Chapter 41

City of the Sun, Chamber of the Jackal

Mohamed picked us up at our hotel in Heliopolis at 6 a. m. when it was still half dark.

We drank small cups of thick black coffee at a roadside stall and then drove west, along dusty streets still almost deserted, towards the River Nile. I had asked Mohamed to take us through Maydan al-Massallah Square, which was dominated by one of the world’s oldest intact Egyptian obelisks.¹ Weighing an estimated 350 tons, this was a pink granite monolith, 107 feet high, erected by Pharaoh Senuseret I (1971–1928 BC). It had originally been one of a pair at the gateway of the great Heliopolitan Temple of the Sun. In the 4000 years since then the temple itself had entirely vanished, as had the second obelisk. Indeed, almost all of ancient Heliopolis had now been obliterated, cannibalized for its handsome dressed stones and ready-made building materials by countless generations of the citizens of Cairo.²

Heliopolis (City of the Sun) was referred to in the Bible as On but was originally known in the Egyptian language as Innu, or Innu Mehret – meaning ‘the pillar’ or ‘the northern pillar’.³ It was a district of immense sanctity, associated with a strange group of nine solar and stellar deities, and was old beyond reckoning when Senuseret chose it as the site for his obelisk. Indeed, together with Giza (and the distant southern city of Abydos) Innu/Heliopolis was believed to have been part of the first land that emerged from the primeval waters at the moment of creation, the land of the ‘First Time’, where the gods had commenced their rule on earth.⁴

Heliopolitan theology rested on a creation-myth distinguished by a number of unique and curious features. It taught that in the beginning the universe had been filled with a dark, watery nothingness, called the Nun. Out of this inert cosmic ocean (described as ‘shapeless, black with the blackness of the blackest night’) rose a mound of dry land on which Ra, the Sun God, materialized in his self-created form as Atum (sometimes depicted as an old bearded man leaning on a staff):⁵

The sky had not been created, the earth had not been created, the children of the earth and the reptiles had not been fashioned in that place … I, Atum, was one by myself … There existed no other who worked with me …⁶

Conscious of being alone, this blessed and immortal being contrived to create two divine offspring, Shu, god of the air and dryness, and Tefnut the goddess of moisture: ‘I thrust my phallus into my closed hand. I made my seed to enter my hand. I poured it into my own mouth. I evacuated under the form of Shu, I passed water under the form of Tefnut.’⁷

Despite such apparently inauspicious beginnings, Shu and Tefnut (who were always described as ‘Twins’ and frequently depicted as lions) grew to maturity, copulated and produced offspring of their own: Geb the god of the earth and Nut, the goddess of the sky. These two also mated, creating Osiris and Isis, Set and Nepthys, and so completed the Ennead, the full company of the Nine Gods of Heliopolis. Of the nine, Ra, Shu, Geb and Osiris were said to have ruled in Egypt as kings, followed by Horus, and lastly – for 3226 years – by the Ibis-headed wisdom god Thoth.⁸

Who were these people – or creatures, or beings, or gods? Were they figments of the priestly imagination, or symbols, or ciphers? Were the stories told about them vivid myth memories of real events which had taken place thousands of years previously? Or were they, perhaps, part of a coded message from the ancients that had been transmitting itself over and over again down the epochs – a message only now beginning to be unravelled and understood?

Such notions seemed fanciful. Nevertheless I could hardly forget that out of this very same Heliopolitan tradition the great myth of Isis and Osiris had flowed, covertly transmitting an accurate calculus for the rate of precessional motion. Moreover the priests of Innu, whose responsibility it had been to guard and nurture such traditions, had been renowned throughout Egypt for their high wisdom and their proficiency in prophecy, astronomy, mathematics, architecture and the magic arts. They were also famous for their possession of a powerful and sacred object known as the Benben.⁹

The Egyptians called Heliopolis Innu, the pillar, because tradition had it that the Benben had been kept here in remote pre-dynastic times, when it had balanced on top of a pillar of rough-hewn stone.

The Benben was believed to have fallen from the skies. Unfortunately, it had been lost so long before that its appearance was no longer remembered by the time Senuseret took the throne in 1971 BC. In that period (the Twelfth Dynasty) all that was clearly recalled was that the Benben had been pyramidal in form, thus providing (together with the pillar on which it stood) a prototype for the shape of all future obelisks. The name Benben was likewise applied to the pyramidion, or apex stone, usually placed on top of pyramids.¹⁰ In a symbolic sense, it was also associated closely and directly with Ra–Atum, of whom the ancient texts said, ‘You became high on the height; you rose up as the Benben stone in the Mansion of the Phoenix …’¹¹

Mansion of the Phoenix described the original temple at Heliopolis where the Benben had been housed. It reflected the fact that the mysterious object had also served as an enduring symbol for the mythical Phoenix, the divine Bennu bird whose appearances and disappearances were believed to be linked to violent cosmic cycles and to the destruction and rebirth of world ages.¹²

Connections and similarities

Driving through the suburbs of Heliopolis at around 6.30 in the morning I closed my eyes and tried to summon up a picture of the landscape as it might have looked in the mythical First Time after the Island of Creation¹³ – the primordial mound of Ra–Atum – had risen out of the flood waters of the Nun. It was tempting to see a connection between this imagery and the Andean traditions that spoke of the emergence of the civilizer god Viracocha from the waters of Lake Titicaca after an earth-destroying flood. Moreover there was the figure of Osiris to consider – a conspicuously bearded figure, like Viracocha, and like Quetzalcoatl as well – remembered for having abolished cannibalism among the Egyptians, for having taught them agriculture and animal husbandry, and for introducing them to such arts as writing, architecture, and music.¹⁴

The similarities between the Old and New World traditions were hard to miss but even harder to interpret. It was possible they were just a series of beguiling coincidences. On the other hand, it was possible that they might reveal the fingerprints of an ancient and unidentified global civilization – fingerprints that were essentially the same whether they appeared in the myths of Central America, or of the high Andes, or of Egypt. The priests of Heliopolis, after all, had taught of the creation, but who had taught them? Had they sprung out of nowhere, or was it more likely that their doctrine, with all its complex symbolism, was the product of a long refinement of religious ideas?

If so, when and where had these ideas developed?

I looked up to discover that we had left Heliopolis behind and were winding our way through the noisy and crowded streets of down-town Cairo. We crossed over to the west bank of the Nile by way of the 6 October Bridge and soon afterwards entered Giza. Fifteen minutes later, passing the massive bulk of the Great Pyramid on our right, we turned south on the road to upper Egypt, a road which followed the meridional course of the world’s longest river through a landscape of palms and green fields fringed by the encroaching red wastes of pitiless deserts.

The ideas of the Heliopolitan priesthood had influenced every aspect of secular and religious life in Ancient Egypt, but had those ideas developed locally, or had they been introduced to the Nile Valley from elsewhere? The traditions of the Egyptians provided an unambiguous answer to questions such as these. All the wisdom of Heliopolis was a legacy, they said, and this legacy had been passed to humankind by the gods.

Gift of the Gods?

About ten miles south of the Great Pyramid we pulled off the main road to visit the necropolis of Saqqara. Rearing up on the desert’s edge, the site was dominated by a six-tier ziggurat, the step-pyramid of the Third Dynasty Pharaoh Zoser. This imposing monument, almost 200 feet tall, was dated to approximately 2650 BC. It stood within its own compound, surrounded by an elegant enclosure wall, and was reckoned by archaeologists to be the earliest massive construction of stone ever attempted by humanity.¹⁵Tradition had it that its architect was the legendary Imhotep, ‘Great of Magic’, a high priest of Heliopolis, whose other titles were Sage, Sorcerer, Astronomer and Doctor.¹⁶

Saqqara.

We shall have more to say about the step-pyramid and its builder in a later chapter, but on this occasion I had not come to Saqqara to see it. My sole objective was to spend a few moments in the burial chamber of the nearby pyramid of Unas, a Fifth Dynasty pharaoh who had reigned from 2356 to 2323 BC.¹⁷ The walls of this chamber, which I had visited several times before, were inscribed from floor to ceiling with the most ancient of the Pyramid Texts, an extravaganza of hieroglyphic inscriptions giving voice to a range of remarkable ideas – in acute contrast to the mute and unadorned interiors of the Fourth Dynasty pyramids at Giza.

A phenomenon exclusively of the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties (2465–2152 BC), the Pyramid Texts were sacred writings, parts of which were thought to have been composed by the Heliopolitan priesthood in the late third millennium BC, and parts of which had been received and handed down by them from pre-dynastic times.¹⁸ It was the latter parts of these Texts, dating to a remote and impenetrable antiquity, which had particularly aroused my curiosity when I had begun to research them a few months previously. I had also been amused – and a little intrigued – by the strange way that nineteenth century French archaeologists appeared almost to have been directed to the hidden chamber of the Pyramid Texts by a mythological ‘opener of the ways.’ According to reasonably well-documented reports, an Egyptian foreman of the excavations at Saqqara had been up and about at dawn one morning and had found himself by the side of a ruined pyramid looking into the bright amber eyes of a lone desert jackal:

It was as if the animal were taunting his human observer … and inviting the puzzled man to chase him. Slowly the jackal sauntered towards the north face of the pyramid, stopping for a moment before disappearing into a hole. The bemused Arab decided to follow his lead. After slipping through the narrow hole, he found himself crawling into the dark bowels of the pyramid. Soon he emerged into a chamber and, lifting his light, saw that the walls were covered from top to bottom with hieroglyphic inscriptions. These were carved with exquisite craftsmanship into the solid limestone and painted over with turquoise and gold.’¹⁹

Today the hieroglyph-lined chamber beneath the ruined pyramid of Unas is still reached through the north face by the long descending passage the French archaeological team excavated soon after the foreman’s astonishing discovery. The chamber consists of two rectangular rooms separated by a partition wall, into which is let a low doorway. Both rooms are covered by a gabled ceiling painted with myriads of stars. Emerging stooped from the cramped passage, Santha and I entered the first of the two rooms and passed through the connecting doorway into the second. This was the tomb chamber proper, with the massive black granite sarcophagus of Unas at its western end and the strange utterances of the Pyramid Texts proclaiming themselves from every wall.

Speaking to us directly (rather than through riddles and mathematical legerdemain like the unadorned walls of the Great Pyramid), what were the hieroglyphs saying? I knew that the answer depended to some extent on which translation you were using, largely because the language of the Pyramid Texts contained so many archaic forms and so many unfamiliar mythological allusions that scholars were obliged to fill in the gaps in their knowledge with guesswork.²⁰ Nevertheless it was generally agreed that the late R. O. Faulkner, a professor of the Ancient Egyptian Language at University College London, had produced the most authoritative version.²¹

Faulkner, whose translation I had studied line by line, described the Texts as constituting ‘the oldest corpus of Egyptian religious and funerary literature now extant’ and added, ‘they are the least corrupt of all such collections and are of fundamental importance to the student of Egyptian religion …’²² The reason why the Texts were so important (as many scholars agreed), was that they were the last completely open channel connecting the relatively short period of the past that humanity remembers to the far longer period that has been forgotten: ‘They vaguely disclose to us a vanished world of thought and speech, the last of the unnumbered aeons through which prehistoric man has passed, till finally he … enters the historic age.’²³

It was hard to disagree with sentiments like these: the Texts did disclose a vanished world. But what intrigued me most about this world was the possibility that it might have been inhabited not only by primitive savages (as one would have expected in remote prehistory) but, paradoxically, by men and women whose minds had been enlightened by a scientific understanding of the cosmos. The overall picture was equivocal: there were genuinely primitive elements locked into the Pyramid Texts alongside the loftier sequences of ideas. Nevertheless, every time I immersed myself in what Egyptologists call ‘these ancient spells’, I was impressed by the strange glimpses they seemed to afford of a high intelligence at work, darting from behind layers of incomprehension, reporting on experiences that ‘prehistoric man’ should never have had and expressing notions he should never have been able to formulate. In short, the effect the Texts achieved through the medium of hieroglyphs was akin to the effect the Great Pyramid achieved through the medium of architecture. In both cases the dominant impression was of anachronism – of advanced technological processes used or described at a period in human history when there was supposed to have been no technology at all …