Hash: SHA1 In article , "People's Commissar" wrote: >Check out >> Fekri Hassan has built up a picture of what happened >> Ancient Apocalypse is a new BBC series that investigates >> the dramatic collapse of great civilisations. Here, the >> series producer Jessica Cecil relates the climate disaster >> that struck the Egyptian Old Kingdom ... Thanks for the tip! Re the Old Kingdom (pun intended), here's an item from a 1994 _Scroll of Set_: [On Monday, November 7, 1994 Michael Aquino and Linda Reynolds met at the University of California, Berkeley for a closed-circuit televideo conference with Professor Emeritus Harry I. Jones, Department of Archaeology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Aquino and Reynolds had recently seen the film _Stargate_ and had pointedly- divergent opinions concerning its substance, symbolism, and significance. Magister Dennis Mann and Adept Karen Revay had recommended Jones as a knowledgeable specialist in the field. Also participating, from a televideo facility at the deYoung Museum of San Francisco, was a noted rock musician, here identified as "X". (The following transcript of the teleconference has been edited for length.)] MA: Dr. Jones, have you seen the film _Stargate_? HJ: No, I'm afraid I don?t get to the movies very much. What was it about? X: It was a somewhat fictionalized account of a project I did for the U.S. Space Command at Cheyenne Mountain two years ago. It was supposed to be hush-hush, under wraps, all that sort of thing. I guess it didn?t turn out to be that well-kept a secret, did it? LR: Is that why the young archaeologist in the film looked so much like you? Was that deliberate? X: Could be. Nobody asked me. I didn't even know the film was being made until I saw it advertised in the paper. HJ: What was this project? X: Back in the seventies I did quite a few songs dealing with Egypt, space travel, galactic, with an emphasis on the Andromeda Galaxy. I made some of it up, other people in the band made some of it up, but I took the basic ideas from a lot of speculation about that sort of thing that was going around in the Haight at the time. Some serious, some not so. It evidently got me on file with the Air Force, if you can believe that. LR: The Air Force contacted you about it? X: Well, the Stanford Research Institute down in Palo Alto asked me to participate in some discussions. I thought it was all civilian academic. Turned out that two of the people in the white coats wore blue ones underneath. So then in 1991 I was asked to come out to Colorado Springs. It was supposed to be a seminar sort of thing at the Air Force Academy, but when I got there, they took me up to the mountain, and then things got weird. Michael was there; he knows. MA: It was weird, all right. But let's talk about what the film did with it. In the movie some archaeologists in Egypt working in a Fourth Dynasty dig discovered a gigantic stone ring, which was found to be some sort of mechanism oriented to the constellations as they appeared during the Fourth Dynasty. It wound up in Cheyenne Mountain, given another name in the movie for whatever reason. The people SPACECOM originally brought in didn't have the hieroglyphic skills to decipher all of the inscriptions, but the X-character did, and managed to turn the thing on. It was the "stargate" of the film's title, and worked as a sort of slingshot to an unnamed planet in the vicinity of Orion. The X-character took the trip, together with a Special Forces A-team led by, um - LR: Led by a colonel who everyone thought was a weirdo but who got pulled into the Space Command because he happened to have the mix of skills to handle something like this? X: Ha! MA: So on the Orion-planet the archaeologist and the team found a desert city of human slaves and an Egyptian- style pyramid and temple, which turned out to be a landing-site for an alien spaceship, also shaped like a pyramid. The alien was a disembodied intelligence who possessed the body of a young man, called himself "Ra", and used advanced technology to display both himself and a number of zombified human assistants as Egyptian gods animal heads and so forth and oppress the slave city. The team from Earth exposed the "gods" for what they were, blew up the alien in his spaceship, and returned to Earth through the stargate, minus the X-character, who decided to stay on the Orion planet. LR: The insinuation was that the alien originally came to Egypt, on Earth, at the time of the Fourth Dynasty, was responsible for the technology required to build the Great Pyramid, didn't want the Egyptians to be literate, hence the absence of inscriptions in the Pyramid. When Michael saw the film, he got mad because he thought it was portraying the Egyptian gods as an oppressive alien fraud. I didn't agree. I thought that the alien came to Earth and saw an opportunity to impersonate the gods which the Egyptians already had, and did as effective a job of it as his technology would allow. X: And the film was full of hints, in-jokes, and nose tweaks. Budge's books were kicked around for being obsolete in the hieroglyphics department. Hoffman's _Egypt Before the Pharaohs_ got several cameo shots, although that book is fairly conventional. There was a "sarcophagus" in the alien's pyramid-ship that could bring dead humans back to life - the implication being that the mysterious coffer in the King's Chamber of the Great Pyramid was built as a ritualistic imitation of that device. HJ: Well, I'll give Hollywood credit for coming up with some wild movie fantasies. MA: Just a fantasy, then, in your opinion? HJ: So what *were* you guys doing at the mountain? Never mind, I don't want to get you in any trouble. But let's take a look at some of the factors which would make a movie like this possible: One - Egypt's civilization seemed to come out of nowhere, all of a sudden. One moment you've got a bunch of hunting and farming tribes wandering around the Nile Valley; the next you've got a highly-organized nation-state society doing brain surgery, writing and thinking in any number of abstractions, and erecting buildings so geographically precise, and so precisely designed, that five thousand years later we still can't duplicate them. Two - The Pyramids, and particularly the Great Pyramid. There's been any number of books written about them, as you know. Edwards. Tompkins. Lots of conventional archaeology, even more far-out stuff. Just this year another one - _The Orion Mystery_ by Bauval and Gilbert, who are going on about how if you sight up the south ventilation shaft from the King's Chamber, adjusting to 2600 BCE or so, you get Orion, and if you look at the three Giza pyramids from above, you are supposed to see something like Orion's belt. Since that book came out in 1994, I?m guessing that it's where your film got the Orion theme. But these are all just theories. Not even theories, really - just speculation. Nobody has the slightest idea, really, who built the Great Pyramid, or why, or when. Stand back and *look* at the damned thing. It's an architectural nightmare. It's impossible to build. All of its interior design features make absolutely no sense. The location, size, and design of the passages and chambers make no sense. The coffer - um, well, anyway you get the point. The Pyramid irritates people because it is so utterly alien to what people have usually built throughout recorded history. It's also so big that it can't be ignored. So you're going to get a procession of idiots - scholars, occultists, whatever - insisting that they can explain it. They're just pulling ideas out of the air. And, like now, you're going to get storytellers making cute movies about it. _Land of the Pharaohs_ in the fifties, _Stargate_ today, something else tomorrow. Incidentally the Egyptians were reading and writing just fine in the Fourth Dynasty. They were doing it in the *First* Dynasty! The Great Pyramid doesn't have any writing in it - LR: - The X-archaeologist in the film said that at the beginning, but he was ridiculed by an audience of Egyptologists, one of whom insisted that Khufu's name was inscribed on some of the internal building-blocks. HJ: Just scrawled graffiti. If you saw someone's handwritten name crayoned on a piece of concrete in an elevator shaft of the Empire State Building, would you assume that he built the building or that it was built to commemorate him? Hardly. That's just another instance of Egyptologists scrambling around desperately, trying to shoehorn the Pyramid into a nice, ordinary place in their books. X: A few minutes ago you mentioned Orion, and that book - LR: - _The Orion Mystery_ - X: _The Orion Mystery_. Apparently the authors were quite excited about Orion and the Pyramid. Any thoughts? HJ: Archaeology is a three-step process. First you find something. Then you try to figure out what it means. Finally you have to get other archaeologists to listen to you and agree with you. Late 19th Century there the director of the solar physics observatory of the Royal College of Science in London was a professor of astronomical physics by the name of Norman Lockyer. Got knighted for his Sun-studies, I think. Anyway he got interested in Egypt - decided that the Egyptian gods were in fact glyphs of solar, lunar, and stellar bodies, relationships, phenomena. He went on to apply this idea to Egyptian monuments and architecture. Wrote the whole thing up in a book called _The Dawn of Astronomy_. Pissed conventional Egyptologists off something fierce. You see, it was accepted, by which I mean entrenched in doctrine, that Egypt was a civilization too primitive and superstitious to be capable of anything like complex astronomy, to say nothing of architecture based on it. Also Lockyer was an astronomer, not a school-trained archaeologist, which meant that he was an outsider and upstart. So his book was disdainfully ignored. For years it was almost impossible to find. Shortly after the war I came across a copy, and after reading it I harassed some friends at MIT into reprinting it. Lockyer was not mind-numbed by all of the Osirian mortuary stuff that Plutarch imprinted on conventional Egyptology. He understood the original, pre-dynastic Set/Horus dichotomy - Set the celestial pole and/or the circumpolar stars, Horus the Sun which "defeated" the night sky every dawn and was "defeated" by it every evening. He knew that Egypt, as an agrarian culture with a seasonal river, was highly attuned to astronomical signals of the cycling of time. Do you see the point here? Lockyer's god-system *worked*. That is, his Egyptian gods did exactly what their priests said they would, right on time, over and over again. This wasn't one of those situations where you pray or sacrifice to a god and nothing happens. It *worked*. Lockyer also took the ponderous Osiris/Isis mythology and resolved it as neatly as could be, without all the human death-fetishism that conventional Egyptology insists upon: "I have previously noted the symbolism of Sirius-Hathor as a cow in a boat associated with the constellation of Orion. There is a point connected with this which I did not then refer to, but which is of extreme importance for a complete discussion of the question now occupying us. We get associated with the cow in the boat, Orion (Sah) as Horus, but in other inscriptions we get Orion as a mummy that is to say, in the course of Egyptian history the same constellation is symbolized as a rising sun at one time and a setting sun at another. Now, that must have been so if the Egyptian mythology were consistent and rested on an astronomical basis, because Sah rose in the dawn in one case and faded at dawn in the other. From the table giving a generalized statement with regard to Osiris, similar to that we have already considered for Isis, it looks as if the mythology connected with Osiris is simply the mythology connected with any celestial body becoming invisible. We have the sun setting, the moon waning, a planet setting, stars setting, constellations fading at dawn. We see, therefore, that the Egyptian mythology was absolutely and completely consistent with the astronomical conditions by which they were surrounded; that, although it is wonderfully poetical, in no case is the poetry allowed to interfere with the strictest and most accurate reference to the astronomical phenomena which had to be dealt with." The argument, then, for the use of "Isis" as a generic name is greatly strengthened by the similar way in which the term "Osiris", which is acknowledged to be a generic name, is employed. LR: And the point of the Orion azimuth-channel in the Pyramid? HJ: _The Orion Mystery_ assumes that the Pyramid was in fact Khufu's tomb, and that his spirit expected to go to the stars to merge with Osiris after his body's death, and that the Orion- constellation represented Osiris. Presumably the southern air- vent in the King's Chamber was to give Khufu a running start in the right direction. The authors conveniently ignore the northern, polar-stars-oriented vent, to be sure. MA: You don't think there's anything to their theory? HJ: It's absurd to consider the Pyramid a tomb. One look at its internal design is enough to dispel that notion. The Egyptians designed and decorated their tombs methodically and elaborately. The coffer in the King's Chamber is an inch or so wider than the passages to that part of the Pyramid. Nor does it have a lid. And of course when Al Mamun's men got into the King's Chamber for the first time, i.e. by boring through solid rock around the sealed granite-plugged passages in 813 CE, there was nothing there except the empty coffer. Makes no difference: Since then conventional Egyptologists have been insisting that the Pyramid was Khufu's tomb, because that's the only way they can fit it into their equally-conventional image of Egypt. LR: About those shafts in the King's Chamber, let me read you something from _The Orion Mystery_: "Badawy's architectural studies had shown that the ancient Egyptians did not ventilate tombs ... Badawy pointed out: 'To ventilate the burial chamber of Cheops channels running horizontally at the level of the ceiling would have been more adequate than the inclined shafts ... One should add to this inadequacy in the design all the constructional problems involved in the building of the two inclined shafts through all the courses, a process which could have been avoided by building them through one horizontal course.'" HJ: If the Egyptians didn't ventilate tombs, it stands to reason that the Pyramid wasn't designed as a tomb, doesn't it? Why provide *any* air-access to a sealed tomb? Also, as the descending, ascending, and Grand Gallery passages clearly show, the Pyramid-builders weren't in the least deterred by constructing inclined passages. All of those could have been made level, or stepped, if inclines presented a problem. Incidentally you cannot look through either vent-shaft and see the sky, Orion or otherwise, for the simple reason that the shafts do not run in a straight line from the walls of the King's Chamber. They both run horizontally through the chamber walls, only then bend upwards. In daytime, and with all interior lights in the Pyramid turned off, they *do* admit two faint beams of light, however, but that's all I?m going to say about *that* for now. X: In _Stargate_ the implication is the Great Pyramid was Fourth Dynasty, i.e. Khufu. When do you think it was built? HJ: According to the Arab historian Abu-Zeyd-el-Balkhy, inscriptions on the now-destroyed exteriors of the Giza pyramids give their time of construction as when Lyra was in the sign of Cancer. That would have been about 73,000 years ago, in the late-middle Palaeolithic. X: Well, what about that book they were using at Cheyenne - the one that also got cameoed in _Stargate_? MA: Hoffman's _Egypt Before the Pharaohs_ - HJ: I know it well; I know Mike Hoffman. He and I used to go drinking at Virginia when I was a Visiting Professor there a few years back. Yeah, the book's sound as far as it goes, but remember that it's based on what you?d call the "normal range" of archaeological supporting data: geological digs, climate calculations, pottery, tools, hut ruins, that sort of thing. It found just what you would normally expect to find in a mideast precivilization of that time period. Point is Hoffman assumes, not unreasonably, that there was nothing else sitting around the Nile while the Gerzean Egyptians were building huts and carving flints - something like the Pyramid, for instance. Hoffman has no way of knowing that it was *not* there all the while, looming over the Gerzeans. Hoffman brings out in his book that the hook we hang Egyptian dynastic dating on, particularly the early dynasties, is a list from Manetho, an Egyptian priest at Sebennytos in the Nile Delta around 280 BCE. We have it today only in fragments, but it's *still* the hook, so to speak. That's how we get the usual 30 dynasties, and conventional Egyptologists are more or less happy with that. What they're *not* so happy about is that Manetho's list goes on quite a ways before Menes, before the accepted date of 3100 BCE going backwards: 350 years Thinites; 1,790 years other Memphite kings; 1,817 years other kings; 1,255 years "Heroes"; and before that 13,900 years in which the _neteru_ - the "gods" - reigned physically on Earth. That's where Manetho stops. LR: But Egypt is full of other pyramids which have been reliably dated to the Old Kingdom. HJ: But not by any stretch of the same construction quality. Most of them are just crumbling piles of rock. They could just as easily be imitations of a pre-existing, mysterious, and impressive Great Pyramid. X: At Cheyenne we began by using a computer-modeling program to take the sky back to the coded references we were given to work with. But the initial conclusion was that something was wrong with the data, with the inscriptions, because the reconstructed sky went back around 25,000 years. HJ: According to Hoffman, you had just basic tool-making culture at that time. X: That thing at Cheyenne wasn't any piece of chipped flint! LR: Was it like the Stargate? In the film, I mean. MA: Actually we couldn't figure out *what* the hell it was. It came from Egypt, but we weren't told exactly from where. It's a mechanical device, moving parts of some sort, non-organic, so it couldn't be carbon-dated; and X did in fact discover that several of the symbols on it corresponded to the 25,000-year-old sky; but that's where the project came to a halt. In fact the 25,000-figure was considered invalid somehow, because the archaeological advisors of the project were quite certain that Egyptian civilization only went back to 3100 BCE. So that sent them off in other directions, and X went home and I was assigned back to regular J2 duties. I thought the whole thing had been dropped as a dead end. Looks like someone got the bright idea to use it as the basis for a movie, including X's involvement - though it's nice to see that you aren't marooned somewhere around Orion, X! X: Looked like fun in the film. Almost wish I were. LR: The project was halted, you said, but the film implied that the device was in fact a - a jumping device between Earth and the Orion planet, and that evidence of an alien masquerading as an Egyptian god showed up there. X: My fault, probably. At Cheyenne I was going on about some of the themes in my music, and we got into some interesting bull sessions on all of that, and I guess someone was making notes. Did you ever hear "The Wheel", "Point Zero", some of the older stuff, as from _Bark_: "Egyptian kings they sing of Gods and pyramids of stone, And they left the deserts clean, and they left the deserts golden And shining as a beacon for those who need a road Into the day and through the night we go and find our way home ..." ... that sort of thing? Quite a lot of it, really. MA: One thing in the film surprised me - why the alien chose to impersonate Ra. Why not Set, who in the kind of lightweight Egyptian mythology used in _Orion Mystery_, and the film, is cast as the "evil god"? Not that I'm complaining. But why not Osiris, who _Orion Mystery_ insists was associated with Orion? Ra was the *Sun*-god, more specifically *Earth's* Sun-god, and as I recall he was not particularly nasty. LR: Could be because Ra was famous for being a "traveling" god - in his barque across the heavens every day - which would have supported this alien's use of his spaceship. HJ: Also you said that the film dated this character to the Fourth Dynasty. I don't know whether they got that technical about it, but it wasn't until much later in dynastic history that Osiris became anything more than a god of the dead, and to begin with a minor one, for in the underworld he was subordinate to Ra, or Auf, the "dead Sun", during the hours of darkness. LR: We?re about out of time here. Any closing comments? X: I?d like to go back to Cheyenne and try that gadget out, if that?s how it works. MA: I'm rather fascinated to see that there's so much data hiding behind the facade of the movie, even if some of it's off in left field. Looks like at least some hard thinking went into it, and possibly got derailed later in the editorial process - for example, the need to turn it into a monster- movie with a bad alien instead of portraying Ra as a more benevolent type of superalien - Michael Rennie in a nemyss, whatever. HJ: Amazing the lengths some people will go to write a crazy story about the Great Pyramid. LR: Thank you all.