Page 353 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

Saqqara.
We shall have more to say about the step-pyramid and its builder in a
later chapter, but on this occasion I had not come to Saqqara to see it. My
sole objective was to spend a few moments in the burial chamber of the
nearby pyramid of Unas, a Fifth Dynasty pharaoh who had reigned from
2356 to 2323 BC. The walls of this chamber, which I had visited several
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times before, were inscribed from floor to ceiling with the most ancient of
the Pyramid Texts, an extravaganza of hieroglyphic inscriptions giving
voice to a range of remarkable ideas—in acute contrast to the mute and
unadorned interiors of the Fourth Dynasty pyramids at Giza.
A phenomenon exclusively of the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties (2465-2152
BC), the Pyramid Texts were sacred writings, parts of which were thought
to have been composed by the Heliopolitan priesthood in the late third
millennium BC, and parts of which had been received and handed down
by them from pre-dynastic times. It was the latter parts of these Texts,
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dating to a remote and impenetrable antiquity, which had particularly
aroused my curiosity when I had begun to research them a few months
previously. I had also been amused—and a little intrigued—by the strange
way that nineteenth century French archaeologists appeared almost to
have been directed to the hidden chamber of the Pyramid Texts by a
mythological ‘opener of the ways.’ According to reasonably well-
documented reports, an Egyptian foreman of the excavations at Saqqara
had been up and about at dawn one morning and had found himself by
the side of a ruined pyramid looking into the bright amber eyes of a lone
desert jackal:
It was as if the animal were taunting his human observer ... and inviting the
puzzled man to chase him. Slowly the jackal sauntered towards the north face of

17 Atlas of Ancient Egypt, p. 36.
From Fetish to God in Ancient Egypt, p. 147: ‘Judging by the Pyramid Texts, the priests
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of Heliopolis borrowed very largely from the religious beliefs of the predynastic
Egyptians ...’ See also The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead, p. 11.

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