 |
 |
|
David Rohl |
Unfortunately the next scheduled speaker, Graham Phillips, was unable to attend the event due to illness (he sent his apologies). This left the stage open to our next speaker, the Egyptologist David Rohl. He is the author of A TEST OF TIME and LEGEND, as well as being the archaeological correspondent for THE EXPRESS newspaper.
Starting with the Edfu Building Texts, David explained that every Egyptian temple was the role model for the concept of the mound, or island, of First Creation, and that each was built in accordance with this divine principle. He then provided ample evidence of the incursion into Egypt's Eastern Desert of a boat people who came forth in high-prowed boats unlike the papyrus vessels known to the prehistoric communities that thrived along the Nile in predynastic times. He showed that accompanying these carvings, found carved on rocks in the various wadis which run approximately east-west, were primary religious symbols such as the so-called `dancing goddess', a slim-line mother goddess, with her arms outstretched above her head. |
There was also the falcon, the symbol of the god Horus. Some of these vessels showed multiple oars, while others showed cabins and matchstick men indicating that these vessels were very large indeed with crews of up to 80 men. Still others, without religious symbols, are seen by David as military boats making incursions from the Red Sea to the Nile. He and his colleagues have carefully recorded all of these petroglyphs over a period of several years.
It is David's opinion that these vessels represent the invasions of a peoples noted in Egyptian texts as the Followers of Horus, the semi-divine beings said to have ruled the country before the advent of the first pharaoh in around 3100 BC. Moreover, he proposes that their original homeland was Mesopotamia, and in particular Eridu, the first city, built on the Persian Gulf in Lower Iraq. Here they are remembered as the Uruk culture, which thrived shortly before the rise of the first king of Sumer around 3000 BC.
David uses linguistics, similarities of art styles and artefacts, as well as crossovers in religious beliefs to demonstrate the relationship between predynastic Egypt and ancient Iraq. He went on to propose that Eridu represented the original mound of First Creation spoken of so specifically in the Edfu Building Texts. In other words, the pharaonic Egyptians recalled their original homeland in far off Mesopotamia through myth and religion, including the design and layout of temple structures.
These findings tie in well with biblical tradition. The construction of Eridu's great temple to the god Ea, or Enki, begun around 5500 BC, is seen by David as the original Tower of Babel (which has nothing whatsoever to do with any ziggurat in Babylon), while the dispersion of the tribes to various parts of the ancient world is considered to be the migration of the Uruk culture to Egypt via the Island of Bahrain and the Red Sea. David also shows, quite conclusively, that the Uruk king accredited with having built Eridu is remembered in the Bible as Nimrod the Hunter.
David's entire lecture
is a complete, compulsive and highly convincing package, which is accompanied
by the best slide selection (many of them composite images made up by
David himself) I have ever seen. Afterwards, I suggested that even on
its own this material would make an incredible book. Yet he pointed
out that much of it already appears in his book LEGEND, published in
1998.
I have no problem with his entire theory, other than to suggest that some of the migrations from Mesopotamia were much earlier than the time-frame he suggests (3500-3100 BC). Furthermore, some of these peoples entered Egypt via the Nile Delta from the Levant and probably belonged to the sea-faring proto-Phoenician cultures of Byblos and ancient Ugarit, modern Ras Shamra. Early Phoenician tradition talks about the foundation of Egyptian civilisation by one of its gods, a figure named Taautus, a form of the Egyptian moon-god Thoth. There is a crossover of artefacts, particularly carved stone jars, between Byblos and pre-dynastic Egypt showing that the former might well have influenced the foundation of the latter. I believe that the core legends behind the Edfu Building Texts relate to a much earlier period to the one described by David. Indeed, its references to an enemy snake known as the Great Leaping One, who brings a catastrophic end to the first period of creation, is perhaps a memory of the cometary impact, which occurred in 9000-8500 BC. More on this subject in GATEWAY TO ATLANTIS.
Read Andrew's reports on the next lecture or choose from below:
Yuri Stoyanov
Christopher Knight and
Robert Lomas
Robert Bauval
John Lash
David Rohl
Michael Baigent
Colin Wilson
Andrew Collins
|
|