Faking History

by Jason Colavito

  Did he build them for his treasures and his corpse,

  As a tomb to protect them from the Flood?

  Or are these observatories for the planets,

  Selected by learned observers because of the excellence of the place?

  Or are they the description of planetary calculations,

  Such as those once done by the Persians and the Greeks?[272]

  And there we have it: proof that there was an ancient, or at least medieval, tradition that the pyramids had been celestial observatories. And here is how it connects back to Proclus: Proclus wrote in his commentary on Plato’s Timaeus that the Egyptians “survey without impediment the celestial bodies, through the purity of the air, and preserve ancient memorials, in consequence of not being destroyed either by water or fire.” He also claims—and this is crucial—that the Egyptian history could be found on “pillars, in which things paradoxical and worthy of admiration, whether in actions or inventions, are inscribed.” Now, combine this with the Jewish myth recorded by Flavius Josephus in Antiquities of the Jews, speaking of the children of Seth, the descendants of Adam before the Flood:

  They also were the inventors of that peculiar sort of wisdom which is concerned with the heavenly bodies, and their order. And that their inventions might not be lost before they were sufficiently known, upon Adam’s prediction that the world was to be destroyed at one time by the force of fire, and at another time by the violence and quantity of water, they made two pillars, the one of brick, the other of stone: they inscribed their discoveries on them both, that in case the pillar of brick should be destroyed by the flood, the pillar of stone might remain, and exhibit those discoveries to mankind; and also inform them that there was another pillar of brick erected by them. Now this remains in the land of Siriad to this day.[273]

  Some believe that Josephus mistakenly conflated Seth, the son of Adam, with Sesostris, the Egyptian pharaoh, while others think it was Set, the Egyptian god-hero. Siriad refers to Egypt in its guise as the “Land of Sirius,” the star venerated most in Egypt.

  Can you see the connection? The tradition of destruction by both fire and water persists from at least Josephus to Proclus, from the first century CE to the fifth, with the idea that the great pillar of stone was inscribed with scientific knowledge and had some relationship to Sirius and the stars. The original Greek manuscript of Josephus is long gone (though an eleventh-century edition remains), so some have speculated that the Latin word columna (pillar) in the oldest extant Latin text might have been translating the Greek word for pyramid rather than specifically a standing column. This is, of course, speculation.

  At any rate, Josephus’ work was translated into Arabic and was well known to the Arabs before and after the coming of Islam. From these sources, we can then very clearly see the origin of the famous Arab story of how the pyramids were built. Note in this version of the Arab story that both the Flood and the rather unusual (and non-canonical) scourge of fire are found, just as in Josephus:

  We have seen what the stars predicted. We saw a disaster descend from the sky and come up out of the earth. When we were sure what this event would be, we sought more information and we found that the waters would cover the earth, destroying its animals and plants. Being quite sure of the event, we told our king, Saurid ben Sahluq: He built a tomb for himself and others for his family. […] He raised a house (?) in the Delta and in the Saïd and engraved on their walls the details of science, astronomy and prognostication, the stars, alchemy, art, medicine, and all the useful or harmful things. These were briefly explained and easy to understand for those who know our writing and language. […] Then we looked at what would happen after this disaster. The world would have to bear calamities, and we discovered that the planets presage a new scourge descending from the sky that would be the opposite of the first. This scourge of fire would burn the four corners of the earth. […][274]

  Several versions of this story exist, differing in the details. Several versions suggest that the scientific inscriptions were written in or on the pyramids themselves. The version given above is the only one attributed to a non-Arab or non-Coptic source. Al-Maqrizi quotes an earlier writer, el-Galil Abu Abd Allah Mohammed Ben Salamat el Qodai, as claiming this text derives from an Egyptian manuscript translated into either Greek or Latin in the time of the Roman emperor Philip the Arab (244-249 CE)—a suspiciously convenient Arab emperor.

  We know from Pliny that “most” Romans believed the pyramids to simply be the make-work project of megalomaniacs,[275] so the observatory-Flood tradition must derive from a non-Greco-Roman source, probably originating in a Jewish interpretation of Isaiah 19:19 in which there will be a monument (a “pillar,” or a matstseba) on the border of Egypt as a reference to the Great Pyramid of Egypt. What better way to turn the tables on one’s oppressors than to claim their greatest work as the Lord’s own? And if it was a work of God, it must therefore predate the Flood, from a time before Egypt had fallen into idolatry.

  Neither Herodotus nor Diodorus Siculus mentions scientific knowledge being written on the pyramid’s surface.[276] Both claim only that a few inscriptions mark the cost of the foodstuffs used to feed the builders (1,600 talents for radishes, onions, and garlic), and no inscriptions have been found on the remaining casing stones of the Giza pyramids. Thus the “scientific” inscriptions (allegedly carved and inlayed in blue stone no less!) must derive from the Jewish myth, probably when the oldest form of the legend, as given above, became confused and the inscriptions observed on the temples of Egypt (which were often painted blue) were mistakenly attributed to the pyramids as well. Arranging the various legends from simplest (and most likely earliest) to most elaborate finds that the writing was attributed to the temples in the simplest legends, but in the most complex and elaborate was added to the pyramids too, like in this one where the priests wrote “on every surface of the pyramids, the ceilings, foundations, and walls, all the sciences familiar to the Egyptians.”[277] (It should also be noted that sixth dynasty pyramids had interior hieroglyphic inscriptions, but not the Giza pyramids.) It is probably telling that the stories told of the blue inscriptions of scientific knowledge on the Great Pyramid’s casing seem to all date from after the removal of the casing stones to build the mosques and walls of Cairo.

  Even the name of the king most frequently associated with the pyramids, Surid (or Sourid or Saurid), may be a corruption of Sesostris, the (apocryphally) legendary pharaoh, or Suphis, a Greek transliteration of Khufu as given in Manetho,[278] otherwise called Cheops by Herodotus. (Possibly Suphis >> Suphid >> Surid.) This would be particularly interesting since a legend in Manetho recorded by the Christian writer Julius Africanus and preserved in Syncellus and Eusebius in slightly different versions told that Suphis raised the Great Pyramid, held the pagan gods in contempt, and wrote a sacred book, thus making him a good candidate for monotheistic veneration. In Africanus’ version:

  Suphis reigned 63 years. He built the largest pyramid which Herodotus says was constructed by Cheops. He was arrogant towards the gods, and wrote the sacred book; which is regarded by the Egyptians as a work of great importance.[279]

  Later Christian and Islamic writers took this to mean that Suphis suppressed idolatry or otherwise promoted monotheism, though this is not the apparently meaning of the text.

  This must be the origin of the idea that the pyramid builder had secret knowledge. Now, for the Jews the prophet Enoch lived before the Flood and was believed to have also, like Saurid, received a dream vision from God that included the coming Flood and the final punishment of nonbelievers “full of fire and flaming, and full of pillars of fire.”[280] Given that he also wrote his book (the Book of Enoch, which was not actually ancient but believed to be) to preserve knowledge of astrology, the Jewish tradition thus seems to have influenced the fictive history of Egypt under another name, especially since the Arabs connected the dots and identified Saurid with Edris (Idris), who was also identified with Enoch.

  It therefore s
eems probable that the tradition of Enoch’s vision of Flood and fire, of astronomy and secret knowledge, wed to Manetho’s observations on Khufu’s sacred book and contempt for the pagan gods, read in light of the Jewish tradition of the pre-Flood pillars, gave rise to Arab pyramid myths. This is a remarkable—and to my knowledge unexplored—continuity of tradition from Antiquity to the late Middle Ages.

  When John Greaves wrote his Pyramidographia in the sixteenth century, he must have had the Arab texts in mind when he was discussing Proclus, giving accidental rise to the story that the pyramids were observation platforms for Sirius. But that is the least interesting thing about the whole scenario. Once again, though, we find that alternative authors, in dealing only with the surface of stories at their most literal level, have missed the most interesting and informative connections among ancient and medieval peoples.

  33. Scholars’ Three-Century Mistake about Myth

  Intellectual laziness, scholarly shortcuts, and outright fabrications aren’t unique to alternative historians and ancient astronaut speculators. But whoever takes the shortcuts, the result is almost always the same: mistakes are perpetuated, are accepted as truth, and corrupt the historical record. This chapter offers an object lesson in what happens when scholars rely on secondary sources and repeat earlier writers’ work uncritically. This sidelight into Greek mythology was a gigantic pain to untangle thanks to more than three centuries of scholars copying each other. My thanks go to the great Hellenist M. L. West for his assistance in tracking down the origins of this weird little mistake.

  In modern manuals of mythology, it is common to list the “original” name of the Greek hero Jason, of Argonautic fame, as Diomedes. It appears as such in the Oxford University Press’s Dictionary of Ancient Deities (2000), Robert Graves’s The Greek Myths (1950), and even the monumental Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology (1849), the most complete account of Greco-Roman sources ever assembled. Scholars such as F. Max Müller, the Abbé Banier, and countless others have accepted the identification and built theories upon it.

  But what bothered me is that I couldn’t find any evidence of Jason ever being called Diomedes in the ancient Greek and Roman literature. Not once. And that’s where things got complicated.

  The scholarly sources all cite the ancient scholia (notes) made on the poet Pindar’s Fourth Pythian Ode, the oldest poem to tell the story of Jason. Specifically, they cite the scholion at verse 211 (old system), commenting on Jason’s claim in the poem that the centaur Chiron, his teacher, called him by the name Jason. At verse 211 the scholiast wrote that Chiron gave Jason his name, but the scholiast does not specify any former name. Neither does the scholiast who repeated the exact same information in the scholia to Apollonius of Rhodes’ Jason epic the Argonautica at 1.554. So where did the name Diomedes come from?

  It comes from a scholarly mistake.

  In 1567, the Renaissance humanist Natali Conti (Natales Comes) published his monumental Latin-language compilation of Greco-Roman mythology, called Mythologiae, which quickly became the standard manual of myth, called a mythography, of the Renaissance and the basis for nearly all modern mythographies via its use in the Abbé Antoine Banier’s influential 1711 mythography, Mythologie et la fable expliqués par l’histoire. In the first edition, Conti reported the Pindar/Apollonius scholia correctly: “When Jason had become a man and had learned from Chiron the healing art, he was called Jason.”[281] But in the expanded edition of 1581, something had changed: “When Jason had become a man and had learned from Chiron the healing art, he was called Jason, having first been called Dolomedes.”[282]

  The Classical scholar Winifred Warren Wilson noted in 1910 that Conti had amended his original line to add information from the Apollonius scholia at 3.26, but he made a mistake. He misread the Greek word δολόμηδες (“crafty”) as a proper name and affixed it to Jason despite the scholion having nothing to do with him.[283]

  So far, so good. But how did Dolomedes become Diomedes?

  Well, as it turns out, most modern mythographers derive their work, ultimately, from the Abbé Banier, who produced the first scholarly mythography in 1711. According to Wilson, when Banier developed his mythography, he was using a flawed copy of Natali Conti, which contained numerous typographical misprints. Banier used the Lyons edition of 1653, based on the Geneva edition of 1651, in which “Diomedes” is misprinted for “Dolomedes.” This typographical error became Banier’s authoritative assertion that Chiron taught Jason “the Sciences, which he himself professed, especially Medicine, and gave him for that Reason the name of Jason, instead of Diomedes, which he had before.”[284]

  And with the exception of Winifred Warren Wilson and me, for three hundred years almost no one bothered to check the original sources and blindly accepted as fact Banier’s assertion, based on a typographical misprint of Conti’s original error. If a legitimate scholar said it, it had to be true. Right?

  34. Afrocentrism, Ancient Astronauts, and the Black Sea Africans

  Afrocentristic theorists and ancient astronaut theorists don’t agree on much, but one thing they share is a common belief that ancient texts can be used without any confirming evidence to generate radical revisions of ancient history. In Herodotus we find an accounted of the mythical Egyptian pharaoh Sesostris, whom the Greek historian claims conquered lands as far north as modern Georgia.[285] Archaeology has failed to find any evidence of this, and most historians think the story is a corruption and exaggeration of events from the reigns of Ramesses II, Seti I, and possibly Senusret II. Later, Diodorus Siculus and Strabo magnified this pharaoh still further, making him the conqueror of the entire world. Needless to say, there is no evidence whatsoever of Egyptians in France, or England, or Spain.

  Herodotus also says that the Colchians, the people of modern Georgia, are the descendants of Sesostris’ army and of a colony founded on the Black Sea. His evidence was primarily the shared rites of circumcision, along with some nebulous claims that the people were “black,” which in those days was a conventional way of saying they were located close to the east, where the sun rose and therefore “burned” them. The same word for “black” was also used to describe Greece’s own olive-skinned people.

  For the people of Colchis are evidently Egyptian, and this I perceived for myself before I heard it from others. So when I had come to consider the matter I asked them both; and the Colchians had remembrance of the Egyptians more than the Egyptians of the Colchians; but the Egyptians said they believed that the Colchians were a portion of the army of Sesostris. That this was so I conjectured myself not only because they are dark-skinned and have curly hair (this of itself amounts to nothing, for there are other races which are so), but also still more because the Colchians, Egyptians, and Ethiopians alone of all the races of men have practised circumcision from the first. [The Colchians] alone work flax in the same fashion as the Egyptians, and the two nations are like one another in their whole manner of living and also in their language…[286]

  Based on this, Robert Temple, the ancient astronaut writer, argued in The Sirius Mystery (1976) that Colchis was an actual Egyptian colony and that it was through this colony that the sacred truth that flying space frogs from Sirius had given humanity civilization was passed from Egypt to Greece, and thus from the Greeks to the Dogon of Africa.

  At least Temple stopped there.

  Afrocentric theorist R. A. Jairazbhoy proposed in a 1988 article that not only was Colchis an Egyptian colony but because the Egyptians were racially identical with sub-Saharan West Africans (the ancestors of most African-Americans), Colchis was therefore a Black colony, and in fact all of the Greek myths associated with it were nothing more than Greeks misinterpreting Black Egypt’s African pomp and splendor.[287] Strangely, there almost seemed to be confirming evidence of this. There is an actual population of African descendants living in Georgia. In 1988 Afrocentrist John G. Jackson explained why these people prove that Africa had conquered the classical world and gave it civili
zation:

  This area has been called the ‘Black Soviet’ because there are so many Black people living down there. Of course they tell you in the history books that these people are the descendants of slaves that the Russians imported in the Middle Ages. But if this territory was settled by the Egyptians in ancient times, then these people are probably their descendants.[288]

  But this isn’t really true. The most sympathetic researchers looking for “so many Black people” found a population of no more than thirty people, and that was in 1959—three decades before Jackson and Jairaz-bhoy claimed widespread African populations on the Black Sea.[289]

  For these thirty people to have been the remains of Sesostris’ army requires us to assume, as several scholars have noted, that the Egyptians brought an army composed of both Black men and women, that they in-bred for three thousand years, never took any non-Black people for spouses, and somehow maintained a reproductively viable population in the face of isolation and discrimination. The Africans of Colchis knew the truth and tried to tell the Afrocentrists, who refused to listen. Ethnographers and archaeologists listened, and through their work we know the truth: They are the last descendants of Ottoman-era slaves from when the territory was part of Turkey.[290]

  This is a far cry from imaginary Egyptian armies and flying space frogs, but it has the virtue of being true.

  35. Afrocentrism and the Aztec Calendar