Page 383 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

Serene stability

Who can guess what the civilizations of the Andes and of Mexico might
have achieved if they too had benefited from such powerful symbolic
continuity. In this respect, however, Egypt is unique. Indeed, although the
Pyramid Texts and other archaic sources recognize a period of disruption
and attempted usurpation by Set (and his seventy-two ‘precessional’
conspirators), they also depict the transition to the reigns of Horus, Thoth
and the later divine pharaohs as being relatively smooth and inevitable.
This transition was mimicked, through thousands of years, by the
mortal kings of Egypt. From the beginning to the end, they saw
themselves as the lineal descendants and living representatives of Horus,
son of Osiris. As generation succeeded generation, it was supposed that
each deceased pharaoh was reborn in the sky as ‘an Osiris’ and that each
successor to the throne became a ‘Horus’.
32
This simple, refined, and stable scheme was already fully evolved and
in place at the beginning of the First Dynasty—around 3100 BC. Scholars
33
accept this; the majority also accept that what we are dealing with here is
a highly developed and sophisticated religion. Strangely, very few
34
Egyptologists or archaeologists have questioned where and when this
religion took shape.
Is it not to defy logic to suppose that well-rounded social and
metaphysical ideas like those of the Osiris cult sprung up fully formed in
3100 BC, or that they could have taken such perfect shape in the 300
years which Egyptologists sometimes grudgingly allow for them to have
done so? There must have been a far longer period of development than
35
that, spread over several thousands rather than several hundreds of
years. Moreover, as we have seen, every surviving record in which the
Ancient Egyptians speak directly about their past asserts that their
civilization was a legacy of ‘the gods’ who were ‘the first to hold sway in
Egypt’.
36
The records are not internally consistent: some attribute much greater
antiquity to the civilization of Egypt than others. All, however, clearly and
firmly direct our attention to an epoch far, far in the past—anything from
8000 to almost 40,000 years before the foundation of the First Dynasty.
Archaeologists insist that no material artefacts have ever been found in
Egypt to suggest that an evolved civilization existed at such early dates,
but this is not strictly true. As we saw in Part VI, a handful of objects and
structures exist which have not yet been conclusively dated by any

32 Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection, volume II, p. 273. See also in general, The
Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts.
33 Archaic Egypt, p. 122; Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt, p. 98.
34 See, in general, Kingship and the Gods; Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection; The Gods
of the Egyptians.
35 Archaic Egypt, p. 38.
36 Manetho, p. 5.

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