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following chapters. Whoever they were, they must have spent a great deal
of their time observing the stars, and they had accumulated a fund of
advanced and specialized knowledge concerning the star Sirius in
particular. Further evidence for this came in the form of the most useful
calendrical gift which the gods supposedly gave to the Egyptians: the
Sothic (or Sirian) cycle.49
The Sothic cycle was based on what is referred to in technical jargon as
‘the periodic return of the heliacal rising of Sirius’, which is the first
appearance of this star after a seasonal absence, rising at dawn just
ahead of the sun in the eastern portion of the sky.50 In the case of Sirius
the interval between one such rising and the next amounts to exactly
365.25 days—a mathematically harmonious figure, uncomplicated by
further decimal points, which is just twelve minutes longer than the
duration of the solar year.51
The curious thing about Sirius is that out of an estimated 2000 stars in
the heavens visible to the naked eye it is the only one to rise heliacally at
this precise and nicely rounded interval of 365 and a quarter days—a
unique product of its ‘proper motion’ (the speed of its own movement
through space) combined with the effects of precession of the
45 Ibid., p. cxviii. See also The Gods of the Egyptians, volume I, p. 400.
46 The Egyptian Book of the Dead, p. 8.
47 Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection, volume II, p. 248.
48 For a full discussion see Death of Gods in Ancient Egypt, particularly pp. 328-30.
49 Sacred Science, p. 27.
50 Death of Gods in Ancient Egypt, p. 27.
51 Sacred Science, p. 172.
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equinoxes.52 Moreover, it is known that the day of the heliacal rising of
Sirius—New Year’s Day in the Ancient Egyptian calendar—was
traditionally calculated at Heliopolis, where the Pyramid Texts were
compiled, and announced ahead of time to all the other major temples up
and down the Nile.53
I remembered that Sirius was referred to directly in the Pyramid Texts
by ‘her name of the New Year’.54 Together with other relevant utterances
(e.g., 66955), this confirmed that the Sothic calendar was at least as old as
the Texts themselves,56 and their origins stretched back into the mists of
distant antiquity. The great enigma, therefore, is this: in such an early
period, who could have possessed the necessary know-how to observe
and take note of the coincidence of the period of 365.25 days with the
heliacal rising of Sirius—a coincidence described by the French
mathematician R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz as ‘an entirely exceptional
celestial phenomenon’?57
We cannot but admire the greatness of a science capable of discovering such a
coincidence. The double star of Sirius was chosen because it was the only star that
moves the needed distance and in the right direction against the background of
the other stars. This fact, known four thousand years before our time and
forgotten until our day, obviously demands an extraordinary and prolonged
observation of the sky.58
It was such a legacy—built out of long centuries of precise observational
astronomy and scientific record-keeping—that Egypt seems to have I
benefited from at the beginning of the historical period and that was
expressed in the Pyramid Texts.
In this, too, there lies a mystery ...
Copies, or translations?
Writing in 1934, the year of his death, Wallis Budge, former Keeper of
Egyptian Antiquities at the British Museum and the author of an
authoritative hieroglyphic dictionary,59 made this frank admission:
52 Ibid., p. 26-7. For numbers of stars visible to the naked eye see Ian Ridpath and Wil
Tirion, Collins Guide to Stars and Planets, London, 1984, p. 4.
53 Sacred Science, p. 173.
54 The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, p. 165, line 964. Sacred Science, p. 287.
55 The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, pp. 165, 284; Sacred Science, in particular p.
287ff.
56 The established archaeological horizon of the calendar can indeed be pushed back
even further because of the recent discovery, in a First Dynasty tomb in upper Egypt, of
an inscription reading, ‘Sothis, herald of the New Year’ (reported in Death of Gods in
Ancient Egypt, p. 40.)
57 Sacred Science, p. 290.
58 Ibid., p. 27.
59 E. A. Wallis Budge, An Egyptian Hieroglyphic Dictionary, (2 volumes), John Murray,
London, 1920.
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The Pyramid Texts are full of difficulties of every kind. The exact meanings of a
large number of words found in them are unknown ... The construction of the
sentence often baffles all attempts to translate it, and when it contains wholly
unknown words it becomes an unsolved riddle. It is only reasonable to suppose
that these texts were often used for funerary purposes, but it is quite clear that
their period of use in Egypt was little more than one hundred years. Why they were
suddenly brought into use at the end of the Fifth Dynasty and ceased to be used at
the end of the Sixth Dynasty is inexplicable.’60
Could the answer be that they were copies of an earlier literature which
Unas, the last pharaoh of the Fifth Dynasty, together with several of his
successors in the Sixth Dynasty, had attempted to fix for ever in stone in
the tomb chambers of their own pyramids? Budge thought so, and felt the
evidence suggested that some at least of the source documents must
have been exceedingly old:
Several passages bear evidence that the scribes who drafted the copies from which
the cutters of the inscriptions worked did not understand what they were writing
... The general impression is that the priests who drafted the copies made extracts
from several compositions of different ages and having different contents ...’61
All this assumed that the source documents, whatever they were, must
have been written in an archaic form of the Ancient Egyptian language.
There was, however, an alternative possibility which Budge failed to
consider. Suppose that the task of the priests had been not only to copy
material but to translate into hieroglyphs texts originally composed in
another language altogether? If that language had included a technical
terminology and references to artefacts and ideas for which no equivalent
terms existed in Ancient Egyptian, this would provide an explanation for
the strange impression given by certain of the utterances. Moreover, if
the copying and translating of the original source documents had been
completed by the end of the Sixth Dynasty, it was easy to understand why
no more ‘Pyramid Texts’ had ever been carved: the project would have
come to a halt when it had fulfilled its objective—which would have been
to create a permanent hieroglyphic record of a sacred literature that had
already been tottering with age when Unas had taken the throne of Egypt
in 2356 BC.
Last records of the First Time?
Because we wanted to cover as much of
the distance to Abydos as was
possible before nightfall, Santha and I reluctantly decided that it was time
to get back on the road. Although we had originally intended to spend
only a few minutes, the sombre gloom and ancient voices of the Unas
tomb chamber had lulled our senses and almost two hours had passed
since our arrival. Stooping, we left the tomb and climbed the steeply
60 From Fetish to God In Ancient Egypt, pp. 321-2.
61 Ibid., p. 322.
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angled passageway to the exit, where we paused to allow our eyes to
adjust to the harsh mid-morning sunlight. As we did so, I took the
opportunity to look over the pyramid itself, which had fallen into such a
crumbling and thoroughly dilapidated state that its original form was
barely recognizable. The core masonry, reduced to little more than a
nondescript heap of rubble, was evidently of poor quality, and even the
facing blocks—some of which were still intact—lacked the finesse and
careful workmanship demonstrated by the older pyramids at Giza.
This was hard to explain in conventional historical terms. If the normal
evolutionary processes that govern the development of architectural skills
and ideas had been at work in Egypt, one would have expected to find the
opposite to be true: the design, engineering and masonry of the Unas
Pyramid should have been superior to these of the Giza group, which,
according to orthodox chronology, had been built about two centuries
previously.62
The uncomfortable fact that this was not the case (i.e., Giza was ‘better’
than Unas and not vice versa) created knotty challenges for Egyptologists
and raised questions to which no satisfactory answers had been supplied.
To reiterate the central problem: everything about the three stunning and
superb pyramids of Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure proclaimed that they
were the end products of hundreds, perhaps even thousands of years of
accumulated architectural and engineering experience. This was not
supported by the archaeological evidence which left no doubt that they
were among the earliest pyramids ever built in Egypt—in other words,
they were not the products of the mature phase of that country’s
pyramid-building experiment but, anomalously, were the creations of its
infancy.
A further mystery also cried out for a solution. In the three great
pyramids at Giza, Egypt’s Fourth Dynasty had reared up mansions of
eternity—unprecedented and unsurpassed masterpieces of stone,
hundreds of feet high, weighing millions of tons apiece, which
incorporated many extremely advanced features. No pyramids of
comparable quality were ever built again. But only a little later, beneath
the smaller, shabbier superstructures of the Fifth and Sixth Dynasty
pyramids, a sort of Hall of Records seemed to have been deliberately
created: a permanent exhibition of copies or translations of archaic
documents which was, at the same time, an unprecedented and
unsurpassed masterpiece of scribal and hieroglyphic art.
In short, like the pyramids at Giza, it seemed that the Pyramid Texts
had burst upon the scene with no apparent antecedents, and had
occupied centre-stage for approximately a hundred years before ‘ceasing
operations’, never to be bettered.
Presumably the ancient kings and sages who had arranged these things
had known what they were doing? If so, their minds must have contained
62 Atlas of Ancient Egypt, p. 36.
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a plan, and they must have intended a strong connection to be seen
between the completely uninscribed (but technically brilliant)—pyramids
at Giza, and the brilliantly inscribed (but technically slipshod) pyramids of
the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties.
I suspected, too, that at least part of the answer to the problem might
lie in the pyramid-field of Dahshur, which we passed fifteen minutes after
leaving Saqqara. It was here that the so-called ‘Bent’ and ‘Red’ Pyramids
were located. Attributed to Sneferu, Khufu’s father, these two monuments
(by all accounts very well preserved) had been closed to the public many
years ago. A military base had been built around them and they had for a
long while been impossible to visit—under any circumstances, ever ...
As we continued our journey south, through the bright colours of that
December day, I was overtaken by a compelling sense that the Nile Valley
had been the scene of momentous events for humanity long before the
recorded history of mankind began. All the most ancient records and
traditions of Egypt spoke of such events and associated them with the
epoch during which the gods had ruled on earth: the fabled First Time,
which was called Zep Tepi.63 We shall delve into these records in the next
two chapters.
63 Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt, p. 263.
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Chapter 43
Looking for the First Time
Here is what the Ancient Egyptians said about the First Time, Zep Tepi,
when the gods ruled in their country: they said it was a golden age1
during which the waters of the abyss receded, the primordial darkness
was banished, and humanity, emerging into the light, was offered the
gifts of civilization.2 They spoke also of intermediaries between gods and
men—the Urshu, a category of lesser divinities whose title meant ‘the
Watchers’.3 And they preserved particularly vivid recollections of the gods
themselves, puissant and beautiful beings called the Neteru who lived on
earth with humankind and exercised their sovereignty from Heliopolis
and other sanctuaries up and down the Nile. Some of these Neteru were
male and some female but all possessed a range of supernatural powers
which included the ability to appear, at will, as men or women, or as
animals, birds, reptiles, trees or plants. Paradoxically, their words and
deeds seem to have reflected human passions and preoccupations.
Likewise, although they were portrayed as stronger and more intelligent
than humans, it was believed that they could grow sick—or even die, or
be killed—under certain circumstances.4
Records of prehistory
Archaeologists are adamant that the epoch of the gods, which the
Ancient Egyptians, called the First Time, is nothing more than a myth.
The Ancient Egyptians, however, who may have been better informed
about their past than we are, did not share this view. The historical
records they kept in their most venerable temples included
comprehensive lists of all the kings of Egypt: lists naming every pharaoh
of every dynasty recognized by scholars today.5 Some of these lists went
even further, reaching back beyond the historical horizon of the First
Dynasty into the uncharted depths of a remote and profound antiquity.
Two lists of kings in this category have survived the ravages of the ages
and, having been exported from Egypt, are now preserved in European
1 Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt, pp. 263-4;
see also Nicolas Grimal, A History of
Ancient Egypt, Blackwell, Cambridge, 1992, p. 46.
2 New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology, p. 16.
3 The Gods of the Egyptians, volume I, pp. 84, 161; The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts,
pp. 124, 308.
4 Osiris And The Egyptian Resurrection, volume I, p. 352.
5 Michael Hoffman, Egypt before the Pharaohs, Michael O’Mara Books, 1991, pp. 12-13;
Archaic Egypt, pp. 21-3; The Encyclopaedia of Ancient Egypt, pp. 138-9.
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museums. We shall consider these lists in more detail later in this
chapter. They are known respectively as the Palermo Stone (dating from
the Fifth Dynasty—around the twenty-fifth century BC), and the Turin
Papyrus, a nineteenth Dynasty temple document inscribed in a cursive
form of hieroglyphs known as hieratic and dated to the thirteenth century
BC.6
In addition, we have the testimony of a Heliopolitan priest named
Manetho. In the third century BC he compiled a comprehensive and widely
respected history of Egypt which provided extensive king lists for the
entire dynastic period. Like the Turin Papyrus and the Palermo Stone,
Manetho’s history also reached much further back into the past to speak
of a distant epoch when gods had ruled in the Nile Valley.
Manetho’s complete text has not come down to us, although copies of
it seem to have been in circulation as late as the ninth century AD.7
Fortuitously, however, fragments of it were preserved in the writings of
the Jewish chronicler Josephus (AD 60) and of Christian writers such as
Africanus (AD 300), Eusebius (AD 340) and George Syncellus (AD 800).8
These fragments, in the words of the late Professor Michael Hoffman of
the University of South Carolina, provide the ‘framework for modern
approaches to the study of Egypt’s past’.9
This is quite true.10 Nevertheless, Egyptologists are prepared to use
Manetho only as a source for the historical (dynastic) period and
repudiate the strange insights he provides into prehistory when he
speaks of the remote golden age of the First Time. Why should we be so
selective in our reliance on Manetho? What is the logic of accepting thirty
‘historical’ dynasties from him and rejecting all that he has to say about
earlier epochs? Moreover, since we know that his chronology for the