Chapter 46
If it were not for the powerful mythology of Osiris, and if this civilizing, scientific, law-making deity was not remembered in particular for having introduced domesticated crops into the Nile Valley in the remote and fabled epoch known as the First Time, it would probably not be a matter of any great interest that at some point between 13,000 BC and 10,000 BC Egypt enjoyed a period of what has been described as ‘precocious agricultural development’ – possibly the earliest agricultural revolution anywhere in the world identified with certainty by historians.1
As we saw in recent chapters, sources such as the Palermo Stone, Manetho and the Turin Papyrus contain several different and at times contradictory chronologies. All these chronologies nevertheless agree on a very ancient date for the First Time of Osiris: the golden age when the gods were believed to have ruled in Egypt. In addition, the sources demonstrate a striking convergence over the importance they accord to the eleventh millennium BC in particular,2 the precessional Age of Leo when the great ice sheets of the northern hemisphere were undergoing their final, ferocious meltdown.
Perhaps coincidentally, evidence unearthed since the 1970s by geologists, archaeologists and prehistorians like Michael Hoffman, Fekri Hassan and Professor Fred Wendorff has confirmed that the eleventh millennium BC was indeed an important period in Egyptian prehistory, during which immense and devastating floods swept repeatedly down the Nile Valley.3 Fekri Hassan has speculated that this prolonged series of natural disasters, which reached a crescendo around or just after 10,500 BC (and continued to recur periodically until about 9000 BC) might have been responsible for snuffing out the early agricultural experiment.4
At any rate, that experiment did come to an end (for whatever reason), and appears not to have been attempted again for at least another 5000 years.5
Kick-start
There is something mysterious about Egypt’s so-called ‘palaeolithic agricultural revolution’. Here, quoted from the standard texts (Hoffman’s Egypt before The Pharaohs and Wendorff and Schild’s Prehistory of the Nile Valley) are some key facts from the little that is known about this great leap forward that occurred so inexplicably towards the end of the last Ice Age:
1 ‘Shortly after 13,000 BC, grinding stones and sickle blades with a glossy sheen on their bits (the result of silica from cut stems adhering to a sickle’s cutting edge) appear in late Palaeolithic tool kits … It is clear that the grinding stones were used in preparing plant food.’6
2 At many riverside sites, at exactly this time, fish stopped being a significant food source and became a negligible one, as evidenced by the absence of fish remains: ‘The decline in fishing as a source of food is related to the appearance of a new food resource represented by ground grain. The associated pollen strongly suggests that this grain was barley, and significantly, this large grass-pollen, tentatively identified as barley, makes a sudden appearance in the pollen profile just before the time when the first settlements were established in this area …’7
3 ‘As apparently spectacular as the rise of protoagriculture in the late Palaeolithic Nile Valley was its precipitous decline. No one knows exactly why, but after about 10,500 BC the early sickle blades and grinding disappear to be replaced throughout Egypt by Epipalaeolithic hunting, fishing and gathering peoples who use stone tools.’8
Scanty though the evidence may be, it is clear in its general implications: Egypt enjoyed a golden age of agricultural plenty which began around 13,000 BC and was brought to an abrupt halt around the middle of the eleventh millennium BC. A kick-start to the process appears to have been given by the introduction of already domesticated barley into the Nile Valley, immediately followed by the establishment of a number of farming settlements which exploited the new resource. The settlements were equipped with simple but extremely effective agricultural tools and accessories. After the eleventh millennium BC, however, there was a prolonged relapse to more primitive ways of life.
The imagination is inclined to roam freely over such data in search of an explanation – and all such explanations can only be guesswork. What is certain is that the none of the evidence suggests that palaeolithic Egypt’s ‘agricultural revolution’ could have been a local initiative. On the contrary it feels in every way like a transplant. A transplant appears suddenly, after all, and can be rejected equally fast if conditions change, just as settled agriculture seems to have been rejected in ancient Egypt after the great Nile floods of the eleventh millennium BC.
Climate Change
What was the weather like then?
We’ve noted in earlier chapters that the Sahara, a relatively young desert, was green savannah until about the tenth millennium BC; this savannah, brightened by lakes, boiling with game, extended across much of upper Egypt. Farther north, the Delta area was marshy but dotted with many large and fertile islands. Overall the climate was significantly cooler, cloudier and rainier than it is today.9 Indeed, for two or three thousand years before and about a thousand years after 10,500 BC it rained and rained and rained. Then, as though marking an ecological turning-point, the floods came. When they were over, increasingly arid conditions set in.10 This period of desiccation lasted until approximately 7000 BC when the ‘Neolithic Subpluvial’ began with a thousand years of heavy rains, followed by 3000 years of moderate rainfall which once again proved ideal for agriculture: ‘For a time the deserts bloomed and human societies colonized areas that have been unable to support such dense populations since.’11
By the birth of dynastic Egypt around 3000 BC, however, the climate had turned around again and a new period of desiccation had begun – one that has continued until the present day.
This, then, in broad outline, is the environmental stage upon which the mysteries of Egyptian civilization have been played out: rain and floods between 13,000 BC and 9500 BC; a dry period until 7000 BC; rain again (though increasingly less frequent) until about 3000 BC; thereafter a renewed and enduring dry period.
The expanse of years is great, but if one is looking for a First Time within it which might accord with the golden age of the gods, one’s thoughts turn naturally to the mysterious epoch of early agricultural experimentation that shadowed the great rains and floods between 13,000 BC and 10,500 BC.
Unseen connections?
This epoch was crucial not only for the Ancient Egyptians but for many peoples in other areas. Indeed, as we saw in Part IV, it was the epoch of dramatic climate shifts, rapidly rising sea levels, earth movements, floods, volcanic eruptions, bituminous rains and darkened skies that was the most probable source of many of the great worldwide myths of universal cataclysm.
Could it also have been an epoch in which ‘gods’ really did walk among men, as the legends said?
On the Bolivian Altiplano those gods were known as the Viracochas and were linked to the astonishing megalithic city of Tiahuanaco, which may have pre-existed the immense floods in the Andes in the eleventh millennium BC. Thereafter, according to Professor Arthur Posnansky, though the flood-waters subsided, ‘the culture of the Altiplano did not again attain a high point of development but rather fell into a total and definitive decadence.’12
Of course, Posnansky’s conclusions are controversial and must be evaluated on their own merits. Nevertheless, it is interesting that both the Bolivian Altiplano and Egypt should have been scoured by immense floods in the eleventh millennium BC. In both areas too, there are signs that extraordinarily early agricultural experiments – apparently based on introduced techniques – were attempted and then abandoned.13 And in both areas important question-marks have been raised over the dating of monuments: the Puma Punku and the Kalasasaya in Tiahuanaco, for example, which Posnansky argued might have been built as early as 15,000 BC,14 and, in Egypt, megalithic structures like the Osireion, the Great Sphinx and the Valley Temple of Khafre at Giza, which John West and the Boston University geologist Robert Schoch have dated on geological grounds to earlier than 10,000 BC.
Could there be an unseen connection linking all these beautiful, enigmatic monuments, the anomalous agricultural experiments of 13,000–10,000 BC, and the legends of civilizer gods like Osiris and Viracocha?
‘Where is the rest of this civilization?’
As we set out on the road from Abydos to Luxor, where we were to meet John West, I realized that there was a sense in which all the connections would look after themselves if the central issue of the antiquity of the monuments could be settled. In other words, if West’s geological evidence proved that the Sphinx was more than 12,000 years old, the history of human civilization was going to have to be rewritten. As part of that exciting process, all the other strange, anachronistic ‘fingerprints of the gods’ that kept appearing around the world, and the sense of an undercurrent of ancient connections linking apparently unrelated civilizations, would begin to make sense …
When West’s evidence was presented in 1992 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science it had been taken seriously enough to be publicly debated by the Chicago University Egyptologist Mark Lehner, director of the Giza Mapping Project, who – to the astonishment of almost everybody present – had been unable to come up with a convincing refutation. ‘When you say something as complex as the Sphinx dates to 9000 or 10,000 BC,’ Lehner had concluded:
it implies, of course, that there was a very high civilization that was capable of producing the Sphinx at that period. The question an archaeologist has to ask, therefore, is this: if the Sphinx was made at that time then where is the rest of this civilization, where is the rest of this culture?15
Lehner, however, was missing the point.
If the Sphinx did date to 9000 or 10,000 BC, the onus was not on West to produce other evidence for the existence of the civilization which produced it, but on Egyptologists and archaeologists to explain how they had got things so wrong, so consistently, for so long.
So could West prove the antiquity of the Sphinx?