the builder of the Second Pyramid of Giza, the photographic choice was appropriate because the Giza pyramids are ancient Egypt’s best-known monuments.
Figure 44
Appropriate too was the next large stone sculpture on exhibit, that of the Pharaoh Mycerinus/Menkaura in divine company (fig. 45), for he was—was he not?—the presumed builder of the Third Pyramid in Giza and of the even more famous Sphinx. The two sculptures are imposing in size: That of the seated Chefren a massive 5.5 feet in height, and that of the standing Mycerinus over 3 feet in height—sizes befitting the sizes of the pyramids attributed to them. One could thus expect—as I did—to find an even more impressive large statue of Khufu/Cheops, builder of the even grander Great Pyramid; but there was none.
Figure 45
Was it missing because there was no statue of Khufu, the greatest builder of them all? I found the answer when I actually visited the Museum in Cairo. Yes, there is a statue—one sole carved image—of Cheops/Khufu; but it is not an imposing one as would befit the builder of the greatest stone edifice on Earth; it is a tiny statuette, carved of ivory, less than 3 inches high (fig. 46). It was a shame to bring it over to New York (and Boston and Los Angeles, where the special exhibit was also shown). The curators, both in the USA and in Egypt, did not need the embarrassment of an OOP.
“OOP” is an acronym, the initials of “Out Of Place”—a term applied to archaeological objects that do not belong to the period, the place, the culture in which they were found. There are true OOP artifacts—physical objects whose existence cannot be denied, yet they are “cannot be” objects that could not possibly exist; they are by any yardstick Out Of Place. Other OOPs are categorized as such because they make the experts feel that they “do not belong” simply because they do not conform to the Establishment’s tenets. And then there are OOPs which, for one reason or another, are just embarrassing—if it were up to the experts, they should not have been found at all; but here they are!
Figure 46
Whatever the OOP category, they pose a problem to the museum authorities: What shall be done with such embarrassing objects? Various museums deal variably with the OOP problem. Without doubt, more than a few such objects end up just out of sight, never displayed, and probably as often as not remaining unknown.
An example of that is the case of the Headless Spaceman (fig. 47), an artifact that the Istanbul Museum in Turkey has refrained from displaying because “there were no astronauts and spacecraft 4,500 years ago.” For five decades the Museum even denied the existence of the artifact. When I was tipped off about it in the 1990s, I was visiting Turkey as a guest of the Turkish Government, so the Museum could not deny the object’s existence, but explained its non-display by its being a fake. It finally put it on display under my persistence; but then removed it again . . .
Readers of the first book of The Earth Chronicles Expeditions will also recall the case of the Olmec elephant toy (fig. 48) that was on display in the Jalapa Museum in Mexico, and then was removed (together with a wall panel dating the Olmec civilization to ca. 3000 B.C.)—undoubtedly because of its embarrassing proof that Africans (familiar with elephants that do not exist in the Americas) somehow arrived in Mesoamerica thousands of years before Columbus, when people could not possibly cross the Atlantic Ocean.
Figure 47
Figure 48
The Egyptian Museum in Cairo too has its embarrassing OOPs; the diminutive Cheops statuette has been one of them, and was treated accordingly . . .
Some museums arrange their exhibits chronologically; others by category, or by provenance, or by the “culture” to which they belong. The Egyptian Museum chose to display its artifacts by the period to which they belonged—Old Kingdom, Middle Kingdom, New Kingdom—and their dynasties.
Thus, as one entered the Museum (Room 48 in the ground-level floor plan, fig. 49) looking for the Old Kingdom’s famed kings, the statue of Menkaura was encountered to the left in room 47; the statue of Chefra who preceded him was placed farther back in room 42, next to a large limestone statue of Zoser from Sakkara.
And where is Khufu/Cheops? His embarrassing statuette is nowhere to be seen in this Old Kingdom section. It is not even on the ground floor. And unless one knows exactly where to look on the second floor, it will be missed altogether; for it has been placed up there, along with other knickknacks, in a glass-covered tabletop display case near the stairs leading down and out of the Museum. The main attraction on that second floor of the Museum are the dazzling finds from the tomb of Tutankhamen, of the New Kingdom’s Eighteenth Dynasty, including his golden death mask (plate 15); but visitors uninformed of the little Khufu, just walk by and go down the stairs.
Figure 49
Once, visiting the Museum with my Expedition group, I left the group to linger at the Tutankhamen displays (I had seen those artifacts several times before), and found a chair to sit on next to the Khufucontaining display case. Waiting for the group to reach the stairs to go back down (at which time I was going to show them the statuette), I was contemplating not so much the statuette itself as its location. I was in fact wondering: No matter the size, why have the Museum’s officials not granted a chronologically correct and a deserved place of honor to the presumed builder of the Great Pyramid?
Could it be that in their innermost hearts they too have doubts?
And that leads us to the second Cairo Museum OOP, the Inventory Stela.
The Egyptian Museum was established in 1858 by the French archaeologist Auguste Mariette, whom many consider the Father of modern Egyptology, mostly with archaeological objects that he himself had unearthed; the Inventory Stela was one of them. He found it in Giza in 1853, in the remains of a temple for the goddess Isis situated beside the Great Pyramid and the Sphinx—exactly where according to the stela’s inscription (see fig. 13) it was set up by Cheops/Khufu: In the temple beside the already existing Great Pyramid and Sphinx.
The Inventory Stela was so named because, after the opening lines which we have quoted earlier, Khufu listed on it an “inventory” of the religious objects that he had found in the Isis temple when he undertook its restoration. He does make reference to a small pyramid which he says he built to honor the princess Henutsen (whom he married?)—one of the three small pyramids at the eastern foot of the Great Pyramid (see figs. 5 and 6). Would he not have claimed to having also built the Great Pyramid were he its builder?
As earlier explained, the Inventory Stela was irrefutable proof, provided by Khufu/Cheops himself, that he did not build the Great Pyramid, and that the Pyramid (and Sphinx) were already there in his time. Although that created a problem for Egyptologists committed to the Khufu-built-it tenet, the artifact could not be hidden away—it was found, after all, by the Museum’s very founder, and its discovery was reported in the scientific journals of the time, which also printed a picture of it (fig. 50). So what could archaeologists do with such an OOP? They declared it to be a forgery, perpetrated (at a later time) by the ancient Egyptians themselves!
Not all the Egyptologists of the early twentieth century were doubters. James H. Breasted (Ancient Records of Egypt) felt that the Inventory Stela
bore all the marks of authenticity and included it in the list of Fourth Dynasty artifacts. The great French Egyptologist Gaston Maspero (The Dawn of Civilization) suggested that even if it was from a later time, it was a copy of an earlier authentic artifact, and thus a factual record of the life and deeds of Khufu.
But considerations of national pride—led in the 1930s by a foremost native Egyptologist, Selim Hassan—finally dominated the purely scientific discussions. In the words of Hassan (Excavations at Giza), the inscription was made “long after the death of Khufu” but its makers invoked his name “to support some fictitious claim of the local priests.” The suggested “long after” date was that of the Twenty-sixth Saitic Dynasty—an incredible two thousand years later! But, heeding Hassan’s nationalistic views, the Stela was moved to the very back of the Museum’s ground floor, placed in a row with other stelas from such later periods.
Some fifty years later, on my first visit to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, I went to that back area of the ground floor to see the Stela; but I couldn’t find it. I asked the guards about it, showing them the illustration that I had with me; but they had no idea what I was talking about. I asked to talk to the Curator, or anyone else in the Director’s office. It was not a simple matter, but I managed to get someone there to talk to me. Grudgingly looking up the Museum directory and other lists, the person said Yes, the Stela is there, in the back row. I went back, but still couldn’t find it. Back at the Director’s office, they told me, in so many words, to stop bothering them.
Figure 50
In all subsequent visits I made sure to look for the Inventory Stela; but I could not find it. In the Briefing Notes I prepared for the first Earth Chronicles Expedition group, I listed the Inventory Stela among the “must see” artifacts and included its photograph, asking all in the group to try and find it—anywhere in the Museum.
But this OOP is still missing.
There has been another OOP—a true OOP—that has fared better in Cairo’s Egyptian Museum. For the sake of identification, I will call it “The Flywheel,” though what it really is remains an enigma.
The best way to describe it is to show a picture of it—an actual photograph (plate 16). It was discovered in 1936 in the tomb of the crown prince Sabu, son of king Adjib of the First Dynasty, in northern Sakkara—just south of Giza. It is thus certain that the object was placed in the tomb circa 3100 B.C.; so the object as such must be at least that old, but could of course be older.
Reporting this and other discoveries in that tomb and others near it, Walter B. Emery (Great Tombs of the First Dynasty) described the object as a “bowl-like vessel of schist” and remarked that “No satisfactory explanation of the curious design of this object has been forthcoming.”
The object is indeed curious, unusual, and unique. Round—some twenty-four inches in diameter—it has three precise curved cutouts that create three complex bladelike surfaces. A central hole, with a protruding rim, suggests that the object was made to fit over an axle, probably for rotation purposes. A thin circular frame surrounds these features; and the whole thing looks extremely delicate—it is less than four inches at its thickest (fig. 51). The shape and curvatures suggested to technical experts that the object was intended to be immersed in some liquid.
Materials studies revealed that the object was carved out of a solid block of schist—a rock which is very brittle and which easily splits into thin irregular layers. That such a stone was chosen suggests that it was nevertheless used because only it made possible the elegantly precise shaping of the object’s unusual curved parts and cutouts. But the experts who examined it doubted whether the object, if it were put into actual rotational use, could have remained intact for long, if at all—it would have quickly split apart under the centrifugal force. This has led some, like Cyril Aldred (Egypt to the End of the Old Kingdom), to conclude that the stone object “Possibly imitates a form originally made of metal.”
Figure 51
According to such opinions, this was a stone copy of a functional metal object. But the only metal in use by people 5,000 or more years ago was copper, and to cast the object out of copper required a mold even more complex than the object itself. Was it then somehow machined to obtain its complex and delicate shape? If so—with which precision tools?
This last question applies whether the stone object is a copy of a metal original or the actual original itself. But apart from the questions of how the object was made, or of what material, there remain the basic puzzling questions: What was it for? If it was rotating on an axle, what was the axle attached to or part of ? Who had the technical ability to make it—and who had the technology that needed it and used it?
The object’s possible function occurred to me some forty years after its discovery, as I was reading in a technical journal about a revolutionary design of a flywheel that a California-based company was developing for the American space program. A flywheel, it needs to be explained, is a circular wheel-like object attached to the rotating shaft of a machine or an engine as a means to regulate the equipment’s speed of rotation—or (as in metal presses, vehicles such as trains or buses, or in aviation) to store energy for power surges.
The flywheel has been in use for more than two centuries; its basic mechanical property has been the ability to store in the flywheel’s circumference the energy obtained in the center—for which reason, the circumference had to be solidly thick and heavy. But in the 1970s engineers of the Lockheed Missile & Space Company developed an opposite design—with a lightweight rimmed wheel (fig. 52a). Their research was continued by the Airesearch Manufacturing Company which developed a light-rimmed flywheel, hermetically sealed so that it could be used while immersed in a housing filled with a lubricating liquid. Responding to my request, Airesearch sent me photographs of their flywheel (fig. 52b) with a portfolio of technical data, which strengthened my guess that the ancient object was some kind of a flywheel of advanced design—storing the energy in a thin rim and rotating in a lubricating liquid.
Since the Egyptians of 3100 B.C. (or earlier) did not have the technology to manufacture the object, or the sophisticated equipment in which it could be used, the “Flywheel” was clearly an OOP. Nevertheless, the Museum authorities did not hide it away in a basement corner; they did put it on display—as far as I recall, in Room 43 among other small finds from the earliest dynasties. The logic behind the decision to display this object, I assume, was that if the early Pharaohs could build the Giza Pyramids, why wouldn’t they possess other sophisticated capabilities? Unlike the Inventory Stela, it—according to this logic—affirmed rather than contradicted the “Our ancestors could do it!” stance.
Figure 52
But of course, if you doubt one, you cannot help but doubt the other . . .
Since the “Flywheel” irrefutably exists, and since it must be dated to 3100 B.C. or earlier, the basic questions remain: Who could have manufactured it, to what kind of advanced technological equipment was it attached, and who made and used such advanced equipment?
Plate 1. The Great Pyramid
Plate 2. The Sphinx with the two pyramids in the background
Plate 3. Cleaned up Niche in the Great Pyramid’s Queen’s Chamber, also showing southern shaft opening
Plate 4. Niche opening covered with wire-mesh frame
Plate 5. Different Niche opening, February 1995
Plate 6. Niche opening: cover removed, looking in
Plate 7. Cogswell’s flashlight shining from inside the secret passageway
Plate 8. Cogswell emerging from the passageway
Plate 9. Photograph from inside the passageway, looking back toward the entryway
Plate 10. Photograph taken near the entrance to the secret chamber (note the blackened lintel stone)
Plate 11. Looking into the secret chamber
Plate 12. The upper part of the chamber and its blackened ceiling
Plate 13. The chamber’s walls and some of its ceiling stones
Plate
14. The tunnel’s stonework, approaching the exit
Plate 15. Gold mask of Tutankhamen
Plate 16. “Flywheel” from 3100 B.C.
Plate 17. Earth Chronicles Expedition group at Stonehenge
Plate 18. Ggantija, the largest temple on the island of Gozo
Plate 19. View of Hagar Qim temple on Malta
Plate 20. Earth Chronicles Expedition group dwarfed by boulders at Hagar Qim
Plate 21. Tarxien temple
Plate 22. Expedition group photo of Sun’s rays on the marker stone in the Mnajdra lower temple on Summer Solstice
Plate 23. Malta ruts
Plate 24. Malta ruts at “Clapham Junction”
Plate 25. The Iceman of the Alps at the Archaeological Museum of South Tyrol in Bolzano, Italy
Plate 26. Statue of Ptah
Plate 27. The Shroud of Turin on display
Plate 28. Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper
Pate 29. The author with Monsignor Balducci
Plate 30. Creation of Adam, Sistine Chapel
Plate 31. The 12th Planet original cover
Plate 32. The two illustrations from the sidebar of the Sky & Telescope article
Plate 33. The main part of the Antikythera Mechanism
Plate 34. Remains of Harran’s medieval defensive walls
Journeys to the Mythical Past Page 6