Page 366 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

The Pyramid Texts are full of difficulties of every kind. The exact meanings of a
large number of words found in them are unknown ... The construction of the
sentence often baffles all attempts to translate it, and when it contains wholly
unknown words it becomes an unsolved riddle. It is only reasonable to suppose
that these texts were often used for funerary purposes, but it is quite clear that
their period of use in Egypt was little more than one hundred years. Why they were
suddenly brought into use at the end of the Fifth Dynasty and ceased to be used at
the end of the Sixth Dynasty is inexplicable.’
60
Could the answer be that they were copies of an earlier literature which
Unas, the last pharaoh of the Fifth Dynasty, together with several of his
successors in the Sixth Dynasty, had attempted to fix for ever in stone in
the tomb chambers of their own pyramids? Budge thought so, and felt the
evidence suggested that some at least of the source documents must
have been exceedingly old:

Several passages bear evidence that the scribes who drafted the copies from which
the cutters of the inscriptions worked did not understand what they were writing
... The general impression is that the priests who drafted the copies made extracts
from several compositions of different ages and having different contents ...’
61
All this assumed that the source documents, whatever they were, must
have been written in an archaic form of the Ancient Egyptian language.
There was, however, an alternative possibility which Budge failed to
consider. Suppose that the task of the priests had been not only to copy
material but to translate into hieroglyphs texts originally composed in
another language altogether? If that language had included a technical
terminology and references to artefacts and ideas for which no equivalent
terms existed in Ancient Egyptian, this would provide an explanation for
the strange impression given by certain of the utterances. Moreover, if
the copying and translating of the original source documents had been
completed by the end of the Sixth Dynasty, it was easy to understand why
no more ‘Pyramid Texts’ had ever been carved: the project would have
come to a halt when it had fulfilled its objective—which would have been
to create a permanent hieroglyphic record of a sacred literature that had
already been tottering with age when Unas had taken the throne of Egypt
in 2356 BC.

Last records of the First Time?

Because we wanted to cover as much of the distance to Abydos as was
possible before nightfall, Santha and I reluctantly decided that it was time
to get back on the road. Although we had originally intended to spend
only a few minutes, the sombre gloom and ancient voices of the Unas
tomb chamber had lulled our senses and almost two hours had passed
since our arrival. Stooping, we left the tomb and climbed the steeply

60 From Fetish to God In Ancient Egypt, pp. 321-2.
61 Ibid., p. 322.

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