and heal them. In that day there will be a highway from Egypt to Assyria, and the Assyrian will come into Egypt, and the Egyptian into Assyria, and the Egyptians will worship with the Assyrians. In that day Israel will be the third with Egypt and Assyria, a blessing in the midst of the earth, whom the Lord of hosts has blessed, saying, “Blessed be Egypt my people, and Assyria the work of my hands, and Israel my heritage.” (Isaiah 19)
It is difficult to see how the Great Pyramid is spoken of in this chapter.
Extremists on either side of this debate took their points to such a degree that there was no room for reasonable elements of the other side’s theories. In the case of the pyramidology, the biblical side of this debate often espoused positions that were simply not supportable by any existing evidence. In this case, even good evidence of a prophetic timeline inside the Great Pyramid and a correlation with chapters in the Egyptian Book of the Dead were dismissed along with the rest of the pyramidological theories. Gradually, even reasonable researchers had to leave any part of pyramidology alone, casting it into pseudoscience, or worse, sheer fiction. It became taboo. Today, no archaeologists in their right minds would present a paper on the correlation of the Great Pyramid with the Egyptian Book of the Dead—not if they wanted to keep their position at a university or on an authorized expedition team approved by Islamic Egyptian authorities.
Yet, our story requires that we sift through the muck and mire of pyramidology for the gold nuggets, and so we continue.
The content in the Egyptian Book of the Dead dates to before the pharaohs, the pyramids, and the papyruses (papyri). In remote antiquity the content existed orally. They were called “utterances,” only to be spoken as part of a spell-like invocation. They contained “words of power” (hekau). On a coffin lid containing a copy of this ancient content there is written djed-medu, which may be interpreted as “words to be spoken.” Even the earliest inscribed texts of the Egyptian Book of the Dead contain portions indicating that they had been composed and revised long before the earliest known pharaohs.
The utterances were first carved on pyramid walls in Saqqara. Scholars agree that the “Pyramid Texts,” as they are called, belong to a much earlier people and that priests of the subsequent dynastic periods had received them orally as part of sacred lore. Only later had the words become inscribed on the walls of select pyramids. Of such antiquity were these utterances that the scribes carving the hieroglyphics were perplexed over the origin of the texts and their meaning. [Reported by Gaston Maspero, “La Religion Égyptienne,” 1884, in Revue de l’Histoire des Religions, t. xii. p. 125.] Yet, the scribes knew these texts were of vital importance and the priests overseeing the inscriptions expressed reverence concerning the texts. (See illustration 6.)
The pyramid texts were first discovered by French Egyptologist Sir Gaston Maspero in 1881. They are found in the pyramid of Unas (Fifth Dynasty; Unas likely ruled from 2375 to 2345 BC, but some date this pyramid to 3333 BC; Unas can also be written Unis). They are also found in the pyramid of Teti (Sixth Dynasty; Teti likely ruled from 2357? to 2332? BC and can also be written as Teta). They are found in the pyramids of Pepi I (2332 to 2283 BC) and Pepi II (2278 BC to 2184 BC) and in the pyramid of Merenra (2260 to 2254 BC). Each of these pyramids is located near the Step Pyramid of Djoser (pronounced zo-ser, dating to the Third Dynasty 2630 BC).
Who were the predynastic people that maintained the oral tradition? They may be those people who built and used the so-called “Egyptian Stonehenge,” an assembly of huge stone slabs in the southern Sahara Desert in an area known as Nabta and dates to about 6,500 years ago! (See illustration 7.) That’s 1,000 years before the Stonehenge in England. Since the first Egyptian dynastic period began in 3400 BC with Pharaoh Hsekiu in Lower Egypt (the northern Delta area) and Pharaoh Scorpion I in Upper Egypt (the southern mountainous area), the Nabta people would have been active for roughly 3,000 years before the Egyptian kingdoms. The Dynastic period began in 3400 BC and ended in 525 BC when Egypt was conquered by the Persian Empire, ending the reign of the last Egyptian pharaoh, Ankhkaenre Psamtik III. You may have thought that Cleopatra VII was the last pharaoh of Egypt, but by the time she came along, true Egyptians had been ruled and assimilated by Persians and Greeks for some 500 years.
One last detail about Nabta: We know that this predynastic “Stonehenge” complex once stood on the shoreline of an ancient lake that was formed roughly in 9000 BC when the African monsoon shifted north and tropical rainfall occurred. Then, the African monsoon began to drift to the southwest around 2800 BC, and the desertification that we see today began. Today Egypt is desert on the east, south, and west, except for a little irrigated area along both banks of the Nile River and canals that run off the great river. A high culture capable of building a Stonehenge would have had lush living conditions for nearly 6,000 years, and this would have included the first 1,600 years of the pharaonic dynasties. Interestingly, this means that the Sphinx could have existed in a time of tropical conditions. It would certainly explain the running-water erosion marks on the walls of the Sphinx Pit. But that’s another issue—one that we are not getting into here.
The earliest written papyruses of the Egyptian Book of the Dead date to between 1580 BC and 1350 BC, which would be the Eighteenth Dynasty—a long time after they were inscribed on early pyramid walls. However, records indicate that written copies existed as early as 2750 BC but none have been found.
No two copies of the Egyptian Book of the Dead contain the same text; presumably because they were produced individually by different scribes with their own and their client’s prejudices. The variations in content also reflect the time period in which they were written and are categorized according to these four main editions:
1. The Heliopolitan version written in hieroglyphics and edited by the priests of the college of Annu in Heliopolis, which began during the Fifth Dynasty (2498-2345 BC). However, these priests indicate in their records that there were previous editions dating back to 2750 BC (again, none have been found—yet).
2. The Theban version, which was commonly written on papyruses in hieroglyphics and was divided into chapter-like sections, each having a distinct title but no specific order to the sections. This version was from the Eighteenth to Twentieth Dynasties (1549-1064 BC).
3. Next there was a hieroglyphic and hieratic version that was closely related to the Theban version, which also had chapters but no fixed order of chapters and was used mainly in the Twentieth Dynasty (1187-1064 BC).
4. The Säite (Greek) version was used after the Twenty-Sixth Dynasty to the end of the Ptolemaic Period. This version had chapters that were arranged in a definite order. It is commonly written in hieroglyphics and in hieratic.
Much later, in 1805 AD, Napoleon’s staff created the first modern reproduction of the Egyptian Book of the Dead.
Of course no one could translate the Egyptian Book of the Dead until the discovery of the Rosetta Stone in 1799 by a French soldier, Pierre-François Bouchard, of Napoleon’s expeditionary team, and then not until 1822 when Jean-François Champollions’ translation of the stone was published. From 1822 on Egyptian hieroglyphs could be deciphered.
The text of the Egyptian Book of the Dead was originally written in both red and black ink; in some cases it was highly illustrated, in others a single illustration opened a chapter, and in the Theban editions there were no illustrations at all. Red ink was usually reserved for the titles of the chapters, opening and closing sections of the utterances, the instructions on how to perform the incantations correctly, and for important names. Black ink was used for the overall text of the manuscript. (See illustrations 8, 9, 10.)
The
