The Sign and the Seal

by Graham Hancock

  So the Exodus began, and with it a prolonged period of danger and enchantment during which, at the foot of Mount Sinai, the Ark of the Covenant was built. Before reaching Sinai, however, the Red Sea had to be crossed. Here Moses gave another dramatic demonstration of his prowess in the occult arts:

  And Moses stretched out his hand over the sea; and the Lord caused the sea to go back by a strong east wind all that night, and made the sea dry land, and the waters were divided. And the children of Israel went into the midst of the sea upon the dry ground: and the waters were a wall unto them on their right hand and on their left.139

  As everyone who has ever attended Sunday school will remember, the pursuing Egyptian forces followed the Israelites into ‘the midst of the sea, even all Pharaoh’s horses, his chariots and his horsemen.’140 Then:

  Moses stretched forth his hand over the sea – and the waters returned, and covered the chariots, and the horsemen, and all the host of Pharaoh that came into the sea after them; there remained not so much as one of them. But the children of Israel walked upon dry land in the midst of the sea; and the waters were a wall unto them on their right hand, and on their left.141

  Again, and predictably, the Bible put emphasis on the power of God: Moses may have stretched out his hand a couple of times but it was the Lord who ‘caused the waters to go back’ – and to ‘return’. I found it slightly harder to accept the scriptural party-line on this, however, after I had learned that the ability to command the waters of seas and lakes had also frequently been claimed by Egyptian priests and magicians. For example, one of the ancient documents that I studied (the Westcar Papyrus) related a story from the early Fourth Dynasty – some 1,500 years before the time of Moses – which focussed on the doings of a certain Tchatcha-em-ankh, a Kher Heb or High Priest attached to the court of Pharaoh Seneferu. Apparently the Pharaoh was out boating one day in the pleasant company of ‘twenty young virgins having beautiful heads of hair and lovely forms and shapely limbs.’ One of these ladies dropped a much- favoured ornament of hers into the lake and was broken-hearted to have lost it. The Pharaoh, however, summoned Tchatcha-em- ankh who

  spake certain words of power (hekau) and having thus caused one section of the water of the lake to go upon the other, he found the ornament lying upon a pot-sherd, and he took it and gave it to the maiden. Now the water was twelve cubits deep, but when Tchatcha-em-ankh had lifted up one section of the water onto the other, that portion became four and twenty cubits deep. The magician again uttered certain words of power, and the water of the lake became as it had been before he had caused one portion of it to go up onto the other.142

  While of course to do with a much more trivial incident, the story in the Westcar Papyrus nevertheless contained many points that I could only regard as startlingly similar to the parting of the waters of the Red Sea. This, in my view, left no room for doubt that Moses’s virtuoso performance in bringing about the great miracle established him firmly in an ancient, and very Egyptian, occult tradition. Sir E. A. Wallis Budge, who I had first encountered through his translation of the Kebra Nagast, but who had also been keeper of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities at the British Museum, had this to say on the subject:

  Moses was a skilled performer of magical rituals and was deeply learned in the knowledge of the accompanying spells, incantations, and magical formulas of every description … [Moreover] the miracles which he wrought … suggest that he was not only a priest, but a magician of the highest order and perhaps even a Kher Heb.143

  Secret science?

  As a Kher Heb (High Priest) of the Egyptian temple Moses would undoubtedly have had access to a substantial corpus of esoteric wisdom and of magico-religious ‘science’ that the priestly guilds kept secret from the laity. I knew that modern Egyptologists accepted that such a body of knowledge had existed.144 I also knew that they had very little idea as to what it might actually have consisted of: obscure references to it appeared in inscriptions in the tombs of senior temple officials but almost nothing of any substance had survived in written form. A great deal was probably passed on in an exclusively oral tradition confined to initiates.145 Scholarly opinion had it, however, that most of the rest had been destroyed, either deliberately or accidentally. Who could possibly guess what treasures of learning were lost when fire ravaged the great library at Alexandria – a library that was reputed, by the second century BC, to have contained more than 200,000 scrolls?146

  There was, however, one matter on which there was no need to speculate: as Herodotus put it in the fifth century BC, ‘Egypt has more wonders in it than any country in the world and more works that are beyond description than anywhere else.’ Amongst other achievements, this widely travelled Greek historian – whose books are still in print – rightly credited the Egyptians with being ‘the first of mankind to invent the year and to make twelve divisions of the seasons for it’. Herodotus also claimed to have penetrated some of the mysteries of the Egyptian priesthood, but then, rather tantalizingly, added that he could not – or would not – reveal what he had learned.147

  Herodotus was not the first or the last visitor to Egypt to come away with the distinct impression that there were hidden secrets there – and that there might be more to these secrets than mere religious mumbo-jumbo. Indeed the notion that this ancient culture originally promoted itself to greatness through the application of some kind of advanced, but now lost, scientific knowledge was, I discovered, one of the most durable and pervasive in human history: it had proved equally attractive to furious cranks and sober scholars and had been the subject of immense amounts of controversy, acrimony, wild speculation and serious research.

  It was a notion, furthermore, that impinged directly upon my quest because it raised an intriguing possibility: as a magician skilled in Egyptian ‘sacred science’, might not Moses have had at his disposal far more in the way of knowledge and technology than had hitherto been recognized by the archaeologists? And might he not have applied this knowledge and technology to the construction of the Ark of the Covenant?

  Such a hypothesis seemed worthy of further investigation. I quickly discovered, however, that what was known about the technological achievements of the ancient Egyptians raised at least as many questions as it answered.

  It was clear, for example, that these people were clever metalworkers: their gold jewellery, in particular, was quite exquisite, showing a degree of craftsmanship rarely equalled since. It was also notable, from the very earliest times, that the edges of their copper tools were brought to a remarkable degree of hardness – so hard, in fact, that they could cut through schist and the toughest limestone. No modern blacksmith, I learned, would have been able to achieve such results with copper; it was thought likely, however, that any ‘lost art’ lay less in the manufacture of the tools than in the manner in which they were manipulated on site by the stonemasons.148

  A study of many surviving hieroglyphs and papyri left me in no doubt that the ancient Egyptians were – at the very least – moderate mathematicians in the modern sense. They employed unit fractions and appeared to have developed a special form of infinitesimal calculus which enabled them to compute the volume of complex objects.149 It also seemed highly probable, more than 2,000 years before the Greeks, that they had understood how to use the transcendental number pi to derive the circumference of any circle from its diameter.150

  Egyptian observational astronomy was another area in which great progress appeared to have been made at a very early date. According to Livio Stecchini, an American professor of the history of science and an expert on ancient measurement, astronomical techniques in use as early as 2200 BC had enabled Egyptian priests to calculate the length of a degree of latitude and longitude to within a few hundred feet – an achievement that was not to be equalled by other civilizations for almost 4,000 years.151

  The Egyptians also excelled in medicine: their surgeons were skilled in a variety of difficult procedures,152 their understanding of the human nervous syste
m was refined, and their pharmacopoeia included several well known drugs in their first-recorded applications.153

  I came across many further pieces of evidence which illustrated the relatively advanced state of Egyptian knowledge at a time when the European peoples were still plunged in barbarism. In my view, however, none of the data suggested the existence of any science that we would regard as truly breathtaking today, nor of any branch of technical achievement sufficiently sophisticated to account for the potent energies that the Ark of the Covenant had been able to unleash. Nevertheless, as I have already noted, the belief that the Egyptians were the guardians of some ‘great and secret wisdom’ was widespread and almost immune to counter-argument.

  I knew very well that such ardent conviction often stemmed more from a subconscious desire to glorify the past of the human species than from any rational weighing up of empirical facts. This, certainly, was the dominant opinion of members of the archaeological establishment, most of whom regarded the ‘great and secret wisdom’ theory as balderdash and claimed to have found nothing extraordinary in Egypt in more than a century of painstaking digging and sifting. I myself am sceptical and pragmatic by nature. Nevertheless I must confess that the physical evidence which I saw everywhere around me during the series of research trips that I made to this beautiful and time-worn land convinced me that the academics did not have all the answers, that much remained to be explained, and that there were a number of aspects of the Egyptian experience which had been lamentably under-researched simply because they were beyond the scope of conventional archaeology – and probably of all other accepted forms of scholarly investigation as well.

  Three sites had a particularly profound impact on me: the temple complex at Karnak; the Zoser ‘step’ pyramid at Saqqara; and the Great Pyramid at Giza on the outskirts of Cairo. It seemed to me that the special composite quality of raw power, delicate grace, imposing grandeur, mystery and immortality that these edifices possessed stemmed from the working out within them of a refined and highly developed understanding of harmony and proportion – an understanding that could reasonably be said to have amounted to a science. Combining engineering, architecture and design, that science had been remarkable by any standards. It had never since been surpassed in its ability to stimulate religious awe, and it had been equalled in Europe only in the great Gothic cathedrals of the Middle Ages such as Chartres.

  Was this an accident? Was the essentially similar effect on the senses of the Egyptian monuments and the Gothic cathedrals a matter of pure chance – or was there perhaps a connection?

  I had long suspected that there had indeed been a connection and that the Knights Templar, through their discoveries during the Crusades, might have formed the missing link in the chain of transmission of secret architectural knowledge.154 At Karnak, as I walked slowly past the looming pylons, into the Great Court, and through the forest of giant columns of the Hypostyle Hall, I could not help but remember that Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, the Templars’ patron, had defined God – astonishingly for a Christian – as ‘length, width, height and depth’.155 Nor could I forget that the Templars themselves had been great builders and great architects, or that the Cistercian monastic order to which Saint Bernard had belonged had also excelled in this particular field of human endeavour.156

  Centuries and civilizations before them, however, it had been the ancient Egyptians who had been the first masters of the science of building – the first and still the greatest architectmasons that the world had ever known. Moreover, the monuments that they left behind beggared description and challenged time itself. Typical in this respect were two tall obelisks that dominated the Karnak complex and that I found myself particularly drawn to on my own visits there. One, I discovered, had been erected by Pharaoh Tuthmosis I (1504–1492 BC) and the other by Queen Hatshepsut (1473–1458 BC).157 Both were perfect monoliths, hewn from single slabs of solid pink granite, the former standing 70 feet in height and weighing an estimated 143 tons, the latter standing 97 feet in height and weighing an estimated 320 tons.158 A few minutes’ walk to the south, overlooking a sacred lake that was used by the temple priests for elaborate purification ceremonies, I found a third, but tumbled and broken, obelisk, the top 30 feet of which – surmounted by a finely pointed pyramidion – were nevertheless quite undamaged. On one occasion, following the advice of a guidebook I had with me,159 I stepped over the rope perimeter surrounding this fallen giant and placed my ear to the angle of the pyramidion. I then struck the granite firmly with the palm of my hand and listened, entranced, as the entire monolith reverberated with a deep, low-pitched tone like some strange and prodigious musical instrument.

  It seemed to me that this phenomenon could not possibly have been accidental. On the contrary, the enormous care and skill required to produce such a monolith (when the same splendid visual effect might have been achieved simply by cementing block on block) only really made sense if the ancient Egyptians had wanted to realize some special property inherent in a single piece of stone.

  Something, at any rate, other than mere aesthetic considerations must have lain behind the erection of these elegant and flawless stelae. I learned that they had not been hewn locally but rather had been transported by river from granite quarries more than 200 kilometres to the south.

  The Nile was a highway broad and deep. It was therefore reasonable to suppose, once the obelisks had been loaded upon barges, that it would not have been so difficult a matter to float them downstream. What I found much harder to understand, however, was the method that the ancient Egyptians had employed to get these massive needles of stone on to the barges in the first place – and then off them again once they had arrived at their destination. One monolith had been left in situ at the quarries, only partially separated from the bedrock, because it cracked before it was completely excavated. Had this accident not befallen it, however, it would have made an obelisk 137 feet high and almost 14 feet thick at its base. Obviously, when the work was started, it had been confidently intended that this monstrous object – weighing a staggering 1,168 tons160 – would be moved and erected somewhere. Yet it was extremely difficult to explain exactly how that would have been done by a people who (according to the archaeologists) lacked even simple winches and pulley systems.161 Indeed I knew that the task of moving so large a piece of solid stone over a distance of several hundred feet – never mind several hundred kilometres! – would have taxed to the limit the ingenuity of a modern team of construction engineers supported by the most sophisticated and powerful machinery.

  Equally puzzling, once the monoliths reached Karnak, was the manner in which they had been set upright on their pedestals with such faultless accuracy. In one of the temples a relief depicted Pharaoh raising an obelisk with no assistance of any kind and making use of just a single piece of rope.162 It was quite normal for the ruler to be portrayed in heroic poses and perhaps all that was intended here was a symbolic representation of a real process in which hundreds of labourers were trained to pull together on multiple ropes. However, I could not rid myself of the suspicion that there must have been more to it than this. According to John Anthony West, an experienced Egyptologist, the Pharaohs and priests were preoccupied with a principle known as Ma’at – often translated as ‘equilibrium’ or ‘balance’. It was possible, he suggested, that this principle might have been carried over into practical spheres and ‘that the Egyptians understood and used techniques of mechanical balance unknown to us’. Such techniques would have enabled them to ‘manipulate these immense stones with ease and finesse … What would be magic to us was method to them.’163

  If the obelisks, at times, seemed like the products of almost superhuman skill, I had to admit that the Pyramids in all ways surpassed them. As Jean Franqois Champollion, the founder of modern Egyptology, once remarked, ‘the Egyptians of old thought like men a hundred feet tall. We in Europe are but Lilliputians.’164

  Certainly, when I first entered the Great Pyramid at Giza, I felt like
a Lilliputian – dwarfed and slightly intimidated, not only by the sheer mass and size of this mountain of stone but also by an almost tangible sense of the accumulated weight of the ages.

  On previous visits I had only seen the exterior of the pyramid, since I had felt no desire to join the swarms of tourists pouring inside. Early in the morning of 27 April 1990, however, I managed by means of a small bribe to get into the great structure completely on my own. In the dim light provided by a series of low-wattage bulbs, and bent over almost double to avoid hitting my head on the rock face above, I climbed the 129 feet of the ascending passage, and then the 157 feet of the more spacious Grand Gallery, until I reached the so-called ‘King’s Chamber’ – a 2:1 rectangle, the floor of which measured 34 feet 4 inches by 17 feet 2 inches. Just over 19 feet high, the ceiling of this room – which occupied the very heart of the pyramid – consisted of nine monolithic blocks of granite each weighing approximately 50 tons.165

  I do not remember how long I remained in the chamber. The atmosphere was musty, and the air warm – like the exhalation of some giant beast. The silence that surrounded me seemed absolute, all-enveloping, and dense. At some point, for a reason that I cannot explain, I moved to the middle of the floor and gave voice to a sustained low-pitched tone like the song of the fallen obelisk at Karnak. The walls and the ceiling seemed to collect this sound, to gather and amplify it – and then to project it back at me so that I could sense the returning vibrations through my feet and scalp and skin. I felt electrified and energized, excited and at the same time calm, as though I stood on the brink of some tremendous and absolutely inevitable revelation.