1991, p. 7ff.
29 Ibid., pp. 9-10.
30 Sent to me by fax 27 January 1993.
31 David O’Connor, ‘Boat Graves and Pyramid Origins’, p. 12.
32 Ibid., p. 11-12 .
33 Guardian, 21 December 1991.
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of seafaring had been present in Egypt from the very beginning of its
3000 year history. Moreover I knew that the earliest wall paintings found
in the Nile Valley, dating back perhaps as much as 1500 years before the
burial of the Abydos fleet (to around 4500 BC) showed the same long,
sleek, high-prowed vessels in action.34
Could an experienced race of ancient seafarers have become involved
with the indigenous inhabitants of the Nile Valley at some indeterminate
period before the official beginning of history at around 3000 BC?
Wouldn’t this explain Egypt’s curious and paradoxical—but nonetheless
enduring—obsession with ships in the desert (and references to what
sounded like sophisticated ships in the Pyramid Texts, including one said
to have been more than 2000 feet long)?35
In raising these conjectures, I did not doubt that religious symbolism
had existed in Ancient Egypt in which, as scholars endlessly pointed out,
ships had been designated as vessels for the pharaoh’s soul.
Nevertheless that symbolism did not solve the problem posed by the high
level of technological achievement of the buried ships; such evolved and
sophisticated designs called for a long period of development. Wasn’t it
worth looking into the possibility—even if only to rule it out—that the
Giza and Abydos vessels could have been parts of a cultural legacy, not
of a land-loving, riverside-dwelling, agricultural people like the
indigenous Ancient Egyptians but of an advanced seafaring nation?
Such seafarers could have been expected to be navigators who would
have known how to set a course by the stars and who would perhaps also
have developed the skills necessary to draw up accurate maps and charts
of the oceans they had traversed.
Might they also have been architects and stonemasons whose
characteristic medium had been polygonal, megalithic blocks like those
of the Valley Temple and the Osireion?
And might they have been associated in some way with the legendary
gods of the First Time, said to have brought to Egypt not only civilization
and astronomy and architecture, and the knowledge of mathematics and
writing, but a host of other useful skills and gifts, by far the most notable
and the most significant of which had been the gift of agriculture?
There is evidence of an astonishingly early period of agricultural
advance and experimentation in the Nile Valley at about the end of the
last Ice Age in the northern hemisphere. The characteristics of this great
34 See Cairo Museum, Gallery 54, wall-painting of ships from Badarian period c. 4500 BC.
35 The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, p. 192, Utt. 519: ‘O Morning Star, Horus of the
Netherworld ... you having a soul and appearing in front of your boat of 770 cubits ...
Take me with you in the cabin of your boat.’
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Egyptian ‘leap forward’ suggest that it could only have resulted from an
influx of new ideas from some as yet unidentified source.
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Chapter 46
The Eleventh Millennium BC
If it were not for the powerful mythology of Osiris, and if this civilizing,
scientific, law-making deity was not remembered in particular for having
introduced domesticated crops into the Nile Valley in the remote and
fabled epoch known as the First Time, it would probably not be a matter
of any great interest that at some point between 13,000 BC and 10,000 BC
Egypt enjoyed a period of what has been described as ‘precocious
agricultural development’—possibly the earliest agricultural revolution
anywhere in the world identified with certainty by historians.1
As we saw in recent chapters, sources such as the Palermo Stone,
Manetho and the Turin Papyrus contain several different and at times
a very ancient date for the First Time of Osiris: the golden age when the
gods were believed to have ruled in Egypt. In addition, the sources
demonstrate a striking convergence over the importance they accord to
the eleventh millennium BC in particular,2 the precessional Age of Leo
when the great ice sheets of the northern hemisphere were undergoing
their final, ferocious meltdown.
Perhaps coincidentally, evidence unearthed since the 1970s by
geologists, archaeologists and prehistorians like Michael Hoffman, Fekri
Hassan and Professor Fred Wendorff has confirmed that the eleventh
millennium BC was indeed an important period in Egyptian prehistory,
during which immense and devastating floods swept repeatedly down the
Nile Valley.3 Fekri Hassan has speculated that this prolonged series of
natural disasters, which reached a crescendo around or just after 10,500
BC (and continued to recur periodically until about 9000 BC) might have
been responsible for snuffing out the early agricultural experiment.4
At any rate, that experiment did come to an end (for whatever reason),
and appears not to have been attempted again for at least another 5000
years.5
1 Egypt before the Pharaohs., pp. 29, 88.
2 To give yet another example, here is Diodorus Siculus (first century BC) passing on
what he was told by Egyptian priests: ‘The number of years from Osiris and Isis, they
say, to the reign of Alexander, who founded the city which bears his name in Egypt
[fourth century BC], is over ten thousand ...’ Diodorus Siculus, volume I, p. 73.
3 Egypt before The Pharaohs, p. 85.
4 Ibid., p. 90.
5 A History of Ancient Egypt, p. 21.
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Kick-start
There is something mysterious about Egypt’s so-called ‘palaeolithic
agricultural revolution’. Here, quoted from the standard texts (Hoffman’s
Egypt before The Pharaohs and Wendorff and Schild’s Prehistory of the
Nile Valley) are some key facts from the little that is known about this
great leap forward that occurred so inexplicably towards the end of the
last Ice Age:
1 ‘Shortly after 13,000 BC, grinding stones and sickle blades with a
glossy sheen on their bits (the result of silica from cut stems adhering
to a sickle’s cutting edge) appear in late Palaeolithic tool kits ... It is
clear that the grinding stones were used in preparing plant food.’6
2 At many riverside sites, at exactly this time, fish stopped being a
significant food source and became a negligible one, as evidenced by
the absence of fish remains: ‘The decline in fishing as a source of food
is related to the appearance of a new food resource represented by
ground grain. The associated pollen strongly suggests that this grain
was barley, and significantly, this large gras
s-pollen, tentatively
identified as barley, makes a sudden appearance in the pollen profile
just before the time when the first settlements were established in this
area ...’7
3 ‘As apparently spectacular as the rise of protoagriculture in the late
Palaeolithic Nile Valley was its precipitous decline. No one knows
exactly why, but after about 10,500 BC the early sickle blades and
grinding disappear to be replaced throughout Egypt by Epipalaeolithic
hunting, fishing and gathering peoples who use stone tools.’8
Scanty though the evidence may be, it is clear in its general
implications: Egypt enjoyed a golden age of agricultural plenty which
began around 13,000 BC and was brought to an abrupt halt around the
middle of the eleventh millennium BC. A kick-start to the process appears
to have been given by the introduction of already domesticated barley
into the Nile Valley, immediately followed by the establishment of a
number of farming settlements which exploited the new resource. The
settlements were equipped with simple but extremely effective
agricultural tools and accessories. After the eleventh millennium BC,
however, there was a prolonged relapse to more primitive ways of life.
The imagination is inclined to roam freely over such data in search of
an explanation—and all such explanations can only be guesswork. What
6 Egypt before The Pharaohs, p. 88.
7 Fred Wendorff and Romuald Schild, Prehistory of the Nile Valley, Academic Press, New
York, 1976, p. 291.
8 Egypt before the Pharaohs, pp. 89-90.
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is certain is that the none of the evidence suggests that palaeolithic
Egypt’s ‘agricultural revolution’ could have been a local initiative. On the
contrary it feels in every way like a transplant. A transplant appears
suddenly, after all, and can be rejected equally fast if conditions change,
just as settled agriculture seems to have been rejected in ancient Egypt
after the great Nile floods of the eleventh millennium BC.
Climate Change
What was the weather like then?
We’ve noted in earlier chapters that the Sahara, a relatively young
desert, was green savannah until about the tenth millennium BC; this
savannah, brightened by lakes, boiling with game, extended across much
of upper Egypt. Farther north, the Delta area was marshy but dotted with
many large and fertile islands. Overall the climate was significantly
cooler, cloudier and rainier than it is today.9 Indeed, for two or three
thousand years before and about a thousand years after 10,500 BC it
rained and rained and rained. Then, as though marking an ecological
turning-point, the floods came. When they were over, increasingly arid
conditions set in.10 This period of desiccation lasted until approximately
7000 BC when the ‘Neolithic Subpluvial’ began with a thousand years of
heavy rains, followed by 3000 years of moderate rainfall which once
again proved ideal for agriculture: ‘For a time the deserts bloomed and
human societies colonized areas that have been unable to support such
dense populations since.’11
By the birth of dynastic Egypt around 3000 BC, however, the climate had
turned around again and a new period of desiccation had begun—one
that has continued until the present day.
This, then, in broad outline, is the environmental stage upon which the
mysteries of Egyptian civilization have been played out: rain and floods
between 13,000 BC and 9500 BC; a dry period until 7000 BC; rain again
(though increasingly less frequent) until about 3000 BC; thereafter a
renewed and enduring dry period.
The expanse of years is great, but if one is looking for a First Time
within it which might accord with the golden age of the gods, one’s
thoughts turn naturally to the mysterious epoch of early agricultural
experimentation that shadowed the great rains and floods between
13,000 BC and 10,500 BC.
9 Ibid., p. 86.
10 Ibid., pp. 97-8.
11 Ibid., p. 161.
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Unseen connections?
This epoch was crucial not only for the Ancient Egyptians but for many
peoples in other areas. Indeed, as we saw in Part IV, it was the epoch of
dramatic climate shifts, rapidly rising sea levels, earth movements,
floods, volcanic eruptions, bituminous rains and darkened skies that was
the most probable source of many of the great worldwide myths of
universal cataclysm.
Could it also have been an epoch in which ‘gods’ really did walk among
men, as the legends said?
On the Bolivian Altiplano those gods were known as the Viracochas and
were linked to the astonishing megalithic city of Tiahuanaco, which may
have pre-existed the immense floods in the Andes in the eleventh
millennium BC. Thereafter, according to Professor Arthur Posnansky,
though the flood-waters subsided, ‘the culture of the Altiplano did not
again attain a high point of development but rather fell into a total and
definitive decadence.’12
Of course, Posnansky’s conclusions are controversial and must be
evaluated on their own merits. Nevertheless, it is interesting that both the
Bolivian Altiplano and Egypt should have been scoured by immense
floods in the eleventh millennium BC. In both areas too, there are signs
that extraordinarily early agricultural experiments—apparently based on
introduced techniques—were attempted and then abandoned.13 And in
both areas important question-marks have been raised over the dating of
monuments: the Puma Punku and the Kalasasaya in Tiahuanaco, for
example, which Posnansky argued might have been built as early as
15,000 BC,14 and, in Egypt, megalithic structures like the Osireion, the
Great Sphinx and the Valley Temple of Khafre at Giza, which John West
and the Boston University geologist Robert Schoch have dated on
geological grounds to earlier than 10,000 BC.
Could there be an unseen connection linking all these beautiful,
enigmatic monuments, the anomalous agricultural experiments of
13,000-10,000 BC, and the legends of civilizer gods like Osiris and
Viracocha?
‘Where is the rest of this civilization?’
As we set out on the road from Abydos to Luxor, where we were to meet
John West, I realized that there was a sense in which all the connections
would look after themselves if the central issue of the antiquity of the
monuments could be settled. In other words, if West’s geological
12 See Chapter Twelve.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid.
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evidence proved that the Sphinx was more than 12,000 years old, the
history of human civilization was going to have to be rewritten. As part of
that exciting process, all the other strange, anachronistic ‘fingerprints of
the gods’ that kept appearing around the world, and the sense of an
undercurrent of ancient connections linking apparently unrelated
civi
lizations, would begin to make sense ...
When West’s evidence was presented in 1992 at the annual meeting of
the American Association for the Advancement of Science it had been
taken seriously enough to be publicly debated by the Chicago University
Egyptologist Mark Lehner, director of the Giza Mapping Project, who—to
the astonishment of almost everybody present—had been unable to come
up with a convincing refutation. ‘When you say something as complex as
the Sphinx dates to 9000 or 10,000 BC,’ Lehner had concluded:
it implies, of course, that there was a very high civilization that was capable of
producing the Sphinx at that period. The question an archaeologist has to ask,
therefore, is this: if the Sphinx was made at that time then where is the rest of this
civilization, where is the rest of this culture?15
Lehner, however, was missing the point.
If the Sphinx did date to 9000 or 10,000 BC, the onus was not on West
to produce other evidence for the existence of the civilization which
produced it, but on Egyptologists and archaeologists to explain how they
had got things so wrong, so consistently, for so long. So could West
prove the antiquity of the Sphinx?
15 AAAS Annual Meeting, 1992, Debate: How Old is the Sphinx?
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Chapter 47
Sphinx
‘Egyptologists,’ said John West, ‘are the last people in the world to
address any anomaly.’
Of course, there are many anomalies in Egypt. The one West was
referring to at that moment, however, was the anomaly of the Fourth
Dynasty pyramids: an anomaly because of what had happened during the
Third, Fifth and Sixth Dynasties. Zoser’s Step Pyramid at Saqqara (Third
Dynasty) was an imposing edifice, but it was built with relatively small,
manageable blocks that five or six men working together could carry, and
its internal chambers were structurally unsound. The pyramids of the
Fifth and Sixth Dynasties (although adorned inside with the beautiful
Pyramid Texts) were so poorly built and had collapsed so completely that
today most of them amount to little more than mounds of rubble. The
Fourth Dynasty pyramids at Giza, however, were wonderfully well made
and had endured the passage of thousands of years more or less intact.