Page 370 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

museums. We shall consider these lists in more detail later in this
chapter. They are known respectively as the Palermo Stone (dating from
the Fifth Dynasty—around the twenty-fifth century BC), and the Turin
Papyrus, a nineteenth Dynasty temple document inscribed in a cursive
form of hieroglyphs known as hieratic and dated to the thirteenth century
BC.
6
In addition, we have the testimony of a Heliopolitan priest named
Manetho. In the third century BC he compiled a comprehensive and widely
respected history of Egypt which provided extensive king lists for the
entire dynastic period. Like the Turin Papyrus and the Palermo Stone,
Manetho’s history also reached much further back into the past to speak
of a distant epoch when gods had ruled in the Nile Valley.
Manetho’s complete text has not come down to us, although copies of
it seem to have been in circulation as late as the ninth century AD.
7
Fortuitously, however, fragments of it were preserved in the writings of
the Jewish chronicler Josephus (AD 60) and of Christian writers such as
Africanus (AD 300), Eusebius (AD 340) and George Syncellus (AD 800).
8
These fragments, in the words of the late Professor Michael Hoffman of
the University of South Carolina, provide the ‘framework for modern
approaches to the study of Egypt’s past’.
9
This is quite true. Nevertheless, Egyptologists are prepared to use
10
Manetho only as a source for the historical (dynastic) period and
repudiate the strange insights he provides into prehistory when he
speaks of the remote golden age of the First Time. Why should we be so
selective in our reliance on Manetho? What is the logic of accepting thirty
‘historical’ dynasties from him and rejecting all that he has to say about
earlier epochs? Moreover, since we know that his chronology for the
historical period has been vindicated by archaeology, isn’t it a bit
11
premature for us to assume that his pre-dynastic chronology is wrong
because excavations have not yet turned up evidence confirming it?
12

6 Egypt before the Pharaohs, pp. 12-13; The Encyclopaedia of Ancient Egypt, pp. 200,
268.
7 Egypt before the Pharaohs, p. 12.
8 Archaic Egypt, p. 23; Manetho, (trans. W. G. Waddell), William Heinemann, London,
1940, Introduction pp. xvi-xvii.
9 Egypt before the Pharaohs, p. 11.
10 Ibid., p. 11-13; Archaic Egypt, pp. 5, 23.
11 See, for example, Egypt before the Pharaohs, pp. 11-13.
12 This is a particularly important point to remember in a discipline like Egyptology
where so much of the record of the past has been lost through looting, the ravages of
time, and the activities of archaeologists and treasure hunters. Besides, vast numbers of
Ancient Egyptian sites have not been investigated at all, and many more may lie out of
our reach beneath the millennial silt of the Nile Delta (or beneath the suburbs of Cairo
for that matter), and even at well-studied locations such as the Giza necropolis there are
huge areas—the bedrock beneath the Sphinx for example—which still await the
attentions of the excavator.

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