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Inverting the pyramids |
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By Khaled Diab The world isn’t short on wacky theories about Egypt’s greatest monuments. The reality is less fun, but more illuminating. |
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September
2008
The quack
theories about my country’s history can be very entertaining, with the
all-time classic being that only aliens could have constructed something as
magnificent and precise as the pyramids. Astoundingly, up to 45% of people
who took part in a recent survey believed that the pyramids (and Stonehenge)
were physical
evidence of alien life. Of course, this poll appeared in the Sun, the
same newspaper which reported on an ‘alien army’ that had been spotted over
England and Wales. Some UFOlogists even claim that civilisation itself was an
alien import. One man
of the cloth has come up with an ingenious solution to the mystery of the
pyramids which also ‘disproves’ evolution. Maltese evangelist pastor Vince
Fenech believes
that dinosaurs helped build the pyramids, presumably after being
domesticated. There is a certain eccentric beauty to this ‘Flintstones’
theory: the ancient Egyptians didn’t have any mechanical heavy-lifting
equipment that we know of, so let’s give them a biological variety. But even
when human agency behind the pyramids is acknowledged, the credit for them is
disputed. The most famous alternative theory is that Israelite slaves built
these colossal structures. The late Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin
stirred up a furore in Egypt when he claimed, prior to arriving for the first
official visit by an Israeli leader to Cairo, that his
ancestors built the pyramids. Of
course, no archaeologist takes this theory seriously, since the pyramids were
already pretty ancient when the Israelites are presumed to have been in Egypt
and it is now generally accepted that slaves
did not work on the project. There is
also no biblical evidence that the Israelites worked on the pyramids. Baruch
Brandel, the director of the Israel Antiquities Authority library, notes
that: “The Torah only mentions that the Israelites built Pithom and Ramses
during the New Kingdom period.” So, where
does this legend come from? Scotland, actually. Charles Piazzi Smyth believed
that the mysterious Hyksos – who may have invaded, or simply migrated, to
Egypt nearly a millennium after the pyramids were built – were the Hebrew
people, and that they built the Great Pyramid. Some Jews
began to prescribe to this far-fetched theory to draw pride amid
discrimination, just as the 19th century Afrocentric movement in
the United States extended the period of Kushite (modern-day Nubia) rule for
two centuries during the Third Intermediate Period to all of Egyptian history
in order to claim that ancient Egypt was “black African”. This
flies in the face of all the evidence that points to the fact that Egypt – an
integral part of the Fertile Crescent and sitting on the northeastern edge of
Africa – was always a multiracial society but that the basic make-up of the
population has not changed much since ancient times. Besides, skin colour did
not mean anything beyond the physical to the Egyptians, who were more
interested in whether you were culturally Egyptian or not. This is reflected
in the fact that both free people and slaves in Egyptian wall paintings were
of various colours and races. This
includes the Biblical Israelites. But identifying who exactly this wandering
people were is fraught with difficulty, as no non-biblical evidence exists
that identifies their presence in Egypt conclusively. Israeli
archaeologist Ze’ev
Herzog says that
the available
evidence points to the fact that: “The Israelites were never in Egypt,
did not wander in the desert, did not conquer the land in a military campaign
and did not pass it on to the 12 tribes of Israel. Perhaps even harder to
swallow is the fact that the united monarchy of David and Solomon, which is
described by the Bible as a regional power, was at most a small tribal
kingdom.” So, why
create these myths? Egypt was the mega-power of the region and the Levant was
part of the Egyptian empire for centuries. Perhaps once a group of vassal
rulers managed to shake off Egyptian hegemony, they needed to create a heroic
back-story which, at once, demonised the Egyptians and borrowed from their
grandeur. In addition, there is plenty of historical evidence of Canaanite
tribes settling in Egypt in times of famine and some became slaves, and the
stories of their sporadic return could have been amalgamated into one epic
legend. In
addition, the idea that the Israelites were originally not monotheists, but
practised monolatry, i.e. the worship of a local god as the top god while
recognising the existence of other gods, does not sit comfortably with the
Abrahamic traditions. Despite
Egypt’s polytheistic reputation, monotheism was actually invented in Egypt,
as far as historians can ascertain. Amenhotep IV (renamed Akhenaten) began
the worship of Aten as the one god, probably for political reasons, because
he wanted to clip the wings of the powerful priesthood of the supreme god
Amun-Ra. Akhenaten’s iconoclasm did not survive him, and the old priesthoods
re-formed after his mysterious death. Moreover,
Egyptian themes are found throughout the Abrahamic faiths, and not just in
the explicit mentions of Egypt in the holy scriptures. The idea of the
‘messiah’, which means the anointed one, bears a striking resemblance to the
identity of pharaoh, who was also the anointed one and god’s representative
on earth, while the Virgin and Child story seems to be a rehashing of the Osiris-Isis-Horus myth.
In some ways, a rationalised form of polytheism is actually alive and well,
if we consider God as Osiris and the devil as a sort of Seth, while the
angels are equivalent to the legion of minor deities. Naturally,
the Middle East is not ready for this shock to the system: not only are these
biblical legends crucial to Zionism’s historic claim, they also form the
bedrock of the Jewish, Christian and Islamic faiths in a highly religious
region of the world. This
column appeared in The Guardian Unlimited’s Comment is Free section
on 18 August 2008. Read the related
discussion. |
ã2008
– Khaled Diab. Unless otherwise stated, all the content on this website is the
copyright of Khaled Diab.