THE SMITING TEXTS

by Roy Lester Pond

  “We do know that Emory spent time there,” Kalila said.

  Chapter 52

  THE MAJOR SPONSOR of the forthcoming Egyptian exhibition tour to the USA flew in from Cairo with Dr Melinda Skilling.

  Melinda chose the opportunity to reunite with Anson and arranged for him to meet her sponsor who was eager to meet Emory Hunter’s son.

  She and her sponsor were staying at the Winter Palace, situated on the Nile Corniche, and overlooking palms and cruise boats on the river, a grand piece of old colonial geometry, recently restored, with high ceilings and a European ambience. Anson half expected to glimpse an ageing Howard Carter idling in an antique chair, waiting to entice an admirer into conversation as he was often known to do in his later years.

  “How is your tour going?” she said, meeting him in the lobby and gathering his hand in hers in a greeting. “Is your tour group learning to engage with the sacred Egypt at the metaphysical level?”

  “They’re more sceptical of me than you Egyptologists,” he smiled.

  A young woman joined them in the lobby of the Winter Palace. As slender and perfectly composed as a Middle Kingdom statue, the woman introduced herself as Mr Saad’s personal secretary.

  “Hello Mr Hunter,” she said, holding him in the thrall of sparkling eyes behind the narrow frames of her glasses. “We have followed your career with great interest over the years. I am Salima. Will you come with me to Mr Saad’s suite?”

  They followed the secretary down a carpeted hallway. The swaying form of the girl was as snaky as the figures he had seen dancing above serpents in the tomb. She ushered them into a suite with an office area attached, where a man, balding and Middle Eastern in appearance, shuffled papers and rose from behind a desk to greet his visitors.

  Ibrahim Saad, the Egyptian born head of SACER, was erect, balding and healthy-looking for his fifty years. Maybe he had found the secret of youth in his American pharmaceutical empire. He came around to shake hands and invited them to sit in leather chairs. His secretary took a seat herself. “I had the pleasure and the challenge of working with your father, Anson,” he said.

  “He was an unruly genius and a man of secrets – secrets which I believe he took with him and that, as his sponsor, I am still interested in revealing.”

  “Then you found him as remote and private as I did,” Anson said.

  “Have you any inkling about exactly what your father may have discovered?”

  Anson remembered the warnings about the SACER Foundation. “I can’t tell you anything yet,” he told the head of SACER honestly.

  “I share a lot with you, Anson. I too am on a personal quest to uncover your father’s secrets. But with me it’s not a search for a proof of heaven or otherwise, but for knowledge.”

  Anson tried to deflect him from his questioning. “I’d be interested to know what kind of knowledge you are hoping to find in Egypt. Pharmaceuticals is your field, I understand.’ Saad ran a palm over his shiny head.

  "What does a man who makes drugs care about Egyptology? It may surprise you, but the two fields have always converged in my mind. Pharmaceuticals and ancient Egypt, that is. Drugs, chemistry and alchemy are all peculiarly Egyptian domains. The words chemistry and alchemy, come from Kemt or Kemmis, the ancient name for Egypt. And it has been a fruitful relationship. I have made it my business to explore and yes, plunder, the pharmacopoeia of ancient Egypt. I have had my experts pore over medical papyri and other classical sources such as Dioscorides, Hippocrates, Pliny the Elder, and the Alexandrian and Arabian alchemists who pursued the notion of the Philosopher’s Stone and the idea of transmuting base metals into gold. My chemists have examined and investigated ointments, plants, roots, fruits and leaves, rare stones and minerals, animal fat, vegetable extracts, herbs, resins and every chemical compound we could isolate. Combinations of these ingredients are leading to promising discoveries. We're still doing a lot of such work at Scarab Pharmaceuticals.”

  “I hope you don't include some of the more earthy concoctions of the ancient Egyptians,” Anson said with a smile, “like ass's dung mixed in fresh milk and fly dung from a wall mixed with mud to a paste.”

  “Sh-sh,” he said playfully putting a finger to his lips. “We don't want that getting out. What would the Drug & Food Administration say? Granted, there were strong excremental elements in the Egyptian pharmacopoeia, but many medicines were sound, as we are discovering thousands of years later.”

  "You don't have to convince me,” Anson said. “I’ve read of one papyrus that prescribed the application of a fungus from the underside of a lily for the treatment of sword wounds."

  Melinda joined in. “Penicillin, thousands of years before Fleming and Florey.”

  “They also applied mouldy bread to wounds,” Ibrahim Saad said, his enthusiasm growing. “We've now discovered that simple honey has antibiotic qualities. The medical professional in Egypt was highly advanced, with specialists, just as we have today. The most amusing medical title was that given to the specialist who looked after the bowels and stomach. He was known as the ‘Shepherd of the Rear’."

  Anson smiled. “And now the chemistry and medicine of Egypt is funding your exploration of Egypt’s past.”

  “Exactly. There are three kinds of knowledge that interest me. New knowledge, forbidden esoteric knowledge and lost knowledge. I have an idea that your father’s discovery may embrace all three, that what he has actually found may be the legendary Lost hall of Records. You’ve heard about the Hall? This, my friends, is the Holy Grail. Where is this hall? Is it below the Giza Plateau as so many have suggested? Countless attempts to find it there in hidden chambers in the pyramids or uder the Sphinx have ended in disappointment. But we have reason to believe that the time for some great discovery in Egypt is upon us. And that we must act soon. Other forces, hostile to the truth, will attempt to stop us. Conservative forces, fundamentalist Christians and Muslims are forming a new religious alliance, united in wishing to hinder our discovery of the truth. This may be our last chance to find this secret before its history is obliterated... ”

  There were many forces at work in Egypt, Anson thought, and this man was just one more of them, an alchemist who wanted to transmute the base metal of archaeological picks and shovels into knowledge and power.

  “I have been wondering a great deal about what your father may have discovered, particularly in his old hunting ground of Abydos,” Ibrahim Saad said. “And to that end I have invested funds in so-called space archaeology.”

  His assistant got up and lowered a screen and now Anson noticed a PowerPoint projector on the desk, connected to a laptop in front of the sponsor. He opened up the computer and set it up to play. Suddenly the screen filled with a satellite photograph of Egypt spread out across the curvature of the earth, revealing the narrow, long-stemmed river and adjoining emerald cultivation fields, leading to the spreading lotus of the delta region at the head where it opened into the Mediterranean Sea and, surrounding all, the rippled sands of the world’s largest desert, stretching away far and bare.

  “This is a new view of Egypt,” he said. “Thanks to satellite technology.”

  He clicked on a photograph of a satellite in space.

  “This is a satellite gazing down on Egypt from an altitude of 570 kilometres. It gleams in the heavens like the golden barque of the sun god Ra, powered by sails in the form of outspread solar panels. Gold covers its 1.4-ton body like the flesh of the gods - a skin of gold-coated Mylar. Pure, imperishable gold not only protects it from corrosion on the outside. The sacred metal also forms its veins and nerves in gold wires and gold-plated electronic circuits and contacts for switches, relays and connectors.

  “Echoing Ra, the satellite rides in a sun-synchronous orbit, and, from its inclination of 98 degrees, it sees Egypt below, in particular our focus for today, the most ancient burial ground said to be the legendary burial place of the Egyptian god of the dead, Osiris, and birthplace of the cult of death and resurrection. But unlike Ra in
his other form as Aton the sun disk, the satellite does not send down rays ending in little beneficent hands to touch the land. Instead it sends a series of radio wave pulses at the rate of 1,700 per second to probe the density of objects on the ground and beneath the dry sand, which it collects in a backscatter of echoes. Then it ponders this knowledge, analyses it and communicates it to mankind through visions seen on a screen.

  “It sees stone temples, chapels, mud-brick enclosures, boat graves – a fleet of fourteen 23-metre long boats marooned in an ocean of desert. It sees mounds of broken pottery, spoil heaps, the spectral signatures of tombs of the earliest kings.”

  “Did your father find something here, perhaps even the tomb of Osiris, and if so, where exactly might its hidden location be? What can the all-seeing eye in the sky tell us?”

  “The use of non-invasive satellite and multi-spectral imagery to locate lost archaeological sites in Egypt is still in its infancy, yet already it has pin-pointed hundreds of sites for future exploration and we believe there could be up to 3,000 previously unexplored sites in Egypt. Within a decade we should see the first mapping record of the entire Nile Valley.”

  He clicked a slide to reveal a close image of the plain of Abydos. “For our remote sensing study of the Abydos region we are analyzing both optical and microwave information. We are also calling on an international array of satellite images - optical satellites like America’s Landsat, the French SPOT satellite and the high-resolution optical images from Russia's KVR-1000, as well as JERS-2, the high frequency Japanese Earth Resources Satellite. JERS-2 has the ability to ‘see’ through the dry sand even more accurately and detect the microwave signature of bedrock, limestone blocks, mudbricks, and other archaeological objects, including pottery sherds and stone fragments.”

  Virtual archaeology, Anson thought. Was this the future of discovery in Egypt? He hoped not. He believed that the best tools were biologically based – nose, eyes and gut instinct. Tombs weren’t built by machines, but by men who listened to the whisperings of their gods, men attuned to symbolic meaning, not science. You could read far more from the sweep of dunes and rocks, and the natural graphs of hills and valleys, than from any computer curve.

  “Depending on scale and the amount of money you want to spend, it can reveal ancient settlement patterns, promising land features that may reveal sites as well as detect subsurface structures beneath the shifting sand.”

  Saad pointed with the glowing red spot of a laser pen at the satellite image.

  “Here we focus on our area of interest, the high desert above historic Abydos and its fringes on either side, an area of roughly 10 x 10km, scanned first at 10 microns. Here’s a map that reveals the location of high artefact density patches. What does it reveal to us? All the known historic features of course – temples like that of Seti jand Rameses, tombs and funerary enclosures and the site known as Umm el-Qa’ab, the Mother of Pots, so named because of the vast deposits of pottery found there, but it also reveals new things, traces of another funerary temple from the Middle Kingdom. There are also interesting reflections around the temples of Rameses 11 and Seti 1, walls or what could possibly be ancient causeways.

  “But what of the tomb of Osiris? Has it already turned up? There are other ghostly signatures under the sands. No success yet, but we are still analysing the optical and microwave information. So we just keep looking,” he said.

  Satellites did have their limitations, it seemed. They were no replacement for people like Emory Hunter

  Chapter 53

  ‘The Other Egypt’ – Anson Hunter’s blog.

  A CODEX found in the buried Nag Hammadi cache in Upper Egypt says:

  ‘Do you not know, Asclepius, that Egypt is the image of heaven? Moreover, it is the dwelling place of heaven and all the forces that are in heaven. If it is proper for us to speak the truth, our land is the temple of the world. But you should know that a time will come when Egyptians will seem to have served the divinity in vain, and all their activity in their religion will be despised. For all divinity will leave Egypt and flee upward to heaven. And Egypt will be widowed; it will be abandoned by the gods. For foreigners will come into Egypt, and they will rule it.’

  In December 1945, local peasants in Nag Hammadi turned up a collection of thirteen leather-bound papyrus codices buried in a sealed jar… fifty-two mostly Gnostic treatises, three works from Corpus Hermeticum and a partial translation of Plato’s Republic, believed to be a library, hidden by monks from the nearby monastery of St Pachomius when the possession of such dangerous writings was denounced as heresy and made an offence following the disapproval of Athanasius and the Theodosian decrees. The contents of the codices were written in Coptic, translated from Greek. Most famous was the only copy of the Gospel of Thomas.

  Is heaven in Egypt and was it the genesis of heaven as my father seemed to believe?

  Of course many take a less radiant view of Egypt. I had an email from an historian with a religious bent who took issue with my view of Egypt: ‘Dynastic Ancient Egypt was not a land of allure, as you like to imagine; it was the most draconian civilization the world has ever known,’ he wrote. ‘Why can you not see it? The truth is there in the museum cases of the world, captured in the Egyptian paintings and carvings in wood or stone or on plaster of ordinary folk, the servant girl, the baker, the boatman, the seated scribe. The expression in their eyes, wide in their whites, is fear. They lived and died in terror. But if God punished this civilization as it was told in the Book of Exodus, why do you think you would have loved it?

  ‘Look at the carved Egyptian eye of Isis on the wall of a temple. Look at this eye of this goddess. You think it is a symbol of mystery, the single, feminine Egyptian eye in profile. Quintessential. But this black orb is not a symbol of allure; it is more like a dead planet in a pitiless universe. The oasis civilization of pharaonic Egypt was a hell where the sun beat down like a swordsmith’s hammer and reeds conspired in whispers at the edge of a river of tears. The land was hemmed in by deserts like the sides of a coffin and by a police, judicial, fiscal, priestly and bureaucratic system that arrested freedom like an image in diorite, the hardest of stone, which the carvers in the workshops shaped not with ease, as it seemed from their sublime achievements, but with the sacrifice of lifetimes. There is a reason why a people still celebrates their hasty exodus from this place with unleavened bread and bitter herbs 2000 years on. The Nazis of the twentieth century killed the Jews; the Ancient Egyptians ground their souls to stone dust…’ Birthplace of heaven – or hell?

  Chapter 54

  THEY TRAVELLED the eighty-seven miles from Luxor to Abydos in a small convoy, a minibus, a Land Cruiser and an escort of Egyptian guards armed with AK47s riding in an army truck in front. By the time they arrived, wind began to swirl and pluck at their clothes as they stood in the plain of Abydos, the sky turning a reddish brown, an effect caused by dust high in the atmosphere.

  The khamsin, a dust storm that could paralyse Egypt for days, was on its way.

  “These are possibly the finest raised bas-reliefs in all of Egypt,” the SCA girl told them, leading them through the glowing, illuminated halls in Pharaoh Seti’s temple of Osiris in Abydos. But the American weren’t listening.

  “We’ve heard there are some peculiar glyphs here, of what look like highly developed aircraft, helicopters and so on,” Bloem said. Anson smiled, remembering Dr Melinda Skilling’s jibe at their meeting at Johns Hopkins: Certain alternative theorists appear willing to believe that the ancient Egyptians possessed helicopters, fixed-wing aircraft and armoured tanks, but submarines probably weren’t of much use in the shallower reaches of the Nile.

  Saneya gave a small frown. “Very well.” She took them to a doorway in the temple and pointed up at the lintel.

  They craned their necks. Glyphs on the lintel clearly appeared to depict highly developed aerial technology, a helicopter, some sort of flying saucer, a submarine, and a fixed-wing aircraft. Ear’s earpiece dropped out of his ear.
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  “That’s a Jayhawk, helicopter,” he said.

  “And there’s an armoured tank,” Eyes said, “and a jet!”

  “What we are looking at is called a palimpsest,” said the SCA woman. “Pharaohs sometimes usurped and modified inscriptions. This is what happened here, as Rameses tried to claim his father’s temple for himself writing over the top of the original text. Some of the filling has dropped out here and there, where the older and the newer inscriptions overlap, and that has left these curious shapes. Nothing more.”

  “I can buy the explanation of cement falling out and showing something that looks like one modern weapon,” Ears, said. “But a whole arsenal of modern weapons. That’s a stretch!”

  She shrugged his skepticism aside.

  The Americans suddenly looked at ancient Egypt in a new light, But they were looking for the wrong kind of weapon, Anson thought, moving on.

  Outside the temple, Anson examined a stone structure created from colossal slabs of stone, blinking away fine dust from his eyes, whipped up by the wind.

  “Abydos is ground zero for Egyptian mythology,” he told the others. “It’s the most sacred site in Egypt and long believed to be the stairway of the god Osiris. If you’re looking for a locus of power, this is where it should be.”

  They walked along the side of the stone building standing in the desert, glancing over to see a sunken forecourt like a pit, with a hall of giant limestone blocks. “This is the so-called Osireion and it was once believed to be the god’s tomb. The centre of this pit-building takes the form of an island, surrounded by a channel of water once linked with the Nile, the island representing the primeval mound emerging from the waters of Nun during creation. It was probably used for thousands of years as a site for the re-enactment of the Osirian Mysteries. Today, it’s flooded.”

  Could this have once been the tomb of Osiris? Anson wondered. The Osireion was thought to be Middle Kingdom in construction, although the simple severity of the design could make it Old Kingdom, but somehow he did not think it was a candidate. Could my father have found the actual tomb of the man-god Osiris? But where?