The Secret Chamber of Osiris: Lost Knowledge of the Sixteen Pyramids (12 page)

Hawass did not elaborate on this, but shortly after my visit to Giza plans were hatched by him to revamp the wall, ostensibly to prevent “hawkers” from peddling their wares to tourists. As such, all manner of additional security features were added in order to foil the hawkers.

Egypt’s famous Giza Pyramids are being given a £14m ($27m) makeover, starting with a state-of-the art security fence to stop hawkers harassing tourists.

Visitors to the World Heritage site have for years had to fend off persistent peddlers, offering camel rides and trinkets. Now a 12-mile (20-km) fence, complete with infra-red sensors, security cameras and alarms has been erected. It is the first phase of a project to modernize the 5,000-year-old site. Egyptian authorities say once the revamp is complete, it will make visiting the Wonder of the World a friendlier experience.

The chain-link fence with its motion sensors, which reaches a height of 13ft (4 metres) at some points, will set off alarms and alert the security control room if anyone gets too close. Watched by CCTV, visitors will now enter through a security building and pass through gates with metal detectors and X-ray machines.

The site where the three Giza Pyramids stand—located on the outskirts of the capital, Cairo—used to be completely open and tourists faced a gauntlet of peddlers selling everything from souvenir statues to photographs.
⁴

CCTV, infrared sensors, motion detectors, metal detectors. When one considers that such security measures are not in evidence at any of the other large pyramid sites, this does seem a bit over the top if it truly is, as Hawass has stated, simply to prevent local people from trying to sell a few souvenirs to tourists—especially so when many of them actually peddle their wares
within
the Giza complex itself, having paid entry themselves to gain access to the site and all the tourists milling around there. It rather seems to me that there was another unspoken motive for having this additional security put in place at the Giza site. And it occurred to me that this motive may actually be more to do with preventing people from gaining access to restricted areas beyond the wall. As previously mentioned, Could the Egyptian authorities already know about this apex location, and have they perhaps already discovered something there, something that they are perhaps trying to keep under wraps?

For the moment, however, such questions would have to be set aside. I could go no farther in my quest, and so, as I wearily retraced my footsteps along the desert road, I resolved to return to my hotel and try to find some other means of getting beyond the wall and accessing the apex location in order to complete my journey, to give homage and offer my gift to Osiris. I had come this far and was not about to be beaten so easily. It was time to put Plan B into action.

5

THOTH: HARBINGER OF THE DELUGE

The pyramids themselves, doting with age, have forgotten the names of their founders.

THOMAS FULLER

As I trekked back along the desert road, the three giant pyramids of the Giza plateau once more presented themselves to me in majestic fashion, the unified body of Osiris becoming more and more dismembered or disjointed with each and every step. From where I now stood the three great triangular forms appeared against the horizon almost like the sails of a great ship, sailing over the rolling sand dunes of the desert almost like waves on the sea—a group of pyramids known to the ancient Egyptians as Akhet Khufu (Khufu’s horizon).

According to conventional Egyptology, Akhet Khufu is the name the ancient Egyptians gave to Khufu’s Great Pyramid, although there has been much conjecture over the years as to what this term really means or, indeed, refers to. It is my contention that the name Akhet Khufu, contrary to mainstream opinion, actually refers to the
entire
Giza site (not solely the Great Pyramid of Khufu) and that this somewhat enigmatic ancient name has been misinterpreted by Egyptologists as meaning “horizon” but instead refers to the coming deluge anticipated by the ancient Egyptians. In brief, the name Akhet Khufu, rather than meaning “Khufu’s horizon,” should more properly be translated as something like “protects [against the] coming deluge of Thoth.”

As was touched on in chapter 1 of this book, a number of ancient legends associate the building of the early, giant pyramids—in particular the Great Pyramid—with one of the earliest gods of ancient Egypt, Thoth (later paralleled with the Greek god Hermes). Typically the god Thoth is portrayed in the ancient Egyptian pantheon as the god of knowledge, writing, and science. In his anthropomorphic form, Thoth appears with the body of a man and the head of an ibis (figure 5.1), although he is sometimes portrayed in the form of a baboon.

In
Legends of the Gods: The Egyptian Texts,
British Egyptologist Sir E. A. Wallis Budge writes of the relationship of Thoth with the ancient Egyptian god Ra and of the various forms Thoth could take.

Figure 5.1. Thoth, in one of his forms as an ibis-headed man

Thoth was to be his vicar, to fill his place, and “Place of Ra” was to be his name. He gave him power to send out a messenger (hab), so the Ibis (habi) came into being. All that Thoth would do would be good (khen), therefore the Tekni bird of Thoth came into being. He gave Thoth power to embrace (anh) the heavens, therefore the Moon-god (Aah) came into being. He gave Thoth power to turn back (anan) the Northern Peoples, therefore the dog-headed ape of Thoth came into being. Finally Ra told Thoth that he would take his place in sight of all those who were wont to worship Ra and that all should praise him as God. Thus the abdication of Ra was complete.
¹

How then did Thoth come to be associated in these legends with the Great Pyramid and other pyramids too? The following passage (previously presented in chapter 1 of this book) tells how the ancient Egyptians thought of the imminent flood that would destroy their civilization.

Then Thoth, being the tongue of the Great God declares that, acting for the Lord Tem, he is going to make a Flood. He says: “I am going to blot out everything that I have made. This Earth shall enter into (i.e., be absorbed in) the watery abyss of Nu (or Nunu) by means of a raging flood, and will become even as it was in primeval time. I myself shall remain together with Osiris, but I shall transform myself into a small serpent, which can be neither comprehended nor seen.” Budge explains: “. . . one day the Nile will rise and cover all Egypt with water, and drown the whole country; then, as in the beginning, there will be nothing to be seen except water.”
²

The passage above is believed by the ancient Egyptians to have been the words of the god Ra, although the words were actually spoken through the god Thoth (the “vicar” of Ra), thus Thoth, in speaking these words, is associated with the coming deluge, as the harbinger or messenger of the deluge.

This is not to say, of course, that the gods Ra and Thoth actually conspired to send a great deluge to destroy the ancient Egyptian kingdom. But to the ancient Egyptians everything, good or bad, was believed to be caused by the desires and the actions of their various gods. That the ancient Egyptian astronomer-priests went away and measured “the height of the stars” (as instructed by Surid) and found something abnormal about their disposition would have been regarded by them as the work of the gods. And the great future deluge they believed would arise as a result of the displacement of the heavens would also have been regarded as the will and work of the gods. And that they had even managed in the first place to obtain this knowledge of the abnormal state of the heavens would also have been deemed as wisdom that was bestowed on them by their great god of knowledge and wisdom, Thoth. In this sense, it can be seen how the god Thoth, by imparting knowledge of a future deluge to the king (via his astronomer-priests), would—by extension—become inextricably associated with the means by which the king hoped his kingdom could survive this anticipated calamity; that is, the construction of the pyramid arks.

In short then, while Thoth may not have been directly responsible as the
actual
builder of any of the pyramids, the wisdom that this god imparted to the ancient Egyptians—knowledge of a coming deluge—provided the motivation for these pyramids to be constructed.

But what evidence, if any, is there of Thoth’s association with the Great Pyramid and what connection is there with this and an anticipated deluge? The evidence of such, in my opinion, has always been available to us and is right there in the very name the ancient Egyptians gave to the Great Pyramid and the Giza plateau—Akhet Khufu.

As stated at the opening of this chapter, to many Egyptologists the term Akhet Khufu is to be interpreted simply as meaning “Khufu’s horizon,” although this translation itself is bound up with many differing views among academics as to what “Khufu’s horizon” actually meant or was. Most academics believe the term is connected with the idea of rebirth in that as the sun is reborn on the eastern horizon each and every day, so the Great Pyramid, as Khufu’s (personal) horizon, would ensure the transfiguration and rebirth of the king each and every day. As Professor Jan Assmann writes:

In Egyptian the pyramid of Cheops (whose Egyptian name was Khufu) is called akhet of Khufu. Akhet is the threshold region between the sky, the earth, and the underworld; in particular, akhet is the place where the sun rises. The etymological root of the word has the meaning of “blaze, be radiant”; likewise, the hieroglyph for akhet has nothing in common with the pyramid, but is a pictogram of the sun rising or setting between two mountains. The pyramid does not represent such an akhet, but symbolizes it in an aniconic way. The term of comparison between akhet and pyramid is the idea of “ascent to heaven.” As the sun god ascends from the underworld to the akhet and appears in the sky, so the king interred in the pyramid ascends to heaven by way of his akhet, his threshold of light.
³

This is, of course, all very symbolic and is only one of several attempts by scholars at interpreting the symbolic meaning of the name Akhet Khufu. The Egyptologists also tell us that it was further believed by the ancient Egyptians that the king’s ba and ka (two aspects of the king’s soul) would undertake some alchemical transfiguration into what is known as an akh and that this transformation was facilitated by and occurred within the pyramid. Egyptology further believes that the word
akh
is related to the physical horizon by virtue of the akh passing through the watery underworld known as the Duat (symbolically or otherwise) to emerge anew on the horizon, where the sun is reborn each and every day. It stands to reason then (according to the Egyptologists) that Khufu’s akhet—his pyramid—must have been where his akh was created through some mysterious transfiguration of the king’s ka and ba and rose forth as an “effective one” from within his own “personal horizon.”

However, this interpretation of Akhet Khufu put forward by Assmann is all well and good except for the not-insignificant problem that the akhet pictogram for “horizon” (believed to depict the sun rising between two mountains; figure 5.2) did not actually exist when Khufu was building his Great Pyramid, as is implied in Assmann’s quote above. Indeed, this pictogram only came into being around the end of the Fifth Dynasty, long after Khufu and the completion of the early, giant pyramids.

Notwithstanding this inconvenient fact, the early Old Kingdom of Egypt used, according to the Egyptologists, a different version of the word
akhet
(interpreted by many Egyptologists
also
as meaning “horizon”). The pictogram for this supposedly earlier version of the word
akhet
(horizon) is entirely different from the sun disc between two mounds and invokes instead the use of the ibis (see figure 5.4), which has various translations, inter-alia, “intelligence,” “illumination,” “shining,” “beneficial,” and “useful.”
⁴

Lehner was probably one of the first academics to recognize the translation problem that these two quite distinct versions of the word
akhet
present. In Lehner’s view the older term
akhet,
with the “crested ibis” (figure 5.4), should
not
be translated as “horizon” at all but instead is to be associated with the “spirit of Khufu.” Lehner writes, “Joining the stars, the king becomes an akh. Akh is often translated as ‘spirit’ or ‘spirit state.’ It derives from the term for ‘radiant light,’ written with the crested ibis. . . . Akh is also the word for ‘effective,’ ‘profitable,’ ‘useful.’”
⁵

Figure 5.2. The akhet pictogram is believed to
represent the sun rising between two mountains.

But it seems to me that even Lehner fails to properly grasp the precise nature of the term
akhet
(with the ibis glyph), for while the root etymology of the ibis glyph (
akh
) may well be associated in some way with “radiant light,” as Lehner and other scholars believe, this should not necessarily or automatically imply that this “radiant light” is to be related to or interpreted as “spirit” or “spirit state” or “spiritual light”; there is another perfectly logical and contextually appropriate interpretation for the “radiant light” interpretation of this enigmatic hieroglyph.

Here then, through the use of the ibis hieroglyph, in the earliest version of the name Akhet Khufu, we find the first tangible link of the Great Pyramid to the ancient Egyptian god Thoth, who, as stated at the beginning of this chapter, is often depicted by the ibis. But how then is the ibis connected with the concept of a coming deluge, and, more specifically, how can the ibis (akh) be logically and contextually associated with the various interpretations of “intelligence,” “illumination,” “shining,” “beneficial,” and “useful” that Lehner and other academics believe is to be associated with the term
akh
?

If the translations given above of the ibis glyph (akh) truly means “intelligence,” “illumination,” “effective,” and so on, then, in terms of an anticipated deluge, it is possible that we can understand how the ibis bird “illuminates” not so much with “radiant light” or “spiritual light” but rather with the
light of wisdom.

In ancient Egypt the ibis was regarded as an “enlightened” bird blessed with the wisdom of Thoth, a wise bird that “heralded the inundation” (of the Nile). As such, it is my opinion that the ibis should not be regarded so much as “shining” in the sense of radiance like the sun or a star (thereby wrongly associating it with “spiritual light” and, by extension, the pyramid as tomb), but rather with the “radiance” or “illumination” that we would today attribute to a clever or wise person (i.e., a “bright spark” or an “enlightened one”). In short, the ibis (akh) need not be regarded as “spirit light” but rather as “one that illuminates with its wisdom.”

So if the Arab chroniclers are correct in telling us that the early giant pyramids were built as arks to protect against an imminent deluge, then it seems that the very name of the Great Pyramid—Akhet Khufu—is, through the use of the ibis in this name, inextricably associated with the knowledge of a coming “deluge” or “inundation” spoken by Thoth, himself symbolized by the ibis. In short, the use of the ibis in the name of the Great Pyramid, Akhet Khufu, alludes to foreknowledge of a coming inundation.