Magicians of the Gods

by Graham Hancock

  This, as Reymond comments:

  is a clear picture of a disaster … It destroyed the sacred land with the result that its divine inhabitants died. This interpretation accords with other parts of the first Edfu record which allude to the death of the “Company” [a group of divine beings] and to the darkness that covered the primeval island.52

  Multiple threads seem to come together here: Plato’s variation in the course of heavenly bodies leading to widespread destruction on earth, the murderous falling star in the Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor, the snake of Zoroastrian tradition that springs out of the sky, pierces the earth and makes the world dark, and the Great Leaping Serpent of the Edfu texts whose assault pierces the feet of the Earth God, leads to death for the divine Company and cloaks the primeval island in darkness. I’m reminded, too, of the Ojibwa “myth” reported in Chapter Three of the “star with the long wide tail that came down here once, thousands of years ago”—a “star” specifically recognized as a comet,53 that caused “the first flooding of the earth.” 54

  Comet and asteroid impacts not only cause floods but can also impose huge stresses on the crust of the earth resulting in increased earthquake and volcanic activity. How likely, therefore, is it to be an accident that Plato, who was at pains to preface his story with the “thunderbolts” of Phaethon, implicated both earthquakes and floods in the demise of Atlantis and carefully dated the whole episode to 9,000 years before the time of Solon, i.e. 9600 BC? I suggest there’s a real possibility that all these traditions are pointing to the same horrific epoch of prehistory.

  This epoch, as I’ve argued in earlier chapters, is the Younger Dryas which began cataclysmically 12,800 years ago and ended equally cataclysmically 11,600 years ago with large-scale floods—associated with the cascading collapse of the North American and northern European ice caps—occurring at both dates. The case for multiple impacts from a large, fragmented comet initiating the Younger Dryas is, I believe, a very strong one. In the light of the mythological evidence, the possibility must also be considered that it was further encounters with the orbiting debris stream of the same giant comet that brought the Younger Dryas to an end.

  In the process, I suggest, as so many myths and traditions from all around the world maintain, an advanced civilization was lost to history.

  Mystery of the Sound Eye

  Archaeology is not wrong when it tells us that most of the world in the epoch of 12,800 to 11,600 years ago, was populated by hunter-gatherers, locked in the Stone Age and lacking even the beginnings of agriculture. But Plato, to the eternal frustration of archaeologists, leaves us in no doubt that Atlantis was very different. In brief, it was a great and wonderful empire commanding a large navy of ocean-going ships that gave it the ability to project its power into Africa as far as Egypt, into Europe as far as Italy,55 and onto the mainland of what Plato calls “the whole opposite continent”—by which many believe he meant the Americas56—“which surrounds what can truly be called the ocean.”57 Atlantis was a fully-developed city-state, drawing its wealth from a mature and prosperous agricultural economy and boasting advanced metallurgy and sophisticated architectural and engineering works, all enhanced by an immense wealth of natural resources:

  With such blessings the earth freely furnished them; meanwhile they went on constructing their temples and palaces and harbors and docks. And they arranged the whole country in the following manner: First of all they bridged over the zones of sea which surrounded the ancient metropolis, making a road to and from the royal palace … which they continued to ornament in successive generations … until they made the building a marvel to behold for size and for beauty.

  And beginning from the sea they bored a canal of three hundred feet in width and one hundred feet in depth and fifty stadia in length, which they carried through to the outermost zone, making a passage from the sea up to this, which became a harbor, and leaving an opening sufficient to enable the largest vessels to find ingress. Moreover, they divided at the bridges the zones of land which parted the zones of sea, leaving room for a single trireme to pass out of one zone into another, and they covered over the channels so as to leave a way underneath for the ships; for the banks were raised considerably above the water.

  Now the largest of the zones into which a passage was cut from the sea was three stadia in breadth, and the zone of land which came next of equal breadth; but the next two zones, the one of water, the other of land, were two stadia, and the one which surrounded the central island was a stadium only in width. The island in which the palace was situated had a diameter of five stadia. All this including the zones and the bridge, which was the sixth part of a stadium in width, they surrounded by a stone wall on every side, placing towers and gates on the bridges where the sea passed in.

  The stone which was used in the work they quarried from underneath the center island, and from underneath the zones, on the outer as well as the inner side. One kind was white, another black, and a third red, and as they quarried, they at the same time hollowed out double docks, having roofs formed out of the native rock. Some of their buildings were simple, but in others they put together different stones, varying the color to please the eye, and to be a natural source of delight. The entire circuit of the wall, which went round the outermost zone, they covered with a coating of brass, and the circuit of the next wall they coated with tin, and the third, which encompassed the citadel, flashed with the red light of orichalcum.58

  Nobody now knows exactly what metal the fabled orichalcum of Atlantis was, since Plato tells us that it survived in his day “only in name,”59 but it adds to the aura of technological mastery that still surrounds the fabled lost civilization.

  Seagoing navigation, advanced agriculture and large-scale architectural and engineering works are also among the notable characteristics of the Homeland of the Primeval Ones described in the Edfu texts. We have already seen how the ring system of canals is prefigured there but so too are the grand temples of Atlantis. We read, for example, of a chapel “measuring 90 by 20 cubits” (approximately 45 by 10 meters or 150 by 35 feet):

  At its front was erected a large forecourt of 90 by 90 cubits … Then a hypostyle hall of 50 by 30 cubits was constructed … then another hall of 20 by 30 cubits and two consecutive halls, each 45 by 20 cubits were added at the front of the first hypostyle hall.60

  An enclosure is described measuring 300 cubits (150 meters or 500 feet) from west to east and 400 cubits from north to south. Within it is a temple, the “Mansion of the God” and within that a Holy of Holies measuring 90 cubits from east to west.61

  We also read of a third enclosure on the same grand scale of 300 by 400 cubits. It too contains an inner sanctuary measuring 90 cubits from west to east and 20 cubits from north to south, subdivided into three rooms each of which was 30 cubits by 20 cubits.62

  But the strongest hint of high technology in the Homeland of the Primeval Ones is given in one of the Edfu extracts that describes the cataclysmic demise of the island following the assault of the celestial “snake” called “the Great Leaping One” that “pierces” the Earth God and “splits” the domain. Then we read—and it is most mysterious—that “the Sound Eye fell.”63

  “The mention of the Sound Eye … appears a little strange,” admits Reymond. But she explains, though the texts are obscure on the point, that it seems to be:

  the name of the center of the light which illumined the island.64

  We are, in short, to envisage some artificial system of illumination which lights up the primeval island of the gods. Beyond that:

  All that can be said, with due reserve, is that it looks as though there is an allusion to a disaster which caused the fall of the Sound Eye, with the result that complete darkness fell upon the domain of the Creator.65

  The gods sailed …

  What happened after the disaster that struck Atlantis? Were there survivors? If there were, what did they do with the advanced knowledge that they possessed?

  Plato’s T
imaeus and Critias provide no answers to these questions, but the Edfu Building Texts do, making it clear that there were survivors of the disaster that struck the Homeland of the Primeval Ones—“companies of gods” who were already at sea when the sacred island was flooded. They sailed back to the former location of the island after the cataclysm but:

  saw only reeds on the surface of the water.66

  There was a great deal of mud there also,67 a scene reminiscent of Plato’s description of the vicinity of Atlantis after the flood:

  the sea in that area is impassable to navigation, which is hindered by mud just below the surface, the remains of the sunken island.68

  In the case of the Homeland of the Primeval Ones it seems that enough of the sunken island remained close to the surface for the survivors to attempt to win some of it back from the sea—an endeavor referred to in the Edfu texts as the “creation of the pãy-lands,” where the term “pãy-land” clearly means lands reclaimed from the sea.69 Thus we read how “the Shebtiw recited sacred spells, the water gradually receded from the edge of the island, and the actual land of the pãy-land was brought out.”70 The texts then describe:

  a process of … continuous creation by the emergence of a progressive series of plots of land …71 The creation of these … sacred domains was, in fact, a resurrection and restoration of what had been in the past but had vanished …72 At the end there appeared further pãy-lands which brought to a new life the former homeland.73

  Nonetheless, despite these efforts, the fact remained that the cataclysm had so utterly devastated the primeval island that no amount of reclamation could restore it to its former glory. The only solution for the survivors, therefore, was to attempt to recreate it elsewhere in regions that had not been as badly affected by the catastrophe. The result saw the beginning of a great project of which the world we live in today is the result. What the Edfu texts say, explains Reymond, is:

  that the gods left the original pãy-lands …74 They … sailed to another part of the primeval world …75 [and] journeyed through the … lands of the primeval age …76 In any place in which they settled they founded new sacred domains.77

  Their mission, in short, was to repromulgate the lost civilization and the lost religion of the days before the flood. As Reymond puts it, this “second era of the primeval age” saw “the development of the domains that survived in historical times.”78

  Begin again like children

  The Edfu texts make allusion to the smd, “wandering,” of the “company of gods”79 who initiated the civilizing project. Their leader was the Falcon Horus, after whom the temple at Edfu was much later dedicated, but present, also, was Thoth, the god of wisdom.80 Accompanying Horus and Thoth were the Shebtiw, a group of deities charged with a specific responsibility for “creation,”81 the “Builder Gods” who accomplished “the actual work of building,”82 and the “Seven Sages.”83 This is a matter of interest in the light of the Mesopotamian traditions of the Apkallus explored in Chapter Eight and it seems that something more than coincidence is involved.

  The reader will recall that the Apkallus were often depicted as hybrid creatures, part bird of prey, part human in appearance. Similarly, the Seven Sages of the Edfu texts are described as primeval deities who were capable of assuming “the form of falcons” and of “resembling falcons.”84

  Also exactly like the antediluvian Apkallus, the Seven Sages of the Edfu texts (who are not mentioned elsewhere in Ancient Egyptian inscriptions) were the magicians among the gods. They were seers who could foretell the future,85 and they could swr iht ti—“endue with power the substances of the earth”86—a process of creation “by the word of the creators”87 that, Reymond notes, “has no equivalent.”88 They were, in addition, believed to have the ability “to magnify things,” and thus to provide magical protection.89 On this point, the best sense Reymond is able to make of what she describes as an “unusually obscure” text, is that “the protection was constituted by means of symbols. The magical power of protecting was conferred by a giving of names.”90

  The Apkallus mingled their magic with practical skills—such as laying the foundations of cities and temples. Similarly, the Seven Sages of the Edfu texts also had their practical, architectural side and many passages testify to their involvement in the setting out and construction of buildings and in the laying of foundations.91 Moreover, the Egyptians believed that “the ground plans of the historical temples were established according to what the Sages of the primeval age revealed to Thoth.”92

  This hint of a special connection between the Sages and Thoth is, of course, a further parallel for, as we’ve seen, the Apkallus were linked to Enki, the Mesopotamian god of wisdom. In the Mesopotamian inscriptions, however, Enki is clearly superior to the Sages—indeed, he is their maker. But in the Edfu texts, strangely, it appears that the knowledge of the Sages is regarded as superior to that of the wisdom-god Thoth. Indeed, it was the tradition at Edfu that the original records and archives from which the texts were extracted were nothing less than “the words of the Sages” given as dictation to Thoth, who had then consigned them to writing.93 The texts further disclose that the Sages of the mythical age were believed to be “the only divine beings who knew how the temples and sacred places were created”94 and were themselves the very creators of knowledge,95 which thereafter could only be passed on but not invented anew. This finds parallels in the Mesopotamian notion that since the time of the antediluvian Apkallus nothing new had been invented—with the original revelation simply being retransmitted and unfolded in later epochs.

  Without laboring the point further, therefore, it seems to me that the idea conveyed so strongly in the cuneiform inscriptions of ancient Mesopotamia of a project to recover and repromulgate antediluvian knowledge after a global cataclysm is, rather exactly, the same project that is set out in the Edfu Building Texts, which in turn bear uncanny and troubling resemblances to Plato’s report of the destroyed Ice Age civilization of Atlantis.

  More than that, the Edfu texts invite us to consider the possibility that the survivors of the lost civilization, thought of as “gods” but manifestly human—albeit with mysterious “powers”—set about “wandering” the world after the flood. By happenstance it was only hunter-gatherer populations, the peoples of the mountains and the deserts—“the unlettered and the uncultured,” as Plato so eloquently put it in his Timaeus—who had been “spared the scourge of the deluge.”96 But the civilizers entertained the desperate hope, if their mission would succeed, that mankind might not have to “begin again like children, in complete ignorance of what happened in early times.”97

  The evidence of the Mesopotamian inscriptions, and of Göbekli Tepe to which we will return, is that the mountain lands of ancient Armenia and eastern Turkey were among the primal wildernesses to which the civilizers made their way after the flood. But the testimony of Edfu is that they also came to the Nile flowing in its fertile valley through the deserts of Egypt.

  Moreover the Building Texts say very clearly which part of Egypt they came to first—and it was not Edfu, as we’ll see in the next chapter.

  Chapter 10

  Monastery of the Seven Sages

  In his Timaeus, we’ve seen how Plato speaks of events, described in Ancient Egyptian temple records, that took place 9,000 years before the time of Solon, i.e. in 9600 BC. Nor is the Timaeus the only place where Plato alludes to such vast antiquity. In his Laws, for example, he says of the Ancient Egyptians:

  If you examine their art on the spot, you will find that ten thousand years ago (and I’m not speaking loosely; I mean literally ten thousand), paintings and reliefs were produced that are no better and no worse than those of today.1

  It’s interesting how the Greek philosopher makes a point of this “ten thousand years ago,” emphasizing that he’s not speaking loosely—that he really means it. But we live, supposedly, in a more scientific age with the benefit of objective dating techniques, so what are we to make of such a chronology
?

  Plato was born around 428 BC, so his reference to “ten thousand years” ago translates to around 10,400 BC in our calendar, within a whisker of the date of 10,450 BC that I proposed in Fingerprints of the Gods for the remote epoch, Zep Tepi—“the First Time”—when the Ancient Egyptians believed that the gods walked the earth and the civilization of the Nile Valley had its true beginnings.2

  This date, based on findings that arose from research underlying The Orion Mystery, my friend Robert Bauval’s ground-breaking 1994 study of the astronomical aspects of the world-famous pyramids of Giza in Egypt,3 was developed further by the two of us in 1996 in our co-authored book Keeper of Genesis (titled The Message of the Sphinx in the US).4 In brief, the date arises from the extraordinarily precise layout of the principal monuments of the Giza plateau and the relationship of these monuments to certain stars in the sky. For full details I refer the reader to Fingerprints of the Gods and to Keeper of Genesis, where this issue is explored in depth, but the heart of the matter lies in the fact that the positions of the stars in the sky are not fixed and finite but change very gradually over a great cycle—known to astronomers as the precessional cycle—that unfolds in a period of 25,920 years.

  Figure 33: The effect of precession is to change the Pole Star over very long periods of time.

  The cycle is the result of a motion of the earth itself, a slow circular wobble of the planet’s axis of rotation unfolding at the rate of one degree every 72 years; since the earth is the viewing platform from which we observe the stars, these changes in orientation inevitably affect the positions and rising times of all stars as viewed from earth. Our Pole Star, for example, around which the remainder of the heavens appear to revolve, is simply the star at which the earth’s extended axis, passing through the geographical north pole, points most directly. Presently it is Polaris (Alpha Ursae Minoris, in the constellation of the Little Bear), but the effect of precession is to change the Pole Star over very long periods of time. Thus around 3000 BC, just before the start of the Pyramid Age in Egypt, the Pole Star was Thuban (Alpha Draconis) in the constellation of Draco. At the time of the Greeks it was Beta Ursae Minoris. In AD 14,000 it will be Vega.5 Sometimes in this long cyclical journey the extended north pole of the earth will point at empty space and then there will be no useful “Pole Star.”