likely that their doctrine, with all its complex symbolism, was the product
of a long refinement of religious ideas?
If so, when and where had these ideas developed?
I looked up to discover that we had left Heliopolis behind and were
winding our way through the noisy and crowded streets of down-town
Cairo. We crossed over to the west bank of the Nile by way of the 6
October Bridge and soon afterwards entered Giza. Fifteen minutes later,
passing the massive bulk of the Great Pyramid on our right, we turned
south on the road to upper Egypt, a road which followed the meridional
course of the world’s longest river through a landscape of palms and
green fields fringed by the encroaching red wastes of pitiless deserts.
The ideas of the Heliopolitan priesthood had influenced every aspect of
secular and religious life in Ancient Egypt, but had those ideas developed
locally, or had they been introduced to the Nile Valley from elsewhere?
The traditions of the Egyptians provided an unambiguous answer to
questions such as these. All the wisdom of Heliopolis was a legacy, they
said, and this legacy had been passed to humankind by the gods.
Gift of the Gods?
About ten miles south of the Great Pyramid we pulled off the main road
to visit the necropolis of Saqqara. Rearing up on the desert’s edge, the
site was dominated by a six-tier ziggurat, the step-pyramid of the Third
Dynasty Pharaoh Zoser. This imposing monument, almost 200 feet tall,
was dated to approximately 2650 BC. It stood within its own compound,
surrounded by an elegant enclosure wall, and was reckoned by
archaeologists to be the earliest massive construction of stone ever
attempted by humanity.15 Tradition had it that its architect was the
legendary Imhotep, ‘Great of Magic’, a high priest of Heliopolis, whose
other titles were Sage, Sorcerer, Astronomer and Doctor.16
15 humanity.15 Tradition had it that its architect was the legendary Imhotep, ‘Great of
Magic’, a high priest of Heliopolis, whose other titles were Sage, Sorcerer, Astronomer
and Doctor.16
16 Ibid., p. 158.
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Saqqara.
We shall have more to say about the step-pyramid and its builder in a
later chapter, but on this occasion I had not come to Saqqara to see it. My
sole objective was to spend a few moments in the burial chamber of the
nearby pyramid of Unas, a Fifth Dynasty pharaoh who had reigned from
2356 to 2323 BC.17 The walls of this chamber, which I had visited several
times before, were inscribed from floor to ceiling with the most ancient of
the Pyramid Texts, an extravaganza of hieroglyphic inscriptions giving
voice to a range of remarkable ideas—in acute contrast to the mute and
unadorned interiors of the Fourth Dynasty pyramids at Giza.
A phenomenon exclusively of the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties (2465-2152
BC), the Pyramid Texts were sacred writings, parts of which were thought
to have been composed by the Heliopolitan priesthood in the late third
millennium BC, and parts of which had been received and handed down
by them from pre-dynastic times.18 It was the latter parts of these Texts,
dating to a remote and impenetrable antiquity, which had particularly
aroused my curiosity when I had begun to research them a few months
previously. I had also been amused—and a little intrigued—by the strange
way that nineteenth century French archaeologists appeared almost to
have been directed to the hidden chamber of the Pyramid Texts by a
mythological ‘opener of the ways.’ According to reasonably welldocumented reports, an Egyptian foreman of the excavations at Saqqara
had been up and about at dawn one morning and had found himself by
the side of a ruined pyramid looking into the bright amber eyes of a lone
desert jackal:
It was as if the animal were taunting his human observer ... and inviting the
puzzled man to chase him. Slowly the jackal sauntered towards the north face of
17 Atlas of Ancient Egypt, p. 36.
18 From Fetish to God in Ancient Egypt, p. 147: ‘Judging by the Pyramid Texts, the priests
of Heliopolis borrowed very largely from the religious beliefs of the predynastic
Egyptians ...’ See also The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, p. 11.
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bemused Arab decided to follow his lead. After slipping through the narrow hole,
he found himself crawling into the dark bowels of the pyramid. Soon he emerged
into a chamber and, lifting his light, saw that the walls were covered from top to
bottom with hieroglyphic inscriptions. These were carved with exquisite
craftsmanship into the solid limestone and painted over with turquoise and
gold.’19
Today the hieroglyph-lined chamber beneath the ruined pyramid of Unas
is still reached through the north face by the long descending passage
the French archaeological team excavated soon after the foreman’s
astonishing discovery. The chamber consists of two rectangular rooms
separated by a partition wall, into which is let a low doorway. Both rooms
are covered by a gabled ceiling painted with myriads of stars. Emerging
stooped from the cramped passage, Santha and I entered the first of the
two rooms and passed through the connecting doorway into the second.
This was the tomb chamber proper, with the massive black granite
sarcophagus of Unas at its western end and the strange utterances of the
Pyramid Texts proclaiming themselves from every wall.
Speaking to us directly (rather than through riddles and mathematical
legerdemain like the unadorned walls of the Great Pyramid), what were
the hieroglyphs saying? I knew that the answer depended to some extent
on which translation you were using, largely because the language of the
Pyramid Texts contained so many archaic forms and so many unfamiliar
mythological allusions that scholars were obliged to fill in the gaps in
their knowledge with guesswork.20 Nevertheless it was generally agreed
that the late R. O. Faulkner, a professor of the Ancient Egyptian Language
at University College London, had produced the most authoritative
version.21
Faulkner, whose translation I had studied line by line, described the
Texts as constituting ‘the oldest corpus of Egyptian religious and
funerary literature now extant’ and added, ‘they are the least corrupt of
all such collections and are of fundamental importance to the student of
Egyptian religion ...’22 The reason why the Texts were so important (as
many scholars agreed), was that they were the last completely open
channel connecting the relatively short period of the past that humanity
remembers to the far longer period that has been forgotten: ‘They
vaguely disclose to us a vanished world of thought and speech, the last of
the unnumbered aeons through which prehistoric man has passed, till
finally he ... enters the historic age.’23
19 The Orion Mystery, pp. 57-8.
20 Traveller’s Key to Ancient Egypt, pp
. 166; The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, p. V:
‘The Pyramid Texts ... include very ancient texts ... There are many mythological and
other allusions of which the purport is obscure to the translator of today ...’
21 The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts.
22 Ibid., p. v.
23 James Henry Breasted, The Dawn of Conscience, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York,
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It was hard to disagree with sentiments like these: the Texts did
disclose a vanished world. But what intrigued me most about this world
was the possibility that it might have been inhabited not only by primitive
savages (as one would have expected in remote prehistory) but,
paradoxically, by men and women whose minds had been enlightened by
a scientific understanding of the cosmos. The overall picture was
equivocal: there were genuinely primitive elements locked into the
Pyramid Texts alongside the loftier sequences of ideas. Nevertheless,
every time I immersed myself in what Egyptologists call ‘these ancient
spells’, I was impressed by the strange glimpses they seemed to afford of
a high intelligence at work, darting from behind layers of
incomprehension, reporting on experiences that ‘prehistoric man’ should
never have had and expressing notions he should never have been able
to formulate. In short, the effect the Texts achieved through the medium
of hieroglyphs was akin to the effect the Great Pyramid achieved through
the medium of architecture. In both cases the dominant impression was
of anachronism— of advanced technological processes used or described
at a period in human history when there was supposed to have been no
technology at all ...
1944, p. 69.
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Chapter 42
Anachronisms and Enigmas
I looked around the grey-walled chamber of Unas, up and down the long
registers of hieroglyphs in which the Pyramid Texts were inscribed. They
were written in a dead language. Nevertheless, the constant affirmation,
repeated over and over again in these ancient compositions, was that of
life— eternal life—which was to be achieved through the pharaoh’s rebirth
as a star in the constellation of Orion. As the reader will recall from
Chapter Nineteen, (where we compared Egyptian beliefs with those of
Ancient Mexico), there were several utterances which voiced this
aspiration explicitly:
Oh King, you are this Great Star, the Companion of Orion, who traverses the sky
with Orion ... you ascend from the east of the sky being renewed in your due
season, and rejuvenated in your due time ...’1
Though undeniably beautiful there was nothing inherently extraordinary
about these sentiments, and it was by no means impossible to attribute
them to a people assessed by the French archaeologist Gaston Maspero
as having ‘always remained half savage’.2 Furthermore, since Maspero
had been the first Egyptologist to enter the pyramid of Unas,3 and was
considered a great authority on the Texts, it was hardly surprising that
his opinions should have shaped all academic responses to this literature
since he began to publish translations from it in the 1880s.4 Maspero
(with a little help from a jackal) had brought the Pyramid Texts to the
world. Thereafter, the dominance of his particular prejudices about the
past had functioned as a filter on knowledge, inhibiting variant
interpretations of the more opaque or puzzling utterances. This seemed
to me to be unfortunate to say the least. What it meant was that, despite
the technical and scientific puzzles raised by monuments like the Great
Pyramid at Giza, scholars had ignored the implications of some striking
passages in the Texts.
These passages sounded suspiciously like attempts to express complex
technical and scientific imagery in an entirely inappropriate idiom. Maybe
it was coincidence, but the result resembled the outcome that we might
expect today if we were to try to translate Einstein’s Theory of Relativity
into Chaucerian English or to describe a supersonic aircraft in vocabulary
derived from Middle High German.
1 The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, lines 882, 883; see also, inter alia, lines 2115
and 2116.
2 The Gods of the Egyptians, volume I, p. 117.
3 He did so on 28 February 1881; see The Orion Mystery, p. 59.
4 The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, p. v.
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Broken images of a lost technology?
Take for example some of the peculiar equipment and accessories
designated for the pharaoh’s use as he journeyed to his eternal resting
place among the stars:
The gods who are in the sky are brought to you, the gods who are on earth
assemble for you, they place their hands under you, they make a ladder for you
that you may ascend on it into the sky, the doors of the sky are thrown open to
you, the doors of the starry firmament are thrown open for you.5
The ascending pharaoh was identified with, and frequently referred to, as
‘an Osiris’. Osiris himself, as we have seen, was frequently linked to and
associated with the constellation of Orion. Osiris-Orion was said to have
been the first to have climbed the great ladder the gods had made. And
several utterances left no doubt that this ladder had not extended
upwards from earth to heaven but downwards from heaven to earth. It
was described as a rope-ladder 6 and the belief was that it had hung from
an ‘iron plate’ suspended in the sky.7
Were we dealing here, I wondered, simply with the bizarre imaginings
of half-savage priests? Or might there be some other explanation for
allusions such as these?
In Utterance 261, ‘The King is a flame, moving before the wind to the
end of the sky and to the end of the earth ... the King travels the air and
traverses the earth ... there is brought to him a way of ascent to the sky
...’8
Switching to dialogue, Utterance 310 proclaimed,
‘O you whose vision is in his face and whose vision is in the back of his
head, bring this to me!’
‘What ferry-boat shall be brought to you?’
‘Bring me: “It-flies-and-alights”.’9
Utterance 332, supposedly spoken by the King himself, confided, ‘I am
this one who has escaped from the coiled serpent, I have ascended in a
blast of fire having turned myself about. The two skies go to me.10
And in Utterance 669 it was asked, ‘Wherewith can the King be made to
fly-up?’
The reply was given: ‘There shall be brought to you the Hnw-bark
[italicized word untranslatable] and the ... [text missing] of the hn-bird
[italicized word untranslatable]. You shall fly up therewith ... You shall fly
5 Ibid., p. 227, Utt. 572.
6 Ibid., p. 297, Utt. 688: ‘Atum has done what he said he would do for this King; he ties
the rope-ladder for him.’
7 The Gods of the Egyptians, volume II, p. 241.
8 The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, p. 70, Utt. 261.
9 Ibid.
, p. 97.
10 Ibid., p. 107.
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up and alight.’11
Other passages also seemed to me worthy of more thorough
investigation than they have received from scholars. Here are a few
examples:
O my father, great King, the aperture of the sky-window is opened for you.12
‘The door of the sky at the horizon opens to you, the gods are glad at meeting you
... May you sit on this iron throne of yours, as the Great One who is in Heliopolis.13
O King, may you ascend ... The sky reels at you, the earth quakes at you, the
Imperishable Stars are afraid of you. I have come to you, O you whose seats are
hidden, that I may embrace you in the sky ...14
The earth speaks, the gate of the earth god is open, the doors of Geb are opened
for you ... May you remove yourself to the sky upon your iron throne.15
O my father the King, such is your going when you have gone as a god, your
travelling as a celestial being ... you stand in the Conclaves of the horizon ... and
sit on this throne of iron at which the gods marvel ...16
The constant references to iron, though easy to overlook, were puzzling.
Iron, I knew, had been a rare metal in Ancient Egypt, particularly in the
Pyramid Age when it had supposedly only been available in meteoritic
form.17 Yet here, in the Pyramid Texts, there seemed to be an
embarrassment of iron riches: iron plates in the sky, iron thrones, and
elsewhere an iron sceptre (Utterance 665C) and even iron bones for the
King (Utterances 325, 684 and 723).18
In the Ancient Egyptian language the name for iron had been bja, a
word that meant literally ‘metal of heaven’ or ‘divine metal’.19 The
knowledge of iron was thus regarded as yet another gift from the gods ...
Repositories of a lost science?
What other fingerprints might these gods have left behind in the Pyramid
Texts?20
11 Ibid., p. 284.
12 Ibid., p. 249, Utt. 604.
13 Ibid., pp. 253-4, Utt. 610.
14 Ibid., p. 280, Utt. 667.
15 Ibid., p. 170, Utt. 483.
16 Ibid., p. 287, Utt. 673.
17 B. Scheel, Egyptian Metalworking and Tools, Shire Egyptology, Aylesbury, 1989; G. A.
Wainwright, ‘Iron in Egypt’, Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, vol. 18, 1931.
18 The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, pp. 276, 105, 294, 311.