The Sign and the Seal

by Graham Hancock

  Chapter 13 Treasures of Darkness

  1 Garth Fowden, The Egyptian Hermes: A Historical Approach to the Late Pagan Mind, Cambridge University Press, 1987, pp. 22–3.

  2 See New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology, Hamlyn, London, 1989, p. 28.

  3 Ibid., p. 27. See also E. A. Wallis Budge, Egyptian Magic, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, London, 1901, p. xi: ‘the world itself came into existence through the utterance of a word by Thoth.’ Soon after I had learned this it occurred to me that the whole concept was eerily analogous to the well known biblical passage which stated: ‘In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things came to be, not one thing had its being but through him’ (John 1:1–3). Intrigued by this coincidence I looked further and discovered, to my considerable surprise, that the Judaeo-Christian Scriptures allowed a number of other close parallels to be drawn between Thoth, the pagan moon-god of the Egyptians, and Yahweh, the God of Moses. One of the most striking of these concerned the Ten Commandments given to Moses on Mount Sinai and supposedly inscribed on the tablets of stone that were contained within the Ark of the Covenant: ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image … Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain … Remember the sabbath day and keep it holy … Honour thy father and thy mother … Thou shalt not kill … Thou shalt not commit adultery … Thou shalt not steal … Thou shalt not bear false witness … Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife.’ (Exodus 20:3–17).

  I had always thought that this exacting legal code was unique to early Judaic culture. This assumption, however, was overturned when I found the following remarkably similar formulae in Chapter CXXV of the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead – a chapter which consisted of a series of negative confessions that the soul of the deceased was obliged to make before Thoth in his capacity as divine judge and scribe: ‘Not have I despised god … Not have I killed … Not have I fornicated … Not have I despoiled the things of the god … not have I defiled the wife of a man … Not have I cursed god … Not have I borne false witness’ (see E. A. Wallis Budge, The Egyptian Book of the Dead: The Papyrus of Ani, British Museum Publications, London, 1895, pp. 195–204). Perhaps the most striking parallel of all, however, occurred in a rubric to one part of the Book of the Dead which stated: ‘This chapter was found on an alabaster brick, under the feet of the Majesty of this venerable place, the God Thoth, and it was written by the God himself.’ I already knew, of course, that the Ark of the Covenant had frequently been referred to in the Bible as the ‘footstool of God’ (e.g. 1 Chronicles 28:2) and that it had contained the stone Tablets of the Law written by Yahweh’s own finger. I could therefore only conclude that the match between the thinking and behaviour of Yahweh and Thoth – and also between the beliefs that people had held about the two deities – was much too close to be entirely fortuitous. Neither, I reasoned, was it possible that the biblical passages had influenced the writers of the Book of the Dead since, of the two documents, the latter was by far the most ancient (some of its contents, I knew, went back as far as the fourth millennium BC; the most archaic sections of the Bible, by contrast, were at least 2,000 years younger).

  4 Garth Fowden, The Egyptian Hermes, op. cit., p. 33.

  5 Ibid., p. 23. See also E. A. Wallis Budge, From Fetish to God in Ancient Egypt, Oxford University Press, 1934, pp. 121–2, and the New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology, op. cit., p. 27.

  6 New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology, op. cit., p. 27.

  7 John Anthony West, The Traveller’s Key to Ancient Egypt: a Guide to the Sacred Places of Ancient Egypt, Harrap Columbus, London, 1987, pp. 74–5.

  8 E. A. Wallis Budge (trans.), The Egyptian Book of the Dead, op. cit., Introduction, p. cxviii.

  9 E. A. Wallis Budge, From Fetish to God, op. cit., p. 157. See also M. V. Seton-Williams, Egyptian Legends and Stories, Rubicon Press, London, 1990, p. 16.

  10 This story is to be found in its fullest form in Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride. See M. V. Seton-Williams, op. cit., pp. 24–9. See also E. A. Wallis Budge, From Fetish to God, op. cit., pp. 177 ff.

  11 W. B. Emery, Archaic Egypt, Penguin, London, 1987, p. 192.

  12 E. A. Wallis Budge (trans.), The Egyptian Book of the Dead, op. cit., Introduction, pp. xii and xiii.

  13 W. B. Emery, Archaic Egypt, op. cit., p. 38. Emphasis added.

  14 Ibid., p. 175–91.

  15 Ibid., pp. 177 and 31.

  16 Ibid., p. 26.

  17 Instructions given to Sin on the day of creation by Marduk, chief figure in the Mesopotamian pantheon. Quoted in the New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology, op. cit., p. 57.

  18 Ibid.

  19 E. A. Wallis Budge, From Fetish to God, op. cit., p. 155

  20 W. B. Emery, Archaic Egypt, op. cit., p. 31.

  21 This is Emery’s view also. See ibid., p. 122–3.

  22 Plato, Timaeus and Critias, Penguin Classics, London, 1977, p. 39.

  23 Ibid., pp. 35–8 and 137–8.

  24 Ibid., p. 38.

  25 Ibid. See ‘Appendix on Atlantis’ by Sir Desmond Lee, p. 158.

  26 Ibid., p. 158.

  27 Ibid., p. 40.

  28 See Edmond Sollberger, The Babylonian Legend of the Flood, British Museum Publications, London, 1962. See also The Epic of Gilgamesh, Penguin Classics, London, 1960.

  29 Peter Marshall, Journey Through the Maldives, Camerapix Publishers International, London, 1991, p. 191.

  30 Set Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th edn, 1991, Micropaedia, vol. IV, pp. 441–2.

  31 See Chapter CLXXV of the Book of the Dead where Thoth (in his capacity as universal demiurge) resolves to send a flood to punish sinful humanity: ‘They have fought fights, they have upheld strifes, they have done evil, they have created hostilities, they have made slaughter, they have caused trouble and oppression … [Therefore] I am going to blot out everything which I have made. This earth shall enter into the watery abyss by means of a raging flood, and will become even as it was in primeval time’ (from the Theban Recension of the Book of the Dead, quoted in E. A. Wallis Budge, From Fetish to God, op. cit., p. 198). This compares intriguingly with Chapter 6 of Genesis: ‘And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart … And God said, The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence … And behold I, even I, do bring a flood of waters upon the earth to destroy all flesh wherein is the breath of life from under heaven; and everything that is in the earth shall die’ (Genesis 6:5–17).

  32 E. A. Wallis Budge, From Fetish to God, op. cit., pp. 197–8.

  33 Good summaries of the Plutarch account are given in M. V. Seton-Williams, Egyptian Legends and Stories, op. cit., pp. 24–9; and in E. A. Wallis Budge, From Fetish to God, op. cit., pp. 178–83.

  34 See in particular E. A. Wallis Budge, From Fetish to God, op. cit., p. 182. The Plutarch story has the coffer floating across the Mediterranean to ‘Byblos’ near modern Beirut. Budge dismisses this as a mistranslation, pointing out that byblos was simply a name for the papyrus plant.

  35 Ibid., p. 180.

  36 Josephus, Jewish Antiquities, translated by H. St J. Thackeray, Heinemann, London, 1930, vol. IV, books I-IV, p. 263.

  37 Philo, Life of Moses, translated by F. H. Colson, Heinemann, London, 1935, vol. VI, p. 285.

  38 E. A. Wallis Budge, From Fetish to God, op. cit., pp. 181–2.

  39 Samuel Noah Kramer, The Sumerians: Their History, Culture and Character, University of Chicago Press, 1963. See also John Oates, Babylon, Thames & Hudson, London, 1979.

  40 New Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology, op. cit., pp. 58–60.

  41 Jonah 2:10; 3:2.

  42 Genesis 6:19.

  43 Genesis 6:14.

  44 Genesis 9:1.

  4
5 Luke 24:19.

  46 John 3:5.

  47 Mark 1:9–11.

  48 See E. A. Wallis Budge, Egyptian Magic, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, London, 1901.

  49 J. A. West, Ancient Egypt, op. cit., p. 8.

  50 Thor Heyerdahl, The Ra Expeditions, Book Club Associates, London, 1972, p. 17. Heyerdahl adds, without much further comment, that the pyramid boat had clearly been built ‘to a pattern created by shipbuilders from a people with a long, solid tradition of sailing on the open sea’ (p. 16).

  51 J. A. West, Ancient Egypt, op. cit., pp. 132–3. See also A.J. Spencer, The Great Pyramid, P. J. Publications, London, 1989.

  52 Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt, Tutankhamen, Penguin, London, 1989, pp. 89, 108, 113 and 283.

  53 A.J. Spencer, The Great Pyramid, op. cit.

  54 See, for example, W. B. Emery, Archaic Egypt, op. cit., p. 68.

  55 General History of Africa, UNESCO, Paris, 1981, p. 84–107.

  56 For further discussion see W. B. Emery, Archaic Egypt, op. cit., particularly Chapter 4; Lucy Lamy, Egyptian Mysteries, Thames & Hudson, London, 1981, p. 68; and UNESCO General History of Africa, op. cit.

  57 J. A. West, Ancient Egypt, op. cit., p. 158. The Greeks later appropriated Imhotep, under the Hellenized name Asclepius, as the founder of the science of medicine.

  58 E. A. Wallis Budge, From Fetish to God, op. cit., p. 161.

  59 Garth Fowden, The Egyptian Hermes, op. cit., p. 33.

  60 Ibid., p. 23.

  61 J. A. West, Ancient Egypt, op. cit., p. 12.

  62 Ibid., p. 340.

  63 Ibid., p. 343.

  64 The Jewish Encyclopaedia, Funk & Wagnells, New York, 1925, vol. II, p. 497.

  65 Collins English Dictionary, Collins, London, 1982, p. 261; emphasis added.

  66 Malcolm Barber, The Trial of the Templars, Cambridge University Press, 1989, p. 62. See also pp. 61, 67, 69, 100, 101, 147, 163–4, 167, 175, 178, 182–3, 185–8, 210, 249.

  67 G. Legman, The Guilt of the Templars, Basic Books, New York, 1966, p. 85.

  68 See H.J. Schonfield, The Essene Odyssey, Element Books, London, 1984, pp. 162–5. The code is known as the Atbash cipher. See in particular p. 164.

  69 Ibid., p. 164.

  70 E. A. Wallis Budge, The Gods of the Egyptians, Methuen, London, 1904, vol. I, p. 415.

  71 Ibid., p. 414.

  72 Ibid., p. 414.

  73 David Stevenson, The Origins of Freemasonry, Cambridge University Press, 1990, p. 85. The Masons had venerated Thoth in his later incarnation as Hermes, the Greek god of wisdom. As Stevenson explains: ‘The Greeks had identified their god Hermes with the Egyptian god Thoth, scribe to the gods, and himself a god of wisdom’ (ibid., p. 83).

  74 Ibid., p. 85 (with Thoth again in his incarnation as Hermes).

  75 In De Revolutionibus. For a discussion see Timothy Ferris, Coming of Age in the Milky Way, Bodley Head, London, 1988, p. 65.

  76 From The Harmonies of the World, quoted in Timothy Ferris, Coming of Age in the Milky Way, op. cit., p. 79.

  77 The quotation is from Newton’s Principia, cited in Richard S. Westfall, Never at Rest: a Biography of Isaac Newton, Cambridge University Press, 1980, p. 435.

  78 Ibid., p. 434.

  79 John Harrison, The Library of Isaac Newton, Cambridge University Press, 1978.

  80 Frank Manuel, The Religion of Isaac Newton, Oxford University Press, 1974, p. 86.

  81 Gale E. Christianson, In the Presence of the Creator: Isaac Newton and His Times, Collier Macmillan, London, 1984, p. 262.

  82 Richard S. Westfall, Never at Rest, op. cit., p. 346.

  83 Gale E. Christianson, op. cit., pp. 256–7.

  84 Ibid., p. 257.

  85 Richard S. Westfall, Never at Rest, op. cit., p. 250.

  86 John Maynard Keynes, ‘Newton the Man’, in Newton Tercentenary Celebrations, Cambridge University Press, 1947, pp. 27–9.

  87 Gale E. Christianson, In the Presence of the Creator, op. cit., p. 362.

  88 Ibid.

  89 Ibid., p. 222

  90 Yahuda Manuscript Collection, Jewish National and University Library, Jerusalem, MS 16.2, pp. 48, 50 and 74.

  91 Richard S. Westfall, Never at Rest, op. cit., p. 355.

  92 Ibid., p. 356. See also Gale E. Christianson, In the Presence of the Creator, op. cit., p. 255.

  93 See Gale E. Christianson, In the Presence of the Creator, p. 256.

  94 Piyo Rattansi, ‘Newton and the Wisdom of the Ancients’, in John Fauvel, Raymond Flood et al. (eds), Let Newton Be!: A New Perspective on his Life and Works, Oxford University Press, 1988, pp. 188 and 195.

  95 Quoted by Jan Golinski in ibid., pp. 159–60.

  96 Gale E. Christianson, In the Presence of the Creator, op. cit., p. 222.

  97 Isaiah 45:3.

  98 J. A. West, Ancient Egypt, op. cit., p. 33.

  99 Joshua 6:11–21.

  100 1 Samuel 6:13–19.

  101 1 Samuel 5.

  102 Louis Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews, The Jewish Publication Society of America, Philadelphia, 1911, vol. III, p. 194.

  103 Exodus 3:8.

  104 Exodus 16:35. See Chapter 12, note 28 above.

  105 The shortest route was the ‘Way of the Sea’ (known to the Egyptians as the ‘Way of Horus’ and to the Bible as the ‘Way of the Land of the Philistines’). Slightly longer, but also quickly traversed, was the more southerly ‘Way of Shur’. See Itzhaq Beit-Arieh, ‘The Route Through Sinai’, Biblical Archaeology Review, May/June 1988, p. 31.

  106 Indeed, this is hinted at in the Bible. According to Exodus 13: ‘When Pharaoh had let the people go … God led them not through the way of the land of the Philistines, although that was near; for God said, Lest peradventure the people repent when they see war, and they return to Egypt. But God led the people about, through the way of the wilderness’ (Exodus 13:17–18).

  107 E.g. Exodus 14:9–12; Exodus 14:31; Exodus 15:22–4; Exodus 15:25; Exodus 16:2–3; Exodus 16:4–36; Exodus 17:1–4; Exodus 17:6–7.

  108 Exodus 17:6–7.

  109 Exodus 15:25.

  110 Exodus 16:4–36.

  111 Numbers 12:1–2, and in general Numbers 12.

  112 Numbers 12:10.

  113 Numbers 12:10.

  114 Numbers 16:2–3.

  115 Numbers 16:4.

  116 Numbers 16:5–7, 17. See also 16:39 (King James Authorized Version translation) or 17:4 (Jerusalem Bible translation) for confirmation that the censers were brazen/bronze. There can be no doubt that the phrases ‘put fire therein and put incense in them before the Lord’ (King James Authorized Version) and ‘fill them with fire and … put incense in them before Yahweh’ (‘Jerusalem Bible translation) explicitly and unambiguously mean that they were to burn incense before the Ark. See Chapter 12, note n, above for a full explanation of why this is. See also note 121 below.

  117 Numbers 16:7.

  118 Numbers 16:18.

  119 Numbers 16:19.

  120 Numbers 16:20–1.

  121 Numbers 16:22 and 35 (amalgam of King James Authorized Version and Jerusalem Bible translations). Numbers 16:35 in fact states ‘there came out a fire from the Lord’ (King James Authorized Version translation). The Jerusalem Bible translation says ‘a fire came down from Yahweh’. See Chapter 12, note 11 above for a full explanation of why the work is implied. It is worth adding with reference to this passage that the Israelites did not accept that it had been ‘the Lord’ who had blasted the hapless rebels. Instead they pinned the blame fairly and squarely on the man who controlled the Ark. Numbers 16:41 states: ‘All the congregation of the children of Israel murmured against Moses … saying You have brought death to the people’ (amalgam of King James Authorized Version and Jerusalem Bible translations). The latter is doubly logged as Numbers 17:6. (Emphasis added.)

  122 Numbers 17:12–13 (King James Authorized Version translation). In the Jerusalem Bible the same passage is logged under Numbers 17:27–8.

  123 See Chapter 12 above for a full disc
ussion.

  124 Acts 7 123–4.

  125 Exodus 2:12–15.

  126 Exodus 7:7.

  127 Exodus 2: 15–25

  128 Ahmed Osman, Moses: Pharaoh of Egypt, Grafton Books, London, 1990, p. 171. Osman identified Moses with Pharaoh Akhenaten who briefly introduced a version of monotheism into Egypt before being overthrown.

  129 A good summary account of Flinders Petrie’s expedition to Serabit-el-Khadem is given in Werner Keller, The Bible as History, Bantam Books, New York, pp. 126–9. See also William M. Flinders Petrie, Researches in Sinai, Dutton, New York, 1906.

  130 Itzhaq Beit-Arieh, ‘The Route Through Sinai’, op. cit., p. 33. See also William F. Albright, The Proto-Sinaitic Inscriptions and their Decipherment, Harvard University Press, 1969; Frank Moore Cross, ‘The Evolution of the Alphabet’, Eretz-Israel, vol. 8, 1967, p. 12; Joseph Naveh, Early History of the Alphabet, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, 1982.

  131 Itzhaq Beit-Arieh, ‘The Route Through Sinai’, op. cit., p. 33.

  132 For further details see, for example, Aviram Perevolotsky and Israel Finkelstein, ‘The Southern Sinai Route in Ecological Perspective’, Biblical Archaeology Review, July/August 1985, pp. 27 and 33. See also Egypt: Insight Guide, APA Publications, Singapore, 1989, pp. 243–6

  133 Again for further details see Perevolotsky and Finkelstein, ‘The Southern Sinai Route in Ecological Perspective’, op. cit., p. 27.

  134 Ibid., p. 33.

  135 Ibid., pp. 27 and 33. See also Egypt: Insight Guide, op. cit., pp. 243–6, and Itzhaq Beit-Arieh, ‘The Route Through Sinai’, op. cit.

  136 Itzhaq Beit-Arieh includes a helpful chart of other contenders for the role of Mount Sinai in his paper ‘The Route Through Sinai’, op. cit., p. 37. He concludes that the Exodus almost certainly did follow the southern route through Sinai leading to Mount Sinai as it is presently identified. The same conclusion is drawn in The Times Atlas of the Bible, Guild Publishing, London, 1987, p. 56.

  137 Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival, Penguin Classics, London, 1980, p. 232