Equally intriguing is the Inventory Stela’s statement that “the plans of the Image of Hor-em-akhet”—i.e. of the Sphinx—were brought to the site by Khufu, presumably for reference purposes while the repair of the monument was undertaken. This very obviously implies the existence of an ancient “archive” pertaining to Giza, perhaps a “Hall of Records” reminiscent of the lost records in the temple library at Edfu from which we know the Building Texts were extracted.
These, as we’ve seen, were said to be the words of the Seven Sages, taken down in writing by no lesser personage than the wisdom god Thoth himself. Reymond even suggests that there may once have existed a Sacred Book of the Early Primeval Age of the Gods, in which the whole “divine” plan in Egypt was set out.75 And the indications are, she says, that this was linked to a second ancient book, The Specifications of the Mounds of the Early Primeval Age, which was believed to contain records not only of all the lesser “mounds” and the temples that would ultimately be built upon them as part of the project to bring about the rebirth of the destroyed world of the “gods,” but also of the Great Primeval Mound itself.76
Unfortunately nothing more is known about either of these lost “books” than the few very brief and tantalizing references to them at Edfu. Nonetheless, as I suggested earlier, there is every possibility that this Great Primeval Mound, where the time of the present age of the earth supposedly began, was the rocky hill at Giza around which the Great Pyramid would in due course be built. There is, too, an extraordinary text, preserved on papyrus from Egypt’s Middle Kingdom, which speaks of a search for “the secret chambers of the sanctuary of Thoth”—secret chambers that Khufu wished to “copy” for his temple.
A deep and ancient mystery that we’ll explore in the next chapter lies concealed in these strange references.
Chapter 11
The Books of Thoth
A quick summary.
The Edfu Building Texts speak of the “Homeland of the Primeval Ones”—an island, the location of which is never specified—that was destroyed by an “enemy,” described as a “serpent,” “the Great Leaping One.” The “serpent’s” assault caused a flood that inundated this “primeval world of the gods,” killing the majority of its “divine” inhabitants. A few of them, however, escaped the disaster and fled the scene in boats to wander the earth. Their purpose in so doing was to identify suitable sites where they might set in motion a sacred design to bring about
the resurrection of the former world of the gods … The re-creation of a destroyed world.
And all of these events took place in the “early primeval age”—a very, very long time ago, so long ago that they would have passed beyond human remembering if great efforts had not been made to preserve them. “In our temples,” the Egyptian priests of Sais reportedly told Solon:
we have preserved from earliest times a written record of any great or splendid achievement or notable event which has come to our ears.1
This was the case, too, at Edfu where Reymond’s detailed study reveals that a vast and extensive archive once existed, from which the extracts were taken that the priests carved into the temple walls and that thus still survive. It is by following the trail of clues in these extracts, as we did in the last chapter, that we have arrived at the Great Sphinx, perhaps the very “lion which had the face of a man” that Horus was said in the Edfu texts to have transformed himself into.
In this context, the reference in the Inventory Stela to Khufu having access to plans of the Sphinx, which he refers to when he “restores the statue,” is suggestive of the existence of an ancient archive of Giza—perhaps an archive dating back to the remote age when the site was founded by the “gods” with distinctive astronomical characteristics that would later allow the whole complex to be described as a “book which descended from the sky.” Does this “book” refer to the constellation of Leo as it appeared at dawn on the spring equinox in the epoch of 10,500 BC—a constellation that “descended from the sky” at Giza in the form of the Great Sphinx? And did the three belt stars of the constellation of Orion as they looked in that distant epoch “descend from the sky” at Giza in the form of the ground plans of the three great pyramids?
We’ve seen that the Sphinx, or at any rate large parts of it, could very well have been carved in the epoch of 10,500 BC. The pyramids were certainly completed much later, but it’s my belief that they were built over pre-existing structures dating back to the time of the gods—gods whom the Edfu texts tell us quite explicitly were “capable of uniting with the sky.”2 These pre-existing structures would, of course, have been hidden when they were replaced by the pyramids,3 among them the original natural hill that anchors the whole plan and which was later incorporated into the structure of the Great Pyramid.
Since the Edfu texts envisage the work of the gods as the re-creation in other lands of their lost world, and since the key feature of that lost homeland was “a primeval temple that was erected on a low mound,”4 it becomes all the more likely they would have sought to reproduce these features at Giza. At any rate, no lesser authority than Professor I.E.S. Edwards, formerly Keeper of Egyptian Antiquities at the British Museum, was of the view that the natural hill, now incorporated within the Great Pyramid, was indeed the Great Primeval Mound that is referred to so often in Ancient Egyptian texts5—a mound, we now understand, that drew its sanctity from its predecessor that had once stood in the lost world of the gods. That mound, Reymond tells us, formed “the original nucleus of the world of the gods in the primeval age,”6 so it follows that the rocky mound at the heart of the Great Pyramid, and later the Great Pyramid itself, served the same function in the project to resurrect that lost world in Egypt.
The Inventory Stela is by no means the only testimony to the existence of ancient plans connected with that project. We’ve seen in the Edfu texts how these plans were part of an archive believed to have been set down in writing by the wisdom god Thoth “according to the words of the Sages,”7 so it is not surprising that the Ancient Egyptians of later times became obsessed with “the books of Thoth,” which they appear to have lost access to and which came to be regarded as the fount of all knowledge. A number of papyri have survived documenting searches for the books of Thoth, and these searches, not surprisingly, are always said to have taken place in the vicinity of Giza and the Memphite necropolis.
There is, for example, the story of Setnau-Khaem-Uast, a son of Rameses II, one of the great pharaohs of the thirteenth century BC. Informed that a “book written by Thoth himself” lay concealed in an ancient tomb near Giza:
Setnau went there with his brother and passed three days and nights seeking for the tomb … and on the third day they found it [and] … went down to the place where the book was. When the two brothers came into the tomb they found it to be brilliantly lit by the light which came forth from the book.8
There seems to be a hint of an ancient technology here, reminiscent of Yima’s underground Vara, which “glowed with its own light,” or of the mysterious illumination of Noah’s Ark, described in Chapter Seven. What sound like the artifices of a lost technology are also mentioned in Arab traditions concerning Giza. The Egyptian historian Ibn Abd El Hakem believed that the pyramids were built as places of safekeeping for antediluvian knowledge, prominently including archives of books containing:
The profound sciences, and the names of drugs and their uses and hurts, and the science of astrology, and arithmetic and geometry and medicine … [and] everything that is and shall be from the beginning to the end of time …9
Hakem, who lived in the ninth century AD, could have known nothing of advanced metallurgy or plastics, yet he stated that among the treasures from the time before the flood that were hidden away in the bowels of the pyramids were:
arms which did not rust, and glass which might be bent but not broken.10
He likewise described machines that guarded these antediluvian remnants including:
an idol of black agate sitting upon a thro
ne with a lance. His eyes were open and shining. When anyone looked upon him, he heard on one side of him a voice which took away his sense, so that he fell prostrate upon his face, and did not cease until he died.11
A second machine also took the form of a statue:
He who looked toward it was drawn by the statue until he stuck to it, and could not be separated from it until such time as he died.12
Returning to the traditions of the Ancient Egyptians themselves, we have a text from the Westcar Papyrus, which dates to the Middle Kingdom, around 1650 BC, but was copied from an older document now lost.13 The text makes reference to a “building called ‘Inventory,’” located in the sacred city that the Ancient Egyptians knew as Innu, that the Bible calls On, and that the Greeks later made famous under the name of Heliopolis—the “City of the Sun”—eleven miles northeast of Giza. According to the papyrus “a chest of flint” was stored in Heliopolis containing a mysterious document that Pharaoh Khufu himself is reported to have “spent much time searching for”—a document that recorded “the number of the secret chambers of the sanctuary of Thoth” which Khufu wished “to copy for his temple.”14
What are we dealing with here?
Figure 40: Heliopolis stands about eleven miles northeast of the pyramids of Giza. Other than an obelisk in what is now the Cairo suburb of El Matariya almost nothing remains today of the ancient “City of the Sun”
I.E.S. Edwards points out that Heliopolis, the site of the “Inventory Building,” had been a center of astronomical science closely connected to Giza since time immemorial, and that the title of the high priest of that city was “Chief of the Astronomers.”15 To this the Egyptologist F.W. Green adds that the “Inventory Building” appears to have been a “chart room” at Heliopolis “or perhaps a ‘drawing room’ where plans were made and stored.”16 Similarly, Sir Alan H. Gardiner argues that “the room in question must have been an archive” and that Khufu “was seeking for details concerning the secret chambers of the primeval sanctuary of Thoth.”17
So once again we are confronted by a report that Khufu sought out and consulted ancient documents to guide his works at Giza—whether to restore the Sphinx to its original appearance, as we are told in the Inventory Stela, or to build his “temple” in the correct way, incorporating an ancient design as the Westcar Papyrus suggests. Such traditions, in my view, further strengthen the notion that whatever Khufu and the other pharaohs of the Fourth Dynasty were doing at Giza was more of the order of the fulfillment and completion of plans they had inherited from the time of the gods—antediluvian plans, in other words—than the implementation of some novel scheme of their own. They were, in short, playing their part in the resurrection of the former world of the gods. Moreover, the surface luminescence dating results reported in Chapter Ten, when taken together with the geological arguments about the age of the Sphinx and its temples, invite us to consider that this process had originated in the flood epoch of 10,500 BC, had then lain practically dormant for many millennia during which the ancient knowledge and archives were maintained by initiates in something like a monastery, and then got underway again perhaps as early as the fourth millenium BC with a gradual build-up to its completion and fulfillment in the epoch of 2500 BC.
The existence of such a college of initiates is signaled clearly in the Edfu texts which speak of the long-term mission of:
the Builder Gods, who fashioned in the primeval time, the Lords of the Light … the Ghosts, the Ancestors … who raised the seed for gods and men … the Senior Ones who came into being at the beginning, who illumined this land when they came forth unitedly.18
The Edfu texts do not claim that these beings were immortal. After their deaths, we are told, the next generation “came to their graves to perform the funerary rights on their behalf”19 and then took their places. In this way, through an unbroken chain of initiation and transmission of knowledge, the “Builder Gods,” the “Sages,” the “Ghosts,” the “Lords of the Light,” the “Shining Ones” described in the Edfu texts were able to renew themselves constantly, like the mythical phoenix—thus passing down to the future traditions and wisdoms stemming from a previous epoch of the earth.
Another name for these initiates, and an appropriate one given the importance of Horus at Edfu, was the Shemsu Hor, the “Followers of Horus.”20 Under this name they were particularly closely associated with Heliopolis/Innu, the sacred city where the records of the secret chambers of the sanctuary of Thoth were kept. The reader will recall that at Edfu it was the Seven Sages who specified the plans and designs that were to be used for all future temples throughout the length and breadth of Egypt, so it is interesting that at Dendera, a little to the north of Edfu, inscriptions tell us that the “great plan” used by its architects was “recorded in ancient writings handed down from the Followers of Horus.”21 Identical in all respects to the “Sages” and the “Builder Gods” these Followers of Horus were said to have carried with them a “knowledge of the divine origins” of Egypt22 and of the divine purpose of this land, “which once was holy and wherein, alone, in reward for her devotion, the gods deigned to sojourn upon earth.”23
Stones fallen from heaven
The nexus interlinking the Sages of the Edfu texts with Giza, Heliopolis and the Followers of Horus offers a number of clues that will enable us to take this inquiry forward. Among these, of the first importance, is the fact that Heliopolis, an uninteresting suburb of Cairo today, was once the site of the Temple of the Phoenix—known in Ancient Egypt as the Bennu bird—that famous symbol of resurrection and rebirth.24 In this temple, often referred to as the “Mansion of the Phoenix,” was kept a mysterious object, long since lost to history, a “stone” called the Benben (a word closely linked etymologically to Bennu25) said to have fallen from heaven and depicted as the seed, the sperm, of Ra-Atum, the Father of the Gods. In the Ancient Egyptian language the determinative of the word Benben, as one expert explains:
shows a tapering, somewhat conical shape for the Benben stone which became stylized for use in architecture as a small pyramid, the pyramidion; covered in gold foil it was held aloft by the long shaft of the obelisk and shone in the rays of the sun, whom the obelisks glorified.26
Likewise the capstone of every pyramid was also referred to as its Benben27—an example in excellent condition has survived from the pyramid of the Twelfth Dynasty Pharaoh Amenemhat III and can be seen in the Cairo Museum.
Numerous theories have been put forward as to where the concept of the Benben came from, but the most compelling, in my view, is the work of my friend and colleague Robert Bauval that first appeared in the scholarly journal Discussions in Egyptology in 1989 under the title “Investigation on the Origins of the Benben Stone: Was it an Iron Meteorite?” Similar to many other cases of the worship of meteorites by ancient peoples, Robert argued:
it is likely that the Benben stone once worshipped in the Mansion of the Phoenix was a meteorite. Its conical shape … is very suggestive of an oriented iron meteorite, possibly a mass within the 1–15 ton range. Such objects fallen from heaven were generally representative of “fallen stars” and likely provided the Egyptian clergy with a tangible star object, a “seed” of Ra-Atum.28
A linked possibility was considered by the Egyptologist R.T. Rundle Clark in 1949 in a paper entitled “The Origin of the Phoenix” for the University of Birmingham Historical Journal. He drew attention to the earliest surviving mention of the Bennu bird, which is found in the Pyramid Texts (Old Kingdom, Fifth and Sixth Dynasties) and reads as follows:
Thou [the god Ra-Atum is addressed] did shine upon the Benben Stone in the House of the Bennu bird in Heliopolis.29
But curiously, the Benben stone, always shown in later texts as a geometrical pyramidion,30 is depicted in the Pyramid Texts as a rough stone with slightly curved sides. “This is an important fact,” observed Rundle Clark, “since it shows that the pyramids were not exact copies of the original benben stone in Heliopolis … One can assume that the Be
nben stone became a pyramidion during the Old Empire, but whether influenced by the actual developed contour of the Fourth Dynasty pyramids cannot be determined.31
He went on to note something else that caught my attention:
The form of the Benben stone in [the Pyramid Texts] is that of an omphalos or betyl, the umbilical stone which is so widespread in the early religion of Asia … It is a lesson of this text … that the Benben stone is a betyl-like object and that it is modified into a pyramidion by the Fourth Dynasty.32
What Rundle Clark did not appear to realize in his 1949 paper, and that strongly reinforces Robert Bauval’s later argument, is that betyls, wherever they were worshipped, were nothing more nor less than meteorites—although often they were stony rather than iron meteorites. I had occasion to investigate this issue in some depth in the 1980s when I was researching my book The Sign and The Seal with specific reference to the two tablets of the Ten Commandments said to be contained within the Ark of the Covenant.33
Biblical scholar Menahem Haran, author of the authoritative Temples and Temple Service in Ancient Israel, argues persuasively that “the Ark held not two tables of the law but … a meteorite from Mount Sinai.”34 As such the ancient worship of the Ark and its contents fits in with a wider tradition, distributed across the whole of the Near and Middle East, of veneration of “stones that fell from heaven.”35
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