Page 342 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

Chapter 40

Are There Any Secrets Left in Egypt?

During the early evening of 26 November 1922 the British archaeologist
Howard Carter, together with his sponsor Lord Carnarvon, entered the
tomb of a youthful pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty who had ruled
Egypt from 1352-43 BC. The name of that pharaoh, which has since
resounded around the world, was Tutankhamun.
Two nights later, on 28 November, the tomb’s ‘Treasury’ was breached.
It was filled with a huge golden shrine and gave access to another
chamber beyond. Rather unusually, this chamber, although heaped with a
dazzling array of precious and beautiful artefacts, had no door: its
entrance was watched over by an extraordinarily lifelike effigy of the
jackal-headed mortuary god Anubis. With ears erect, the god crouched
doglike, forepaws stretched out, on the lid of a gilded wooden casket
perhaps four feet long, three feet high and two feet wide.

The Egyptian Museum, Cairo, December 1993
Still perched astride his casket, but now locked away in a dusty glass
display case, Anubis held my attention for a long, quiet moment. His
effigy had been carved out of stuccoed wood, entirely covered with black
resin, then painstakingly inlaid with gold, alabaster, calcite, obsidian and
silver—materials used to particular effect in the eyes, which glittered
watchfully with an unsettling sense of fierce and focused intelligence. At
the same time his finely etched ribs and lithe musculature gave off an
aura of understated strength, energy and grace.
Captured by the force field of this occult and powerful presence, I was
vividly reminded of the universal myths of precession I had been studying
during the past year. Canine figures moved back and forth among these
myths in a manner which at times had seemed almost plotted in the
literary sense. I had begun to wonder whether the symbolism of dogs,
wolves, jackals, and so on, might have been deliberately employed by the
long-dead myth-makers to guide initiates through a maze of clues to
secret reservoirs of lost scientific knowledge.
Among these reservoirs, I suspected, was the myth of Osiris. Much
more than a myth, it had been dramatized and performed each year in
Ancient Egypt in the form of a mystery play—a ‘plotted’ literary artefact,
passed down as a treasured tradition since prehistoric times. This
1
tradition, as we saw in Part V, contained values for the rate of

1 See, for example, Rosalie David, A Guide to Religious Ritual at Abydos, Aris and Phillips,
Warminster, 1981, in particular p. 121.

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