The Egypt Code Read online

  Astronomical ceiling of the Tomb of Senmut

  The first pyramid to be raised in the Memphite Necropolis was not a smooth-faced structure as one sees with the famous triad at Giza, but a six-tiered edifice known to Egyptologists as the Step Pyramid of Saqqara. According to accepted chronology, the Step Pyramid was built in 2650 BC and belonged to a Third Dynasty king called Djoser. But it is believed to have been the brainchild of a genius called Imhotep, an architect-cum-astronomer who was high priest at the sun-temple at Heliopolis, the principal religious and intellectual centre at that time. Imhotep, who was vizier to King Djoser, named his pyramidal architectural masterpiece ‘Horus is the Star at the Head of the Sky’.2 Why this cryptic name? What strange cosmic function could the Step Pyramid have had? What function at all?

  The orthodox view goes something like this: the Step Pyramid is just a tomb, admittedly a very large and elaborate tomb, but a tomb nonetheless. And as for the reason why it was built at Saqqara, this was simply because the king wanted it within sight of his palace at Memphis. But this tomb-only theory (and it is only a theory) did not quite stick with me. It never did. For one, it did not explain why no mummified body - not a single bone or even mummy linen, nothing - was found, either here at Saqqara or at any of the other pyramid sites in the Memphite Necropolis. But for me it also did not explain why the Step Pyramid bore the name ‘Horus is the Star at the Head of the Sky’. It didn’t sound like your typical epitaph to me. So as far as I was concerned, there had to be some other explanation for all this that fitted the scale and context of what I saw there.

  Let’s begin at the beginning. Scientific research started at Saqqara in the early 1920s with the arrival on site of two British archaeologists, Cecil M. Firth and James E. Quibell. They were later joined by a Frenchman, Jean-Philippe Lauer. Lauer had the rare quality of being both an architect and an archaeologist, and so smitten was he by the magic and mystery of this site that he spent the next 60 years of his life lovingly restoring it as best as he could to its former glory. The thing that first strikes you when you reach the Step Pyramid complex is its imposing entrance façade. This façade is an integral part of the huge 10-metre-high boundary wall that once enclosed the whole complex. Running 550 metres in length and 220 metres in breadth, the boundary wall alone is a brilliant masterpiece of intricate architecture that would tax even our contractors today. I shall return to this extraordinary wall later on, for it represents much more than a mere boundary to the whole complex. Meanwhile, as you go past the entrance and through the roofed corridor flanked by columns, you will emerge into a vast open courtyard that will take your breath away. For at its northern end looms the 60-metre-high Step Pyramid like some giant tsunami of stone. At such proximity it boggles the imagination and fires up the senses. The Step Pyramid was, in fact, built in several phases that finally resulted in the six tiers or ‘steps’ that one sees today. It was originally encased in polished white limestone slabs which, except for a few weather-beaten ones on the first two tiers, were completely stripped off by Arabs in medieval times to built mosques and villas in Cairo.

  To enter the Step Pyramid you must descend a sloping shaft cut into the bedrock on its north face. At the bottom of the shaft, some 20 metres below ground level, is an elaborate and very bizarre system of tunnels, corridors, chambers and pits. The ceiling of one of the underground chambers is engraved with an exquisite motif of five-pointed stars, a reminder that this tenebrous place was once considered a cosmic environment interfacing with the starry world of the gods. On the walls of what is prosaically known as the King’s Apartments are carved depictions showing the king performing rituals related to his jubilees, which, presumably, were to be celebrated in his afterlife ad infinitum. In here one gets a curious and very unsettling feeling of the presence of the king - still lingering unseen, unheard, but most definitely felt. But if you want to see a tangible representation of the king’s alter ego then you have to go outside the pyramid to a strange little room that looks very much like the control cabin of a tower crane and that has long baffled Egyptologists and other researchers with its meaning or function.

  The Serdab

  Imagine a powerful laser beam shooting up from the King’s Apartments to emerge on the north face of the Step Pyramid. Then imagine this beam passing through the head and then the eyes of a statue of the king seated in a small stone cubicle. Known as a serdab (meaning ‘cellar’ in old Arabic), this bizarre cubicle was for me the black box of the Step Pyramid complex.

  The serdab was discovered when Firth and Quibell were clearing the debris around the north side of the Step Pyramid in 1925. They were intrigued by its design, which, for some curious reason, was not level but was tilted against the lower step of the pyramid. This quite clearly was not due to settlement or subsidence, since the serdab was built into the stone masonry of the Step Pyramid as one builds a skylight window into a sloping roof. In other words, the tilt was deliberate. Even more intriguing was the presence of two round holes that had been drilled in the north face of the serdab at eye level. And when Firth and Quibell took their first peep through them, they were astounded to find staring back at them the placated eyes of a seated life-size statue of the king (which has now been moved to the main hall of the Cairo museum and replaced with a replica). Now, seeing it again myself, I could not shake off the feeling that the king was not simply gazing at something just outside the serdab, but at something far beyond, in the lower part of the northern sky.3 From my knowledge of astronomy, I knew that it could not have been the sun or the moon because these can never occupy this region of the sky. There was thus only one other candidate left to consider: a star. This conclusion certainly fits with the Step Pyramid’s name ‘Horus is the Star at the Head of the Sky’. As for the identity of ‘Horus’, according to the American Egyptologist Mark Lehner, ‘Djoser is the name given to this king by New Kingdom visitors to this site a thousand years later. But the only royal name found on the walls of the complex is the Horus name, Netjerykhet.’4 The same is confirmed by Egyptologists Ian Shaw and Paul Nicholson of the British Museum, who wrote that ‘Only the Horus name Netjerikhet was found in 3rd dynasty inscriptions associated with the pyramid, and it is only through New Kingdom graffiti that an association has been made between this name and Djoser.’5

  The statue of the pharaoh Djoser in the serdab oriented 4 deg. 35′ east-of-north towards the star Al Kaid in the Big Dipper (in Ursa Major) marking the rising of Sirius in the east.

  Horus was an ancient sky-god who had a very ‘close association to the king’.6 Indeed, so close was this association that the king was given not only a Horus name but also a Golden-Horus title at his coronation. To put it more bluntly, the king was seen as the incarnation of Horus on earth. The god Horus was always depicted either as a falcon or as a man with a falcon’s head. According to the British Museum’s Dictionary of Ancient Egypt, his ‘eyes were interpreted as the sun and the moon, and he was frequently described in the Old Kingdom (2686-2181 BC) as a god of the east, and hence of the sunrise. In this guise he became known as Horemakhet (“Horus in the Horizon”) and he was also merged with Ra (the sun-god) to become Ra-Horakhty (Horus of the Horizon).’7 Egyptologists will tell you that there are numerous forms of Horus, such as ‘Horus the Child’, ‘Horus the Elder’, ‘Horus of Edfu’, ‘Horus of Behdet’, ‘Horus Son of Osiris’ and so on.8 But this is like saying that there were numerous forms of Jesus because we read of ‘Jesus the child’, ‘Jesus the man’, ‘Jesus the son of God’, ‘Jesus the son of Joseph’, ‘Jesus the Lamb of God’, ‘Jesus the Messiah’, ‘Jesus of Nazareth’, ‘Jesus of Bethlehem’ and so on. Recently the American Egyptologist Edmund Meltzer has put an end to this modern confusion by cogently arguing that there was only one Horus, with ‘different aspects, or facets, of the same divine persona’.9 I have to agree with Meltzer that this makes a lot more sense. At any rate, all Egyptologists nonetheless agree that the most common aspect of Horus throughout the whole history of ancient Egypt w
as ‘Horus son of Osiris’. And as Meltzer further explains: ‘The living king was identified as an earthly Horus and the dead king (his father/predecessor) as Osiris. When the king died, he became Osiris . . . Horus is the royal heir/successor par excellence, the epitome of legitimate succession.’10

  The other problem is that most Egyptologists insist that the god Osiris was not known until the Fifth Dynasty, long after the building of the Step Pyramid. But this stance, too, has been seriously challenged in recent years, with the growing acceptance that Osiris was known in early dynastic times under the title Khentiamentiu: ‘Foremost of the Westerners’ (i.e. ‘the dead’).11 At any rate, there is another aspect of Horus which we have to contend with when it comes to the Step Pyramid. For as we have already seen, Horus was a sky-god closely associated with the sun-god Ra and even sometimes merged with him. Why, then, would the Step Pyramid be identified with a star and not the sun? Osiris was a stellar god identified with Orion, and his wife was a stellar goddess identified with Canis Major (Orion’s dog in Greek mythology). They were the parents of Horus, and it would thus be in total conformity with the astral context that he, too, would have astral attributes. Indeed, according to British Egyptologist Aidan Dodson, ‘A pyramid was intended as the burial place of the pharaoh, but the complex also served as a temple to the god Horus, with whom the pharaoh was identified in his life, and to Osiris, with whom he would be identified in the next.’12 Yet there is a problem: neither Orion nor Canis Major can be seen in the lower northern sky. Not now, not then, not ever. They are southern constellations and can only be seen rising in the eastern horizon then sailing across the southern sky to the west. In ancient Egyptian the word akhet means ‘horizon’, and more specifically the eastern horizon where the sun and stars rise. The word netjer, on the other hand, means ‘divine’ or ‘god’. The ‘khet’ in the Horus-name of Djoser, Netjerykhet, apparently stands for a ‘corporation’ of very ancient gods.13 So Netjerykhet could mean ‘the Divine Corporation’, which, at least to me, does not make any sense. Could the ‘khet’ in Netjerykhet be a phonetic (rather than a cryptogram) to evoke the idea of ‘horizon’, i.e. akhet? Could the Horus name Netjerykhet mean ‘the divine Horus in the Horizon’? Was Horus a star that was seen being born from Osiris-Orion and Isis-Canis Major? But then why was the statue of Netjerykhet in the serdab looking north and not east? Could the statue also be doing something else other than only looking at the lower northern sky? What else? Sitting with such an air of authority and with his eyes transfixed towards the northern sky, this statue of the Horus king Netjerykhet gives the strong impression that it is somehow controlling something in the northern sky from its position on earth. And as odd as this idea may seem to us today, the belief that the king could actually control the cosmic order from a chamber within or attached to his pyramid complex was as valid to the ancient Egyptians as the present-day belief that the president of the United States can control the world from the Oval Office in the White House. But how did the Egyptians imagine that the cosmic order could be controlled? What else was known about this serdab or perhaps others like it that might tell us more about this cosmic function? As far as I could make out, however, there were no serdabs at other pyramid complexes in the Memphite Necropolis or elsewhere. Djoser’s serdab, it seems, was unique. There were, however, many serdabs attached to various mastaba tombs, a sort of flat-roofed bunker-like structure that is thought by many Egyptologists to be the precursors of the step pyramids. But I found out that none of these were inclined towards the sky or had rounded peepholes cut on their north face like Djoser’s serdab. Still, and in spite of these differences, there were features that were common to all, such as having a statue of their owner inside and their alignment, if not inclined, towards the north.

  Representation of Sirius and Orion during the Middle Kingdom

  In 1912 the German archaeologist Hermann Junker, while excavating south of the Sphinx’s Causeway at Giza, discovered a serdab attached to a mastaba belonging to a Fifth Dynasty official called Rawer. Most fortuitously the serdab had inscriptions on it. Judging from the important location and also the size of the mastaba, Junker concluded that Rawer had been a very important official and even perhaps a member of the royal family. Although Rawer’s serdab did not have rounded peepholes, it did have a long squint cut in the north face that had probably served the same purpose. Indeed, according to British Egyptologist A. M. Blackman, who studied Rawer’s serdab, the squint symbolised the ‘eyes’ of the serdab. And most revealing, above the ‘eyes’ were inscribed the words house of the ka.14

  The Egyptians believed that a human being was made of various unseen entities, in much the same way as we think of a person having a spirit, a soul, an ego and so on. An important entity was the ka, which is generally defined by Egyptologists as the ‘double’ or ‘essence’ of a person, a sort of alter ego that was an integral part of that person’s life and, after death, his afterlife. Another important entity was the ba, generally defined as the ‘soul’ of the person, which was imagined to become a star after the person’s death. We shall return to the ba and its relation to stars later on. Meanwhile, a more elaborate and even more revealing definition of the ka is given by the Egyptologist Manchip-White:the Ka was born with a person and remained earthbound on his death. At the instant of death a man’s Ka and his body were united. The Ka lived in the tomb with the mummy, feeding upon the daily offerings and dwelling in the statue enclosed in the serdab15 . . . The idea that the Ka ‘dwelled’ in the statue of the dead person is made evident in this passage from the ancient funerary texts, where the dead person declares: ‘Let my Ka be remembered after my life; let my statue abide and my name endure . . .’16

  The ka statue in the serdab also had to be nurtured in the same manner the person it belonged to had been nurtured during his lifetime. Food offerings to the statue were, of course, symbolic and were depicted in drawings on the walls of the tomb, although real food was often part of the funerary items. On such drawings the most prominent depiction was the thigh of a bull or calf. The thigh - or rather its plough-like shape, as we shall see later - was called meskhetiu. The meskhetiu was generally carried by a priest, who solemnly presented it to the ka of the deceased. Curiously, the same word, meskhetiu, described a small metal cutting tool, a sort of carpenter’s adze, used on the mummy in a ceremony known as ‘the opening of the mouth’. In this ceremony the mouth of the mummy was symbolically sliced open with the cutting tool to allow the ‘breath of life’ to enter the corpse of the deceased. The word meskhetiu, oddly enough, was used also to describe a constellation of stars which today we call the Plough (or the Big Dipper in the US). It was often drawn on the ceilings of tombs and on the lids of sarcophagi in the form of a bull’s thigh sometimes surrounded by seven stars. The common denominator between these three types of meskhetiu - the bull’s thigh, the carpenter’s adze and the Plough - was clearly their adze- or plough-like shapes. From my astronomy I knew that the Plough constellation had always been seen in the northern sky (it still is today), and that once a day it would have passed into the line of sight of the ka statue in the serdab.

  Scanning through the Pyramid Texts - those sacred writings that were found engraved on the walls of Fifth and Sixth Dynasty royal pyramids at Saqqara17 - I found a particular passage that gave a rather vivid picture of the dead king sharing his pyramid with his ka. What grabbed my attention, however, was the curious way the pyramid had been described: ‘A boon . . . that this pyramid and temple be installed for me and my ka . . . Anyone who shall lay a finger on this pyramid and this temple which belong to me and my ka, he will have laid his finger on the Mansion of Horus in the sky . . .’18 The enigmatic description of ‘the Mansion of Horus in the sky’ given to the pyramid had, as one can imagine, a familiar ring to it. It was, of course, uncannily similar to the name given to the Step Pyramid’ ‘Horus is the Star at the Head of the Sky’. It was obvious that both these names strongly indicated that the pyramids were imagined to have their
counterparts in the sky in the form of stars. Or, to put it inversely, that certain stars (in this case one associated with Horus) were symbolised on the ground by certain pyramids. As early as 1977 the Egyptologist Alexander Badawy had drawn attention to precisely this pyramids- stars connection when he wrote that ‘the names of the Pyramids of Snefreru, Khufu, Dededfret, Nebre indicate clearly stellar connotations while those of Sahure, Neferirkare and Neferefre describe the stellar destiny of the Ba (soul).’19

  Later, in 1981, the distinguished British Egyptologist I.E.S. Edwards looked into this mysterious correlation between stars and pyramids and pointed out that the names of two pyramids belonging to the Fourth Dynasty kings Djedefra and Nebka, ‘Djedefra is a sehed star’ and ‘Nebka is a star’, ‘clearly associate their owner with an astral after-life.’20 And more recently the Egyptologist Stephen Quirke brought this matter up again by noting that, ‘The (names of the) Step Pyramid of Netjerkhet (Djoser) and the Abu Ruwash complex of Djedefra are explicitly stellar, in the one case using the word seba “star”, in the other case using the word sehdu “firmament” or “starry sky”. By contrast, there is not a single instance where the name of a pyramid refers explicitly to the sun.’21