Page 196 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

the present race of mankind.
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Last but by no means least, Ancient Egyptian traditions also refer to a
great flood. A funerary text discovered in the tomb of Pharaoh Seti I, for
example, tells of the destruction of sinful humanity by a deluge. The
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reasons for this catastrophe are set out in Chapter CLXXV of the Book of
the Dead, which attributes the following speech to the Moon God Thoth:
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.
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On the trail of a mystery

With the words of Thoth we have come full circle to the Sumerian and
biblical floods. ‘The earth was filled with violence’, says Genesis:
And God looked upon the earth, and, behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had
corrupted his way upon the earth. And God said unto Noah, ‘The end of all flesh is
come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through them; and behold I
will destroy them with the earth.’
45
Like the flood of Deucalion, the flood of Manu, and the flood that
destroyed the Aztecs’ ‘Fourth Sun’, the biblical deluge was the end of a
world age. A new age succeeded it: our own, populated by the
descendants of Noah. From the very beginning, however, it was
understood that this age too would in due course come to a catastrophic
end. As the old song puts it, ‘God gave Noah the rainbow sign; no more
water, the fire next time.’
The Scriptural source for this prophecy of world destruction is to be
found in 2 Peter 3:

We must be careful to remember that during the last days there are bound to be
people who will be scornful and [who will say], ‘Everything goes on as it has since
it began at the creation’. They are choosing to forget that there were heavens at
the beginning, and that the earth was formed by the word of God out of water and
between the waters, so that the world of that time was destroyed by being flooded
by water. But by the same word, the present sky and earth are destined for fire,
and are only being reserved until Judgement Day so that all sinners may be
destroyed ... The Day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night, and then with a
roar the sky will vanish, the elements will catch fire and fall apart, and the earth

42 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1991, 7:798. The Rig Veda, Penguin Classics, London, 1981,
pp. 100-1.
43 The Encyclopaedia of Ancient Egypt, p. 48.
From the Theban Recension of The Egyptian Book of the Dead, quoted in From Fetish
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to God in Ancient Egypt, p. 198.
45 Genesis, 6:11-13.

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