by Andrew Collins

New Dawn Magazine No. 49

July-August 1998

from NewDawnMagazine Website

Spanish version

PART ONE

The Great Pyramid is humanity's greatest architectural achievement.

Two and a half million blocks, ranging in size from two to seventy tons a piece, were used in the construction of this silent sentinel of the past, the largest and perhaps the most enigmatic of the three matching structures on the Giza plateau.

It covers an area of 13 acres and weighs an incredible six million tons, and up until the construction of the Eiffel Tower, it was the tallest structure in the world. There is more stone in the Great Pyramid than in all the churches, chapels and cathedrals built in England.

Yet this wonder of the past is more than just an architectural curiosity, for it embodies a level of sophistication far superior to anything the world has produced at any time since this age. Over the past 200 years many hundreds of books have been written about the mysteries of the Great Pyramid, most of them more fantasy than fact.

Yet shining through all of them is a hardcore of evidence which shows that the pyramid builders were privy to universal knowledge far beyond that accredited to the ancient Egyptians who lived around 4500 years ago, the time-frame in which the pyramids are said to have been built.

Let me provide a few examples. The Great Pyramid is considered to have been built as an exact geodesic representation of the earth's northern hemisphere.

Precision geometry incorporating harmonics, proportions and sound acoustics was incorporated into its exterior and interior design.

Its four sides are aligned to the cardinal points with such precision that modern-day surveyors would have trouble replicating this laser-like accuracy, while in relation to the earth the Great Pyramid is situated in the dead centre of its largest land-mass.
 

To the Sound of a Trumpet

More extraordinary still is the knowledge that the pyramid builders could well have possessed a form of sonic technology that included the ability to raise stone blocks into the air and pierce through granite at a feed-rate unmatched even today.

It has long been known that many of the temples and monuments of Pharaonic Egypt incorporate an intimate knowledge of sound acoustics, while one specific legend preserved by an Arab writer of the tenth-century AD named al-Masudi records how the builders of the pyramids were able to move stone blocks a distance of "one bow-shot" through an avenue of metal poles, simply by hitting them with a rod.

Furthermore, there exist age-old legends from places such as Bolivia, Mexico and Greece which tell of the first cities being built by mythical figures who could make stones raise into the air by using sound alone.

At the site of the ancient city of Tiahuanaco high up on the Bolivian Altiplano, for instance, local Indian legends speak of the city's first inhabitants as able to move stones from the local quarry to their places of destination to "the sound of a trumpet".

• So what reality is there behind such wild claims?

• Are they all to be dismissed as the naive delusions of primitive peoples?
   

Precision Impossible

During an in-depth study of the temples and monuments of Giza in the 1880s, respected Egyptologist W.M. Flinders Petrie uncovered clear evidence of a precision stone-ware technology that surpassed anything else achieved in the ancient world.

It included the use of nine-feet long, jewel tipped saws to cut and fashion objects such as the sarcophagus inside the King's Chamber of the Great Pyramid.

He also found that the pyramid builders used highly specialized drilling techniques to bore perfect holes in hard granite, lathe-finish beautiful bowls in tough diorite and fashion exquisite stone vases with openings no larger than a little finger.

American technologist Christopher Dunn has recently completed an in-depth study of the ancient Egyptians' incredible stone-ware industry and has convincingly demonstrated that they used ultrasound-induced vibration to enhance their drilling capabilities.

Such a conclusion might seem beyond comprehension, but this present author has uncovered hard evidence to demonstrate that Tibetan monastic communities as late as the present century were in possession of a sonic technology that included the creation of weightlessness in stone blocks and the destruction of physical matter using ultrasound vibration.

Furthermore, it has now come to light that a nineteenth-century maverick scientist named John Ernst Worrell Keely quite independently found a way of raising heavy objects into the air and disintegrating lumps of granite using sympathetic vibratory apparatus.

• How did the pyramid builders of 4500 years ago gain such an extraordinary insight into a science and technology little understood even today?

• What became of this lost technology, and why has much of it only been rediscovered in our present age?

In order to suitably answer these questions, we must embark on a journey that will reveal a virtually alien world, inhabited by a forgotten culture composed of a priestly elite who lived in Egypt's fertile Nile valley during a distant epoch long before the accepted genesis of civilization.

It will reveal the existence at Giza of buildings and monuments seemingly left by this Elder race, as well as the firm presence beneath the Great Sphinx of an underworld complex known today as the Hall of Records.

To attempt to understand this mystery more fully we must return to the Giza plateau and examine its strange megalithic temples, for these suggest a construction date long before the pyramid age.
 

Temples of the Gods

Egyptologists assert that the Valley Temple, which sits on the edge of the plateau, was built at the time of the Pharaoh Khafre, around 2550 BC.

Certainly, it is linked via a stone causeway to another ancient temple on the eastern side of the Second Pyramid which is also accredited to Khafre.

Further evidence of this conclusion, they say, is the Valley Temple's similarity in design to other temples on the Giza plateau, as well as its proximity to the Great Sphinx and the fact that statues of Khafre were found abandoned in a well located beneath its floor.

This would appear to be incorrect, for recent geological surveys of the Great Sphinx have revealed that the weathering effects visible on its body, and on the nearby enclosure wall, were caused not by wind, as the Egyptologists believe, but by water precipitation - in other words, rain. Lots of it, over a very, very long period of time.

Such a supposition creates insurmountable problems for the academics as it is known that the last time Egypt produced enough rain to have created such raging torrents of water was during the 3000-year stretch between 8000 and 5000 BC.

More damning still to the orthodox views of the Egyptologists is the knowledge that recent astronomical research in respect to the orientation and placement of the monuments on the Giza plateau, clearly point towards a foundation date sometime between 11,000 and 9000 BC - several thousand years before the age of the Pharaohs.

How can this be possible?

Scholars argue that in the time-frame under question, the eleventh and tenth millennia BC, the Nile valley was inhabited only by,

"bands of people who lived in small huts or shelters and sustained themselves by hunting and gathering".

They also state that these early Nilotic (i.e. those living by the Nile) communities,

"erected no large stone structures of any kind" and had not "taken even the first steps towards the domestication of plants and animals".

This is simply not true.

There is much evidence of prehistoric man along the Nile during this very age, and it clearly shows that between 12,500 and 9500 BC certain communities not only possessed an advanced tool-making industry, but also domesticated animals and developed the earliest agriculture anywhere in the world.

Moreover, just 300 miles away from Giza in what is today Jericho, its inhabitants of 8000 BC were constructing enormous fortification walls, gouging out vast trenches in the hard bedrock and erecting a gigantic stone tower in defense against an unknown enemy. Engineering projects on this scale would have required a high level of social structure and coordinated operations.

No one can say that humanity in this distant age did not have the ability to carve the image of a 240-feet long recumbent lion, and yet accepting this hypothesis brings with it an even greater problem.

Since the core limestone blocks - many up to 100 ton a piece - used in the construction of the Valley Temple, the Sphinx Temple, as well as at least one other similar structure on the Giza plateau, were extracted from the Sphinx enclosure, we must concede that these too date to this same distant epoch.

If this is the case, then the Pharaohs of the pyramid age merely restored these enormous temple structures, which begs the question of who exactly did build them?
 

Epoch of the Elder Gods

The ancient Egyptians saw their culture and religion as having been inherited directly from a divine race that existed thousands of years before the coming of the Pharaohs.

For example, the fragmented Royal Papyrus of Turin, dating to the Nineteenth Dynasty, c. 1300 BC, contains a list of ten netjeru (Ptah, Ra, Shu, Geb, Asar, Set, Heru, Tehuti, Maat, and Heru) - a word simply meaning 'divinities' or gods - who reigned prior to the first kings of Egypt.

The ancient Egyptians also viewed the Giza necropolis as the 'Splendid Place of the First Time', quite literally the abode of the gods who had ruled their land during this misty epoch.

More significantly, the hieroglyphic 'building' texts found on the walls at the Temple of Horus at Edfu (below images), in southern Egypt, tell us much about the activities of the Elder gods, the divine inhabitants, who inhabited the Nile Valley during the epoch of the First Time.

Island of the Gods

Looking at the plateau today, with its desert back-drop and its striking sentinel-like pyramids, that cannot help but exude a stark sense of permanence, it is hard to imagine Giza any different.

Yet the Edfu account, which was compiled from a series of now lost books attributed to the moon-god Thoth, enables us to construct a quite remarkable picture of how the Giza plateau might have looked over 11,000 years ago.

If we were to find ourselves a time-machine and travel back to this distant epoch the chances are that we would enter a hot, humid environment alive with lush green vegetation or the type you might find today in equatorial Africa. If the texts are to be believed, Giza apparently possessed a shallow lake, fed directly from the Nile itself.

Such a supposition is not mere fantasy, for it is known that in past ages the river flowed much closer to the edge of the plateau, while evidence of a sacred lake and dock dated to Old Kingdom times have been found beyond the plateau's western limits.

To the Elder gods this would have signified the primeval sea of chaos out of which the first land emerged at the beginning of time.

On the edge of this sacred lake were, it seems, tall djed-pillars, carved perhaps in dark stone, while standing close to the banks was an enclosure wall beyond which was a gleaming white temple known as the Mansion of Wetjeset-Neter, the 'place of reeds'.

In the shallow waters was a small island, symbolizing the Point of First Creation, crowned with a simple stone structure that proclaimed its immense sanctity. This island is referred to in the Edfu documents as the Island of the Egg or the Island of Trampling, while the stone structure is recalled in the name Place of the Well.

Locally we might have found indigenous peoples of the late Paleolithic age tending cultivated lands, herding domesticated wild animals, making beautiful flint tools and using wooden spears to harpoon fish in the nearby river Nile. Yet behind the tall, imposing walls of the sacred enclosure the texts speak of an altogether different kind of person - commanding figures referred to variously as the Shebtiu, the Sages, the Elders and the Falcons.

These mythical individuals take the guise of birds, implying perhaps that they were priest-shamans who adorned themselves in bird feathers. They are also said to have had radiant faces that must have made them quite striking in appearance. This strange menagerie of divine beings, who were said to number sixty, are spoken of as netjeru, or divinities.

This then is the curious picture emerging from the writings of the Egyptians themselves.

• Yet who exactly were these shamanic individuals who are said to have built the first monuments and temples?

• Were they the ones responsible for the carving of not just the Great Sphinx, but also the earliest megalithic monuments found to this day at places such as Giza and Abydos?

• If this is the case, then what happened to this forgotten culture, and what else might they have left as a legacy to the world?

The Hall of Records

As we enter the next millennium, many great discoveries are being made on the Giza plateau.

None can be more extraordinary than the detection beneath the Sphinx's wedge-shaped enclosure of a series of nine concealed chambers of unnatural origin.

These were first noticed during seismic soundings of the hard bedrock by two research programmes, one led by seismologist Thomas Dobecki in 1991 and the other coordinated in 1996 by the University of Florida in association with millionaire Joseph Schor, a life-long member of the Edgar Cayce Foundation (see below).

Myths and legends that date back to Pharaonic times speak of a subterranean world existing beneath the Giza plateau. Modern-day psychics, occult societies and new-age mystics all firmly believe that an underground complex made up of concealed corridors and unknown chambers will eventually be found at Giza.

They refer to this underworld complex as the 'Hall of Records', the 'Crystal Chambers' or the 'Chambers of Initiation', and suggest that it contains arcane wisdom and knowledge hidden from the world by Egypt's Elder culture prior to the Great Flood. During the 1930s one American psychic named Edgar Cayce stated that the Hall of Records would be found and opened in secret during 1998.

Working on this indication, a British consortium of surveyors and geophysicists, backed by Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, is going to conduct a wide-scale search for the entrance to the Hall of Records in July this year.

What might they expect to find? What really does await discovery beneath the Giza bed-rock?

Ever since Roman times rumors have existed concerning the existence beneath the Giza plateau of a series of under-ground chambers and tunnels. For example, the Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus (fl. AD 360-390) spoke of "subterranean fissures and winding passages called syringes" present beneath the Giza pyramid field.

These were constructed, he said, by,

"those acquainted with the ancient rites, since they had foreknowledge that a deluge was coming, and feared that the memory of the ceremonies might be destroyed".

 

• What exactly were these "ancient rites" that needed to be preserved from being lost in "a deluge"?

• Have the geophysicists working on the recent Giza projects really registered the echoes of Elder gods whose collective memory still lies slumbering beneath its limestone bedrock?

Underworld of the Soul

The Edfu Building Texts speak at length about the presence of this subterranean domain beneath the island of creation once located on the edge of the Giza plateau.

Referred to as the Underworld of the Soul, this structure was used by the divine individuals known as the Shebtiu to conduct strange ceremonies, described as acts of creation, using hand-held power objects.

They are said to have gained their radiance from another much greater object described variously as the embryo, the seed, the egg, the lotus or even the benben, or phallus stone. This was seen to be the creative source of the island, embodying both the male and female regenerative powers.

It is not stated exactly what this object might have been, although the indications are that, similar to the hand-held power objects used by the Shebtiu, it could have been a conical-shaped stone resembling the so-called lingams placed in underground shrines inside some Hindu temples.

These too are seen to embody the dualistic regenerative powers of first creation.

• Could this be what awaits discovery in Giza's underworld domain - powerful lingam stones that were once used in bizarre rites by the precursors of dynastic Egypt?

• Is this what will be found inside the Chambers of Creation, the so-called Hall of Records, if it is indeed discovered over the coming year?

That the ancient Egyptians believed that a physical object of immense creative power lie beneath the sands of Giza does not seem in doubt.

Among the body of magical literature known as The Coffin Texts it speaks of something described as,

"the sealed thing, which is in darkness, with fire about it."

(Note: The so-called Pyramid Texts were later adopted by the commoners and painted on their wooden coffins. They thus came to be called the Coffin Texts, and eventually they were transcribed to papyrus becoming known as the Book of the Dead. Collectively, the three sets of texts are usually referred to as the Book of the Dead)

It is said to contain "the efflux of Osiris", the god of the underworld, and was "put in Rostau", the name given by the ancient Egyptians to the Giza pyramid field.

The text in question goes on to state that this "sealed thing" has been "hidden since it fell from him (Osiris), and it is what came down from him onto the desert of sand".

The burial place of the body of Osiris is integrally linked with the Egyptian concept of the Underworld of the Soul as well as Giza itself. Indeed, the Valley Temple of Khafre is actually referred to in ancient inscriptions as the "House of Osiris". It seems certain that the "sealed thing" of the Coffin Texts is therefore another allusion to the nucleus of the sacred island - the so-called seed, embryo, lotus, egg or phallus found at the heart of Giza-Rostau's Chambers of Creation.

Illustrations that accompany Egyptian texts that detail what will be found inside the hidden chambers show at its heart a strange fiery-orange bell-shaped object over which is the hieroglyph for "night" or "darkness", implying that this powerful object remains in darkness awaiting discovery.

So much for the contents of this lost world, but where might it have been situated, and can it be found today?
 

The Sphinx and the River

During the epoch of the First Time (Zep Tepi) the Shebtiu initiates would perhaps have emerged from the Chambers of Creation, the so-called Hall of Records, to stand upon the sacred island, surrounded by the primeval waters of Nun.

Yet with the desiccation of the eastern Sahara and the rise of Pharaonic Egypt around 3100 BC, the setting has changed quite dramatically.

No longer are we able to look out over the shallow lake, created by the waters of the nearby river Nile, and see beyond it to the first temples of the gods. Gone too is the sacred island, with its structured enclosure and subterranean entrance to Giza's underworld complex. Instead, we find ourselves somewhere in the vicinity of the Giza pyramid field. Yet where exactly?

It is my conclusion that the sacred lake must have lain to the east or north-east of the Great Sphinx and Valley Temple, on the eastern edge of the plateau. In no way can it have been located on the plateau itself, for it rises up too steeply beyond the third pyramid of Menkeure on its western side.

Only on its eastern side can we find a low-lying area sufficient in size to have created either a temporary, or more permanent, lake or reservoir. This observation is supported by the recent discovery of a stone quay on the eastern side of the Valley Temple, which may itself be the last remains of the first temple constructed by the Elder gods on the edge of the sacred lake.

If I am correct in these assumptions, then it could well mean that the entrance to the Hall of Records now lies beneath the streets of the Nazlet el-Samman village, placed beyond the eastern edge of the plateau.

In many ways I hope I am wrong in this assessment of the evidence available to us at the present time. Despite this, these findings appear to concur precisely with the inspired readings of American psychic Edgar Cayce.

In 1933 he revealed the whereabouts of the subterranean complex with the following words:

In position, this lies - as the sun rises from the waters - as the line of the shadows [or light] falls between the paws of the Sphinx; that was set later as the sentinel or guard and which may not be entered from the connecting chambers from the Sphinx's right paw until the time has been fulfilled when the changes must be active in this sphere of man's experience. Then [it lies] between the Sphinx and the river.

Between the Sphinx and the river - in other words to the east of the Sphinx and Valley Temple.

If he was right in this respect, then let us also hope that he was correct in his belief that connecting chambers led from the underground complex to a position coincident to the right paw of the Sphinx monument. If this is so, we still stand a reasonable chance of locating a second entry point using modern-day sounding equipment.

Whether or not the nine chambers discovered in 1996 beneath the Sphinx enclosure by the team put together by the University of Florida are actually connected with Giza's underworld complex remains to be seen.

It may well be that, although of man-made construction, and therefore of profound interest to our knowledge of Egyptian history, they lie too near the surface to be connected with the Chambers of Creation.

On the other hand they might well contain the ultimate proof of the former existence in Egypt of a high culture of almost alien mentality whose knowledge of ancient technology and natural sciences will change the entire way we perceive human evolution.
 

PART TWO

What was the fate of Egypt’s Sphinx-building Elder culture?

The Edfu Building Texts are specific on what became of at least some of the divine inhabitants of Wetjeset-Neter and its sacred domain. They say that, at the end of their time, the Shebtiu "sailed" away to "another part of the primeval world" where they could "continue their creative task" undisturbed.

Further evidence that these mythical beings were mariners or navigators comes from the fact that one Shebtiu is named as "the sailor", while, collectively, the followers of an individual known as the Falcon are referred to as "the crew".

Yet where might they have gone? For where did they set sail at the end of their time in Egypt?

What we know is that the earliest known evidence for primitive agriculture anywhere in the world comes from the Nile valley communities between the thirteenth millennia BC and sometime around 9500 BC. It is then that it disappears from Egypt altogether, and does not reappear until around 5500 BC, some 4000 years later.

Why did it suddenly cease and, more pressingly, what became of the prime movers behind this enormous change from simple hunter-gatherer to domesticated farmer?

We know from the research of respected Egyptologists such as Fekri Hassan of University College, London, that between 10,500 and 9500 BC the Nile Valley suffered repeatedly from extreme flooding on a massive scale. This alone might have forced its inhabitants to seek new territories in which to continue their agricultural lifestyle.

Yet if they did start anew elsewhere, is it possible to trace their destination?
 

Gateway to Eden

The emergence of the so-called Neolithic age marked the transition of the Paleolithic hunter-gatherer into a more settled way of life where instead of moving from place to place, human kind began working in co-operation with nature.

The key element of this major change in lifestyle was, of course, the development of agriculture and animal domestication, which necessitated the establishment of more permanent settlements where a community could work together to produce enough food and livestock to sustain itself through the winter months.

Removing the element of uncertainty from the daily lives of the inhabitants enabled the Neolithic peoples to start developing technical capabilities and regulate their lives for the first time.

This, at least, is the orthodox view of how the gradual change from Paleolithic to Neolithic began in a humble manner, sometime after the end of the last Ice Age. Yet there are major flaws in this supposition, for it is clear that the transition from hunter-gatherer to settled farmer did not occur everywhere at the same time. Indeed, it would seem to have emerged first in one region alone, and to have remained in virtual isolation here for at least 1000 years before spreading very slowly outwards.

The genesis point of the so-called Neolithic revolution is the fertile river-valleys of the Upper Euphrates of northern Syria and eastern Anatolia, modern-day Turkey. Here from around 9500 BC onwards, evidence for the cultivation of wild cereals, as well as animal husbandry, starts to appear at important sites such as the extensive "farmers’ village" at Tell Abu Hureyra on the Upper Euphrates in northern Syria.

Similar to the Nilotic communities of Egypt, evidence of cereal cultivation has come from the discovery here of stone pestles, rubbing stones and milling stones. In addition to this archaeologists also found an abundance of seeds from three different types of cereal grains - two of which had previously been grown by the Nilotic communities of Paleolithic Egypt.

The clear fact that agriculture appears in the Near East around the very same time that it vanishes from the Nile valley is striking and cannot be overlooked. In my opinion, there seems to be a direct link between these two quite different farming regions separated by several hundred miles, and the most obvious solution is the transmission of agricultural knowledge and skills through the migration of individuals from Egypt to the Near East.

So is it possible that some of the remaining Elders departed Giza for the fertile valleys of the Upper Euphrates carrying with them their technological capabilities, sometime around 9500 BC? Let us look a little more closely at the emergence of civilized society in the Near East.

In the 4000 years following the emergence of the Neolithic age in the Near East around 9500 BC, so many advances were made in this region, long held to be the cradle of civilization and the biblical land of Eden (also known as Dilmun in ancient Mesopotamian, i.e. ancient Iraqi tradition), that something rather unique seems to have occurred.

This isolated region has produced the oldest evidence for the use of beaten and smelted metal, the fashioning of linen cloth, the use of fired pottery, the domestication of fruits and vegetables, the production of alcohol in the form of a type of retsina wine, the introduction of writing and the use of bartering tokens.

All these advancements were made first in the fertile valleys of northern Syria, south-eastern Turkey and northern Iraq - a vast and very desolate area known today as Kurdistan, home to the much-troubled Kurdish peoples.

More particularly, the first Neolithic communities of the Upper Euphrates were able to fashion and drill necklaces of agate beads up to 5 centimeters in length as early as 7000 BC.

The level of technical sophistication necessary to drill holes less than 5 mm in diameter, and up to one inch (2.5 cm) in depth at either end of a long slim agate bead no more than 7 or 8 mm in thickness, is almost beyond comprehension.

To drill similar holes in agate today requires the use of a highly specialized diamond-tipped, tungsten carbide drill, and even this has to be constantly cooled by running water. Yet despite this, these beads have been found at a number of sites in the Near East.

No one has satisfactorily accounted for why the Neolithic revolution began where it did - a puzzle that prompted Mehrdad R. Izady, the Professor of Near Eastern studies at New York University, to speak of the Neolithic explosion in the Near East as a "stage of accelerated technological evolution", prompted by "yet uncertain forces".

• What kind of "uncertain forces" had Professor Izady been alluding to here?

• Were they changes in regional flora and fauna, brought on by post-ice age climate changes conducive to the gradual emergence of a cultural revolution, or was it the sudden appearance in the region of highly organized individuals who brought with them an entirely new style of living?

Professor Izady is happy to accept the latter solution as a very real possibility.

• Might these talented individuals have been the final remnants of Egypt’s Elder culture, who are likely to have been responsible for the emergence of agriculture and technology along the Nile valley?

• Was it them who helped catalyze the Neolithic revolution - an event which eventually led to the genesis of civilization among the foothills and plains of ancient Iraq some 5500 years later?

• Could we find any real evidence to suggest that the earliest peoples of the Near East were descendants of those who supposedly built the Sphinx sometime between 10,500 and 9220 BC?
   

Worshippers of the Stars

Searching through the religious traditions of the Mandaeans, a neo-Babylonian tribal-based religion found mostly among the Marsh Arabs of southern Iraq, I discovered something of immense value to this debate.

The Mandaeans believe that their distant ancestors came originally from a mythical location known as the Mountain of the Madai, located to the north or north-east of the city of Harran.

As modern Altinbasak, this ancient religious centre of great learning lies just over the Syrian border in south-eastern Turkey on a tributary of the Euphrates river, some 78 miles (125 km) distance from Abu Hureyra, where the earliest evidence of agriculture in the Near East was found.

The Mandaeans also claim that the Mountain of the Madai is not the true place of origin of their race. They say that their most distant ancestors came originally from Egypt. One Mandaean manuscript even speaks of "the interior of Haran (i.e. Harran) admitting them" upon their arrival in this land, shortly after which they "entered the mountain of the Madai, a place where they were free from domination of all races".

More significantly, various words found in the language of the Mandaeans have clear Egyptian roots.

They include the name of a creator god named Pthahil. He is simply a rendition of the Egyptian god Ptah, who was said to have fashioned the first humans on a potter’s wheel at the beginning of time.

Another word is the root ntr, which in Mandaean means "to watch", "watch-houses" or "watcher", a term used to express supernatural beings who live in their conception of heaven. This same root word is Egyptian where it is used to denote a divinity or god.

The Mandaeans were an offshoot of star-worshipping peoples who inhabited Harran in south-eastern Turkey from the earliest times through to the Middle Ages. They too placed a great importance on Egypt, and it is known that from the early second millennium BC they would make pilgrimages to the Great Sphinx at Giza, where they would leave votive stones in honor of the leonine monument.

This practice continued through till medieval times, for the eleventh-century Arab geographer Yakut el-Hamawi tells us that in his own day the Sabians made pilgrimages to both the Great and Second Pyramids of Giza.

To the Mandaeans and their cousins the Sabians, Egypt appears to have been seen as some kind of ancestral homeland where their earliest forebears lived before their arrival in the Near East. Such assumptions were, however, pure speculation.

What was really needed was much firmer evidence for the existence in the fertile valleys of the Upper Euphrates of a high culture that rose to prominence soon after 9000 BC and whose style of architecture matched that found along the Nile valley.

Only then could it be said that the original gods of Eden had been found.
 

Birds to Men

Such evidence came to my attention in late 1996, when I was notified of the recent discovery at an archaeological site known as Nevali Çori, situated near Hilvan in south-eastern Turkey. Here had been discovered an extraordinary temple dated to 8000 BC.

This so-called "cult building", as German excavator Harald Hauptmann of Heidelberg University named it, featured beautifully carved megalithic blocks that once supported a wooden roof, as well as a perfectly-levelled floor made of "terrazzo", a mixture of lime and mortar, and a huge gateway composed of two 3-metre high megalithic pillars.

On these in low relief were human forms with long flowing hair and five-fingered hands resembling the belly flippers of an amphibian (Nevali Çori was lost in 1992 when the recent completion of the Ataturk Dam caused the rising waters of the nearby Euphrates river to flood the site).

A very similar temple complex is to be found just 60 miles (100 km) away to the north-east at a neolithic site known as Çayönü. A cult building there also has a terrazzo floor, while another contains upright megaliths and a flag-stone floor similar in style to the Valley Temple of Khafre at Giza.

On a more disturbing note, clear evidence of macabre blood rites and human sacrifice have been unearthed both at Çayönü and Nevali Çori, making it clear that its ruling elite were not simply benign wisdom bringers.

Similar to Giza’s sacred domain during the epoch of the First Time, Nevali Çori’s elite group of priest-shamans adorned themselves in garments of bird feathers, in particular the vulture - the symbol of the cult of the dead in Neolithic times.

An extraordinary number of statues and carvings depicting bird-men, or figures adorned with feathers, have been found in association with the cult building from its very earliest phase, which Carbon-14 testing has revealed was as early as 8400 BC. There is every indication that these individuals were the ruling body behind many of the Neolithic communities, and that they were indeed the direct descendants of Egypt’s Elder culture.

More significantly, Nevali Çori’s cult building - constructed at a time when stone age man is thought to have only just emerged from his primitive hunter-gatherer lifestyle - is precision aligned to the south-west.

This in itself should set alarm bells ringing among the archaeological community. Yet this south-westerly orientation seems more than simply an aesthetic effect to line it up with the distant Euphrates river, as has been suggested.

The primary chaos out of which the Near Eastern cultures of the foothills and plains first emerged was viewed mythologically as a huge sea-monster or primeval dragon called Tiamat or Kumarbi. Legend spoke of the physical world being fashioned from the body of this mythical creature, while the tears that flowed from its eyes went to form the water-courses of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers.

Both Tiamat and Kumarbi bore a celestial counterpart seen as forming the stars of the constellation known as Cetus - the great whale or sea-monster - which swam in the celestial form of the Euphrates river. In astronomical terms, this string of 34 stars, stretching between the front paws of Cetus and the left-foot of the giant Orion, is known as the starry stream of Eridanus and the River of the Night.

The whole area of south-western sky in which these constellations are placed was known in Babylonian times as the Gate of the Deep, beyond which lurked the dark primeval waters of chaos with which Tiamat had threatened to drown the world before the current world age.

By using computer calculations, it can be established that at dawn on the spring equinox in 8000 BC, Nevali Çori’s cult building would have been aligned precisely towards the stars of Cetus which would have hung low in the south-western sky.

Furthermore, it can be ascertained that the Euphrates river would have aligned with its own celestial counterpart, the Eridanus, at the same moment. Did these primitive constellations have some kind of special meaning to the inhabitants of Nevali Çori?

Let us look again at its quite specific orientation precisely towards the south-west.
 

Turning to Home

Places of worship in the Jewish and Moslem faiths are orientated towards their greatest religious centers - synagogues face Jerusalem while mosques face towards Mecca.

Could it be possible that the designers of Nevali Çori’s cult building orientated it towards not just the direction most associated with their own myths and legends, but also the homeland of their earliest ancestors - in other words Giza in Egypt?

Further computer calculations, taking into account the curvature of the earth, showed that the bearing of Giza from the position of Nevali Çori is 221.8º, a full 1.8º out from the 223.6º orientation of the standing monolith and a massive 3.1º if we take into consideration the orientation of the cult building itself.

If the alignment linking Nevali Çori with Giza is valid, then it suggested that its priest-shamans really did see the south-west as the direction most associated with the creation of their world. The fact that this imaginary line stretches across the waters of the eastern Mediterranean Sea is also perhaps significant.

With Egypt as their ancestral homeland, this journey across the waters through the Gate of the Deep could have been compared with the emergence of cosmic order out of the primeval waters that had threatened to engulf the world at the beginning of time.

Having conquered the face of the deep, in other words the Mediterranean Sea, to arrive in the Levant, the surviving Elders, as the first gods of Mesopotamia (i.e. ancient Iraq), would have been seen as initiating a new world age.

In this mythical epoch, mortal kind were seen to have lived alongside their immortal teachers - utopic memories that led to much later legends concerning this paradisiacal realm, known in Hebrew as Eden and in ancient Mesopotamian as Dilmun, both connected with the territories located between the headwaters of the two great rivers - the Tigris and Euphrates.

There is, however, one further link with Egypt.
 

The Dusky Monster

In an important work on ancient Euphratean star-lore written by Aratus, a noted Greek astronomer and poet who lived around 270 BC, the sea-monster Cetus is referred to as "the dusky Monster" - a name that was said to express "the blue-black of the nocturnal sky".

To the Sumerians it was known as kumar, "dusky", from which derives the name Kumarbi.

In Aramaic Hebrew, which is a Semitic language linked closely to Akkadian, the same word root becomes akem, "to be black" and "sunburnt". In the Egyptian language, this becomes kem, "black", or kemet, meaning "black land" - the name given to ancient Egypt by its own people.

Mythological legend asserts that this name refers to the black silt left covering the first land, i.e. Egypt, after the waters of Nun receded from the primeval mound at the beginning of time, reflected in the very real alluvial deposits left covering the Nile valley after the yearly inundation.

More curiously, the word kem was used to denote "the end of a period, completion, a finish", while kemet can also mean "to end, to bring to an end".

These definitions imply a completion to a period or cycle of time.

• Is it possible that kemet was the name originally given to Egypt as the primeval homeland by the descendants of the Elder gods who entered the Near East around 9500 BC?

• Was the name an abstract memory of the muddy deposits that were left covering large parts of the Nile valley following the constant series of high floods during the eleventh to tenth millennia BC?

• Did it also preserve a memory of the culmination, or conclusion, of this chaotic period of floods and destruction?

If these thoughts are correct, then it is likely that these memories were carried into the Upper Euphrates region by the last Elder gods and kept alive by the priest-shamans of the Neolithic communities.

Even down to the second millennium BC, the Semitic peoples living in the ancient city of Harran in south eastern Turkey recalled a more direct relationship between their most distant ancestors and kemet, the black land beyond the Mediterranean Sea.
 

The Birth of Sumer

In the opinion of archaeologists and historians alike, the city-states of Sumer constitute the earliest known civilization of the Old World.

Yet their first beginnings were among the mountain communities of the Zagros and eastern Taurus, where the Neolithic revolution had begun 5000 years beforehand.

From its first beginnings in the foothills and plains of northern Syria and Iraq, as well as south-eastern Turkey, the civilization of Sumer and Akkad grew over a 2000-year period to become the most sophisticated society on earth.

The number of ‘firsts’ attributed to the Sumerians is virtually endless.

• They designed the first colored pottery.

• They conducted the first medical operations.

• They made the first musical instruments.

• They introduced the first veterinary skills and developed the first written language.

• They also became highly accomplished engineers, mathematicians, librarians, authors, archivists, judges and priests.

Yet despite all this no one is quite sure who the Sumerians were or why they would appear to have evolved so much faster than any other race.

There is ample evidence to show that the innovative capabilities of the Sumerians derived from what they inherited from their mountain forebears, such as the ruling elite of the so-called Halaf and Ubaid cultures.

These were a priestly caste identified from among the anatomical remains discovered at various sites across the Near East.

Not only did they bear genetic similarities, in that they were an elite family group, but they distinguished themselves from others of the different communities by elongating their heads through deliberate skull deformation during infancy, causing the eyes to appear slanted and giving them an overall striking appearance.

These individuals are represented in abstract form in religious art, and were clearly seen as having long serpent-like faces.

Furthermore, in similar with the priest-shamans of Nevali Çori and the divine inhabitants of Wetjeset-Neter in the Edfu Building Texts, these individuals adorned themselves in ceremonial garments made of feathers.

It was from this elite group of priest-shamans, very possibly the direct descendants of Egypt’s Elder gods, that the old world gained its knowledge or civilization.
 

Return to the Source

Completing the cycle is the fact that the forerunners of the earliest Mesopotamian peoples would seem to have entered Egypt from the Levant during predynastic times, sometime between 4500 and 3500 BC.

They helped initiate the Pharaonic age which began with the institution of the First Dynasty of a united Egypt around 3100 BC. In many respects, this migration to Egypt seems to have been like some sort of return to the source - a return to an ancestral homeland left behind as much as 5000 years beforehand.

In Pharaonic Egypt all the ideas of those who had preserved the seed of the Elder culture were finally realized and put into effect. Although the indigenous peoples of the Nile valley might have been the direct inheritors of the Elder gods’ ancient legacy, which seems to have included the art of sonic technology, these individuals were most probably just small religious groups who kept alive archaic traditions at cult centers such as Giza.

Alone they could do very little. They had no real influence over the ruling tribal dynasties and were not in a position to re-ignite the splendor of their divine ancestors.

Yet with the aid of incoming architects, craftsmen, designers, religious leaders, as well as a new ruling elite, they were now able to begin the process of continuing the glories of the Elder culture, which had dispersed to various parts of the globe many thousand of years beforehand.

Imhotep was the architect of the first ever stone pyramid built at Saqqara during the Third Dynasty for his king, the mighty Djoser.

Its stepped design is very reminiscent of the seven-tiered ziggurat structures of Mesopotamia, while the façades of the temenos walls that surround the pyramid complex are strikingly similar to the exterior walls of cult buildings in ancient Iraq - the temple of Enki at Eridu being a prime example.

Yet the greatest significance of this external influence on the architecture of ancient Egypt is the sheer fact that within just 150 years of Djoser’s reign, it had led to the Elder culture’s surviving technological capability being combined with local building skills to produce what is arguably the world’s greatest architectural achievement, the Great Pyramid.

This monument was the crowning glory not only of Egypt but of everything that had been secretly kept alive since the age of the netjeru-gods, the epoch of the First Time (Zep Tepi).

The precision science, geometry, orientation, stone cutting, hole drilling and architectural planning of the Great Pyramid was the result of a legacy preserved not simply by the wise old priests of Egypt, but by a number of diverse cultures across the Near East.

Their most distant ancestors were the Neolithic gods of Eden, whose own forebears had left Egypt for the fertile valleys of eastern Anatolia during the wide-scale floods that engulfed Egypt between 10,500 and 9500 BC.

It is to these unique individuals, the living descendants of a divine race with a lifestyle that would seem almost alien today, that we owe the genesis of civilization.