On the east face of Djedefre Water Mountain is a most telling inscription or, more specifically, a strange glyph that now, with all that we know of these very ancient star and cattle people, we can easily decipher. The glyph is composed of three rows of signs. The top row shows a five-pointed star, a cow’s head, and a rope with a shape reminiscent of an ankh sign. The middle row depicts a flat plate with four lines extending vertically below it. The bottom row shows the same flat sign but with only one line extending down crookedly, and with two prongs at its end and, on each side, zigzagging lines.
All the signs are recognizable Egyptian hieroglyphs.104
The two other glyphs in the bottom row, a lightining bolt and a human figure running or jumping, probably imply a rain-dance or storm-dance ritual.
Perhaps the entire glyph could thus read: “the star of wisdom which heralds in the rainy season/monsoon is greeted with joy.” Perhaps Djedefre Water Mountain was a sort of natural sun temple to mark the summer solstice, and perhaps the star people or cattle people told the Egyptians of their knowledge and tradition, which linked the summer solstice, the monsoon, and the heliacal rising of the star Sirius.
There are so many water signs on Djedefre Water Mountain that we must recall heavy downpours (the monsoons). Yet climatologists are adamant that the monsoons stopped coming this far north around 5000 BCE—but how else could the Egyptians have known of these heavy downpours if not from a people who had actually experienced them? Further, could these people have traveled such a vast distance—from Nabta Playa to Djedefre Water Mountain, which, as the crow flies, is 360 kilometers (224 miles)?
In chapter 2 we briefly saw that in 2006 the Sahara anthropologists Stefan Kröpelin and Rudolph Kuper discovered another water mountain located 700 kilometers (435 miles) south of Nabta Playa, within Sudan, just west of a place called Dongola. The water mountain, which Kröpelin and Kuper described as a rock shelter, very much resembles Djedefre Water Mountain. Kröpelin and Kuper called the location Gala El Sheikh, and apparently it will soon be part of a protected national park. Also found were many petroglyphs—and, amazingly, there was the same water emblem as the one found by Bergmann at Djedefre Water Mountain (the slightly bulging rectangle with two peaks and within it zigzag lines).105
Unlike Bergmann’s site, however, at Gala El Sheikh there were no ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs or drawings, suggesting that not only was the site of prehistoric origin but also that the people who once occupied this place had cultural connections to those who once occupied the region near Dakhla oasis. If this was so, then both were clearly also connected to the Nabta Playa people, for that site lies directly in the middle of a trail that could have joined Gala El Sheikh and Djedefre Water Mountain. As Carlo Bergmann strongly suspected about these mysterious water emblems, a thorough study of them, as well as further explorations in the Egyptian Sahara and along the possible trail that leads to northwest Chad and the Ennedi Mountains, may prove that a vast network of communication existed in prehistoric times among Black sub-Saharan Africans, and this eventually led them to migrate into the Nile Valley, where they, with their millennia-old knowledge of astronomy, husbandry, and even perhaps basic writing and a religious system, hastened the civilization that we call Egyptian. Much work remains to be done, but the evidence is convincing that the pharaohs were the descendants of these Black prehistoric people from the Egyptian Sahara, and that the pharaohs knew about these people even in early dynastic times.
For more than twenty-five years we have been on the quest for the origins of the ancient Egyptian civilization, yet we never suspected that it would be such a thrilling and rewarding intellectual adventure. We have tried our very best to pass the barrage of entrenched interests and to tell the general public of the many scattered clues that we have found in the alignments of pyramids and temples, all of which have led us to piece together a giant historical puzzle. Slowly but surely a completely new picture of our past emerges, revealing a lost and forgotten world, which extended from the Nile to the borders of Sudan and Chad and which told a very different story of the origins of ancient Egypt—a tale much more thrilling than that which any Egyptologist or anthropologist had previously led us to believe. We now can look with even greater awe at the wonderful legacy of ancient Egypt—especially at those imposing pyramids and temples—and see in them a very ancient message that was written in the stars, a message that directed us to faraway places in the desert and to a time when hardy and intelligent black-skinned men planted a seed that grew in the Nile Valley to give rise to a wonderful civilization. We know that from now on Egypt will never be the same for us, for when a Black Nubian or African passes us by, we will see in him or her, as surely as we see in ourselves, the reflection of a common Black genesis.
POSTSCRIPT
DISCOVERY OF THE KIFAH CAVE
On November 26, 2010, while this book was receiving the final editing at our publisher, we got news from Mark Borda (the Maltese desert explorer who back in 2007 had found the hieroglyphic inscriptions at Jebel Uwainat) that he had just returned from one of his daring solo expeditions in the Sahara and had made a new and stunning discovery, this time at Jebel Arkenu, the “sister-mountain” of Jebel Uwainat (located within the Libyan border some 50 kilometers northwest of Uwainat): a massive prehistoric rock-art site, perhaps the largest known in Libya!
The reader will note that the main events discussed in our book occurred in the vast eastern segment of the Sahara Desert known as the Libyan Desert. The area is bounded on the west by various mountain ranges that extend down the center of Libya, in the east by the River Nile, in the north by the Mediterranean Sea, and in the south by the Tibesti and Ennedi mountains. Measuring some 1,100,000 square kilometers, this area is ten times dryer than the rest of the Sahara and is the world’s largest hyper arid hot desert. Harsh, inhospitable, and waterless, its dune belts, sand sheets, bare rocky plateaus, and mountains are almost completely void of life of any kind, and the little of it that exists is mostly concentrated into a handful of oasis scattered throughout the region. The reader will also recall that in the early to mid-Holocene period (roughly ten to five thousand years ago) the picture was very different. The area was relatively moist with plants, wild animals, and human settlements in considerable abundance.
Today this vast area is teeming with prehistoric remains that date from this period. The Sahara has long been noted for its rock art, primarily in the more accessible and thus more explored Western Sahara. But in recent years a handful of modern-day explorers, equipped with GPS devices and satellite maps are now also penetrating the less accessible wastes of the Eastern Sahara. From their numerous discoveries over the past ten years it now appears that the area contains an immensely rich treasure trove of prehistoric paintings, engravings, and other archaeological remains, ranking it as one of the most important rock-art regions in the world. The distinctively different rock-art styles at the various sites, without the need for tedious and lengthy archaeological excavations, immediately impart a wealth of information about the distribution and movements of the ancient cultures that created them. The ever-growing inventory of sites is gradually building up a map that is revealing the geographical extent of the areas occupied in various ages. It is hoped that more detailed scientific investigation of the rock-art sites will eventually establish the chronological movements of the various groups of people as their populations expanded, contracted, mixed, and migrated, and thus providing a clearer picture of why, how, and when these mysterious desert people impacted the area of the Nile Valley and the later Pharaonic civilization. These discoveries, therefore, have a direct bearing on the various themes discussed in our book.
The “Kifah Cave” is a most dramatic and impressive example of these ongoing recent discoveries and was found by Borda in a previously unexplored area of Mount Arkenu. Mr. Borda, who, as we have seen, had already impressed the archaeological world in 2007 by finding Pharaonic hieroglyphs at Jebel Uwainat, the “sister mountain” of Arkenu, found t
he cave on the morning of November 13, 2010, while exploring the chasms and spires of the much broken sandstone plateau that straddles the northeast of Arkenu. The cave, which is 28 meters wide and only a little more than a meter high at the opening, has the appearance of a horizontal slit sitting atop a series of ledges at the base of a cliff face. The Kifah cave is the most conspicuous of a group of shelters that attracted Borda’s attention from a considerable distance. Being on the highest part of the ridge, where the shelters are located, the Kifah site was one of the last he inspected. The shelters lower down had proved to contain some rock paintings but in spite of the large size of these shelters, as well as the good headroom, light conditions, and ideal and ample rock surfaces on the ceiling, the rock art there consisted only of three cows and a single human figure. Based on this, Borda did not hold much expectations of finding anything more substantial as he proceeded farther up the ridge. When he got onto the final ledge, he could see from a distance of about 20 meters many dark markings on the ceiling of the cave, and within a few moments he was stunned to note that across its entire width, the shelter was filled with painted rock art! His immediate reaction was one of astonishment at the existence of such a large site at Arkenu, mixed with wonderment at the quality and details of the paintings he was seeing!
Borda describes the paintings in the Kifah cave as being from “the Uweinat Pastoralist period.” It is concentrated in the front ceiling area of the cave to a depth of around 4 meters, yielding a continuous painted area of roughly 100 square meters, which makes it one of the largest, if not the largest, rock-art shelter in Libya. The evenness of the ceiling and the unbroken progression of paintings give the impression of a single vast mural. The many hundreds of motifs mainly portray cattle, goats, and other animals such as giraffes (see image of an aardvark on p. 277). Hundreds of humans are also depicted in many different types of scenes such as hunting, herding, domestic, ritual, and so forth (see plates 23 and 24). The fine state of preservation of the images reveals many interesting details about adornment, shoes, clothing, implements, weapons, homes, furnishings, and items used by the prehistoric people. Although the cave extends inward about 8 meters, the deeper reaches are not painted, probably because the ceiling there is too low and dark. Mr. Borda plans to return to the site with a professional photographer to make a composite high-resolution digital montage of the entire painted rock ceiling. A pictorial article will then appear in the SAHARA journal in the middle of 2011. Mr. Borda wished us to also note that Kifah is the name of the first daughter of the Tuareg Salem Ben Yahya, one of Libya’s most renowned desert guides, who Borda has traveled with on several of his expeditions. A day before Borda found the cave, Ben Yahya greeted Borda with the words “your mother was praying you” instead of the usual “good morning.” Ben Yahya then promptly showed Borda a five-inch yellow scorpion that had scurried out from under Borda’s mattress while Ben Yahya was gathering up the sleeping gear. The species is known as the Death Stalker (Leiurus quinquestriatus). Ben Yahya then related the harrowing story of how, at the tender age of just three months, Kifah was killed in the oasis of Rebbiana after the same species of yellow scorpion had crept into her bed while she slept. With the tragic story still ringing in his ears when he found the cave, Borda was moved to dedicate his discovery to the memory of Kifah.
A rock painting of an aardvark
We wish to thank Mark Borda for kindly allowing us to report this discovery and also for providing us with some photographs, which he took at the time of the discovery. Mr. Borda has been exploring the Libyan Desert since 2005, his main objective being to seek out possible remains of ancient Egyptian presence in its vast wastes and beyond. Apart from the discovery mentioned above, he has made a number of significant discoveries. We were among the first to visit one of these in 2008, a site that is now rather dryly referred to in the archaeological world as CC21, but which we prefer to call the “Borda Cave” in this book. It is unusually located between Gilf Kebir and Jebel Uwainat, an area previously thought to be devoid of rock art. The cave contains magnificent prehistoric rock paintings, now considered to be one the very finest and best preserved prehistoric rock-art sites of Egypt. Also the now famous “Uwainat Inscriptions” that Borda found in the southern part of Jebel Uwainat proved that the ancient Egyptians of the early Middle Kingdom (ca. 2000 BCE) somehow managed to travel the vast distance from the Nile across the totally arid desert without camels to meet the mysterious “people of Yam and Tekhebet,” yet unidentified kingdoms perhaps located in the once fertile sub-Saharan regions of Africa.
Thomas Brophy (left) and Robert Bauval at the Uwainat Inscriptions, April 2008
APPENDIX 1
BACK TO THE FIRST TIME
Vega, Sirius, and Orion Agree at Giza
One day our descendants will think it incredible that we paid so much attention to things like the amount of melanin in our skin or the shape of our eyes or our gender instead of the unique identities of each of us as complex human beings.
FRANKLIN THOMAS
I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality. I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word.
MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.
In the main chapters of this book we have seen that there is a connection between the astroceremonial culture of the people of the Nabta region in Late Neolithic times and the earliest protodynastic and dynastic Nile astrosymbolism. The tracking of the rising of Sirius with the stars of the circumpolar Bull’s Thigh constellation leads directly from Nabta to the Nile, as does attention to the motion of Orion’s belt. Here, in more detail, is the evidence for continuous astroceremonial culture in the other direction, back in time to the Middle Neolithic*67 and perhaps earlier. We can now trace the astroceremonial evidence back before 5000 BCE.
So far, in this journey back in astroceremonial time, we have the Sirius-plus–Bull’s Thigh–Alkaid megalithic alignment of 6100 BCE and alignments to the vernal equinox heliacal risings of Orion’s belt stars plus the autumnal equinox heliacal rising of Vega—and all are within a few hundred years of that same epoch. In addition, the Calendar Circle Orion’s belt observing feature stretches back to about 6300 BCE—and the Calendar Circle suggests a method for imagining the entire precession cycle of the sky. The circle draws our attention to two time periods—circa 5000 BCE and, half a precession cycle before this, circa 16,500 BCE. That cycle brackets the time circa 12,000 BCE, which was the era referred to by the ancient Egyptians as Zep Tepi, or the First Time. The pyramids at Giza refer back to that time via their reflection of the Orion’s belt stars in the layout of the Giza monuments. In terms of the precession cycle of a star, if Zep Tepi is the First Time, it is logical that it refers to the culmination time of the star when it is either farthest south or farthest north on its twenty-six-thousand-year cycle. Nabta seems to have been built during the half time or middle time to the Zep Tepi cycle or the precession cycle and also reflects representations from the sky of the earlier time as well as the time when Nabta was built. (Thus if Giza is the place of the First Time, Nabta may be the place of the center of time.) If there is a symbolic connection between Nabta and Giza, it may be possible to find more representation of the First Time at Giza by digging deeper into the findings at Nabta, which might tell us what to look for at Giza.
VEGA AND THE SUBTERRANEAN PASSAGE
As we have seen, the primary stars that were tracked ceremonially at Nabta are Sirius, the stars of Orion’ belt, and the circumpolar stars, including Vega (Alpha Lyrae), which is a very bright star. At visual brightness magnitude 0.0, Vega, since Hellenistic times, defined the brightest portion of the stellar brightness scale. It is essentially equal to the variable star Arcturus as the brightest star in the Northern Hemisphere.*68 Further, it is by far the brightest star that is ever near the long-term path of the celestial pole, and so for several centuries around 1
2,000 BCE, Vega was the brightest North Star ever. In the Great Pyramid at Giza, the two internal chambers, the King’s Chamber and the Queen’s Chamber, are connected to shafts oriented up and out along the meridian, the north–south line in the sky. Though they were previously determined to be air shafts, a number of authors have discussed that they probably indicate stars. Today it is generally accepted that the shafts were, in fact, associated with stars—and that specifically the King’s Chamber southern shaft was oriented to Orion’s belt and the Queen’s Chamber southern shaft was oriented to Sirius during the fourth-dynasty era completion of the pyramid.
Yet the pyramid complex contains another major shaft that is oriented along the meridian: the subterranean passage that cuts in a straight line from the original entrance of the pyramid, down through the bottom courses of masonry on the north side of the pyramid, then deep under ground into the bedrock to the subterranean chamber beneath the center of the pyramid. This other major meridianal shaft of the pyramid has never been successfully associated with a star. The subterranean passage is 1.2 meters (about 4 feet) high and 1.04 meters (3.4 feet) wide and runs 105 meters (344 feet) down into the bedrock. It is surprisingly uniform and straight, descending at an angle of 26.52 degrees.2 Given the latitude of the Great Pyramid, the subterranean passage points to a declination of 86.54 degrees in the sky, 3.46 degrees directly south of the celestial pole. It is precisely aligned over its entire length, “without deviating more than a centimeter in angle or orientation,” as Mark Lehner puts it.3 The meticulous pyramid surveyor Sir Flinders Petrie notes for 2/5 of its length an even greater precision, requiring “readings to 1/100 inch or to 1" [one arc second] on the longer distances.”4 It is one of the most astonishingly precise features of the whole Great Pyramid complex, which itself is a wonder of precision—and it points to the sky, for what could be more of an intended orientation than a star? The passage is cut so consistently straight, and other aspects of the Great Pyramid, such as its cardinal orientation, are so accurate that it is likely that whoever cut the subterranean passage probably did not intend it to align with the celestial North Pole, because if that were indeed the target, it surely would have been hit more accurately.
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