Page 423 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

the counter of the stars, the enumerator of the earth and of what is
therein, and the measurer of the earth.’
17
Normally depicted as a man wearing an ibis mask, Thoth was a leading
member of the elite company of First Time deities who dominated
religious life in Ancient Egypt from the beginning to the end of its
civilization. These were the great gods, the Neteru. Although they were
believed in one sense to be self-created, it was also openly acknowledged
and understood that they had a special connection of some kind with
another land—a fabulous and far-off country referred to in the ancient
texts as Ta-Neteru, the ‘land of the gods’.
18
Ta-Neteru was thought to have had a definite earthly location a very
long way south of Ancient Egypt—seas and oceans away—farther even
than the spice country of Punt (which probably lay along East Africa’s
Somali coast). To confuse matters, however, Punt was also spoken of
19
sometimes as the ‘Divine Land’, or ‘God’s Land’, and was the source of
the sweet-smelling frankincense and myrrh especially favoured by the
gods.
20
Another mythical paradise was also linked to the Neteru—an ‘abode of
the blessed’, where the best of humans were sometimes taken—which
was believed to be ‘situated away beyond a large expanse of water’. As
Wallis Budge observed in his important study, Osiris and the Egyptian
Resurrection, ‘the Egyptians believed that this land could only be reached
by means of a boat, or by the personal help of the gods who were
thought to transport their favourites thither ...’ Those lucky enough to
21
gain entry would find themselves in a magical garden consisting of
‘islands, interconnected by canals filled with running water which caused
them to be always green and fertile’. On the islands in this garden, ‘the
22
wheat grew to a height of five cubits, the ears being two cubits long and
the stalks three, and the barley grew to a height of seven cubits, the ears
being three cubits long and the stalks four.’
23
Was it from a land such as this,, superbly irrigated and scientifically
farmed, that the agriculture bringer Osiris, whose title was ‘President of
the Land of the South’, had voyaged to Egypt at the dawn of the First
24

17 The Gods of the Egyptians, volume I, p. 400.
18 Ibid., volume I, p. 443; volume II, pp. 7, 287.
Ibid., volume II, p. 7, where the deity Amen-Ra is addressed in a hymn: ‘The gods love
19
the smell of thee when thou comest from Punt, thou eldest-born of the dew, who comest
from the Divine Land (Ta-Neteru).’ See also volume II, p. 287. Punt is thought by many
scholars to have been located on the Somali coast of East Africa where the trees that
produce frankincense and myrrh (‘the food of the gods’) are still grown today.
20 Ibid.
21 Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection, volume I, p. 98; Pyramid Texts of Pepi I, Mer-en-
Rah and Pepi II, translated in Ibid., volume II, p. 316, where the maritime connections of
the land of the blessed are made clear.
Ibid., volume I, p. 97.
22
23 Ibid., pp. 97-8.
24 Ibid., volume II, p. 307.

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