Page 397 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

of seafaring had been present in Egypt from the very beginning of its
3000 year history. Moreover I knew that the earliest wall paintings found
in the Nile Valley, dating back perhaps as much as 1500 years before the
burial of the Abydos fleet (to around 4500 BC) showed the same long,
sleek, high-prowed vessels in action.
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Could an experienced race of ancient seafarers have become involved
with the indigenous inhabitants of the Nile Valley at some indeterminate
period before the official beginning of history at around 3000 BC?
Wouldn’t this explain Egypt’s curious and paradoxical—but nonetheless
enduring—obsession with ships in the desert (and references to what
sounded like sophisticated ships in the Pyramid Texts, including one said
to have been more than 2000 feet long)?
35
In raising these conjectures, I did not doubt that religious symbolism
had existed in Ancient Egypt in which, as scholars endlessly pointed out,
ships had been designated as vessels for the pharaoh’s soul.
Nevertheless that symbolism did not solve the problem posed by the high
level of technological achievement of the buried ships; such evolved and
sophisticated designs called for a long period of development. Wasn’t it
worth looking into the possibility—even if only to rule it out—that the
Giza and Abydos vessels could have been parts of a cultural legacy, not
of a land-loving, riverside-dwelling, agricultural people like the
indigenous Ancient Egyptians but of an advanced seafaring nation?
Such seafarers could have been expected to be navigators who would
have known how to set a course by the stars and who would perhaps also
have developed the skills necessary to draw up accurate maps and charts
of the oceans they had traversed.
Might they also have been architects and stonemasons whose
characteristic medium had been polygonal, megalithic blocks like those
of the Valley Temple and the Osireion?
And might they have been associated in some way with the legendary
gods of the First Time, said to have brought to Egypt not only civilization
and astronomy and architecture, and the knowledge of mathematics and
writing, but a host of other useful skills and gifts, by far the most notable
and the most significant of which had been the gift of agriculture?
There is evidence of an astonishingly early period of agricultural
advance and experimentation in the Nile Valley at about the end of the
last Ice Age in the northern hemisphere. The characteristics of this great

See Cairo Museum, Gallery 54, wall-painting of ships from Badarian period c. 4500 BC.
34
35 The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, p. 192, Utt. 519: ‘O Morning Star, Horus of the
Netherworld ... you having a soul and appearing in front of your boat of 770 cubits ...
Take me with you in the cabin of your boat.’

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