The Sign and the Seal

by Graham Hancock

  The question, therefore, was this: what was that ‘common but exceedingly ancient source’, that ‘hypothetical and as yet undiscovered area’, that advanced ‘third party’ to which both Budge and Emery referred? Having stuck their necks out a long way already, I was frustrated to find that neither authority was prepared to speculate much further. Emery, however, did hint at where he thought the cradle of Egyptian civilization might have been located: ‘Vast tracts of the Middle East and the Red Sea and East African coasts’, he rather coyly observed in this context, ‘remain unexplored by the archaeologist.’20

  I was sure that if Egypt had indeed received the gifts of civilization and science from elsewhere then some record of this momentous transaction would have been preserved. The deification of two great civilizers –Thoth and Osiris – was evidence of a kind: although presented as theology, the legends of these gods sounded to my ears much more like the echoes of long-forgotten events which had actually taken place.21 But I felt I needed something more substantial – something which clearly and indisputably attested to beneficial contacts with an advanced donor society and which also explained how that society had managed to disappear without a trace.

  I did find such an account. It was the familiar story of the lost continent of Atlantis – a story that, in recent years, had been so thoroughly degraded by outlandish speculations that it had become a form of professional suicide for any scholar even to appear to take it seriously (let alone to research it properly). After peeling away all the New Age nonsense, however, I was struck by a single significant fact: the earliest-surviving report of Atlantis had come from the Greek philosopher Plato – one of the founders of rational western thought – who had insisted that what he had said on the matter was ‘not fiction but true history’.22 Furthermore, writing around the beginning of the fourth century BC, Plato had added that the original source of his story had been an Egyptian priest – a priest who had spoken of the recurrent destruction of civilizations by floods and who had said of the Greeks:

  You are all young in mind … you have no knowledge hoary with age. [But] our traditions here are the oldest … In our temples we have preserved from earliest times a written record of any great or splendid achievement or notable event which has come to our ears whether it occurred in your part of the world, or here, or anywhere else; whereas with you, and others, writing and the other necessities of civilization have only just been developed when the periodic scourge of the deluge descends, and spares none but the unlettered and uncultured, so that you have to begin again like children, in complete ignorance of what has happened in our part of the world or in yours in early times.

  Thousands of years before, the priest continued,

  There was an island opposite the strait which you call the Pillars of Hercules, an island larger than Libya and Asia combined; from it travellers could in those days reach the other islands, and from them the whole opposite continent which surrounds what can truly be called the ocean. On this island of Atlantis had arisen a powerful and remarkable dynasty of kings … Their wealth was greater than that possessed by any previous dynasty, or likely to be accumulated by any later, and they were provided with everything they could require. Because of the extent of their power they received many imports, but for most of their needs the island itself provided. It had mineral resources from which were mined both solid materials and metals, including one metal which survives today only in name, but was then mined in quantities in a number of localities in the island, orichalc, in those days the most valuable metal except gold. There was a plentiful supply of timber for structural purposes and every kind of animal domesticated and wild, among them numerous elephants. For there was plenty of grazing for this largest and most voracious of beasts, as well as for all creatures whose habitat is marsh, swamp and river, mountain or plain. Besides all this, the earth bore freely of all the aromatic substances it bears today … There were cultivated crops … There were the fruits of trees … All these were produced by that sacred island, then still beneath the sun, in wonderful quality and profusion.23

  This paradise was not to remain ‘beneath the sun’ for much longer, however, because soon – to punish its inhabitants for wrongdoing and an overabundance of materialistic pride – there came ‘earthquakes and floods of extraordinary violence, and in a single dreadful day and night the island of Atlantis was swallowed up by the sea and vanished.’24

  My interest in this story did not stem from what it had to say about Atlantis itself, nor was I convinced by the suggestion as to the island’s location ‘opposite the pillars of Hercules’. My own view – well supported by geophysical evidence25 – was that there could never have been such a landmass in the Atlantic Ocean and that those who persisted in looking for it there were fishing for the reddest of red herrings.

  It did seem to me, however – and the authorities reluctantly concurred on this point26 – that Plato’s account must have had some basis in fact. No doubt he introduced many distortions and exaggerations of his own but he was, nevertheless, recording something that had actually happened, somewhere in the world, and a very long time ago. Furthermore – and of the greatest significance to me – he made it absolutely clear that a memory of this event had been retained by Egyptian priests and set down in the ‘priestly writings’.27

  I reasoned that if a similar memory had been preserved in Mesopotamia then the chance of this being pure coincidence was slight. A far more likely explanation would be that the same cataclysm – wherever it took place – had inspired the traditions of both regions. Accordingly I took a second look at the legends in which I had first noted the similarity between Thoth and the Sumerian moon-god Sin. What I learned did not surprise me: like their Egyptian contemporaries, the Sumerians had not only worshipped a wise lunar deity but had also preserved a record of a flood in ancient times that had destroyed a great, prosperous and powerful society.28

  As my research progressed, therefore, ‘Atlantis’ did come to symbolize for me that ‘hypothetical and as yet undiscovered area’ from whence the wonderful civilizations of Egypt and of Sumer both came. As already noted, I did not believe that the area in question could possibly have been in or even near the Atlantic. Instead, I found myself wholeheartedly agreeing with Professor Emery that it was likely to have stood at a point roughly equidistant from both the Nile Delta and the Lower Euphrates – perhaps in some vanished archipelago similar to the modern Maldives (which scientists believe will be completely inundated within fifty years as a result of rising sea levels linked to global warming29), or along the vast unexcavated coasts of the Horn of Africa, or in a flood-prone region of the Indian subcontinent like modern Bangladesh. Such tropical zones looked all the more credible when I remembered that Plato had mentioned the existence of elephants in his ‘Atlantis’ – creatures that, for many thousands of years, have lived only in Africa, India and South-East Asia.30

  The more thought I gave to notions like these the more it seemed to me that they possessed genuine merit and were worthy of further investigation. In order to orientate myself in this task I therefore wrote down the following conjectures and hypotheses in my notebook:

  Suppose that somewhere around the basin of the Indian Ocean, in the early or middle part of the fourth millennium BC, a technologically advanced society was destroyed by flood. Suppose it was a maritime society. Suppose that there were survivors. And suppose that some of them sailed in their ships to Egypt and Mesopotamia, made landfall there and set about the task of civilizing the primitive inhabitants they encountered.

  Most important of all, suppose that in Egypt the priestly traditions of sacred science – to which Moses was exposed from his childhood – were the means by which the skills and know-how of the settlers were deliberately preserved so that they could be passed down to subsequent generations. In Egypt these traditions were associated from the outset with the worship of the moon-god Thoth (and, in Mesopotamia, with the worship of Sin). Perhaps this was because the settlers themselves
revered the moon – or perhaps they wittingly and rather cold-bloodedly encouraged the deification of a prominent and familiar but yet frightening and ghostly sidereal object. Their aim, after all, would have been to shape and direct the simple and savage minds of the peoples they had found themselves amongst and to create a durable cult – capable of surviving for millennia – as a vehicle for all their otherwise fragile and easily forgotten knowledge. In such circumstances, it is really not difficult to see why they might have chosen to focus on a glowing and uncanny lunar god rather than on some more abstract, more sophisticated but less visible and less corporeal divinity.

  At any rate, once the cult of Thoth had been established in early Egypt, and once its priests had learned and institutionalized the scientific and technological ‘tricks of the trade’ brought by the settlers, then it is logical to suppose that a self-perpetuating process would have begun: the new-found and valuable knowledge would have been fenced about with mysteries, protected from outsiders by all kinds of ritual sanctions and then passed from initiate to initiate, from generation to generation, in an exclusive and secret tradition. This knowledge, of course, would have given its possessors unprecedented mastery over the physical world – at least by the rudimentary standards of the native culture prevailing in Egypt before the coming of the settlers – and would have been expressed in ways that would have seemed astounding to laymen (not least in the erection of stupendous and awe-inspiring buildings). It is therefore easy to understand how the belief that the moon-god had ‘invented’ both science and magic might have taken hold in the population at large, and why it was that the priests of this god were regarded as masters of sorcery.

  Saved from water

  As my research progressed I turned up several pieces of evidence which seemed to provide strong support for the central hypotheses listed above, namely that a secret tradition of knowledge and enlightenment had been ‘carried’ and preserved within the cult of Thoth – a tradition that had been started in the most distant past by sophisticated immigrants who had survived a flood. Highly significant, in this respect, was a very strong theme – traces of which I found running through almost all the sacred literature – which repeatedly associated wisdom, and other qualities of the civilizing hero, with individuals who had been ‘saved from water’.

  The first thing I discovered was that Thoth, who had been seen by the Egyptians as the source of all their knowledge and science, had been credited with having caused a flood to punish humankind for wickedness.31 In this episode, related in Chapter CLXXV of the Book of the Dead, he had acted jointly with his counterpart Osiris.32 Both deities had subsequently ruled on earth after the human race had begun to flourish again. I was therefore excited, when I looked more closely at the story of Osiris, to learn that he had been ‘saved from water’.

  The fullest account of the original Egyptian legend was given by Plutarch33 and stated that, after improving the condition of his own subjects, teaching them all manner of useful skills and providing them with their first legal code, Osiris left Egypt and travelled about the world in order to bring the benefits of civilization to other nations as well. He never forced the barbarians he encountered to accept his laws, preferring instead to argue with them and to appeal to their reason. It was also recorded that he passed on his teaching to them by means of hymns and songs accompanied by musical instruments.

  While he was away, however, he was plotted against by seventy-two members of his court led by his brother-in-law Set. On his return the conspirators invited him to a banquet where a splendid coffer of wood and gold was offered as a prize to any guest who could fit into it exactly. What Osiris did not know was that the coffer had been constructed precisely to his own body measurements. As a result, when the assembled guests tried one by one to get into it they failed. The god-king then took his turn and lay down comfortably inside. Before he had time to get out the conspirators rushed forward, nailed the lid tightly closed and sealed even the cracks with molten lead so that there would be no air to breathe. The coffer was then cast adrift on the Nile where it floated for some time, eventually coming to rest in the papyrus swamps of the eastern Delta.34

  At this point Isis, the wife of Osiris, intervened. Using all her great magic – and assisted by the moon-god Thoth – she went to look for the coffer, found it, and concealed it in a secret place. Her evil brother Set, however, out hunting in the marshes, discovered the location of the coffer, opened it, and in a mad fury cut the royal corpse into fourteen pieces which he then scattered throughout the land.

  Once more Isis set off to ‘save’ her husband. She made a small boat of papyrus reeds, coated with bitumen and pitch, and embarked on the Nile in search of the remains. When she had found them she called again on the aid of Thoth who helped her to work certain powerful spells which reunited the dismembered parts of the body so that it resumed its old form. Thereafter, in an intact and perfect state, Osiris went through a process of resurrection to become god of the dead and king of the underworld – from which place, the legend had it, he occasionally returned to earth in the guise of a mortal man.35

  There were three details of this story that I regarded as being of the greatest interest: first the fact that, during his rule on earth, Osiris was a civilizer and a legislator; secondly that he was placed in a wooden coffer and thrown into the Nile; and thirdly that Isis came to rescue his body in a papyrus boat coated with bitumen and pitch. The parallels with the life of Moses could not have been more obvious – he, too, became a great civilizer and lawgiver, he too was cast adrift upon the waters of the Nile, he too floated in a vessel of papyrus coated with bitumen and pitch, and he too was saved by an Egyptian princess. Indeed, as the historian Josephus recorded, the very name ‘Moses’ meant ‘saved from water’: ‘for the Egyptians call water mou and those who are saved eses; so they conferred upon him this name compounded of both words.’36 Philo, the other great classical commentator, concurred with this etymology: ‘Since he had been taken up from water, the princess gave him a name derived from this, and called him Moses, for Mou is the Egyptian word for water.’37

  I asked myself whether there might not have been other instances – in Egypt and perhaps in Mesopotamia as well – of civilizing heroes who had been saved from water. A search in ancient annals and legends revealed that there had been many. For example Horus, the son of Isis and Osiris, was murdered by Titans and thrown into the Nile. Isis rescued him and revived him with her sorcery. He then learned from her ‘the arts of physic and divination and used them for the benefit of mankind’.38 Likewise, in Mesopotamia, Sargon the Great – whose rule brought unrivalled wealth, splendour and stability to Sumer and neighbouring territories at the end of the third millennium BC39 – had claimed quite specifically to have been saved from water:

  My mother was a priestess. I did not know my father. The priestess, my mother, conceived me and gave birth to me in hiding. She placed me in a basket made of reeds and closed the lid with pitch. She put the basket in the river which was not high. The river carried me away and brought me to Akki who was a man responsible for libations. Akki looked upon me with kindness and drew me from the river.40

  I found that the theme of salvation from water also ran very strongly through the pages of the Old Testament. The prophet Jonah, for instance, was thrown into the sea during a raging tempest, swallowed alive by a giant fish and three days later ‘vomited out upon dry land’ so that he could preach the word of God to the citizens of Nineveh and divert them from their evil ways.41

  Even more familiar was the much more ancient story of Noah, who – together with all his family and with ‘two of every sort of living thing’42 – rode out the primeval deluge in a remarkable survival ship which we know as the ark (‘make it with reeds and line it with pitch inside and out’43). After the flood waters had receded, Noah’s three sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth, heard God’s command to ‘be fruitful and multiply’ and went out to repopulate the world.44

  By far the most famous
and influential biblical figure to be ‘saved from water’, however, was Jesus Christ himself – the only individual, other than Moses, to be described in the Scriptures as ‘mighty in deed and word’45 (a phrase which, as I already knew, implied proficiency in the utterance of magical words of power). Rather than being an actual rescue, the incident in question was wholly symbolic and took the form of the mysterious rite of baptism in the waters of the river Jordan. This, Jesus explained, was absolutely necessary for salvation: ‘Except a man be born of water … he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.’46

  And it came to pass in those days, that Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee, and was baptized of John in Jordan. And straightway coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens opened, and the Spirit like a dove descending upon him. And there came a voice from heaven saying, Thou art my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.47

  Though I knew that the vast majority of practising Christians took this passage from the Gospel of Saint Mark entirely at face value I could not help but wonder whether a deeper layer of meaning might not have been encoded in the stirring and beautiful words. It seemed to me at least possible that what was really being described here was the initiation of Jesus into the enlightened knowledge of a secret cult whose founders were literally ‘saved from water’ thousands of years earlier. Furthermore, I thought it not accidental that it was only after this initiation that Christ began to work his miracles – most of which (including healing the sick, restoring the dead to life, multiplying loaves and fishes, and controlling the elements) would have been instantly recognizable to the High Priests and sorcerers of ancient Egypt as ‘magic tricks’ of the type that they, too, had been trained to perform.48