Page 356 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

Chapter 42

Anachronisms and Enigmas

I looked around the grey-walled chamber of Unas, up and down the long
registers of hieroglyphs in which the Pyramid Texts were inscribed. They
were written in a dead language. Nevertheless, the constant affirmation,
repeated over and over again in these ancient compositions, was that of
life—eternal life—which was to be achieved through the pharaoh’s rebirth
as a star in the constellation of Orion. As the reader will recall from
Chapter Nineteen, (where we compared Egyptian beliefs with those of
Ancient Mexico), there were several utterances which voiced this
aspiration explicitly:

Oh King, you are this Great Star, the Companion of Orion, who traverses the sky
with Orion ... you ascend from the east of the sky being renewed in your due
season, and rejuvenated in your due time ...’
1
Though undeniably beautiful there was nothing inherently extraordinary
about these sentiments, and it was by no means impossible to attribute
them to a people assessed by the French archaeologist Gaston Maspero
as having ‘always remained half savage’. Furthermore, since Maspero
2
had been the first Egyptologist to enter the pyramid of Unas, and was
3
considered a great authority on the Texts, it was hardly surprising that
his opinions should have shaped all academic responses to this literature
since he began to publish translations from it in the 1880s. Maspero
4
(with a little help from a jackal) had brought the Pyramid Texts to the
world. Thereafter, the dominance of his particular prejudices about the
past had functioned as a filter on knowledge, inhibiting variant
interpretations of the more opaque or puzzling utterances. This seemed
to me to be unfortunate to say the least. What it meant was that, despite
the technical and scientific puzzles raised by monuments like the Great
Pyramid at Giza, scholars had ignored the implications of some striking
passages in the Texts.
These passages sounded suspiciously like attempts to express complex
technical and scientific imagery in an entirely inappropriate idiom. Maybe
it was coincidence, but the result resembled the outcome that we might
expect today if we were to try to translate Einstein’s Theory of Relativity
into Chaucerian English or to describe a supersonic aircraft in vocabulary
derived from Middle High German.

1 The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, lines 882, 883; see also, inter alia, lines 2115
and 2116.
The Gods of the Egyptians, volume I, p. 117.
2
3 He did so on 28 February 1881; see The Orion Mystery, p. 59.
4 The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, p. v.

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