The Sign and the Seal. A quest for the Lost Ark of the Covenant

My research had convinced me of the possibility that the ancient Egyptians might have possessed some advanced but secret scientific knowledge which Moses could have applied to the design of the Ark of the Covenant. But where could such a body of knowledge have come from? Ancient Egypt itself, as I was very well aware, provided a simple though supernatural answer to this question. Every relevant surviving record that I had studied claimed unambiguously that it had been given to mankind by the moon-god Thoth, the lord and multiplier of time, the celestial scribe and invigilator of individual destinies, the inventor of writing and of all wisdom, and the patron of magic.(1) Frequently represented on temple and tomb walls as an ibis, or as an ibis-headed man, and more rarely as a baboon, Thoth was venerated throughout Egypt as a true lunar deity who in some manifestations was identical with the moon itself and in others was the guardian of the moon, charged with ensuring that it kept to its course across the night skies, waxing and waning, vanishing and reappearing, precisely as and when it should. It was in this capacity as the divine regulative force responsible for all heavenly calculations and annotations that Thoth measured time, dividing it into months (to the first of which he gave his own name).(2) His powers, however, were believed to have extended far beyond the mere calibration of the seasons. According to the pervasive and influential teachings of the priestly guild established at the sacred city of Hermopolis in Upper Egypt, Thoth was the universal demiurge who created the world through the sound of his voice alone, bringing it into being with the utterance of a single word of power(3) Regarded by the Egyptians as a deity who understood the mysteries of 'all that is hidden under the heavenly vault', Thoth was also believed to have had the ability to bestow wisdom on certain specially selected individuals. It was said that he had inscribed the rudiments of his secret knowledge on 36,535 scrolls and then hidden these scrolls about the earth intending that they should be sought for by future generations but found 'only by the worthy' who were to use their discoveries for the benefit of mankind.(4) Later identified by the Greeks with their own god Hermes, Thoth in fact stood at the very centre of an enormous body of Egyptian traditions stretching back into the most distant and impenetrable past. No scholar, I learned, could honestly say how old this moon-god really was, or even make a guess at where and when his cult began. At the dawn of civilization in Egypt, Thoth was there. Furthermore, throughout the entire 3,000 or more years of the dynastic period, he was continuously revered for certain very specific qualities that he was said to possess and for his supposed contributions to human welfare. He was, for example, credited with being the inventor of drawing, of hieroglyphic writing and of all the sciences specifically architecture, arithmetic, surveying, geometry, astronomy, medicine and surgery. He was also seen as the most powerful of sorcerers, endowed with nothing less than complete knowledge and wisdom. He was exalted as the author of the great and terrible book of magic that was regarded by the priests at Hermopolis as the source of their understanding of the occult. Moreover whole chapters of the famous Book of the Dead were attributed to him, as well as almost the entire corpus of closely guarded sacred literature. He was believed, in short, to possess a virtual monopoly on esoteric learning and was therefore called 'the mysterious' and 'the unknown'.(5) The ancient Egyptians were quite convinced that their first rulers were gods. Not surprisingly, Thoth was one of these divine kings: his reign on earth during which he passed on to mankind his greatest and most beneficial inventions was said to have lasted 3226 years.(6) Before him the Egyptians believed that they had been ruled by another deity Osiris, who was also closely associated with the moon (and with the numbers seven, fourteen and twenty-eight which relate to physical lunar cycles).(7) Although Osiris and Thoth looked quite different from one another in some of their manifestations, I was able to establish that they were similar or related in others (in certain archaic texts they were described as brothers).(8) A number of papyri and inscriptions went even further and portrayed them as being effectively the same entity, or at least as performing the same functions. They were most commonly associated in the celestial Judgment Hall where the souls of the dead came to be weighed in the Great Scales. Here Osiris as judge and final arbiter often seemed to be the superior of the two gods, while Thoth was a mere scribe who recorded the verdict. Many of the tableaux from the Book of the Dead, however, reversed this relationship, as did a large vignette of the Judgment Scene found amongst the Theban funerary papyri of the New Kingdom. This latter document portrayed Osiris sitting passively to one side while Thoth determined the verdict, and then recorded and pronounced it.(9) In other words, not only were Thoth and Osiris both gods of the moon, gods of the dead (and perhaps brothers); both were also judges and law-makers. As my research continued I noted such similarities with interest, but failed, at first, to see their relevance to my own quest for the Ark of the Covenant. Then it occurred to me that there was one invariable link between the two deities which also tied them conceptually to Moses and to all his works: like him they were above all else civilizing heroes who bestowed the benefits of religion, law, social order and prosperity upon their followers. Thoth, it will be remembered, invented writing and science and brought these and many other wonders of enlightenment into the world in order to improve the lot of the Egyptian people. Likewise, Osiris was universally believed to have played a crucial role in the evolution and development of Egyptian society. When he began his rule on earth as divine monarch the country was barbaric, rude and uncultured and the Egyptians themselves were cannibals. When he ascended to Heaven, however, he left behind an advanced and sophisticated nation. His many contributions included teaching his people to cultivate the soil, to plant grain and barley, to grow vines, to worship the gods, and to abandon their previously savage customs. He also provided them with a code of laws.(10) Such stories, of course, could have been fabrications. In a speculative frame of mind, however, I found myself wondering whether there might not after all have been something more than pure fancy and legend behind the tradition that Egypt became a great nation because of the gifts of Thoth and Osiris. Was it not just possible, I conjectured, that the all-wise, all-knowing moon-god could have been a mythical version of the truth a metaphor for some real individual or group of individuals who, in remotest antiquity, brought the benefits of civilization and science to a primitive land?

THE CIVILIZERS

I might have dismissed this notion out of hand had I not learned shortly afterwards of the existence of a great mystery a mystery to which no definitive solution had ever been proposed. Rather than developing slowly and painfully, as might have been expected, it seemed that the civilization of Egypt had emerged all at once and fully formed. Indeed, by all accounts, the period of transition from primitive to advanced society had been so short that it really made no kind of historical sense. Technological skills that should have taken hundreds or even thousands of years to evolve had appeared almost literally overnight, and apparently with no antecedents whatsoever. For example, remains from the pre-dynastic period dated to around 3600 BC showed no trace of writing. Then, quite suddenly and inexplicably, the hieroglyphs familiar from so many of the ruins of ancient Egypt began to appear and to do so, furthermore, in a complete and perfect state. Far from being mere pictures of objects or actions, this written language was complex and structured, with signs that represented sounds only and with a detailed system of numerical symbols. Even the very earliest hieroglyphs were already stylized and conventionalized; it was also clear that an advanced cursive script had come into common usage by the dawn of the First Dynasty.(11) What struck me as remarkable about all this was that there were absolutely no traces of evolution from simple to more sophisticated styles. The same was true of mathematics, medicine, astronomy and architecture, and also of Egypt's amazingly rich and convoluted religio-mythological system (even such refined works as the Book of the Dead existed right at the start of the dynastic period.)(12) Unfortunately, there is not space here to present all or even a tiny part of the data which confirms the sheer suddenness with which Egyptian civilization emerged. By way of summary, however, I will quote the authoritative opinion of Professor Walter Emery, late Edwards Professor of Egyptology at the University of London:

At a period approximately 3,400 years before Christ, a great change took place in Egypt, and the country passed rapidly from a state of neolithic culture with a complex tribal character to [one of] well-organized monarchy. . . At the same time the art of writing appears, monumental architecture and the arts and crafts develop to an astonishing degree, and all the evidence points to the existence of a luxurious civilization. All this was achieved within a comparatively short period of time, for there appears to be little or no background to these fundamental developments in writing and architeaure.(13)

One explanation, I realized, could simply have been that Egypt had received its sudden and tremendous cultural boost from some other known civilization of the ancient world Sumer, on the Lower Euphrates in Mesopotamia, being the most likely contender. Moreover, despite many basic differences, I was able to establish that a variety of shared building and architectural styles(14) did suggest a link between the two regions. None of these similarities, however, turned out be strong enough to allow me to infer that the connection had been in any way causal, with one society directly influencing the other. On the contrary, as Professor Emery put it:

The impression we get is of an indirect connection, and perhaps the existence of a third party, whose influence spread to both the Euphrates and the Nile . . . Modern scholars have tended to ignore the possibility of immigration to both regions from some hypothetical and as yet undiscovered area. [However], a third party whose cultural achievements were passed on independently to Egypt and Mesopotamia would best explain the common features and fundamental differences between the two civilizations.(15)

This theory, I felt, shed revealing light on the otherwise mysterious fact that the Egyptians and the Sumerian people of Mesopotamia worshipped virtually identical lunar deities who were amongst the very oldest in their respective pantheons.(16) Exactly like Thoth, the Sumerian moon-god Sin was charged with measuring the passage of time ('At the month's beginning to shine on earth, thou shalt show two horns to mark six days. On the seventh day divide the crown in two. On the fourteenth day, turn thy full face.')(17) Like Thoth, too, Sin was regarded as being all-knowing and all-wise. At the end of every month the other gods of the Sumerian pantheon came to consult him and he made decisions for them.(18) Neither was I alone in my intuition that something more than mere chance might have underpinned these links between Sin and Thoth. According to the eminent Egyptologist Sir E. A. Wallis Budge:

The similarity between the two . . . gods is too close to be accidental . . . It would be wrong to say that the Egyptians borrowed from the Sumerians or the Sumerians from the Egyptians, but it may be submitted that the literati of both peoples borrowed their theological systems from some common but exceedingly ancient source.(19)

The question, therefore, was this: what was that 'common but exceedingly ancient source', that 'hypothetical and as yet undiscovered area', that advanced 'third party' to which both Budge and Emery referred? Having stuck their necks out a long way already, I was frustrated to find that neither authority was prepared to speculate much further. Emery, however, did hint at where he thought the cradle of Egyptian civilization might have been located: 'Vast tracts of the Middle Eastand the Red Sea and East African coasts', he rather coyly observed in this context, 'remain unexplored by the archaeologist'(20) I was sure that if Egypt had indeed received the gifts of civilization and science from elsewhere then some record of this momentous transaction would have been preserved. The deification of two great civilizers Thoth and Osiris was evidence of a kind: although presented as theology, the legends of these gods sounded to my ears much more like the echoes of long-forgotten events which had actually taken place.(21) But I felt I needed something more substantial something which clearly and indisputably attested to beneficial contacts with an advanced donor society and which also explained how that society had managed to disappear without a trace. I did find such an account. It was the familiar story of the lost continent of Atlantis a story that, in recent years, had been so thoroughly degraded by outlandish speculations that it had become a form of professional suicide for any scholar even to appear to take it seriously (let alone to research it properly). After peeling away all the New Age nonsense, however, I was struck by a single significant fact: the earliest-surviving report of Atlantis had come from the Greek philosopher Plato one of the founders of rational western thought who had insisted that what he had said on the matter was 'not fiction but true history'.(22) Furthermore, writing around the beginning of the fourth century BC, Plato had added that the original source of his story had been an Egyptian priest a priest who had spoken of the recurrent destruction of civilizations by floods and who had said of the Greeks:

You are all young in mind . . . you have no knowledge hoary with age. [But] our traditions here are the oldest. . . In our temples we have preserved from earliest times a written record of any great or splendid achievement or notable event which has come to our ears whether it occurred in your part of the world, or here, or anywhere else; whereas with you, and others, writing and the other necessities of civilization have only just been developed when the periodic scourge of the deluge descends, and spares none but the unlettered and uncultured, so that you have to begin again like children, in complete ignorance of what has happened in our part of the world or in yours in early times.

Thousands of years before, the priest continued,

There was an island opposite the strait which you call the Pillars of Hercules, an island larger than Libya and Asia combined; from it travellers could in those days reach the other islands, and from them the whole opposite continent which surrounds what can truly be called the ocean. On this island of Atlantis had arisen a powerful and remarkable dynasty of kings . . . Their wealth was greater than that possessed by any previous dynasty, or likely to be accumulated by any later, and they were provided with everything they could require. Because of the extent of their power they received many imports, but for most of their needs the island itself provided. It had mineral resources from which were mined both solid materials and metals, including one metal which survives today only in name, but was then mined in quantities in a number of localities in the island, orichak, in those days the most valuable metal except gold. There was a plentiful supply of timber for structural purposes and every kind of animal domesticated and wild, among them numerous elephants. For there was plenty of grazing for this largest and most voracious of beasts, as well as for all creatures whose habitat is marsh, swamp and river, mountain or plain. Besides all this, the earth bore freely of all the aromatic substances it bears today . . . There were cultivated crops . . . There were the fruits of trees . . . All these were produced by that sacred island, then still beneath the sun, in wonderful quality and profusion.(23)

This paradise was not to remain 'beneath the sun' for much longer, however, because soon to punish its inhabitants for wrongdoing and an overabundance of materialistic pride there came 'earthquakes and floods of extraordinary violence, and in a single dreadful day and night the island of Atlantis was swallowed up by the sea and vanished.'(24) My interest in this story did not stem from what it had to say about Atlantis itself, nor was I convinced by the suggestion as to the island's location 'opposite the pillars of Hercules'. My own view well supported by geophysical evidence(25) was that there could never have been such a landmass in the Atlantic Ocean and that those who persisted in looking for it there were fishing for the reddest of red herrings. It did seem to me, however and the authorities reluctantly concurred on this point(26) that Plato's account must have had some basis in fact. No doubt he introduced many distortions and exaggerations of his own but he was, nevertheless, recording something that had actually happened, somewhere in the world, and a very long time ago. Furthermore and of the greatest significance to me he made it absolutely clear that a memory of this event had been retained by Egyptian priests and set down in the 'priestly writings'.(27) I reasoned that if a similar memory had been preserved in Mesopotamia then the chance of this being pure coincidence was slight. A far more likely explanation would be that the same cataclysm wherever it took place had inspired the traditions of both regions. Accordingly I took a second look at the legends in which I had first noted the similarity between Thoth and the Sumerian moon-god Sin. What I learned did not surprise me: like their Egyptian contemporaries, the Sumerians had not only worshipped a wise lunar deity but had also preserved a record of a flood in ancient times that had destroyed a great, prosperous and powerful society.(28) As my research progressed, therefore, 'Atlantis' did come to symbolize for me that 'hypothetical and as yet undiscovered area' from whence the wonderful civilizations of Egypt and of Sumer both came. As already noted, I did not believe that the area in question could possibly have been in or even near the Atlantic. Instead, I found myself wholeheartedly agreeing with Professor Emery that it was likely to have stood at a point roughly equidistant from both the Nile Delta and the Lower Euphrates perhaps in some vanished archipelago similar to the modern Maldives (which scientists believe will be completely inundated within fifty years as a result of rising sea levels linked to global wanning)(29), or along the vast unexcavated coasts of the Horn of Africa, or in a flood-prone region of the Indian subcontinent like modern Bangladesh. Such tropical zones looked all the more credible when I remembered that Plato had mentioned the existence of elephants in his 'Atlantis' creatures that, for many thousands of years, have lived only in Africa, India and South-East Asia.(30) The more thought I gave to notions like these the more it seemed to me that they possessed genuine merit and were worthy of further investigation. In order to orientate myself in this task I therefore wrote down the following conjectures and hypotheses in my notebook:

Suppose that somewhere around the basin of the Indian Ocean, in the early or middle part of the fourth millennium BC, a technologically advanced society was destroyed by flood. Suppose it was a maritime society. Suppose that there were survivors. And suppose that some of them sailed in their ships to Egypt and Mesopotamia, made landfall there and set about the task of civilizing the primitive inhabitants they encountered. Most important of all, suppose that in Egypt the priestly traditions of sacred science to which Moses was exposed from his childhood were the means by which the skills and know-how of the settlers were deliberately preserved so that they could be passed down to subsequent generations. In Egypt these traditions were associated from the outset with the worship of the moon-god Thoth (and, in Mesopotamia, with the worship of Sin). Perhaps this was because the settlers themselves revered the moon or perhaps they wittingly and rather cold-bloodedly encouraged the deification of a prominent and familiar but yet frightening and ghostly sidereal object. Their aim, after all, would have been to shape and direct the simple and savage minds of the peoples they had found themselves amongst and to create a durable cult capable of surviving for millennia as a vehicle for all their otherwise fragile and easily forgotten knowledge. In such circumstances, it is really not difficult to see why they might have chosen to focus on a glowing and uncanny lunar god rather than on some more abstract, more sophisticated but less visible and less corporeal divinity. At any rate, once the cult of Thoth had been established in early Egypt, and once its priests had learned and institutionalized the scientific and technological 'tricks of the trade' brought by the settlers, then it is logical to suppose that a self-perpetuating process would have begun: the new-found and valuable knowledge would have been fenced about with mysteries, protected from outsiders by all kinds of ritual sanctions and then passed from initiate to initiate, from generation to generation, in an exclusive and secret tradition. This knowledge, of course, would have given its possessors unprecedented mastery over the physical world at least by the rudimentary standards of the native culture prevailing in Egypt before the coining of the settlers and would have been expressed in ways that would have seemed astounding to laymen (not least in the erection of stupendous and awe-inspiring buildings). It is therefore easy to understand how the belief that the moon-god had 'invented' both science and magic might have taken hold in the population at large, and why it was that the priests of this god were regarded as masters of sorcery.

SAVED FROM WATER

As my research progressed I turned up several pieces of evidence which seemed to provide strong support for the central hypotheses listed above, namely that a secret tradition of knowledge and enlightenment had been 'carried' and preserved within the cult of Thoth a tradition that had been started in the most distant past by sophisticated immigrants who had survived a flood. Highly significant, in this respect, was a very strong theme traces of which I found running through almost all the sacred literature which repeatedly associated wisdom, and other qualities of the civilizing hero, with individuals who had been 'saved from water'. The first thing I discovered was that Thoth, who had been seen by the Egyptians as the source of all their knowledge and science, had been credited with having caused a flood to punish humankind for wickedness.(31) In this episode, related in Chapter CLXXV of the Book of the Dead, he had acted jointly with his counterpart Osiris.(32) Both deities had subsequently ruled on earth after the human race had begun to flourish again. I was therefore excited, when I looked more closely at the story of Osiris, to learn that he had been 'saved from water'. The fullest account of the original Egyptian legend was given by Plutarch(33) and stated that, after improving the condition of his own subjects, teaching them all manner of useful skills and providing them with their first legal code, Osiris left Egypt and travelled about the world in order to bring the benefits of civilization to other nations as well. He never forced the barbarians he encountered to accept his laws, preferring instead to argue with them and to appeal to their reason. It was also recorded that he passed on his teaching to them by means of hymns and songs accompanied by musical instruments. While he was away, however, he was plotted against by seventy-two members of his court led by his brother-in-law Set. On his return the conspirators invited him to a banquet where a splendid coffer of wood and gold was offered as a prize to any guest who could fit into it exactly. What Osiris did not know was that the coffer had been constructed precisely to his own body measurements. As a result, when the assembled guests tried one by one to get into it they failed. The god-king then took his turn and lay down comfortably inside. Before he had time to get out the conspirators rushed forward, nailed the lid tightly closed and sealed even the cracks with molten lead so that there would be no air to breathe. The coffer was then cast adrift on the Nile where it floated for some time, eventually coming to rest in the papyrus swamps of the eastern Delta.(34) At this point Isis, the wife of Osiris, intervened. Using all her great magic and Assisted by the moon-god Thoth she went to look for the coffer, found it, and concealed it in a secret place. Her evil brother Set, however, out hunting in the marshes, discovered the location of the coffer, opened it, and in a mad fury cut the royal corpse into fourteen pieces which he then scattered throughout the land. Once more Isis set off to 'save' her husband. She made a small boat of papyrus reeds, coated with bitumen and pitch, and embarked on the Nile in search of the remains. When she had found them she called again on the aid of Thoth who helped her to work certain powerful spells which reunited the dismembered parts of the body so that it resumed its old form. Thereafter, in an intact and perfect state, Osiris went through a process of resurrection to become god of the dead and king of the underworld from which place, the legend had it, he occasionally returned to earth in the guise of a mortal man.(35) There were three details of this story that I regarded as being of the greatest interest: first the fact that, during his rule on earth, Osiris was a civilizer and a legislator, secondly that he was placed in a wooden coffer and thrown into the Nile; and thirdly that Isis came to rescue his body in a papyrus boat coated with bitumen and pitch. The parallels with the life of Moses could not have been more obvious he, too, became a great civilizer aid lawgiver, he too was cast adrift upon the waters of the Nile, he too floated in a vessel of papyrus coated with bitumen and pitch, and he too was saved by an Egyptian princess. Indeed, as the historian Josephus recorded, the very name 'Moses' meant 'saved from water': 'for the Egyptians call water mou and those who are saved eses; so they conferred upon him this name compounded of both words.'(36) Philo, the other great classical commentator, concurred with this etymology: 'Since he had been taken up from water, the princess gave him a name derived from this, and called him Moses, for Mou is the Egyptian word for water.'(37) I asked myself whether there might not have been other instances in Egypt and perhaps in Mesopotamia as well of civilizing heroes who had been saved from water. A search in ancient annals and legends revealed that there had been many. For example Hollis, the son of Isis and Osiris, was murdered by Titans and thrown into the Nile. Isis rescued him and revived him with her sorcery. He then learned from her 'the arts of physic and divination and used them for the benefit of mankind'.(38) Likewise, in Mesopotamia, Sargon the Great whose rule brought unrivalled wealth, splendour and stability to Sumer and neighbouring territories at the end of the third millennium BC(39) had claimed quite specifically to have been saved from water:

My mother was a priestess. I did not know my father. The priestess, my mother, conceived me and gave birth to me in hiding. She placed me in a basket made of reeds and closed the lid with pitch. She put the basket in the river which was not high. The river carried me away and brought me to Akki who was a man responsible for libations. Akki looked upon me with kindness and drew me from the river.(40)