Page 399 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

Chapter 46

The Eleventh Millennium BC

If it were not for the powerful mythology of Osiris, and if this civilizing,
scientific, law-making deity was not remembered in particular for having
introduced domesticated crops into the Nile Valley in the remote and
fabled epoch known as the First Time, it would probably not be a matter
of any great interest that at some point between 13,000 BC and 10,000 BC
Egypt enjoyed a period of what has been described as ‘precocious
agricultural development’—possibly the earliest agricultural revolution
anywhere in the world identified with certainty by historians.
1
As we saw in recent chapters, sources such as the Palermo Stone,
Manetho and the Turin Papyrus contain several different and at times
contradictory chronologies. All these chronologies nevertheless agree on
a very ancient date for the First Time of Osiris: the golden age when the
gods were believed to have ruled in Egypt. In addition, the sources
demonstrate a striking convergence over the importance they accord to
the eleventh millennium BC in particular, the precessional Age of Leo
2
when the great ice sheets of the northern hemisphere were undergoing
their final, ferocious meltdown.
Perhaps coincidentally, evidence unearthed since the 1970s by
geologists, archaeologists and prehistorians like Michael Hoffman, Fekri
Hassan and Professor Fred Wendorff has confirmed that the eleventh
millennium BC was indeed an important period in Egyptian prehistory,
during which immense and devastating floods swept repeatedly down the
Nile Valley. Fekri Hassan has speculated that this prolonged series of
3
natural disasters, which reached a crescendo around or just after 10,500
BC (and continued to recur periodically until about 9000 BC) might have
been responsible for snuffing out the early agricultural experiment.
4
At any rate, that experiment did come to an end (for whatever reason),
and appears not to have been attempted again for at least another 5000
years.
5

1 Egypt before the Pharaohs., pp. 29, 88.
2 To give yet another example, here is Diodorus Siculus (first century BC) passing on
what he was told by Egyptian priests: ‘The number of years from Osiris and Isis, they
say, to the reign of Alexander, who founded the city which bears his name in Egypt
[fourth century BC], is over ten thousand ...’ Diodorus Siculus, volume I, p. 73.
Egypt before The Pharaohs, p. 85.
3
4 Ibid., p. 90.
5 A History of Ancient Egypt, p. 21.

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