Ancient Egyptian

Sky Lore:

RETHINKING THE CONVENTIONAL WISDOM

JOANNE CONMAN

DECAN WISDOM BOOKS

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Copyright © 2013 Joanne Conman No part of this book may reproduced without permission.

All rights reserved. ISBN-13: 978-1490506654

ISBN-10: 1490506659

CONTENTS

Introduction………………………………………..…i

1 The Great Mistake…………………………………….1

2 The Onomastica of Amenope………………………..35

3 A Look at Plutarch…………………………………...53

4 The Asyut Coffin Art:

Wainwright’s Helicopter…………………….………..67

5 Neugebauer and Parker………………………………87

6 The So-Called Mithras Liturgy………………….…...111

7 Meskhetiu: The Late Period Texts……………….......134

8 The Book of Day and the Pharaonic Roots of Astrology……………..…….…..142

9 Sah and Meskhetiu:

Planetary Gods of Time…………………………….165

10 Reret……………………………………………….185

11 Conclusion ………………………………………...209

Bibliography………………………………………...217

Plate I Pharaoh’s Helicopter. Courtesy of Frank Dörnenburg.

“For the great enemy of truth is very often not the lie – deliberate, contrived and dishonest – but the myth – persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the clichés of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.”

John F. Kennedy

Commencement Address Yale University, June 11, 1962

INTRODUCTION

In 1987, Dr. Ruth McKinley-Hover of Sedona, Arizona visited the ancient Egyptian holy city of Abydos. She spied what appeared to be a helicopter in the carvings above a lintel in the Temple of Osiris and photographed them. Her photos were seized upon by ancient astronaut theorists and believers in and promoters of ancient technology. “Pharaoh’s helicopter” is still today taken as fact by many. At least one believer defended the helicopter as genuine because the carvings are real and the photos are real. He assured his readers that he had the proof in the form of negatives in his possession. The carvings are in fact real, as are the photos. Although some photos have been retouched, others have not been. The helicopter image is quite clear in some photos that haven’t been retouched. Anyone who knows helicopters can see what plainly looks like a helicopter.

So is it a helicopter or not? What more proof does anyone need besides what they see with their own eyes? Some have wondered if ancient Egyptians had never seen a helicopter, how could they have carved one so well? How do we decide exactly what we’re seeing? We could call in military experts, helicopter designers, or pilots who fly helicopters every day; well-trained, educated, intelligent people who have far more knowledge of helicopters than the rest of us. Such experts have credibility. Such experts are experts! If they all agree that Pharaoh’s helicopter looks like a helicopter, can we relax and declare that we know we are on safe ground with the identification? No. We are not on safe ground because that is the wrong test. Bringing in a group of experts from another time and culture who all agree that an image looks like something they recognize from their own culture is the wrong test. That some people recognize what appears to resemble a helicopter as a helicopter does not make it so. Getting the same reaction from more of them, even well-trained, educated, intelligent experts, proves nothing other than the object in the carving definitely looks like a helicopter to people in our culture who know helicopters. We already knew that. More people agreeing does not and cannot prove that the object is in fact a helicopter. Asking how ancient Egyptians could have carved a helicopter so well if they had never seen one is the wrong question. It assumes that the helicopter is a helicopter when that fact has not been established. To prove what the carving really is requires a different test. And so it is with the alleged star maps, so-called star clocks, and so-called astronomical texts of ancient Egypt. The most well-educated, intelligent astronomers who honestly think and have thought that they recognized star maps in ancient Egyptian funerary and religious material are no different from our experts weighing in on helicopters. In both cases, we have people who think that they recognize something familiar from their own culture in the art of another very different culture from another time. The only reason the early nineteenth-century scholars did

not discover the helicopter in Abydos is that helicopters had not yet been invented. Unfortunately, modern star maps had been. People assumed the alleged star maps were in fact star maps and proceeded from there when that critical fact had never been established. And it still hasn’t. What is the right test? We can begin by approaching ancient art with no preconceived notion of what it “must” be. If it looks like a picture of a helicopter, it certainly can be just what it looks like. But can it be something else? It’s easy to get trapped into thinking that one thing is the only answer when it may not be. Good scientific method is to consider as many alternate hypotheses as one can. We need to ask what explains the data and what else explains the data. We need to consider the most reasonable explanation – the one that needs the least amount of additional explanations added to it – as the best choice. Something else must be considered when examining art from another culture and that is the well-known phenomenon of pareidolia. Pareidolia occurs when the illusion or misperception of an ambiguous stimulus appears to be something distinctly unambiguous. People tend to see something they think they recognize when they view something unknown or ambiguous. For example, a cloud can look like a familiar animal or a rock formation can look like a face. The reason something ambiguous or unknown is recognized as something familiar is because we project something from our own personal and/or cultural experience onto that ambiguous/unknown stimulus. Our brains are wired to make sense out of the world, so we are inclined to perceive things as something that is familiar to us. A person’s world view or belief system also influences their perception. For the ancient astronaut fans and the believers in high tech lost civilizations, there is no question that ancient people had modern technology that was identical or superior to our own. That is part of what makes it so easy for them to find it in the art and texts of ancient cultures. A belief system is in place and the facts they encounter are made to fit into that

belief system. They expect to find evidence supporting what they already believe to be true and so they do. How like Napoleon’s savants and the first Egyptologists they are! A belief system was in place for them too: they were absolutely certain that ancient Egypt was the original source of the sciences, especially astronomy. They were prepared to find support for their beliefs in the art and texts of that ancient culture and so they did. But what alternate hypotheses have been considered that may explain the data better? Nothing was ever done to test or to challenge the initial theory. There are still archaeoastronomers and a number of Egyptologists who maintain a belief in the persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic myth of ancient Egyptian astronomy. They subject all facts to that prefabricated set of interpretations. They enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought. It is ironic that a discipline involved in excavations to discover history does not excavate its own belief system to discover the history of some of its most pernicious dogma. This book examines the origins of that persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic myth and some of its chief perpetrators and perpetuators. We’ll consider the questions that were never asked and the beliefs that were never questioned. We’ll examine some implausible hypotheses that should have been discarded long ago. And we will challenge the blind faith in authorities whose conjectures have been taken as something akin to divine revelation. Beginning where Egyptology itself first went wrong, we look at both the Greco-Roman-era temple zodiacs and the scholars who first studied them. Next, we examine the most important piece of the puzzle, the best single piece of evidence identifying the five planets visible to the naked eye in Pharaonic Egypt, an ancient Egyptian textbook. Then we review material that has been offered as support for the identifications of Sah as Orion and Meskhetiu as the Big Dipper over the last two centuries and you will see how it fails. Finally, we examine evidence that contradicts that dogma in both art and in texts.

The solution to understanding the image of Pharaoh’s helicopter can be found in the study of ancient Egypt: knowledge of the culture, knowledge of the practices of the people, and the ability to read inscriptions. What appears to be a helicopter is the result of hieroglyphs having been carved over other hieroglyphs. Ancient Egyptians did that sort of thing frequently. We have numerous examples of usurped and revised inscriptions from all periods in ancient Egyptian history. When the glyphs are separated, it is possible to read the original line and what was carved on top of it. The shape of the apparent helicopter can be explained easily as a non-helicopter. The glyphs represent part of a title of Ramesses II that was carved over part of a title of his father, Seti I. In New Kingdom Egypt, the time of the pharaohs Seti I and Ramesses II, all kings were known by five names that they took at their coronation: the Horus name, the Nebty or Two Ladies name, the Golden Horus name, the Prenomen, and the Nomen. The Nebty name of Ramesses II, “Protector of Egypt, Subduer of the Foreign Lands,” was carved over the Nebty name of Seti I, “Repeater of Births, Powerful of Strong Arm, Subduer/Repeller of the Nine Bows.” The helicopter we see is the result of part of the word waf (subduer) in Ramesses’ name written over a portion of the word pDt (bows) in Seti’s name. Glyphs being carved over other glyphs is consistent with what we know about Egyptians. Helicopters are not. Decoding the art requires properly reading hieroglyphs and a good knowledge of the ancient Egyptian culture. Modern knowledge of helicopters is unhelpful and irrelevant. Over the last two hundred years, we’ve developed a vision of ancient Egypt that is thought to be historically accurate as a result of scientific investigation. But before anyone knew anything factual, before hieroglyphs had been deciphered, early scholars leapt to conclusions, certain they were correct. Although they were not correct about a number of things, many of their ideas became Egyptological dogma. Consequently our vision of ancient Egypt today is a patchwork of some decent

factual research, some plausible but unprovable conjectures, and some very foolish fantasies. Various explanations have been offered to account for what has survived from ancient Egypt. Often, these explanations are so at odds with one another the imagined culture makes little sense. How do we understand the whole culture in light of all the known facts? Egyptology has always attracted a huge number of crackpots and crackpot theories. It comes close to rivaling medicine in that. In the case of medicine, it’s easy to see that some desperate people, knowing how very ill they are, will want to believe a quack. But why should this be the case in Egyptology? At a meeting for the Society of American Archaeology in April, 1998, Robert L. Bettinger spoke about the persistence of crackpot myths in archaeology, specifically the Moundbuilder Myth:

“Science, and especially archaeology, is always going to be plagued by crackpots and crackpot hypotheses. That’s because science makes room – in essence, provides a ‘niche’ – for any hypothesis, no matter how silly. Indeed, it is progress in knowledge, evidence, and understanding that separates plausible hypotheses from the silly ones, which are simply abandoned and pass from scientific consciousness. Paradoxically, as research and thinking moves further and further from the silly hypothesis in pursuit of more plausible ones, the more the silly hypothesis has the potential for passing as ‘innovative’ thought, simply because most scientists are not thinking that way anymore (almost always for good reason). This is why exponents of silly, long-discarded hypotheses are often portrayed in the public media as creative innovators willing to buck the establishment. Thus, the more archaeology progresses in its pursuit of plausible hypotheses, the more it invites challenges from the lunatic fringe.”1

1 Bettinger, Robert L., commenting on the persistence of the Moundbuilder Myth, Society of American Archaeology Meetings,

One explanation for the amount of crackpottery involving ancient Egypt is that Egyptian antiquities had a good head start compared with other fields of antiquity. Europeans had long been curious about Egypt, fascinated for centuries by the information given by ancient Greek and Roman writers and by what they knew from the Bible. Many Egyptian monuments, such as the pyramids and stone temples, are impressive by virtue of their size and age in a way that a lot of other archaeological remains are not. Mesoamerican and South American pyramids and other large-scale remains, such as the plains of Nazca, also attract a substantial share of nuttiness. But one of the chief reasons Egyptology may be plagued by more crackpots than some other fields is because Egyptologists have done a lot less house-cleaning than scholars in other fields. This is particularly true when it comes to the so-called astronomical material. Many early theories and guesses have been discarded in the study of ancient Egyptian language. No one today would dream of using any of the nineteenth-century grammars as language textbooks or as references, other than as documents chronicling the history of the field. While Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie is acknowledged as one of the founders of the study of prehistoric Egypt, no one today would seriously insist on following his reconstruction of the rise of prehistoric Egyptian cultures and the Egyptian state, to say nothing of his chronology! Archaeologists nowadays strive to take the greatest care to record and catalog any site they excavate – as well as what is in it – so that future scholars can see exactly how artifacts were found. No one today would consider blowing up a tomb with dynamite, as Auguste Mariette once did in search of treasure. But this is not the case when it comes to the so-called astronomical material.

Consider this extraordinary statement made more than half a century ago by a respected Egyptological scholar, Serge

Seattle Washington, April 1998 http://archaeology.about.com/b/2007/02/27/quote-of-the-week-bettinger-on-the-cost-of-doing-business.htm (accessed April 2, 2013).

Sauneron which still reflects the view of too many Egyptologists:

“While we have been able to make a fairly precise account of the historical and geographical knowledge of the Egyptian priests, it is far more difficult to determine the extent of their information in the areas of astronomy and geometry. These are exact sciences which fall outside the usual purview of the humanities, and they can be treated properly only by specialists, while Egyptologists must accept their judgment with respect and gratitude. The problem is that these specialists are not always of the same opinion, while Egyptologists are not qualified to judge among them. Finally so much inanity has been (and continues to be) written on the subject of priestly knowledge of astronomy and geometry by charlatans assured of an uncritical public that scholars, in a reaction that is easy to understand, are willing to broach these two areas only with the greatest of caution.”2

The antidote to this limiting thinking is to get the authorities off their pedestals and to consider the sage advice of Carl Sagan in his famous baloney detection kit: There are no authorities in science.3 No judgment has to be accepted with respect or gratitude simply because it is the judgment of an expert. Egyptologists – and anyone else – can certainly judge among expert opinions by demanding good solid proof and by examining the validity of the arguments. Experts are not mystics; they should be able to defend and to prove their theories. They should be able to explain their opinions. That is the way to determine who is a charlatan and who has discovered something worthy of serious consideration. It should be about ideas, not personalities or imagined personalities.

2 Sauneron Serge, The Priests of Ancient Egypt New Edition, trans. David Lorton (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 149. 3 Sagan, Carl, The Demon-Haunted World: Science As A Candle in the Dark (New York: Ballantine Books, 1996), 210-16.