Antiquity Imagined: The Remarkable Legacy of Egypt and the Ancient Near East 9780755624447, 9781784532758

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To Marguerite, Frances, Tim, Evie and Rufus

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Byzantium

Mt Ararat

Tarsus

Göbekli Antioch

Nineveh

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R Oron R Tyre Alexandria

Megiddo Samaria R Jordan Jericho Jerusalem

Tanis Sakkara Cairo Giza Memphis

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Damascus

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Baghdad

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s Babylon

Masada Ur

Amarna

Egypt and the Near East

e Nil R. Thebes (Luxor)

Aswan

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300 km 300 miles

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS



Map: Egypt and the Near East

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Fig. 1.1

Mystical Egypt: a tour advertisement from the USA, 2012.

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Fig. 1.2 Hermes Trismegistus – seventeenth-century image. (Source: Daniel Stolz von Stolzenberg, Viridarium Chymicum, Frankfurt, 1624)

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Fig. 1.3 Count Alessandro di Cagliostro (1743–95), mystic, Freemason, traveller and fraudster. (Source: Francis Bartolozzi, Comte de Cagliostro, engraving, 1786)

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Fig. 1.4 Egypt in a set design for Mozart’s The Magic Flute, by Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Opernhaus Berlin, 1817.

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Fig. 1.5 H. Spencer Lewis (1883–1939), founder of the Ancient Mystical Order of the Rosae Crucis. (Source: Rosicrucian Digest, 2, 2011, p. 50)

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Fig. 1.6 The revival of ancient Egyptian religion: a modern Kemetic shrine of Thoth. (Source: Tedmek, Wikimedia Commons, 2007)

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Fig. 2.1 The pyramids as the granaries of the biblical Joseph: thirteenth-century mosaic from San Marco Basilica, Venice. (Source: O. Demus, The Mosaics of San Marco in Venice, vol. 2, pl. 291)

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Fig. 2.2 The title page of Pyramidographia, by the English astronomer John Greaves, 1646.

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Fig. 2.3 The Great Pyramid as the geographical centre of the world, according to Charles Piazzi Smyth, 1877. (Source: Charles Piazzi Smyth, Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid, 1877, pl. 20)

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Fig. 2.4 The Great Pyramid as a chronological chart. (Source: Adam Rutherford, The Chronological Markers of the Great Pyramid, 1957)

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Fig. 2.5

 yramidology by Adam Rutherford, published by his Institute of P Pyramidology, 1957–72.

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list of Illustrations

Fig. 2.6 The nineteenth-century image: Pyramids of Geezeh, by David Roberts, 1838.

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Fig. 3.1 ‘Graeco-Egyptian Mummy. Unrolled April 6th 1833.’ The frontispiece from Thomas Pettigrew’s A History of Egyptian Mummies, 1834.

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Fig. 3.2 Public unwrapping of a mummy: an advertisement for an 1864 event in New York.

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Fig. 3.3 The mummy comes alive: 1892 illustration from Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘Lot No. 249’. (Source: A. Conan Doyle, ‘Lot No. 249’, Harper’s Magazine, September 1892)

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Fig. 3.4

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Movie poster for The Mummy’s Curse, starring Lon Chaney, 1945.

Fig. 4.1 The title page of Isaac Newton’s The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended, 1728.

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Fig. 4.2 The worldwide diffusion of culture from Egypt according to Elliot Smith, 1929. (Source: G. Elliot Smith, The Migrations of Culture, 2nd edn, 1929)

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Fig. 4.3 ‘Mummy’ from Torres Strait, Macleay Museum, Sydney, considered by Elliot Smith to be evidence for Egyptian influence in the Pacific. (Source: G. Pretty, Man, 4, 1969)

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Fig. 5.1 Human races according to Ernst Haeckel, 1868. (Source: E. Haeckel, Naturliche Schopfungeschichte, 1868, p. 576)

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Fig. 5.2

Arthur de Gobineau (1816–82), the ‘founder of scientific racism’.

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Fig. 6.1  Freedom’s Journal, launched 1827 and considered the first African American newspaper in the United States.

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Fig. 6.2 Cheikh Anta Diop, honoured at a 2006 conference in his native Senegal. (Source: Pambakuza News)158 Fig. 6.3 Poster advertising a 2009 talk by Molefi Kete Asante, a leading figure in US Afrocentrism.

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Fig. 7.1 Jerusalem at the time of the destruction by the Babylonians: a fifteenth-century conception. (Source: Destruccio Iherosolime, Nuremburg Chronicle, 1493)

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Fig. 7.2

The Battle of Jericho, Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld, 1853.

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Fig. 7.3 Image of the Jewish people in captivity: Eugene Delacroix, La Captivité à Babylone, Palais Bourbon, Paris, 1838.

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list of Illustrations

Fig. 7.4  Cyrus Restoring the Vessels of the Temple: the image created by Gustave Doré, c.1866.189 Fig. 8.1 Members of the British Jerusalem Party in 1867. (Source: Palestine Exploration Fund)

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Fig. 8.2 Edouard Naville excavating at Bubastis (Tell Basta) c.1886–9. (Source: Courtesy Egypt Exploration Society)

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Fig. 8.3 Archaeologist Benjamin Mazar, with granddaughter and future archaeologist Eilat Mazar at the 1970s excavation at the foot of Temple Mount, Jerusalem.

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Fig. 8.4 The Jerusalem Archaeological Park. (Source: CyberXRef, Wikimedia Commons)206 Fig. 9.1 The fall of Jerusalem, a sixteenth-century German image. (Source: Virgil Solis, Biblesche Figuren, Indianapolis Museum of Art, 09.28a)

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Fig. 9.2 Tracing the Lost Tribes of Israel into the British Isles: a map from 1885. (Source: Oxonian, Israel’s Wanderings; or, The Sciiths, the Saxons, and the Kymry, 2nd edn, London: Heywood, 1885)

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Fig. 9.3

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British Israelite family tree. (Source: www.british-israel.us)

Fig. 10.1 The crucifixion of St Peter, in the fresco by Michelangelo, Vatican Palace, Rome, c.1546–50.226 Fig. 10.2 Santiago (St James) as pilgrim: sculpted figure from S. Marta de Tera, Zemer, 1129. (Source: peregrinations.kenyon.edu/photobank/ collection.html)231 Fig. 10.3 St James as the slayer of Moors: statue of Santiago Matamoros in the cathedral of Burgos.

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Fig. 10.4

The tomb of St Thomas in Mylapore, Chennai.

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Fig. 10.5

J oseph of Arimathea Preaching to the Inhabitants of Britain, by William Blake, 1796. (Source: William Blake, A Large Book of Designs)241

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A NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY

Except within quotations, for consistency we have adopted the terms bce (before the Common Era) rather than bc, and ce (Common Era) instead of ad. The terms ‘Middle East’ and ‘Near East’ are both geocentric, and indeed emphasise the dominant theme in this book of outsiders from the West looking from a distance to the region under discussion. It is only ‘east’ to those living to the west (a minority of the world population). ‘The Middle East’ in current international usage is applied to a broad band which includes Egypt and Western Asia, and is sometimes extended into the Maghreb and parts of central Asia. The term ‘Near East’ has long been used by Western historians and archaeologists to apply to South-West Asia, and that usage is applied here, though at times the phrase is also used to include Egypt. In this book references to ‘the Near East’ normally exclude Egypt, while those to ‘the Middle East’ include it, for lack of a less biased term. Other terminology (e.g. the racial terminology in Chapters 5 and 6) may reflect the practice of the period being discussed rather than currently accepted usage.

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INTRODUCTION

The supposed mystical knowledge of the ancients; alien landings at the pyramids; conflicts of identity and race extended back to the distant past; ‘pseudoarchaeologies’ and alternative histories described as the lunatic fringe; New Age movements and the revival of ancient religions; mythical narratives of travels into and from the ancient world. This book surveys a range of imagined, invented, hoped-for worlds applied to the pasts of Egypt, Israel/Palestine and beyond. Over the last 2,000 years, people in what we now call Western societies have created narratives of imagined pasts which relate to the previous 3,000 years of societies to their east: what we now call the Middle East. The growth of literacy in the last two centuries has seen the flourishing of many such imagined pasts, alongside and despite the growth of scholarly and scientific knowledge. And in the last two decades the internet revolution has presented more opportunities for the dissemination of ideas that challenge and contradict the views of the ancient past that have emerged from scholarly and scientific research. The Middle East is the area of Egypt and the Near East, broadly from the Nile Valley east to Iran, from Arabia north to Turkey. But why has this region been the focus of so many imagined pasts? There are different contributors. To the thinkers and writers in classical cities of the Greek-speaking world, and their successors in the Roman Empire, the clearly more ancient civilisation of Egypt was thought to underlie their gods and myths, their arts, sciences and even wider learning. Further east, Persia had presented the greatest and most powerful threat to Greek civilisation, while the comparable threat to Rome had been from Carthage, which had been settled by Phoenicians from the Levant.

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ANTIQUITY IMAGINED

But beyond that, the Middle East was the source of great religions: the three Abrahamic faiths of Judaism, Christianity and Islam (as well as the less widespread Zoroastrianism). Wherever they were in the world, followers of these religions would turn their minds to the locations where their faiths originated and the history associated with those faiths: the Promised Land, the Holy Land, and the holiest sites of Islam. Fascination with the lands where Judaism, Christianity or Islam began is a major theme that influenced many of those who developed the ideas described in this book. By tradition, Egypt saw the sojourn of the twelve Jewish tribes until the Exodus, and the flight of Jesus’ family. Arabia saw the revelations to the Prophet Muhammad. Jerusalem was a holy city to all three religions. Biblical history traverses the lands of the Levant, while early Christianity took root early in what is today Turkey. In Mesopotamia (Iraq) lay the origins of Abraham and the captivity of Judah until the liberation by the ruler of Persia. There was virtually nowhere in the Middle East which did not present links to religious narrative and faith. Holy faith might inspire unholy acts, with conquest and reconquest, whether by Islamic armies or Crusader knights. Europe’s preoccupation with the region came not just from religious ideology but strategic political questions, especially after the Ottomans brought to an end Byzantine Christian power. The control of the Ottoman Empire over the areas of Palestine and Syria was established in 1516 and maintained in one form or another for four centuries until the end of World War I, despite the brief incursion from Napoleon. Egypt, at the meeting point of Africa, the Mediterranean and Asia, and in control of the Red Sea, was considered of major strategic importance. The invasion of Egypt by Napoleon in 1798 had in view the need to protect and develop French commercial interests and trade with the east, especially against British competition and power in India. Britain’s military resistance to the invasion recognised the same strategic importance. The construction of the Suez Canal (1859–69) consolidated these external interests, as Britain and France exerted their influence over Egyptian administration, effecting a British protectorate from 1882. No less, Egypt also had direct economic value to European powers. As the largest country in the Arabic-speaking world (it had nearly 4 million people in the early nineteenth century and 10 million by 1900) it provided both a market for manufactured goods and a source for cotton and other produce. Egyptian self-rule was only established from 1922. Thus at the height of the era of colonial empires, Egypt not only provided European powers a sea lane between Europe and the east, but operated under control of those powers. In Western perception it had been liberated from

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Introduction

Ottoman control, and the European hegemony established a direct link between the land that had inspired ancient classical civilisation and the cultures that claimed to be the inheritors of that classical tradition. The intensive Western re-engagement with countries of the Middle East in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was represented not only in political and administrative relationships but in literary, artistic and academic perceptions, which cultural critical Edward Said dissected – stimulating lively and continuing debate and dissent – in his classic 1978 work Orientalism. Despite its title, this referred to attitudes applied mainly to the modern Islamic world of the Middle East, not further east. Many of the encompassing attitudes that underlay the subjects of Orientalism can be seen in alternative histories of the deeper past discussed in this book. There are elements of scholarly writing in the nineteenth century and even later which reclaimed the region into the history of Western civilisation while distancing it from its Islamic occupants. As modern scholarship in archaeology, history and language uncovered more details of the ancient world, grand narratives of Western civilisation placed the origins of urban life, writing and other attributes of civilisation in the Middle East, with ancient Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) sometimes emphasised more than Egypt, or on a parallel course. Then the growth of prehistoric research attributed the origins of the first crops, domesticated animals and settled village life to a ‘fertile crescent’ stretching from Iran to the Levant. The region was thus seen as central to several of the overriding narratives of human progress. Answers were therefore sought in the deep past and these lands of the east for questions of origins, identity and faith; and for new questions about history, mystical knowledge, racial origins and more. This book describes and discusses a wide range of imagined pasts of Egypt and the ancient Near East. They include Egyptosophy and Hermeticism, forms of Rosicrucianism, recent images of Egypt’s possession of mystic knowledge and modern followers of ancient Egyptian religions. They include the vast range of ‘alternative’ interpretations of the Great Pyramid of Egypt, and the diverse role which mummies have played in Western societies and perceptions. In recent times people have reconstructed the ancient world to match the needs of their own society as they saw it, or would like it to be. Thus we have ancient Egypt as a successful world civiliser in the model of the British Empire, or an exemplary white civilisation, or an exemplary black civilisation, redesigned to fit racial models. Political nationalism has extended back contemporary identities and needs to the distant past to reinforce present attitudes, not least in conflicted regions such as Israel and its neighbours.

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ANTIQUITY IMAGINED

Religions have long revised the past, both as a matter of faith and belief and as part of the politics of religious power and organisation. And scholars in different disciplines have debated the significance and interpretations of the data they recover and study from the ancient world. Books and films thrive on what scholarship can now tell us about the ancient world. But so do books and films (and innumerable websites) about quite alternative models, interpretations and beliefs. Does it matter what people think (or thought) about the distant past? Should we not admit that whatever, individually, we consider the truth is still a subjective perception? Whereas I have knowledge; you have beliefs; they have myths (‘myths’ if we are sympathetic to those other people, or ‘delusions’ if we aren’t). Are not all our approaches subject to thinking of this kind? ‘Common sense’ is a useful reference point, but not an adequate one. What might be a natural assumption to one person (say, that we do not need interplanetary visitors to explain ancient Egyptian architecture) is not the common sense of another; indeed building something the size of the Great Pyramid itself defies our everyday notion of common sense. And we all have personal beliefs which will seem strange to others. The often huge audiences for a television documentary providing an ‘alternative’ view of history may find the persuasive professionalism of the media makes it easy to suspend common sense, just as persuaders in other eras and media could do. Is there more to ‘alternative’ ideas than an opportunity to offend the world of careful and conventional scholarship, to tell experts trained in the university system that they are wasting their time and misguided in their reliance on scientific method? Does ‘truth’ matter, and if so, whose truth? Arguably, there is no loss to science and scholarship if a European widow chooses to spend her income on an expensive tour of ‘mystical Egypt’, with a sunset initiation into ancient mysteries at a temple site. There is no victim if a Christian worshipper finds comfort at the supposed tomb of the apostle Thomas on the east coast of India where he is said to have journeyed from Palestine in the first century ce. And if members of an urban black community in the United States find self-confidence from a course that teaches them that all Western culture can be traced back to an exclusively black Nile Valley civilisation, or even join up to a group practising ancient Egyptian religion, does that present any problem to others? We might express concern when a high school student writing an essay on the ancient world first finds websites with interpretations that say the opposite of what modern-day scholarship might say: not least, this might lead them to a

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Introduction

poor assessment mark. Though if they are operating within a religious or political context where the approved interpretation is itself distant from modern scholarly knowledge, the reverse too could apply. But we can also note times and places where an invented past can not only reflect but can reinforce more problematic results. Soldiers of the Spanish conquests of the Americas were inspired to massacre the indigenous peoples not just because Santiago (apostle Saint James) had come from Jerusalem as their patron but also because he was seen as an active participant in the slaughter. Ideologists of British imperialism could draw comfort from the analogy of a white universal civilisation of the ancient past. Expansion of Jewish Israeli settlement into Arab land has included inspiration and funding by believers (with Christian Zionist support) that this was land divinely allocated and settled in a historically defined kingdom three millennia old. Nationalisms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are constant reminders than narratives of the past not only reflect the present but reinforce it and influence the future. One feature of imagined pasts is that they conflict with each other as much as with conventional scholarship. Academics may mutter about ‘pseudohistory’ and ‘the lunatic fringe’ but they will find many specifics of what they say echoed (now or in past narratives) by those they criticise. A scientific analyst of the Great Pyramid may contemptuously dismiss the author of best-selling books who sees the pyramid as the construction of a pre-Egyptian Atlantean (or alien) race, but the latter may, in turn, accuse the establishment of covering up knowledge. The Atlantean supporter may also dismiss as fantasy the writings of a deeply religious author who sought to trace prophecies of Christianity in the dimensions and ratios of the pyramid. And such a Christian might endorse Protestant criticism of Catholic traditions of saints: not only of saints’ bones and relics brought from the Middle East in the Middle Ages, but stories of the first apostles travelling throughout the world to preach, appoint bishops and be martyred. Individual Catholic scholars might accept a core of truth in such stories but dedicate their own skills to detailed academic study of ancient religions. To modern adherents of those religions, such study misses the essential truths of the ancients that were subsequently lost or suppressed. Some academics devote energy and time to documenting what they see as factual or interpretative errors in the ‘alternative’ histories. To others these alternatives are just a nuisance, stimulating the wrong questions from a popular audience. And to much of scholarship, the world of mystic cults, racial identity politics, ‘biblical’ archaeology or alternative pyramidologies is of no interest whatever: it is out there, but irrelevant to their own research and teaching.

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ANTIQUITY IMAGINED

This book looks at images of the past invented today, when scholarly analysis of ancient Egypt and the ancient Near East is a vast and complex activity. But it also looks at earlier interpretations, no less ‘imagined’, but in very different contexts. We must avoid presentism: a supercilious take on the ignorance of early times. Every generation provides the best medical treatment available, while grateful not to be subject to the limits of knowledge two or three generations earlier. There are always people seeking to understand best the world of present and past within the cultural framework they have inherited, even if their ideas are later rejected. We might therefore seek to distinguish between limitations, errors and frauds. A church historian in late antiquity was using and assessing the sources available to him. A Reformation scholar of the early modern era was trying to reconcile the insights of the classical authors with the framework provided by biblical literature. A later nineteenth-century archaeologist was undertaking scientific research from within societies in which religious beliefs still stood strong. And followers of beliefs cannot be expected to challenge at all points what they have been told by their educational or religious leaders. It is easier to criticise those who invent traditions than those who follow them. There have clearly been ideas and texts which were fraudulent rather than just misguided. If a text (third-century Hermeticist, eighteenth-century mystic Masonic, nineteenth-century sectarian, modern Egyptian religious) was presented not as fiction, not as religious analogy, but with claims it was an ancient document, then we can criticise the past fraud as much as criticism of a new one, just as we would critique an archaeological report which recorded false discoveries or omitted data inconvenient to the author’s hypothesis. Scholarship itself includes differing versions of ‘the truth’, and descriptive narratives change through time. These may come from new data (a fresh excavation, a recently discovered text) but also from the kind of questions being raised. There is no ‘knowledge’ independent of what is being asked, and these questions reflect the time, place and context of the writer or speaker or thinker. Academic culture makes a difference too. In one time and place the emphasis may be on master and disciple: the priority to emulate and reflect the expertise of the scholarly establishment. In a different context, priority might be given to challenging the current consensus, coming up with new questions and new answers. The word ‘sceptical’ can be ambiguous here: sceptical of what? This too reflects the position of the individual. From the present author’s perspective, archaeology can provide the most solid base for reconstructing the past. A pottery vessel within a house whose destruction is radiocarbon-dated to the late seventh century

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Introduction

bce is as close to historical fact as one can get. Interpretation and comparison may show that the same decorative tradition existed two centuries earlier, and suggest a cultural and historical link. The house may contain a votive object whose origins lie a generation earlier. But the finds tell us primarily about the late seventh century. A manuscript of the second century ce is also an archaeological artefact. It can tell us what interested people in the second century. Analysis of its text alongside evidence of similar artefacts from other sites may suggest that it is a copy (though doubtless with additions, excisions and copying errors) of a fifth-century bce document. Its creation would therefore tell us something about the ideas and interests of the fifth century bce. But if its contents describe the twelfth century bce, it still tells us nothing directly about the twelfth century bce. Archaeological work, and texts confidently dated to that period, provide the history of the twelfth century. If a later text echoes some of that reality, so be it. Thus someone with a theory or an idea – about pyramid prophecies, or Atlantean explorers, or Solomonic empires, or the Holy Grail, or mystical lost religions – can declare themselves sceptical of science and scholarship, as can people as widely varied as creationists and Holocaust deniers. Scholarly interpretations do develop and change: climate change sceptics can use debate to cast doubt on a majority of specialists. Today’s idea may be expanded, revised, or be replaced in the light of new data, new interpretations and new questions. At times these changes can be quite radical: the 2003 discovery in Flores, Indonesia, that a second hominin was alive alongside our own species as late as 13,000 years ago is such a shift. But that does not invalidate the scientific method. We could find a massive rich temple of the eleventh century in Jerusalem, or a hidden chamber under the Great Pyramid, or a first-century boat wreck with Christian insignia off the east coast of India, or an underwater city west of the Straits of Gibraltar, and change our views. Meanwhile we have to work within the range of probability using the large amount of evidence available to us, as well as the principle of Occam’s razor – preferring simpler explanations to the more complex. Academics should hope that their views will be replaced: research would be very dull if knowledge were static. That is not the same as inventing a new past to suit a new present. In this book we refer to ‘imagined’ pasts – worlds of the imagination. In the broadest context, imagination is good: the creation and development of an image, a picture, a model, an interpretation. We want our writers, film-makers, interpreters to have imagination in how they present knowledge and understanding.

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ANTIQUITY IMAGINED

We want our researchers, our scholars, our writers to use their imagination in their professional work. We might even admire the past creativity of those who used their imaginative skills when they struggled to reconcile their observations with what they had been taught, or their religious faith with their intellectual curiosity. But do we want imagination to create illusions, falsities, to deny and mislead? When does the world of inspired and informed imagination become instead just an imagined world? In the following chapters we present and explore numerous examples of imagined pasts.

STRUCTURE OF THIS BOOK

This book cannot cover all the different ways in which people in the last 2,000 years imagined the previous 3,000 years. We have selected some major themes. The first chapter looks at the broad range of images of ancient Egypt sometimes grouped as ‘Egyptosophy’. From the classical world, through medieval and Renaissance Europe, to nineteenth-century cults and contemporary New Age movements, ancient Egypt was seen as a source of hidden mysteries and spiritual insights which might be attained and applied. The cautious respect of Greek and Roman travellers was overtaken by Hermeticism, ideas which were revived and refined from early centuries ce to Renaissance Italy to nineteenth-century America. New claims came for the influence of Egyptian religion, taken up into cults and then New Age movements, as well as popular writers stimulating doubts about established scholarly approaches. And today we see Kemetism, intended as a return to the old religion of Egypt. In Chapter 2 we review one of the aspects of the ancient world which has been most attractive to proselytisers of ‘alternative’ pasts. The pyramids of Egypt – and especially the Great Pyramid of Old Kingdom pharaoh Khufu at Giza – have fascinated and intrigued visitors since classical times. Before the emergence of detailed scholarly research in the nineteenth century, they attracted diverse explanations: Joseph’s granaries, constructions by Hebrew slaves, temples, tombs. But alongside the growth of Egyptology has been the growth of modern pyramidologies: numerous conflicting theories of what critics call ‘pyramidiocy’, in contexts from nineteenth-century neo-Christian sects to New Age mysticism to TV documentaries and best-selling journalism. Many have used measurements to see the Great Pyramid as a map of the earth or the universe, or a chronological chart of past and future. To some it was built by Atlanteans, or Iranians, or extraterrestrials.

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Introduction

It served as an initiation centre, or a treasury, or a water pump, or a shelter from meteorites, or an observatory, or a calculator, or survey marker. To yet others it has supernatural powers, sharpening knives or preventing biological decay. Hundreds of thousands of web pages refer to a ‘mystery of the Great Pyramid’. This chapter explores the history and range of alternative pyramidologies. Throughout three millennia of ancient Egypt, the mummy was a preserved body of the dead. Chapter 3 explores aspects of the mummy and its changing image. In the modern West, the mummy has served many other roles in life, literature, film and superstition. Ground-up mummies were long used as a medicine for healing external and internal ailments, though ground mummies were also used in paint and fertiliser. Familiarity with complete mummies increased as they were brought to Europe by collectors – for exhibition and public unwrapping. The beneficent image of the mummy was a theme of much nineteenth-century literature, often involving romantic attachments between male explorers and revived princesses. But in the work of Conan Doyle and others, the resuscitated and vengeful mummy became a threat. This image moved from literature to a vast genre of movies – 130 and still counting – starting with the silent era, then with the landmark film The Mummy (1932). After the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamen, beliefs spread of a curse associated with disturbance of mummified burials. The mummy had come to serve many functions. Chapter 4 is mainly a case study in imperial and colonial ideology. Classical authors argued that Egypt was the source of much science and religion in their civilisation. This was echoed and challenged by Christian and Enlightenment writers who argued over the influence of Egypt. At the height of Britain’s imperial era, the idea was advanced that ancient Egypt was the source of inventions, innovations and ideas that spread throughout the world – an influential argument from anatomist Sir Grafton Elliot Smith (among the foremost human anatomists of his era) and his acolytes. His fundamental view was that innovations in human culture could be created once only; their occurrence elsewhere in time and space reflected diffusion from that one origin. Elliot Smith’s writings presented ancient Egypt as the source of a vast range of cultural changes, religious beliefs and social practices, the diffusion of which stimulated the origin of civilisations from China to Peru and changed material culture from Australia to North America. The concept of distinct physical races, each with their own characteristics and cultures in a hierarchy of ability, dominated much historical discussion from the eighteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century. Chapter 5 looks at the use of the concept in relation to the Middle East, and especially to Egypt, with

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ANTIQUITY IMAGINED

the implication that the latter was a white civilisation. A ‘Hamitic hypothesis’ was advanced for non-African penetration of culture into black Africa. This chapter examines concepts of race and the negative impact they brought to images of the ancient Middle East. Chapter 6 reviews a different aspect of racial models. In response to the idea of a white Egypt, Senegalese scholar Cheikh Anta Diop from the 1950s created an alternative image of the nature and influence of a black Egypt. There were echoes in Black Athena by the late British-American writer Martin Bernal from the 1980s. But there has been a long tradition, especially among African Americans, of seeing ancient Egypt in racial terms as a black African civilisation and black people at the origins of European culture. This chapter traces such movements from the 1830s to today, when Afrocentric political and ideological movements often place ancient Egypt at the core of their ideas. After a series of chapters dealing especially with imagined pasts of Egypt and the Nile Valley, we move round the Mediterranean coast to the Levant. A century and a half of literary, linguistic, theological, historical and archaeological research has uncovered details of the context in which the books of the Hebrew Bible were created, and the background to the religious and historical narrative contained within them. These biblical texts present stories of the history of the Middle East which are fundamental in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Faith in the historicity of biblical narratives has remained, despite modern reinterpretation of these documents by scholarship, and a substantial record of archaeological research. Diverse views remain in religious and secular communities about the events and circumstances presented in the biblical documents. Chapter 7 reviews what modern scholarship understands about the period in which the canon of books in the Hebrew Bible (the Tanakh)/Old Testament and the theology behind them were formalised. Archaeological work in the countries of the Bible – Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and beyond – has substantially illuminated the periods of history in the biblical era, but religious affiliations, ideology and politics have influenced interpretations, debates and discussions. Religious faith funded much of the first archaeological work in the area, and influenced some of the interpretations of excavated sites. Within the state of Israel, the tensions between national foundational narratives and historical research have grown with more recent archaeological interpretations, which have challenged traditional assumptions about the past of the land. The early settlement of Jerusalem is particularly contested ground. Today we can find Zionist Israelis committing large funds to excavation, fundamentalist

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American Christians who finance the search for early Israelites, while Palestinian Arabs may assert their identity with biblical Canaanites. Chapter 8 explores some themes in the deeply contested pasts in and around ‘the Holy Land’. The topic discussed in Chapter 9 – that of the Ten Lost Tribes of the northern kingdom of Israel – became a major theme in Jewish and Christian ideas, and numerous societies in Asia, Africa and the Americas were identified with the Lost Tribes. Some, such as the British Israelites, identified themselves thus, and modern developments have seen widely dispersed claims of early Israelite origins. In Chapter 10 we consider stories which brought early Christian missions out of Palestine to remote regions of the old world. Status and authority in the spread of Christianity in the early churches and the later medieval world was strengthened by a link to the early apostles and disciples. This chapter traces and discusses the history of such traditions: Saint Peter in Rome, Saint Thomas in India, Saint James in Spain, Saint Mark in Egypt, Joseph of Arimathea in Britain, Saint Andrew in Byzantium, Mary Magdalene in France, and others. The countries of the Middle East hold a special place in narratives of human prehistory and early history: as pathways for early human ancestors to pass between continents; as pioneers in permanent settlement, pastoralism and agriculture; the emergence of ‘civilisation’ itself with craft specialisation, writing and state formation; and a source of cultural innovations which spread elsewhere. Yet as new sites and finds are discovered, new dates obtained, new models of interpretation applied (or ignored), narratives of the prehistory and history of the region may be challenged and replaced by new understanding. In the final Chapter 11 we take a brief critical look at some of the subjectivities of scholarship.

A PANOPLY OF THEMES

The alternative approaches to the past discussed in this book represent only some of the topics that have arisen, and continue to arise, in challenging the scholarly and specialist approaches. More could be said on all of those topics, and often has been, as indicated in the bibliographies of sources and suggested further reading. From Egypt, the ‘heretic’ pharaoh Akhenaten has been assigned multiple historical roles in ‘alternative’ histories. As a supposed pioneering monotheist, he has been linked to early Judaism, to Moses and (as noted in Chapter 1) to part of the Rosicrucian tradition. In different ways, Cleopatra has also been the subject of diverse interpretations.

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Biblical literature has inspired an almost unlimited spread of historical imaginings. Authors, even expeditions have claimed to know the location of the Garden of Eden or the Tower of Babel or sites of patriarchal activities. Following the biblical phrase that Noah’s Ark ‘came to rest on the mountains of Ararat’, numerous expeditions to the eastern Anatolian mountain and area have explored for (and at times claimed to have found) the boat’s remains. Eager writers have sought to ‘explain’ the plagues that beset Egypt in the time of patriarch Joseph. Expeditions have traversed the Sinai Peninsula to track the route of Moses’ Exodus (or have funded archaeologists who offered to include this topic in their survey). Apart from the pursuit of these topics by Westerners (from Christian, neo-Christian or Jewish religious backgrounds), many places within the Middle East itself have associations with biblical characters, often maintained through Islamic tradition. Eve’s tomb is in Saudi Arabia, Cain killed Abel on Jebel Qasioun near Damascus, Moses struck a rock to produce water at Wadi Musa in Jordan, and so on. Similarly many sites in Israel, the Palestinian territories, Jordan and beyond are linked to events in the life of Jesus or his apostles. Stories of the migrations of Jewish people go well beyond the Lost Tribes discussed in Chapter 9; the identification of diaspora Africans as ‘Black Jews’ makes an interesting juxtaposition with the Egyptian identification discussed in Chapter 6. The Phoenicians, too, have been regular victims of alternative histories. Because they were the most prominent seagoing sailors of the ancient Middle East, they could be used to fit into many theories. We mention a few in earlier chapters: as they travelled west to the Americas (Chapter 6) or east to the Pacific (Chapter 4). They were credited with trading along the coast of southern Africa and extending their reach into the gold mines and lost cities of the African interior. To Irish academic linguist Augustus Henry Keane (1833–1912) it was both Phoenicians and Jews who settled Madagascar in the Indian Ocean. Such reinterpretations of the past have been presented as fact, not fiction. Apart from the discussion of the Egyptian mummy (Chapter 3), we have not examined the vast area of novels, short stories and movies which give their own versions of Egypt, Israel, biblical narratives and the ancient east. They may be designed as entertainment but the images they create can penetrate and have wide impact. A special credit is due to writers and to film production companies and directors who seek to include the best available knowledge in their reconstructions of the ancient world. At one level such imaginings can cause us amusement, or smug dissent. But behind many of the ‘alternative’ histories, quasi-archaeologies, new and

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fundamentalist religious beliefs and profitable films and books, there lies a set of deeper issues. The past belongs to those who occupied it, and arguably the onus is on those who study the past to help contemporaries understand it. In that framework, rewriting or creating a past to fit later needs could be seen as a theft of that past: the corruption of imagination. This book explores such creations.

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CHAPTER 1

MYSTICAL ROLES FOR ANCIENT EGYPT

Ancient Egypt has long provided inspiration for those who sought to advance mystical, theological and philosophical views, and to support these by arguing that they reflected a heritage of ancient knowledge. They may identify themselves, or be described as, Hermeticists, Rosicrucians, members of a Freemasonry order, Theosophists, Anthroposophical, adherents of a New Age movement, or followers of the original true Egyptian religion as Kemetists. And today they may frame their alternative Egypt in secular terms: mysterious more than mystical. For two millennia creators and supporters of such ideas have turned to an image of ancient Egypt as their authority. Egypt under the pharaohs – the three millennia from the First Dynasty until the death of Cleopatra in 30 bce – has brought special fascination to a broad public of readers and travellers as well as serious scholars. Multiple images of ancient Egypt have influenced architecture and design, and form part of popular culture as well as education. The fascination of the period has made ancient Egypt a standard topic in any series of illustrated children’s books, a sure drawcard for a museum exhibition, an element of many school syllabi and the subject of innumerable television documentaries. Novels and movies build on, and reinforce, images of ancient Egypt. Serious books have long presented, and re-presented, the history and society, the art and archaeology of the ancient Nile Valley, as uncovered by study and research by historians, linguists, archaeologists and specialists in ancient technology. In modern times up to 13 million foreigners have visited Egypt annually, the majority drawn to view the remains of the ancient civilisation.

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Figure 1.1  Mystical Egypt: a tour advertisement from the USA, 2012.

Perhaps the largest mystery remaining in the study of ancient Egypt is why people have continued to create imagined and fanciful pasts for a period and place that has been so well documented. Pharaonic Egypt has provided the modern world with an excess of inscriptions and finds from excavations, with historical and archaeological studies on every matter of detail: a wealth of material has survived in the Nile Valley and the delta, deserts and oases that border it. The history, religion and ideas, social and economic structure, technology and skills of Pharaonic Egypt have been the subject of innumerable accounts, analyses and discussions since the expansion of epigraphic work from the mid-nineteenth century and the explosion of archaeological studies thereafter. Debates on matters of detail and analysis continue in an active international field of scholarship, but within a common core of understanding. In contrast to all of this scholarship, numerous writers and speakers and subsequently film-makers and website hosts have imposed on ancient Egypt, perhaps more than any other ancient civilisation, their own theories: mysteries of the

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pyramids, riddles of the sphinx, lost wisdom of the ancients (called ‘Egyptosophy’ in a survey by Erik Hornung). And Egypt has been used to provide support for alternative world histories, involving lost civilisations, ancient maritime migrations across the Atlantic or Pacific oceans, or the past presence of aliens visiting from other planets or galaxies. Ancient Egypt has become a serial victim. But while the models and details may be new and ever-changing, they follow an old pattern, an esoteric tradition, of attributing to ancient Egypt special knowledge and spiritual insights.

EMERGENCE OF KNOWLEDGE

What is not surprising is that before the textual translations and the archaeological work of the later nineteenth century, the ancient ruins of Egypt stimulated widespread comment and speculation. We cannot pass the same critical judgements on the past images that we might apply in our contemporary dismissal of wild ideas and invented constructions. For Egypt does present some of the most remarkable testimonials of the ancient world, demanding understanding and explanation. Massive pyramids of stone, ruined temples and tombs with detailed friezes showing gods and kings, inscriptions on distant rock faces, and the brilliantly crafted and beautiful antiquities admired and traded widely – all these have inspired outsiders’ esteem and wonder since classical times. When Greek writer Herodotus in the mid-fifth century bce visited Egypt, for the previous 75 years part of the Persian Empire, he was yet another inquiring tourist in a land where the first pyramids were already 2,100 years old. Like all tourists, he wondered at their meaning and origins and found local people willing to entertain him with stories. In the absence of better explanations now available, the readers of Renaissance and even Enlightenment Europe chose to rely on such observations of travellers and writers from the classical era. Despite – or perhaps because of – Persian rule, the cults of the Egyptian gods remained strong and active at the time of Herodotus’ visit, and Persian policy was to avoid disrupting local cults. He observed and reported on what he saw and was told of contemporary practice and beliefs; and he noted what heritage and background the fifth-century priests claimed for their cults. They also told me that the Egyptians first brought into use the names of the twelve gods, which the Greeks took over from them, and were the first to assign altars and

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images and temples to the gods, and to carve figures in stone […] They are religious to excess, beyond any other nation in the world […] The names of nearly all the gods came to Greece from Egypt.1

There is little from Herodotus which is too fanciful or beyond the range of probability: where he is suggesting hypotheses on geography or the flow of the Nile, he says they are such. The priests and others (no doubt some imaginative interpreters and guides) recounted to him myths and legends and their interpretations of much earlier Egyptian history, including pharaohs associated with the Giza pyramids, and while these stories may have no historical validity, the Greek spelling of names persisted in later use. Even though the narratives recorded by Herodotus and other classical writers may lack historical substance, they fall within the range of other stories of the period in the Mediterranean: they do not extend to the mystical reconstructions of some modern writers, though the rituals of Egyptian priests continued to fascinate visitors. When Alexander the Great conquered Persian Egypt in 332 bce he did not impose Greek culture and deities; instead he claimed an identity as the son of the deity Amun. Writing in the first century bce, Greek historian Diodorus Siculus summarised the ancient perspective: Egypt was ‘the place where mythology places the origin of the gods, where the earliest observations of the stars are said to have been made and where, further, many noteworthy deeds of great men are recorded’.2 He continued: Greeks, who have won fame for their wisdom and learning, visited Egypt in ancient times, in order to become acquainted with its customs and learning […] For the priests of Egypt […] offer proofs from the branch of learning which each one of these men pursued, arguing that all the things for which they were admired among the Greeks were transferred from Egypt.3

But with the growth in Egypt of (Coptic) Christianity and then the arrival of Islam in the mid-seventh century ce, pagan and polytheistic ancient Egypt was regarded by many with loathing rather than the admiration or the fascination of the Greco–Roman world. Medieval and even later European images of Egypt were influenced by biblical sources as much as classical, such as interpretations of the pyramids as granaries built by Joseph for the pharaoh, or built by Hebrew slaves before the Exodus. A short chronology of the earth was assumed from biblical literature, with creation

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about 4,000 years before Christ. To many this meant ancient Egypt’s origins were close to those of mankind itself – or, at least, far closer than the writer’s day; in contrast, Sir Isaac Newton, while accepting a creation date around 4000 bce, argued in The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended (1728) for a lower chronology of ancient Egypt. By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, many travellers from the Christian and Muslim worlds had visited, written about or illustrated the standing remains of ancient Egypt as well as carrying off portable antiquities. But the nineteenth century transformed Egypt from a place of puzzlement and wonder to restore its place in European understanding of human history. Napoleon’s expedition of conquest in Egypt (1798–1801) was accompanied by scholars and scientists to travel and study these sites, and a major outcome for scholarship was the publication in Paris between 1809 and 1829 of the multiple volumes in large format of the Description de l’Égypte. An important by-product of the invasion was the acquisition by the French and subsequent confiscation by the British of the trilingual Rosetta Stone, which assisted linguists such as Thomas Young and especially Jean-François Champollion (announced in 1822) in the decipherment of ancient Egypt’s hieroglyphic writing system. The many inscriptions on museum objects and recorded from Egyptian monuments could then allow Egyptian voices to explain themselves, with numerous translations published in the second half of the nineteenth century. Excavation of sites and recording of their relics for more than museum display could develop under the antiquities administration established in 1858 under Auguste Mariette. Scientific field research proper began later, with an explosion of archaeological excavation, removal of finds overseas for study and recording of local monuments in the half-century from Flinders Petrie working in Egypt in the 1880s until the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamen in 1922–32, after which Egyptian legislation limited the export of finds. The number of annual expeditions involving excavation and recording in recent years has been massive, slowed only by the political crisis in Egypt, with up to 240 current or recent foreign projects listed by the government’s Supreme Council of Antiquities in addition to research and work by Egyptian teams. This has resulted in too much, not too little, information, crowding the museum stores and placing publication demands on research teams. The University of Munich’s Egyptological Bibliographical Database listed 53,000 publications in Egyptology which have appeared after 1978. All the new information allowed new historical syntheses. German scholar Heinrich Karl Brugsch compiled a lengthy history of Egypt in 1859, extended to

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two detailed volumes in its second edition (1877). By 1902 British Egyptologist E. A. Wallis Budge could compile an eight-volume history of ancient Egypt, and successive survey volumes covered every aspect of the ancient society. This much greater knowledge inspired greater interest, but in turn that provided a context for ideas which rejected and conflicted with the scholarly knowledge and understanding that had emerged: alternative and invented Egypts.

MYSTIC KNOWLEDGE AND ESOTERIC CULTS: HERMETICISM AND BEYOND

There is a long history to the idea that ancient Egypt possessed access to mystic insights and esoteric knowledge. Authors from the ancient Greek and Roman worlds credited the foundations of their religion, art and architecture to Egypt, attributing to Egyptian priests discoveries in mathematics, astronomy and other sciences. Even more direct links were created, such as assigning Egyptian ancestry to the royal family of Argos (considered forebears of Alexander the Great), and putting Egypt on the itinerary of past heroes and historical figures. To some Greek philosophers and other writers, an imagined past Egyptian state could serve as a model of the ideal. The classical writers introduced a misunderstanding of Egyptian formal script which would persist for two millennia: the idea that the individual signs they called Hieroglyphs (literally ‘sacred carvings’) contained esoteric knowledge and were all allegorical or direct representations of their visible subject (the most common actually represent consonants in alphabetical, biliteral or triliteral form). Within the Roman Empire there developed cults of the Egyptian gods Isis (with examples such as the Temple of Isis at Pompeii) and Osiris (or Serapis, thought by some to be a composite of Osiris and Apis). This went alongside identifying some of their own deities with those of Egypt. Other traditions developed to assign special mystical knowledge and insights to Hermes Trismegistus (Hermes Thrice Great), a figure who combined aspects of the Egyptian god Thoth with those of the Greek god Hermes, deities whose credits including writing and magic. Hermetic traditions had wide popular followings in and beyond Ptolemaic Egypt, reflecting a fascination with the heritage of ancient Egypt now under foreign rule. Magic spells, as well as alchemy, were associated with these cults. Hermetic writings such as the Asclepius (which we have in Latin translation) and the Corpus Hermeticum, written in Greek within the Roman Empire of the

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Figure 1.2  Hermes Trismegistus – seventeenth-century image.

early centuries ce, purported to report detailed mystical insights of Hermes Trismegistus. Egypt is an image of heaven […] everything governed and moved in heaven came down to Egypt and was transferred there. If truth were told, our land is the temple of the whole world.4

Among Hermetic ideas was the view that sacred Egyptian texts had been buried in the (now lost) tomb of Alexander the Great. A continuity of the Hermetic tradition is seen in the medieval era in both the Middle East and Europe, with Hermes Trismegistus regarded as one of the great (but now clearly human) ancient prophets. Early Islamic scholars identified the Qur’anic prophet Idris with Hermes – ninth-century author al-Yaq‛ubi claiming that Idris was the first man to use writing. The core Arabic Hermetic tradition has been dated by Islamicist scholar Michael Cook to the eleventh century, with new writings originating in the Muslim world, though not linked through Coptic

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Christianity to the earlier traditions. It was influential in Egypt itself, though possibly originating further east. Under titles such as Akhbar al-Zaman (History of Time), images were given of an ancient Egypt possessing a high level of science, with knowledge extending back to antediluvian priests of Egypt, and a Hermes whose attributes even extended to building pyramids. The twelfth-century Andalusian Muslim writer on the history of science, Sa‛id al-Andalusi, wrote that ‘Hermes, a resident of Upper Egypt before the Flood, was the source of all science’. Muslim traditions credited him with contributions to astronomy, medicine and poetry, as well as building the pyramids and recording knowledge there. Egyptologist Erik Iversen has argued that in medieval Europe ‘an almost mystical veneration for the wisdom of the Egyptians lived on’.5 This was a period in which few Europeans reached Egypt, and little was experienced directly of Egyptian monuments and antiquities. The less that was known about ancient Egypt, the greater could be the sense of ancient – if heathen – knowledge. But the ancient Hermetic texts were known to Christian theologians and scholars. Two images of ancient Egypt were interwoven, but both credited it with great power. The Christian and Muslim image took from the Jewish Pentateuch the story of the Captivity from Joseph to Moses under powerful pharaohs, and the maintenance of Jewish monotheism under alien oppression. The classical authors – known to scholars in the Arabic-speaking world at least as much as in Europe – provided the image of Egyptian antecedents to Greek culture with a priestly cult possessing skills and knowledge. An interest in Hermeticism saw a revival with the Renaissance, initially not so much as a challenge to Christianity as a source to access ancient Egyptian knowledge of magic. The early Hermetic writings were published in translated editions in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, attracting interest from figures as diverse as seer Nostradamus and cosmologist Nicolaus Copernicus. The Catholic Italian friar Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) considered that Hermeticism was an authentic ancestor to the monotheistic religions – a view that was among the causes of his conviction on charges of heresy and subsequent execution. Historian Frances Yates suggested the early seventeenth century saw ‘a phase in which the Renaissance Hermetic-Cabalistic tradition had received the influx of another Hermetic tradition, that of alchemy’,6 giving another pillar to its support. But, with the growth of sophistication in classical scholarship, there were sceptical views from seventeenth-century scholars such as Isaac Casaubon, Francis Bacon and Hermann Conring, who suggested that the early Hermetic writings were fakes

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– if priestly fakes – around an invented Hermes who had never existed. While scholarship might argue its origins, interest and adaption of Hermeticism would continue. As early modern Europe reclaimed more of the classical heritage, a greater wealth of writing was revealed from Greek and Roman travellers to Egypt, while European travellers also reported on what they had seen in or from the Nile Valley. Interest in Egypt grew – but with no knowledge of the ancient language, and set within the framework of European ideologies. The idea was advanced by the English non-conformist Theophilus Gale in 1669 (and others) that the ancient Egyptians had learned religion and knowledge from the Jews. Dissenters argued the opposite: that the Hebrews had gained learned and indeed religious insights from the Egyptians. Hermes was central to many such lines of thought, seen as a contemporary (and teacher) of Moses or as an antecedent whose spiritual teaching was ancestral to Jewish monotheism and Christianity. With the erosion of the power of Catholic orthodoxy in parts of Europe and the growth of Reformation scholarship, of Protestantism, and the growing cohort of philosophers and scientists, the idea was strengthened that ancient Egyptian priestly cults had acquired knowledge independently and quite different from that of the revealed biblical narrative. But alongside the dominant view of classical writers that this meant knowledge of sciences and the arts, a belief continued in esoteric or mystical knowledge originating in ancient Egypt. Such knowledge may have been lost, but might still be traced. Isaac Newton and other Cambridge scholars were fascinated by the idea of ancient wisdom from Egypt, but tied it to their perception of links with Jewish beliefs. Newton considered science and religion had progressed hand in hand: a joint tradition to be found in ancient pharaonic Egypt and then reflected in both Jewish and classical traditions which were maintained in the contemporary era. Secret societies in Italy and elsewhere claimed access to such mysteries. Imaginative fiction and supposed mystic traditions were interwoven. Movements grew in Europe that claimed links to the ancient and mystical wisdom of Egypt: Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism and new Hermeticism, in traditions that are echoed in New Age movements of the present day. Mysticist ideas would be attributed to an Egyptian origin, and until the nineteenth-century expansion of scholarly knowledge about ancient Egyptian civilisation, such claims were easy to advance; thereafter they seemed surprisingly easy to maintain. Creating a cult involved ‘discovering’ some ancient literary or human repository of the ancient knowledge

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and building a group or following around its mysteries. Indeed it seems a common feature of many cults and mystical movements that as they progress in time, their supposed roots expand. The origins of the Rosicrucian movement can be traced to German publications in 1614–15 which attributed to an invented or allegorical ‘Christian Rosenkreu[t]z’ travels in the Arab world, where he had studied science and the magical arts to gain esoteric knowledge ultimately derived from the ancient world. This claim was further strengthened when Michael Maier, physician to the house of Hapsburg and enthusiast for alchemy and the occult, wrote of Egyptian (Hermetic) interpretations of fable and myth. As the Rosicrucian movement developed (at times interwoven with Freemasonry), the emphasis on an Egyptian origin of many of its mysteries grew.

Figure 1.3  Count Alessandro di Cagliostro (1743–95), mystic, Freemason, traveller and fraudster.

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Freemasonry has slightly later institutional origins, with Lodges established in several countries in the early eighteenth century. In the contested history of Freemasonry there have been suggestions of links to ancient Egyptian rites and knowledge, with symbols from Egypt used in different contexts within Freemasonry. More consistently Freemasonry has cited origins linked to Kings Solomon and Hiram. Fanciful fiction presented as revelation was a feature of the life (1743–95) of infamous fraudster ‘Count Alessandro di Cagliostro’ (Giuseppe Balsamo). In a career that included active contributions to Freemasonry, he created a panoply of occultist ideas which he attributed to revelations and to direct training in the ancient mysteries he had received in Egypt. He joined a Masonic lodge (with mainly French and Italian members) in London in 1716. He claimed to have read a manuscript treatise by George Coston suggesting an Egyptian origin for Freemasonry, founded by an Egyptian High Priest called the Great Copt or Copht. For some years he travelled within and outside of Freemason communities in Europe, pursuing the idea that he had instruction from (or indeed was himself) the Great Copht. He also extended his activities to selling ‘Egyptian’ amulets. His life ended in Italian prison, held on the Pope’s orders under the charge of Freemasonry: indeed as a ‘propagator of Egyptian Masonry’. An influential early novel by the French priest Jean Terrasson was published in 1731 in France and the following year in Germany and in England under the title Life of Sethos, Taken from Private Memoirs of the Ancient Egyptians (Sethos being the name of an Egyptian pharaoh in Herodotus’ Histories). The book’s title page described it as ‘translated from a Greek manuscript’ and the opening passage maintains the image of a ‘discovered’ work: The Greek manuscript, of which I here offer the Publick a Translation, was found in the library of a foreign nation, extremely jealous of this sort of treasure […] The author is no where named: But we find by several Passages in this work, that he was a Greek born, and lived at Alexandria, under the reign of Marcus Aurelius […] There is no room to doubt but this work is a fiction.7

Some took its imagined contents as inspiration for factual beliefs. French Freemasonry was both an influence on, and further influenced by, this book. Mozart’s 1791 opera The Magic Flute with libretto by fellow Freemason Emanuel Schikaneder used Egyptian themes that have been traced back to Sethos, while the character of Sarastro in the opera is considered to be based on Cagliostro.

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Figure 1.4  Egypt in a set design for Mozart’s The Magic Flute, by Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Opernhaus Berlin, 1817.

O Isis and Osiris! What delight! The dark night retreats from the light of the sun! – Soon will the noble youth experience a new life, soon will he be wholly dedicated to our Order. His spirit is bold, his heart is pure, soon will he be worthy of us.8

MODERN ADHERENTS OF EGYPTIAN MYSTERIES

In the modern era our knowledge of ancient Egypt has massively expanded, both in new data from excavations, explorations and translations of texts, and in analysis, interpretation and debate. But alongside this growth in scholarly and scientific research has been the continuation, and diversification, of esoteric cults and enthusiasms for imagined worlds of mystic Egypt, some emerging from Europe, many from the United States of America. Writings (or films, or websites) in this genre may draw from early sources such as the ancient or more recent Hermetic writings, while many selectively raid the scholarly Egyptological literature where it

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may be useful in supporting a core belief and argument. Many esoteric ideologies, whether religious or secular in nature, include some reference to ancient Egypt. The growth of scholarly knowledge and discussion has not, therefore, discouraged or reduced the enthusiasm for alternative Egypts of the imagination. The Book of Mormon was published in the state of New York in 1830 by Joseph Smith as a translation of the text on golden plates that had been revealed to him since a first vision in 1820. The text, concerning North Americans who had settled there from ancient Jerusalem, was said to have been written in ‘reformed Egyptian’ which Smith could translate with divinely supplied tools. And now, behold, we have written this record according to our knowledge, in the characters which are called among us the reformed Egyptian, being handed down and altered by us, according to our manner of speech. And if our plates had been sufficiently large we should have written in Hebrew; but the Hebrew hath been altered by us also; and if we could have written in Hebrew, behold, ye would have had no imperfection in our record.9

Another document which was long considered as one of the fundamental texts of the Church of Latter Day Saints (Mormons) is the Book of Abraham translated by Joseph Smith in 1835, some five years after he published the Book of Mormon. This, however, was based on real Egyptian papyri brought to Smith by their owner Michael Chandler to seek Smith’s help in translating them. Smith advised that the papyri provided the records of Joseph in Egypt, and of the patriarch Abraham, and with further divine inspiration he translated the second of these, though the volume was only published in 1842. One feature of this book was its emphasis on the divine curse on Ham and thereby on the negro race, although the ancient Egyptians were also defined as descendants of Ham and therefore cursed. Unfortunately for the later followers of Smith’s Church of Christ (founded in 1830), the knowledge of ancient Egyptian pioneered by Champollion gained ground and the papyri were shown to be standard funerary documents. Ancient Egypt was important to the ideas of the driving force behind the 1875 foundation in New York of the Theosophical Society, the Russian-born Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831–91). One of the most fascinating and enigmatic figures in modern religious movements, and a prodigious traveller, H. P. Blavatsky’s influence spread widely and has remained in today’s Theosophical Societies. Blavatsky wrote a book which she named Isis Unveiled: A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology (1877). This surveyed

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numerous religions, and included tributes to the importance of the Hermetic ideas and the Egyptian sources of these. To ancient Egypt – and India – she attributed lasting insights. The answers are there. They may be found on the time-worn granite pages of cavetemples, on sphinxes, propylons, and obelisks. They have stood there for untold ages, and neither the rude assault of time, nor the still ruder assault of Christian hands, have succeeded in obliterating their records […] The key was in the keeping of those who knew how to commune with the invisible Presence, and who had received, from the lips of mother Nature herself, her grand truths. And so stand these monuments like mute forgotten sentinels on the threshold of that unseen world, whose gates are thrown open but to a few elect.10

‘Madame’ Blavatsky would later be a supporter of alternative interpretations of the pyramids. But as Theosophy developed, ideas emphasising Egyptian influences became less important. Arguably they were of greater interest to her follower, the Austrian Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925), who broke with the Theosophical Society in 1913 to found the Anthroposophical Society. Among his writings is a book on Egyptian myths and mysteries which tracks the esoteric beliefs of his movement back to early Egyptian roots. He made much use of Egyptian images in proselytising his organisation and its arguments, and this line was maintained by his own follower, the Swiss-born Ernst Uehli (1875–1959), though making the chain of knowledge more complex by including Iranian prophet Zarathustra in the ancestry of Hermeticism. The Hermetic Movement of the Golden Dawn was founded in Britain in the 1880s. Its origins were influenced by Freemasonry and some Rosicrucian links. Its texts and indeed its meeting places referred to Egyptian deities, but it might well be seen, among the precursors of modern New Age movements, as one of the last of the Hermeticist tradition. A number of modern groups have adopted the seventeenth-century term Rosicrucian. The largest of these is the US organisation AMORC (Ancient Mystic Order Rosae Crucis), founded in 1915 by H. Spencer Lewis (1883–1939), its ‘first imperator’. AMORC writings have attributed their ideas to ancient Egyptian mystery schools with a specific development in the fifteenth-century bce reign of Tuthmosis III. In his history of the Rosicrucian order Rosicrucian Questions and Answers (1929 and subsequent editions) Lewis laid detailed claim to the antiquity underlying AMORC: ‘The Rosicrucian order has its traditional conception and

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birth in Egypt in the activities of the Great White Lodge.’ The ‘mystery schools’ taught the more profound secrets of nature, science and art. As their members became more select and teaching more profound, the pharaohs from Ahmose I taught directly, and Tuthmosis III established the current form of the organisation, in 1489 bce, on a Thursday (hence AMORC meetings were commonly held on a Thursday). The pharaoh Akhenaten was the major contributor to development; there were 282 Brothers and 62 Sisters in his time, and 410 at his death. In Lewis’s writing, Hermes (born 22 March 1257 bce) was a sage in the reign of Akhenaten and became Master of the Great White Brotherhood, with Moses enrolled as an initiate. In this presentation, Lewis was thus able to weave together aspects of Egyptian traditional religion, Akhenaten’s brief monotheistic period, Hermeticism and Judaism. In his 1916 book The Symbolic Prophecy of the Great Pyramid Lewis integrated alterative pyramidologies into his system. The organisation’s headquarters in San Jose, California, includes a museum of Egyptian antiquities. AMORC continues to trace its links to the ‘knowledge transmitted to it by the sages of Ancient Egypt’. Their website presents a statement on the heritage claimed by the organisation. The Rosicrucian movement, of which the Rosicrucian Order, AMORC, is the most prominent modern representative, has its roots in the mystery traditions, philosophy, and myths of ancient Egypt dating back to approximately 1500 B.C. In antiquity the word ‘mystery’ referred to a special gnosis, a secret wisdom. Thousands of years ago in ancient Egypt select bodies or schools were formed to explore the mysteries of life and learn the secrets of this hidden wisdom […] the Order’s first member-students met in secluded chambers in magnificent old temples, where, as candidates, they were initiated into the great mysteries […] The mystery schools, over centuries of time, gradually evolved into great centers of learning, attracting students from throughout the known world […] Centuries later, Greek philosophers such as Thales and Pythagoras, the Roman philosopher Plotinus, and others, journeyed to Egypt and were initiated into the mystery schools.11

Frenchman Alexandre Saint-Yves d’Alveydre (1842–1909) was a contemporary of Theosophist Blavatsky. His wide-ranging writings included contributions to occultism and he argued that Egyptian culture was an inheritor of the earlier lost civilisation of Atlantis which had constructed the Sphinx at Giza. The ideas of d’Alveydre would be echoed by René Schwaller de Lubicz, born in Alsace-Lorraine in 1887. He was an active writer, and pursued a range of interests from Theosophy

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Figure 1.5  H. Spencer Lewis (1883–1939), founder of the Ancient Mystical Order of the Rosae Crucis.

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to alchemy. In Le Temple dans l’homme (1949) he described a powerful political elite presumed to underlie ancient Egypt. His writing attributed esoteric scientific and mathematical skills to ancient Egypt. The idea of attributing the origins of ancient Egyptian civilisation to a lost civilisation of Atlantis gained prominence through the writing of Ignatius Donnelly (1831–1901). Donnelly, Pennsylvania-born, maintained over 18 years an active political career within Minnesota or representing that state in Congress. In a subsequent period without political office he turned to different kinds of controversy in writing about the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays and the idea of a catastrophic world flood caused by a passing comet. In his book Atlantis: The Antediluvian World (1882) he would argue in detail that ‘the oldest colony formed by the Atlanteans was probably in Egypt, whose civilisation was a reproduction of that of the Atlantic island’ of Atlantis. His arguments were secular in structure and intent: an alternative history of mankind, and especially of the origins of pharaonic civilisation. The explanation is simple: the waters of the Atlantic now flow over the country where all this magnificence and power were developed by slow stages from the rude beginnings of barbarism. And how mighty must have been the parent nation of which this Egypt was a colony! Egypt was the magnificent, the golden bridge, ten thousand years long, glorious with temples and pyramids, illuminated and illustrated by the most complete and continuous records of human history, along which the civilization of Atlantis, in a great procession of kings and priests, philosophers and astronomers, artists and artisans, streamed forward to Greece, to Rome, to Europe, to America […] we can still see the swarming multitudes, possessed of all the arts of the highest civilization, pressing forward from out that other and greater empire of which even this wonderworking Nile-land is but a faint and imperfect copy.12

Such ideas about Atlantean origins had resonance on the popular imagination: conscious, and perhaps – as in the case of Edgar Cayce – subconscious. Edgar Cayce from Kentucky (1877–1945) was a psychic whose visions were unconnected with the earlier mystical movements. Although claiming to be within the Christian tradition, his numerous visions while in a trance condition emphasised reincarnation, and proclaimed links both to the lost continent of Atlantis and to ancient Egypt which the Atlanteans had colonised. Cayce in his trances became Ra Ta, an eleventh-millennium bce priest in Egypt, with detailed visions of events in

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Egypt which had provided the foundation of spiritual values continuing through to Christianity. Cayce was among those who believed a repository of ancient knowledge – a ‘Hall of Records’ – was to be found beneath the Sphinx at Giza, an idea that has persisted. Of course, many individuals, not just those guided directly in sessions with Edgar Cayce, have claimed under hypnosis and otherwise a previous life in ancient Egypt (though commonly not this ancient). The significance of Cayce is the continuation of those who believe in his insights. Late in his (current) life in 1931 Cayce founded the not-for-profit Association for Research and Enlightenment (ARE), based in Virginia, whose supporters have built on the record of his psychic ‘readings’. Today it promotes holistic health and spiritual growth alongside the authority of Cayce’s visions of the ancient past of Egypt and beyond. In 2012 interested parties could attend an ARE conference in Virginia on ‘Egyptian Mysticism and Initiation: awakening the initiate within you’. Its website announced classes on the prophecy of the Great Pyramid of Giza, healing temples, chanting exercises and the stories of reincarnated Egyptians, led by a speaker who had ‘meditated in the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid over 80 times’.

NEW AGE AND ANCIENT EGYPT

An organisation such as the Association for Research and Enlightenment can be seen as a pioneering example in the category of ‘New Age’ models which developed most strongly in the decades from the 1960s, especially from bases in the United States. Many New Age movements emphasise spiritual values together with bodily health, but a special authority is gained when an ancient pedigree can be cited for their approach and ideas, as in the continuing ARE. This has led to a wide spectrum of links to ancient Egypt. The term ‘New Age’ has been applied to a broad range of approaches and movements, and the links of recent and contemporary movements and ideas to an imagined Egyptian heritage are also extremely diverse. We therefore need to avoid oversimplification: there is not a single, coherent Egyptosophy or Egyptocentric movement. At one extreme are individuals and groups who wish to share with others a deeply held spiritual insight and model for living, with a faith which is strengthened by a belief that it has inherited a tradition of wisdom of great (and specifically Nile Valley) antiquity. At the other extreme would be those who cynically exploit others’ ignorance, superstition and yearning for a new set of

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beliefs by publishing books, creating and broadcasting films, or providing tours and tourist facilities which exploit an invented mystic Egyptian past. Within the many New Age movements, groups and proponents and ideas, ancient Egypt therefore plays different roles. There are some which place themselves in the Rosicrucian, or Theosophical or Anthroposophical tradition. There are others who refer formally back to Hermetic writings, especially those of the early centuries ce, and claim to follow or develop ideas inspired by these. Then there are quite original New Age ideologies (some of which have adopted the label of Pagan) which nevertheless choose references to ancient Egypt as a source of inspiration. The term ‘Kemetism’, and sometimes ‘Kamatism’ (from vocalisation of the ancient Egyptian word for the land of Egypt, kmt) has been adopted by, or applied to, movements (again, especially in the United States) which have emerged during and since the 1970s as formal revivals of a supposed Ancient Egyptian religion. These contrast with older movements which integrated elements of Christianity with supposed earlier traditions. Some of the new movements have emerged within the African American community, reflecting the older tradition (discussed in Chapter 6) in which Ancient Egypt was considered a black civilisation, highly influential on later European civilisation, and an identification by which black American society might regain confidence and pride. Leading examples of such black American groups are the Nuwaubian movement founded by Malachi York in Georgia in the 1990s, and the earlier Ausar Auset Society originating in New York in the 1970s. The Ausar Auset Society emerged in a period also marked by radical (and at times violent) African American urban political movements, but with a very different concept of revolutionary change. It has since expanded through different US cities and also has chapters in the Caribbean, Toronto and London. Its main founder, Panamanian-born, renamed himself Ra Un Nefer Amen. He has spread the spiritual message of the society through books and pamphlets, lectures, videos and websites. While the Egyptian inspiration is explicit (Ausar = Osiris, Auset = Isis) and the iconography of the founder uses Egyptian themes, the belief system appears contemporary, with inspiration from different sources. It can thus be compared with the structure of earlier movements which attributed their origins in ancient wisdom but developed their beliefs and practices to meet contemporary needs. AAS spiritual practices aim at assisting each and every man and woman in the development of their divine qualities. The Society’s team of health practitioners stay

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current with leading edge advancement in holistic health science, and its members are taught vegetarian diet and health practices relevant to modern living. The Ausar Auset Society is a Pan-African religious organization […] as well as a social vehicle that allows for the expression of the spiritual values learned […] Based on the indigenous traditional African cultures dating from the earliest documentable periods (Kamit [ancient Egypt], Indus Kush [pre-Aryan Vedantic India], Canaan [Palestine], and Kush/Nubia [Ethiopia/Sudan]), the classes taught revolve around the oldest religion known to mankind – the Ausarian religion of ancient Kamit. The Kamitic Tree of Life (Paut Neteru) forms the basis of the cosmogony (philosophy) of this ancient system […] The Ausar Auset Society functions as an international body that teaches Kamitic philosophy (cosmology), meditation and ritual, oracle consultation, yoga, nutrition, herbalism, homeopathy, astrology, African history/ culture, and other disciplines.13

The Nuwaubian movement emerged later, identifiable by the 1990s in the US state of Georgia. Its founder, Malachi York is a controversial figure whose approach has developed a more contentious reputation than other groups that cite Egyptian inspiration, due in part to York’s subsequent long-term prison sentence on charges including racketeering. Despite this, it continues to have followers who identify with a Nuwaubian movement and use Egyptian terms and iconography alongside eclectic use of other elements.

Figure 1.6  The revival of ancient Egyptian religion: a modern Kemetic shrine of Thoth.

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The mix and different foci of Kemetism tends to reflect the background of the individual founders of each group. The Church of the Eternal Source in the USA also dates from 1970, its main founder, Harold Moss (1937–2010) coming from a white Californian Theosophist family. The church states that it: follows the principles of Egyptian spirituality and religion including honoring all of the Ancient Egyptian Gods and Goddesses and utilizing the Goddess Ma’at in finding a balance, harmony and order between one’s self, the world and the afterlife. We reconstruct the Ancient Egyptian Religions as they were practiced by the Egyptian temples and through personal worship, in the context of the modern world, and incorporate these beliefs into our daily lives. Our knowledge is based on information gathered from studying scholarly sources in Egyptology, translations from ancient texts as well as personal revelation.14

Arguably, in such an organisation dedicated to following ancient Egyptian religion, it is accuracy and adherence to the best scholarly knowledge of ancient Egypt that matters. The church’s website has clear links to such scholarly resources and organisations. The House of Netjer defines the group’s beliefs as ‘Kemetic Orthodoxy’. Its founding spirit around 1988 was a Chicago-trained Egyptology graduate, Tamara Siuda, from a Methodist family in Illinois. Her group name as leader (Nisut) is now Her Holiness Sekhenet-Ma’at-Ra Setep-en-Ra Hekatawy I. The group’s practices and beliefs are based upon her interpretation of those of ancient Egypt, although the language is more modern and individualistic and the movement claims not to be polytheistic. The recommended reading of the organisation is also the orthodox Egyptological literature, and none of the quasi-historical alternative histories are cited. An example of those proselytising a version of Egyptian beliefs are the New Hampshire authors and publishers trading as Akhet Hwt-Hrw and as Kephra Publications. The founders have an eclectic background which may not be atypical of New Age groups: both interested in ‘The Western Mysteries’ (European occultism), one an astrologer, hypnotherapist and ‘forensic hypnotist’ with a background in Celtic esotericism before enrolment in a Hermetic order, his partner celebrating her native American heritage but with interest in European sorcery. Other groups combine aspects of Egyptian religion with those of other pagan (Wicca) beliefs, allowing a mix-and-match approach. There are websites in which

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enthusiasts for following elements of Kemetism and Egyptian religion can share information and ideas. The Kemetic movement of ‘pagan’ religions is primarily a United States phenomenon, although the French Ta Noutri also operated as an informal group following Egyptian religion.

SECULAR EGYPT

Numerous recent books, films and websites present images of Egypt which are at sharp variance to those within scholarly Egyptological debates, but without an intention of creating religious or New Age cults. Where support for such ideas builds up into large (and often internet-based) groups, they might, however, be considered as secular quasi-cults. As discussed in Chapter 2, a number of such models of alternative Egypts focus on providing alternative interpretations of the Egyptian pyramids, notably the Great Pyramid of Giza, but others have a broader remit. The flow of books and films attributing to ancient Egyptian civilisation an earlier, Atlantean or extraterrestrial origin looks unlikely to dry up. The US-based History Channel on cable and satellite television has come under criticism from scholars for broadcasting uncritical films which they categorise as pseudohistory and pseudoarchaeology: from alien invasions to Nostradamus to impending world catastrophes. Episodes in their series ‘Ancient Aliens’ have had audiences of up to two million viewers. Such contemporary proponents differ on the origins they attribute to ancient Egyptian civilisation. Whereas earlier alternative models would often credit the Egyptians themselves with greater powers and knowledge (knowledge which might be encoded within the Great Pyramid if not buried in a temple), writers may now favour other earlier origins: migrants from Atlantis, or the activity of extraterrestrials, as in works such as Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods (1968) or Robert Temple’s The Sirius Mystery (1975). Special powers held in the pyramids remain dominant in such ideas, but the Sphinx near the Pyramids of Giza has its own appeal. This challenges the Egyptological dating to the reign of Old Kingdom pharaoh Khafre about 2550 bce. As with the pyramids, in these arguments the Sphinx sculpture is treated out of its local architectural or artistic context and attributed to Atlanteans or pre-Egyptians. It may be assigned as the location of hidden records of esoteric wisdom yet to be recovered. Such ideas spread deep in popular imagination. American John Anthony West was influenced by the approach of de Lubicz in

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his Serpent in the Sky: The High Wisdom of Ancient Egypt (1979, revised 1993). West was able to advance his views of the great antiquity of the Sphinx to over 33 million viewers in the 1993 documentary Mystery of the Sphinx (narrated by actor Charlton Heston and winning an Emmy Award). Egyptian science, medicine, mathematics and astronomy were all of an exponentially higher order of refinement and sophistication than modern scholars will acknowledge […] Moreover, every aspect of Egyptian knowledge seems to have been complete at the very beginning […] Egyptian civilisation was not a ‘development’, it was a legacy […] It is now possible virtually to prove the existence of another, and perhaps greater civilization ante-dating dynastic Egypt – and all other known civilizations – by millennia. In other words, it is now possible to prove ‘Atlantis’, and simultaneously, the historical reality of the Biblical Flood.15

In 2012 West was offering ‘Magical Egypt Tours […] focusing on Symbolism, Metaphysics and Alternative Egyptology’, including optional ‘Private Great Pyramid Meditation’.16 Influential American writer Robert Schoch followed this argument while incorporating the pyramids into his model of an ancient pre-pharaonic Egypt (see Chapter 2). Schoch has also written on catastrophism and parapsychology, and has extended his interests in unorthodox history to other themes. I’m scheduled to speak in England for the first time, at the Megalithomania Conference in Glastonbury. I will present my latest research, which connects the Great Sphinx of Egypt to the 12,000-year-old site in Turkey known as Göbekli Tepe; both bear witness to events that brought the last ice age to an end. I will also speak about my research and recent visits to Easter Island.17

Atlantis as an ancient civilisation and as the (eleventh-millennium bce) source of early Egyptian monuments and later Egyptian civilisation gained support in the widely selling books of Robert Bauval, author of The Orion Mystery: Unlocking the Secrets of the Pyramids (1994). Bauval has not so much ignored established scholarship as taken up battle with it. His 2012 book Breaking the Mirror of Heaven: The Conspiracy to Suppress the Voice of Ancient Egypt, with controversial Egyptian author Ahmed Osman, seeks to ‘reveal the long-hidden and persecuted voice of ancient Egypt and call for the return of Egypt to its rightful place as the Mother of Nations and the Mirror of Heaven’.

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Bauval also worked with the Briton Graham Hancock, the highly successful author of books such as Fingerprints of the Gods: The Evidence of Earth’s Lost Civilization (1995), on a joint book published in 1996, Keeper of Genesis (also published as Message of the Sphinx) and dedicated to John Anthony West. Hancock, too, has written across a broad range of alternative history and archaeology, from the lost Ark of the Covenant to transatlantic travellers, as well as shamanism and altered states of consciousness. His writing has expanded from what others might describe as fantasy non-fiction to write what he himself described as fantasy fiction: [W]e have journeyed back in time to stand beneath skies more than 12,000 years old […] we believe that we are able to identify with certainty who and what the Sphinx really is […] Meanwhile the Great Sphinx waits patiently. Keeper of secrets. Guardian of mysteries.18

Such books are typically dismissed by scholars as ‘pseudohistory’ and ‘pseudoarchaeology’. This is a broad category, and one which stretches from bestselling authors of major trade publishing houses, attracting reviews in respectable magazines and newspapers, through to privately distributed pamphlets and supporting websites. At their most professional, these often share certain characteristics, including a clear and inviting writing style. They are typically filled out with selected academic data and references, not always relevant to the argument made, but sufficient to imply to the reader a serious intent and knowledge. To these are added the authors’ own observations. It is not uncommon for writers in this genre to dismiss the imagined pasts in other writers’ work as flawed and fantastic – claims which give the impression the current writer must be different. Bold theories are advanced, with the clear implication that scholarly specialists of Egypt are narrow and indeed just wrong; or, sometimes, that they are suppressing the truth for professional purposes. Finally, a feature of much in the genre is that they leave conclusions open: there remains some mystery about what actually happened; we just know that the conventional views are in error. These authors may be conscious about their role. In their 2012 book Bauval and Osman celebrate ‘alternative’ Egyptologists, who challenged old dogmas with radical and controversial new theories and highlighted an Egypt far older, more mysterious, and more sophisticated than previously thought. Books […] that hit the bestseller lists and

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brought Egyptology out of the confines of a dry academia […] ancient Egypt and its mysteries spread like wildfire.19

Such alternative, quasi-historical arguments applied to ancient Egypt provide fiercely alternative histories, but have only tangential connection with New Age groups seeking religious sustenance from an early Egyptian priestly tradition. These groups may choose to adopt the arguments of the alternative histories, but the major authors of these books reach a far wider readership than those that are attracted to New Age beliefs and cults. Less influential but no less committed – and, atypically, Canadian and female – is the work of Carmen Boulter. Her five-part video documentary series The Pyramid Code has broader goals as part of her examination of ‘matriarchal consciousness, ancient knowledge and sophisticated technology in a Golden Age’. The Pyramid Code […] explores the pyramid fields and ancient temples in Egypt as well as ancient megalithic sites around the world looking for clues to matriarchal consciousness, ancient knowledge and sophisticated technology in a Golden Age […] The series explores penetrating questions: Who were the ancients and what did they know? Could the pyramids be much older than traditional Egyptology would have us believe? Could it be that the ancients were more technologically advanced than we are today? […] Are we really the most advanced civilization to ever live on Earth?20

Carmen Boulter’s website offered the opportunity for travellers to join a tour of ‘Magic Egypt’ which covers some of the more conventional tourist sites of pharaonic Egypt but with an esoteric interpretation. Within Egypt itself, as Lisa Wynn has described, tourist facilities are accommodating the needs of these ‘alternative’ tourists – both secular and New Age. Arguably guides have bent their interpretations to tell visitors what they wanted to hear since Herodotus’ time or before. But given the importance of tourism to Egypt’s economy and the growth of visitors who seek something different from conventional history and archaeology, not only tour operators are meeting their needs. The bodies responsible for the administration of antiquities and sites have recognised this development and sought to meet its interests, though within a framework of continuing to protect sites. Meanwhile, the visitor who wants to take away an image of the mystic knowledge of ancient Atlantean priests, and some healing crystals as a memento, will find Egypt welcoming enough.

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While many of the modern invented mysteries of Egypt stem from Europe or North America, it is worth mentioning an Egyptian development with an Arab world following. That is the belief in a powerful substance, ‘red mercury’ (al-zīʼbaq al-ahmar) or Egyptian mercury (al-zīʼbaq al-masri), whose healing properties date back to ancient Egyptian priests and which can supposedly be found within containers in ancient Egyptian tombs, especially those of pharaohs. The break-in and thefts at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo which took place during the political unrest of January 2011 were attributed to a search for this material to sell on the Arab black market. With the growth of the internet, it is no longer necessary to undertake a lecture tour, publish a book, make a film or start an organisation to advance an ‘alternative’ view about Ancient Egypt: a website is enough. And a group can advance their perspectives using multiple media via the Web. Any search for references to phrases around the theme of a mystic Egypt will uncover an astonishing number and variety of sites, offering tourism, history and alternative histories, theologies, theories of aliens and Atlantis, advertisements for books and films and talks. Some are just sites which collect multiple alternative ideas without arguing specifically for their validity, while others are sites like www.catchpenny.org which challenge the alternative models of Egypt or other quasi-histories.

THE MEANING OF ALTERNATIVE EGYPTS

There is such a broad range of alternative ideas of ancient Egypt, at odds with those within scholarly discourse, that generalisations are dangerous. Those who respect Hermetic literature as a source of personal spiritual inspiration may have little in common with creators of a website about extraterrestrials marking out the Great Pyramid as a landing site. But there are trends which group together some of the ‘alternative Egypts’ and themes which help the understanding of these diverse imagined worlds. The physical survival of antiquities and monuments from ancient Egypt (especially temples and tombs) carry some responsibility for the attraction to alternative history of the Nile Valley over, say, the Indus Valley. Mesopotamia may have the civilisations but lacks the grandeur of so many visible monuments that the Nile Valley presents, the latter offering far greater accessibility to the visitor (and film-maker) than many other great civilisations.

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As noted above, it is important to distinguish between invented worlds (which contest the scholarly knowledge of Egypt gained since the mid- to late nineteenth century) and those best-guess imaginings which preceded that era. Especially, rational writers and thinkers sought to fit what they could learn of ancient Egypt within their own world view – from classical Greeks making comparisons with their own gods and sciences, to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century savants working within a biblical chronology which placed all of human (and world) history within six millennia. Such approaches are different from the created document, the fraudulent tradition, whether generated to support a faith-based argument or merely to deceive. The second-century Hermetic writings of the Roman Empire, the eleventh-century Hermetic writings from the Islamic world, the Egyptian Freemasonry of Count Cagliostro are such, while critics would place some of the more recent writers and proselytisers in this genre. Two ironies can be observed. One – certainly not limited to Egyptosophy – is the growth of supposed sources as a movement or idea advances. A cult may originate with only one or two founding sources documents; as it grows and develops, more sources are ‘discovered’ and cited and the heritage of apparent historical authenticity can increase with the distance from a first emergence. Notable too is the apparent growth of alternative models as the scholarly knowledge also grows. Instead of killing off esoteric and mystical images of Egypt, the massive growth of studies of the archaeology, history and literature of Egypt has been accompanied by the growth of the alternatives. Every television documentary on some aspect of ancient Egypt seen through the eyes of conventional knowledge and interpretation seems matched by another about the mystery, riddle, magic or unknown aspects of Egypt, about Atlanteans or extraterrestrials, and hidden or secret knowledge. Even films which reach conclusions in line with scholarly and scientific research may have titles which suggest they are addressing mysteries, puzzles and secrets which Egyptologists would regard just as explanations and interpretations. Most surveys of ancient Egypt by historians, archaeologists and Egyptologists do not engage with the ‘alternative’ Egypts we have outlined. They do not regard them as substitute interpretations or legitimate challenges, but as another kind of writing or activity. Most would probably class Kemetism or the alternative histories of a Bauval or Schoch with deliberate fictions like the 1994 movie, and subsequent television series, Stargate, using themes of intergalactic aliens and ancient Egypt for entertainment with no implication that it is anything more. But they would endorse the active critics of ‘pseudohistory’ and ‘pseudoarchaeology’.

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There is probably limited value in offended specialists denouncing all the proponents of alternative understandings of Egypt with anger, frustration or despair. These proponents may have rejected the views that have emerged and been refined in two centuries of research and in tens of thousands of books and articles and seminars, but their agendas are different. ‘Mystic Egypt’ exists to meet a range of human needs, among certain people, within certain societies. These needs may be a yearning for an anti-establishment framework of knowledge: a set of interpretations which show that academia is narrow, bigoted, dull. Or they may be for a set of spiritual values and a feeling – not to be tested in too much detail – that these are ultimately inherited from ancient knowledge passed down from deep in human history. There seems no likelihood that invented pasts of an esoteric, mystic Egypt of secret, sacred knowledge will vanish. Despite the diversity of Western ideas, interpretations and uses of ancient Egypt in the last fourteen centuries has been the distancing of that past from the dominant ideology of the same land, that of Islam (from 639 ce, with Ottoman control from 1517 ce). Whether Christian or secular, New Age or quasi-scientific, cultic or political in focus, the constructions of a mystic Egypt have served to sever the Nile Valley from its Muslim citizens and rulers, often to forge or suggest a direct link between the ancients and the writer’s time and place – a link in which there is no role for Islamic Egypt. And some of these have their strongest representation when applied to Egypt’s pyramids, as discussed in the next chapter.

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CHAPTER 2

PYRAMIDOLOGIES AND PYRAMID MYSTERIES

The pyramids of Egypt have long attracted some of the most extreme ‘alternative’ interpretations of ancient Egypt – an exceptionally broad range of mutually contradictory ‘explanations’ which have attracted the designation of ‘pyramidiocy’ from their critics. To academic specialists, the pyramids were originally built as the monuments, first seen about 2550 bce in Old Kingdom Egypt, that mark royal burial places, constructed by Egyptian labour, designed by Egyptian engineers and architects working for a powerful centralised pharaonic state within an ideology that paid particular attention to the afterlife. The best known and most visited of Egypt’s numerous pyramids are those at Giza, on the desert edge 20 kilometres south-west of Cairo, and the largest of these is the so-called Great Pyramid, that of pharaoh Khufu (the Cheops of classical texts), from around 2520 bce. Built from limestone blocks and some internal granite with a hidden underground chamber dug into the bedrock, it is the only survivor of the ancient Seven Wonders of the World. But there is a large and significant set of traditions which provide dramatically alternative interpretations of the pyramids. Typically – though not always – these disengage their subject from the context of Egyptian society. Some concentrate only on the Giza pyramids, and many have developed and applied their ideas exclusively on the Great Pyramid. The range and diversity of alternative pyramidologies is substantial: at least 30 different uses or meanings have emerged over two millennia, with a burst of new approaches in recent decades. Most are incompatible, though occasionally an

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Figure 2.1  The pyramids as the granaries of the biblical Joseph: thirteenth-century mosaic from San Marco Basilica, Venice.

author will suggest several possibilities. In these approaches, the Great Pyramid may be anything but just a royal tomb of an Old Kingdom pharaoh. It may be a repository for ancient knowledge, encoded in its measurements or buried within its structure. This may be knowledge about the dimensions of the earth, or about the wider universe, or time past and future, or mathematics, or spiritual knowledge. It may hold secrets about physical or biological science and be able to effect changes to physical matter or biological materials. It may be a tool for predicting the future, for astronomy, for astrology. There are more prosaic, if no less improbable, pyramidologies: the Great Pyramid was a training centre in ancient mysteries, or an initiation centre, or a temple; it was built for protection against earthquakes, or as a repository for sacred objects, or a giant water pump. It was built by Iranians or Atlanteans, or by extraterrestrials who made it a marker for a landing pad, or just a monument. There are readily testable ideas, such as the claim that the Great Pyramid was built of synthetic (and therefore not pharaonic) materials; there are more untestable theories, such as the existence of hidden chambers; there are hardto-test theories, such as that Egypt’s antiquities administration are hiding secret evidence, or that they themselves have access to a secret pyramid tunnel.

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While alternative pyramidologies of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries may have introduced aliens to Giza, much earlier traditions linked it to the early Jewish traditions in the Old Testament/Tanakh and thence the Qur’an. Alongside secular interpretations there have been many pious attempts to integrate the pharaonic pyramids into a contemporary religious narrative – whether a conventional religion, a derivative sect, or a new religious cult. Critics of ‘pseudohistory’ and ‘pseudoarchaeology’ take the alternative pyramidologies as a classic example of invented pasts, interpretations based not on science but on fantasy and imagination. To most Egyptologists writing on the pyramids, these are not of relevance or interest, though the term ‘pyramidiots’ pursuing ‘pyramidiocy’ has been applied to these rival interpreters. Where they are mentioned, it is more a focus on the pre-scientific attempts to understand the pyramids, or the nineteenth-century attempts to use ratios of pyramid measurements in a grand theory about their role. This led a young Englishman with surveying knowledge, William Matthew Flinders Petrie, to Egypt to check the measurements, and thus brought a great pioneer excavator of Egypt into the field.

PYRAMID NON-MYSTERIES

The Egyptian pyramids naturally attract admiration and wonder now, as they did to early Greek and Roman visitors, and doubtless to ancient Egyptians too. This has stimulated substantial scientific research on these sites; like any subject, there remains room for debate and discussion, but only limited ‘mystery’. Egypt maintained remarkable continuity of belief – about the gods, the afterlife and the role of the state and the pharaoh. Theology developed and changed; ritual and belief varied by class and place and time; but continuity rather than revolution and change is a theme of Egyptian history. Interrupted by the 17-year rule of the monotheistic reign of Akhenaten in the fourteenth century bce, society moved quickly back to earlier norms. When new ruling houses came from the Libyan west, or the Kushitic south, or indeed from Macedonia, their authority was marked by adoption of the form and titles of their antecedent pharaohs. King lists emphasised the longevity of pharaonic rule; iconography reflected this, with the dual crown of Upper and Lower Egypt. In Sakkara the architect of the Step Pyramid, Imhotep, was honoured over 2,000 years later with an active cult in which citizens sacrificed ibises. The emphasis on an afterlife which continued much of the pattern of earthly society is reflected in three millennia of Egyptian tombs. The pyramids, a tradition

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developed in the Old Kingdom (c.2575–2125 bce), are the above-ground markers of tombs which may be within them or below ground level. The form saw some revival on a smaller scale in the Middle Kingdom. Rather more than 120 pyramids were built in ancient Egypt. There was a revival of pyramid architecture in Sudan in the first millennium bce and the first three centuries ce. But it is Khufu’s Pyramid at Giza that has attracted most of the attention and claims of the alternative views, although its neighbour, that of Khafre (Chephren), has linear measurements only 6 per cent less. Khufu’s pyramid has a burial chamber within the superstructure rather than just in the bedrock beneath the pyramid. Indeed, it has even been suggested by Egyptologist David Jeffreys that the size and location of the true pyramids makes them look of uniform size when viewed from the capital city of Memphis. The origin of the pyramid form seems to lie in the flat mud-brick royal tombs of the first dynasties, called mastabas. The Step Pyramid of Djoser at Sakkara is effectively a stack of six mastabas of reducing size, using limestone in its construction. Over the next century the form evolved to the smooth-sided pyramids seen at Giza, with that of Khufu the largest. The Great Pyramid was certainly a symbol of a powerful centralised state. It was a state able to accumulate wealth from agricultural surpluses through taxation and then redistribute them as payments for labour. The seasonal nature of Egyptian agriculture, set by the annual Nile flood, may well have helped in such demands for intensive labour. The creation of major monuments under the direction of political and religious elites (often the same) can be tracked throughout human history: from the tenthmillennium bce temple of Göbekli Tepe in Turkey, through the cathedrals and mosques of the medieval world, to the palaces of twentieth-century dictators in Africa and the Middle East. Such constructions have symbolic functions but also economic ones: the role of major construction as an economic driver and stimulus was not purely the discovery of John Maynard Keynes. Whether this is described as forced labour or heavily incentivised labour may be subjective. In constructing a large, solid monument, form is dominated by function, by available materials and by technology. Unlike the Meso-American temple of Chichen Itza, or the Cahokia mound in western Illinois, or a Babylonian Ziggurat, the external surface of the pyramid was not functional. Building a monument to maximum height requires either a cone or a pyramid, unless a column suffices; and if stone is to be used, a pyramid has construction advantages. The angle of the sides is limited by the means of hauling and positioning building materials. It requires

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careful planning by mathematicians, architects and engineers, but the centralised power of Old Kingdom pharaohs was more than sufficient to support such specialist skills. The main commitment is labour, in securing and erecting materials. Making an exact design in orientation and symmetry is not the main challenge. Much is known about Old Kingdom Egypt and the context of pyramid building, some now from excavations at the workers’ village south of the Sphinx at Giza. If the pyramid signifies something other than a large monument built to an exact, symmetrical and physically achievable design, then the symbolism of the form remains open to debate. Egyptologists have suggested three different analogies for the pyramid shape. One casts the pyramid as a stairway for the pharaoh to reach the heavens; the Step Pyramid of successive mastabas makes this more convincing than the subsequent smooth-sided pyramids. Alternatively, the smooth sides of a pyramid may represent the sloping rays of the sun, in an era when the sun deity Ra was of particular importance to the rulers of Egypt. Perhaps better attested is the comparison between the pyramid form and the benben, the mound which arose from primordial waters to provide a place for the deity Atum to settle. The implication is that the pyramid form symbolised this primeval mound. A benben stone – probably not itself pyramidal – was erected at a temple in Heliopolis. But Egyptologist Barry Kemp has noted the very different forms in which the benben is presented, and suggests that supposed links with the sun may be verbal, not visual. Perhaps that symbolic interpretation of the pyramid form was subsidiary to the selection of the form on architectural grounds. Before exploring the range of inventions, fantasies, beliefs and hopes about the pyramids, and the Great Pyramid of Khufu at Giza in particular, it is salutary to note the realism of Pliny the Elder (23–79 ce): The pyramids in Egypt deserve mention, even if only incidentally. They are a pointless and absurd display of royal wealth, since the general view is that they were built either to deny money to the kings’ successors and the rivals who plotted against them, or else to keep the people employed. These men showed much vanity in this enterprise.1

EARLY CONCEPTS OF THE PYRAMIDS

Egypt was frequently visited by Greek and Roman travellers, and many classical writers knew of the pyramids’ role as monuments for dead pharaohs, and described

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the form and dimensions of what they themselves saw or had learnt from previous writers. They did not attribute mystical or divine purpose to them, although they did hear and repeat local informants’ stories of the historical background which contained much that was imaginary. Herodotus in his Histories reported what he was told by priests and others in Egypt – a mixture of fable and reconstructed history, in which his informants made suggestions about the time and labour involved in building the Giza pyramids. Diodorus Siculus in the first century bce presented a rational view of the challenges of building the pyramids, which he discussed in some detail, while repeating the local stories he was told. The eighth king, Chemmis of Memphis, ruled fifty years and constructed the largest of the three pyramids, which are numbered among the seven wonders of the world […] by the immensity of their structures and the skill shown in their execution they fill the beholder with wonder and astonishment […] It is said that the stone was conveyed over a great distance from Arabia and that the construction was effected by means of mounds, since cranes had not yet been invented at that time […] an inscription on the larger pyramid gives the sum of money expended on it, since the writing sets forth that on vegetables and purgatives for the workmen there were paid out over sixteen hundred talents […] It is generally agreed that these monuments far surpass all other constructions in Egypt, not only in their massiveness and cost but also in the skill displayed by their builders. And they say that the architects of the monuments are more deserving of admiration than the kings who furnished the means for their execution; for in bringing their plans to completion the former called upon their individual souls and their zeal for honour, but the latter only used the wealth which they had inherited and the grievous toil of other men.2

The understanding that the pyramids marked burials was echoed in Coptic Christianity of Egypt and among many subsequent Arab writers, though the names given to specific kings vary widely. But it is unsurprising that scholars and writers in the medieval traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam sought further explanations of the massive monuments of Egypt which fitted the world view of their own religions and religious literature. The later continuation of some of these ideas may be more surprising. Jewish historian Josephus, writing in the late first century ce about the labours of the Israelites in captivity in Egypt, extended his paraphrasing of Exodus with some interpretation of what their forced labour at the hands of the Egyptians involved:

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They enjoined them to cut a great many channels for the river, and to build walls for their cities and ramparts […] they set them also to build pyramids; and by all this wore them out; and forced them to learn all sorts of mechanical arts, to accustom them to hard labour. And four hundred years did they spend under these afflictions.3

This suggestion added to the Tanakh/Old Testament text has persisted until today within Jewish communities and even in Egypt itself, linking the labour of the biblical Israelites to the construction of the pyramids. An alternative biblical link of the pyramids saw them as constructed for grain storage by the biblical Joseph, who in Genesis: gathered up all the food of the seven years when there was plenty in the land of Egypt, and stored up food in the cities: he stored up in every city the food from the fields around it. So Joseph stored up grain in such abundance – like the sand of the sea – that he stopped measuring it.4

There is an echo of this in the Qur’an, where Joseph wins favour with the pharaoh and says: ‘Place in my charge the store-houses of the land; behold, I shall be a good and knowing keeper.’5 Another Qur’anic reference which some see as implying a pyramid is when Moses confronts a later pharaoh: ‘kindle me a fire for [baking bricks of] clay, and then build me a lofty tower, that haply I may have a look at the god of Moses.’6 The identification of the pyramids as these grain storage facilities was made by fifth-century Julius Honorius in his Cosmographica, and the same idea was echoed in the Arab world. It took hold in medieval Europe. Some support came from a passage in the account of his journeys in Egypt by late-twelfth-century traveller Rabbi Benjamin from Tudela in Spain: The store-houses also of Joseph of blessed memory are to be found in great numbers in many places. They are built of lime and stone, and are exceedingly strong. A pillar is there of marvellous workmanship, the like of which cannot be seen throughout the world.7

More influential was the reference in the fourteenth-century The Travels of Sir John Mandeville by an unknown author, a book now seen as a mixture of real and borrowed experience with pure invention. The text is unambiguous on

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Joseph’s Barns, which still exist in Egypt beyond the River Nile towards the desert that is between Egypt and Africa. There are Joseph’s Barns which were made to keep corn in for the seven lean years which were foretold in the seven dead ears of wheat which King Pharaoh saw in a dream, as the first books of the Bible says. And they are made wonderfully clever of well-hewn stone. Two of them are marvellously high, and broad too; the remainder are not so big […] Some men say they are the tombs of some great men in ancient times; but the common opinion is that they are the Barns of Joseph, and they find that in their chronicles. And truly, it is not likely that they are tombs, since they are empty inside and have porches and gates in front of them. And tombs ought not, in reason, to be so high.8

The influence of this view is demonstrated in the thirteenth-century mosaic in the second north cupola of Saint Mark’s Basilica in Venice. Here Joseph is shown distributing grain against a background of his granaries: six tall pyramids, with windows in the upper part of the forward group. The pyramids were described by many travellers and writers in the medieval and later Muslim world, though often in the context of dismissing the paganism of the ancients. To many Muslim philosophers and writers the pyramids served as examples of the pharaohs’ arrogance. Writing in the fifteenth century, Egyptian historian al-Maqrizi held to the view that the pyramids contained records of ancient knowledge not yet recovered, and his ideas had some influence on later European interpretations. Renaissance Europe saw a rise of interest in aspects of ancient Egypt – elements of its architecture and art in particular. And with Reformation scholarship and its emphasis on classical sources, the understanding was maintained that the pyramids represented the burial places of ancient Egyptian rulers. There were, however, later explanations of the pyramids to fit with traditional religious beliefs, giving ancient Egypt a rather surprising role in early religion. George Stanley Faber, in 1816, saw the pyramid as a representation of Mount Ararat on which Noah had landed after the Great Flood, and produced complicated explanations for the disappearance of this tradition and the belief they were tombs in reality rather than in an allegorical sense: We shall now begin to perceive the reason, why each Egyptian pyramid, though like every other pyramid a copy of mount Meru or mount Ararat, was […] declared by the priesthood to be the tomb of a very ancient king of the country […] as mount Ararat was at one the altar and the allegorical tomb of the patriarch; every pyramid,

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though used sacrificially as an altar, was not on that account the less esteemed his tomb also.9

And so on for several pages. To the English author on religion William Osburn, writing in the 1840s and 1850s, the Great Pyramid was a copy of the biblical Tower of Babel, an idea not widely taken up. Knowledge of Egyptian history and language was by now significantly greater, making Osburn something of a pioneer in raising models in opposition to current scholarly research in the books he published. His books were intended to strengthen belief in the historicity of the Bible and give new importance in ancient history to Israel. But others would come to give the pyramids, or just the Great Pyramid, and their creators a quite individual role in history.

MULTIPLE DIFFERENT ALTERNATIVES

Discussions of Egyptian pyramids by academic Egyptologists are based upon the physical evidence of the sites, in the context of wider evidence for the same periods of Egyptian history derived from texts, monuments and objects in other locations. The largest ‘metrical’ group of alternative pyramidologies from the mid-nineteenth century to today, described in detail later in this chapter, also believed they were using hard physical evidence in demonstrating their theories. These use measurements and ratios to create interpretations of the pyramids as maps of the earth or the stars or of time past and future, and more. However, once one moves away from material evidence, it is possible to advance very diverse and different ideas. This is especially notable when the Great Pyramid of Khufu is considered independently from other pyramids, and out of the context of our knowledge of ancient Egyptian society. Pyramids have stimulated what could be called creativity or fantasy, imagination or pyramidiocy, alternative histories or pseudohistories. Many in this class of ‘non-metrical’ interpretations see the Great Pyramid as functional rather than symbolic, although they rarely explain why it was necessary to build at such a scale: 2.5 million cubic metres on a base of 230 metres. The idea is indeed old-established that the Great Pyramid, in particular, contained ancient knowledge but not in the form of measurements and ratios. The pyramid form is associated with some Masonic traditions; ‘Count’ Cagliostro wove into his personal narrative the story that he had received secret initiation within

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the Great Pyramid. Pyramids feature in the setting of Mozart’s The Magic Flute, both symbolically and the location, with an inscribed wall, within which a scene is set. Even the presence of a pyramid on the United States dollar bill has been traced by some to a Masonic influence. The idea of the Great Pyramid as a centre for ritual initiation and training was more recently developed by US author Robert Schoch, in popular works such as Voyages of the Pyramid Builders (2003) and Pyramid Quest: Secrets of the Great Pyramid and the Dawn of Civilization (2005), both with R. A. McNally. We assume that the latter book’s reference to a ‘scared space’ in the pyramid (p. 209) is a misprint. Schoch has hedged his bets by describing other theories without clearly rejecting or endorsing them. His conclusions were that the Great Pyramid has multiple stages of development, with origins in a pre-pharaonic civilisation, but all linked to a goal to ‘replicate the cosmos’. Its initial use as a sacred site he dates before 5000 bce, possibly as early as 7000 bce. Astronomical orientation and usage date to the Predynastic of the fourth millennium bce, so that by the time of the conventional Old Kingdom dating it was already well established and its uses built up further, including continuing ritual training and initiation. A variant for the builders of the Great Pyramid is the proposal associated with Ernest Uehli, author of Kultur und Kunst Agyptens: ein Isisgeheimnis (1975), that it was ancient Iranians (not Atlanteans or Egyptians) who built it to record ancient Iranian astral mysteries. People from a lost continent of Atlantis are credited elsewhere with constructing the pyramids – or just the Great Pyramid. This was a view of Ignatius Donnelly and psychic Edgar Cayce (see Chapter 1), while in the 1930s British mystic Paul Brunton, in A Search in Secret Egypt (1935), recorded in some detail a conversation he had had with an Atlantean high priest during a night he had spent within the chambers of the Great Pyramid. The men who had inhabited prehistoric Egypt, who had carved the Sphinx and founded the world’s oldest civilization, were men who had made their exodus from Atlantis to settle on this strip of land that bordered the Nile. And they had left before their ill-fated continent sank to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, a catastrophe which had drained the Sahara and turned it into a desert.10

Changing the builders of the great monuments of Egypt does not, however, advance the argument of why they were built.

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Just as supporters of Atlantis weave the Great Pyramid into their narrative, so do enthusiasts arguing for an ancient presence of extraterrestrial aliens. Swiss writer Erich von Däniken (born 1935), perhaps the most prominent ‘pseudoarchaeologist’ (to his critics) of his generation, has led the case for ‘ancient astronauts’ – whom he recognises in ancient rock paintings and engravings – as the architects and builders of the Great Pyramid. American Robert Temple had given more detail of such a theory with locating the ancient visitors’ home in the Sirius star system: his The Sirius Mystery ( 1976), now subtitled New Scientific Evidence of Alien Contact 5,000 Years Ago, was followed by Egyptian Dawn (2010), which presents more uncertainties. To African American Malachi York (see Chapter 1) the association of the Great Pyramid with aliens is a major benefit for humanity. Within alien theories, an alternative idea is that the Great Pyramid was built to provide a marker for a landing site. This idea is found in an unambiguously titled book from a major trade publisher, Our Ancestors Came From Outer Space by Maurice Chatelain (1976), for whom publicity has claimed a former affiliation in the US with NASA. His is one of the few ‘alternative’ theories that seem to justify the scale at which the pyramid was built. This reverses the interpretation of the Step Pyramid as a staircase for the king to the gods; instead the gods (or aliens) could use the pyramid at an access point to earth. And around the turn of the millennium David Icke, who advances the view that reptilian aliens are among us in human form (and in some very influential positions), warned of the danger of the Great Pyramid being used for their sinister purposes. There have also been less mystical interpretations of Egyptian pyramids: some almost, but not quite, leaning towards the realm of the practical. Coming from Australia – a vast land still being surveyed – railway engineer Robert Ballard suggested in The Solution of the Pyramid Problem (1882) that the different pyramids existed to serve as survey markers. I was crossing from Alexandria to Cairo, and saw the pyramids of Gizeh. I watched them carefully as the train passed along, noticed their clear cut lines against the sky, and their constantly changing relative position. I then felt a strong conviction that they were built for at least one useful purpose, and that purpose was the survey of the country. I said, ‘Here be the Theodolites of the Egyptians.’ Built by scientific men, well versed in geometry, but unacquainted with the use of glass lenses, these great stone monuments are so suited in shape for the purposes of land surveying, that the practical engineer or surveyor must, after consideration, admit that they may have been built mainly for that purpose […] The Pyramids of Egypt

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may be considered as a great system of landmarks for the establishment and easy readjustment at any time of the boundaries of the holdings of the people.11

A variant approach argued that the Great Pyramid served as a giant sundial – an idea first offered by Charles Piazzi Smyth (see below) but advanced by French astronomer Jean Baptiste Biot after his visit in 1853, and further adapted in Moses Cotsworth’s 1904 book on the almanac. Among the most secular and routine is the proposal by Ohio-based Edward Kunkel in a private publication (1967) that the Great Pyramid served as a giant water pump for ancient Egypt. While this might sound, at first, like a satirical poke at the extremes of alternative archaeologies, an animation shown on a number of websites provides a working model. An Oregon-based Pharaoh’s Pump Foundation now exists for several worthy goals: ‘Redeveloping the ancient but ultramodern water pumping technology of the Great Pyramid would help our modern but troubled world.’ In contrast to such extreme models, those views seem quite modest which give the pyramids a practical role within ancient Egyptian society different from that of a tomb. In 1774 the Dutch scholar Cornelius de Pauw, in his broad-ranging book Recherches philosophiques sur les Égyptiens et les Chinois, suggested the Great Pyramid was a temple for the worship of a supreme deity. Much later came the suggestion by German author Frank Teichmann in Der Mensch und sein Tempel (1978) that it provided a place for the initiation and coronation of Egyptian pharaohs. More prosaic still are the suggestions that the Great Pyramid was designed to protect sacred relics and artefacts, from British writer Alan Alford, in Pyramid of Secrets (2003) and The Midnight Sun (2004), with the observation that it has done so successfully, since the hidden chambers remain hidden – a proposition more difficult to disprove than some. Within the complex ideas of Immanuel Velikovsky (1895–1979), another major figure in ‘pseudoarchaeology’ and ‘pseudoscience’, came the suggestion that pyramids in Egypt served to protect Egyptians (presumably just the elites) from earthquakes or from falling meteorites – curiously, an argument that saw some modern echoes from astronomer Chandra Wickramasinghe. In recent decades there has been increasing enthusiasm for the attribution of more direct supernatural powers to the Great Pyramid. Different theories have emerged which have in common direct physical power possessed by the pyramid, some considering it provides a barrier to cosmic rays or to other physical or

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biological intrusions. There have been suggestions that food (and other biological matter) left within the Great Pyramid does not decay; this proposition was readily disproved by Egyptian archaeologist Zahi Hawass. A variant of this approach suggests that the Great Pyramid contains bioenergies which have healing powers – a proposal of German writer, and Nostradamus enthusiast, Manfred Dimde in Die Heilkraft der Pyramiden (1997). Claims for physical rather than biological powers of the Great Pyramid include the idea that a razor blade will sharpen itself if left inside it: in 1959 Czech scientist Karel Drbal successfully patented a cardboard ‘Cheops Pyramid Razorblade Sharpener’ to build on this concept. Some, like American Pat Flanagan (a ‘New Age’ inventor) in Pyramid Power (1973), have argued that any pyramid shape can have unusual physical properties, and the Egyptian pyramids are just (very!) large examples. The idea has also grown that the Great Pyramid was a source or an accumulator of energy, able to focus rays or otherwise achieve electrical output. Canadian filmmaker Carmen Boulter has asked ‘whether the pyramids were energy conductors that transmitted energy to affect human consciousness around the world’. The Egyptian pyramids lend themselves to mention in a wide range of New Age websites.

MYSTICAL MEASUREMENTS AND ENCODED MESSAGES OF PYRAMIDOLOGY

There is a long tradition that considers the ‘Great Pyramid’ of Khufu at Giza a repository of ancient knowledge, knowledge specifically encoded metrically: in its measurements, angles, orientations, and their ratios. This approach typically separates the Great Pyramid from its context among other pyramids (the neighbouring pyramid of Khafre/Chephren being only slightly smaller) and often considers it out of the context of Old Kingdom Egypt altogether. While the origins of this ‘pyramidology’ approach are from the mid-nineteenth century, and its most detailed presentations were completed by the mid-twentieth century, websites continue to feature aspects of the tradition alongside other alternative interpretations of the Egyptian pyramid form. Early proponents of the messages encoded in the Great Pyramid saw these from a Christian perspective as a tool of the divine, but secular versions of the same model have emerged in recent decades. Use of the measurements of the pyramid was initially based on the work of English astronomer, mathematician and orientalist John Greaves (1602–52), the

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son of a Church of England clergyman, who was a student and later a professor at Oxford University. He visited Egypt and its major pyramids, and entered the Khufu pyramid, confirming that it could not have been for grain storage. In his Pyramidographia, or a description of the Pyramids in Ægypt (1646, reissued in 1737), after a detailed discussion of the classical sources on the pyramids, and of ancient Egyptian burial practices, he published his own careful description with measurements of the pyramids of Giza, with a rational discussion on their construction. I imagine […] that they first made a large and spacious tower in the midst reaching to the top; to the sides of this tower I conceive the rest of the building to have been applied piece after piece, like so many buttresses or supporters, still lessening in height, till at last they came to the lowermost degree. A difficult piece of building, taken in the best and easiest projection: and therefore it is no wonder if it were not often imitated by the ancients […] Yet surely if we judge of things by the events, and if we reflect upon the invention of monuments, which are raised by the living to perpetuate the memory of the dead, then this is as commendable a way as any.12

Greaves’ work was much admired by Isaac Newton, who used it in his discussions of a ‘sacred cubit’. Newton hoped that the Great Pyramid could illuminate ancient scientific knowledge, tied to his chronology which privileged the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem. Newton’s essay on the sacred cubit was published as part of the 1737 reissue of Greaves’ writings. Meanwhile, understanding the pyramids as markers of the tombs of powerful pharaohs remained dominant among European commentators and scholars. The irony is that as greater knowledge of ancient Egypt grew rapidly in the nineteenth century from study of ancient texts, monuments and artefacts, so too grew the stimulus to create alternative interpretations to those of the growing scholarly studies. From the 1840s onwards a sequence of European (and, later, North American) writers developed their own interpretations of the Great Pyramid which rivalled those of the new scholarship. It was the measurements of the pyramids that fuelled the widest groups of interpretations. Imaginative writers sought to use the dimensions, angles and orientations of the Khufu pyramid to advance detailed hypotheses of alternative meanings and roles for the monument – interpretations we can describe as pyramidology, and which attracted popular appeal. The raw numbers themselves were not useful. A divine creator did not have ten fingers and the universe is not constructed on the decimal system, although the

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Figure 2.2  The title page of Pyramidographia, by the English astronomer John Greaves, 1646.

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base 10 system was used in Egyptian mathematics as it is today, unlike Babylonia (6 x 10 = base 60), Mayan (base 20), computer (binary) and other human systems. The pyramidologists’ use of numbers from the Khufu pyramid depended on ratios and relationships: linear, two- and three-dimensional, angles and orientations. A challenge to the pyramidologists’ model is the erosion that the millennia have brought to some of the external structure, together with elements of roughness in construction, so that many of the basic numbers were subject to margins of error or room for adjustment. The calculations of pyramidology demonstrate a truism: that if you perform an exact mathematical function on an inexact number you create a result with the illusion of exactness. The logical objection to the use of the resulting numbers is that correlation does not represent causation: discovering numbers and series (e.g. ratios in pyramid dimensions) which can be correlated with other series (e.g. dates in human history) is not itself a demonstration of link or intention. The measurements used in pyramidology come from the internal chambers and passageways as well as the external form. These provided a wide range of available numbers for multiple uses. In the 400-page work of Theosophist J. Ralston Skinner, Key to the Hebrew-Egyptian Mystery (1875), one quarter of the side of the Great Pyramid and the sine of 30° were used as the basis for a solar year, with the square root of the figure for the solar year then visible in the King’s Chamber. The pyramids allowed theorists to generate their own fundamental units of measurement – commonly ‘the pyramid inch’ – which fitted the approach. There is thus an apparent inner logic in much of the mathematical arguments of pyramidology, though calculations to 1/100,000 of a foot, as used by Skinner, look decidedly odd for a weathered stone monument. Perhaps the strongest demonstration of the fallacies in the mathematical arguments comes from within pyramidology itself – the fact that the same range of measurements and use of ratios could be used to argue their significance across many conflicting models: geographies of earth or of stars, time maps of past or future, an almanac, surveying markers, or calculator for different ancient purposes. If the same approach could be used for multiple quite incompatible models, each model is itself weakened. But there were enough numbers derived from measuring the pyramid to create numerous ratios; and enough numbers resulted from this to find parallel points in other sets of numbers and ratios: temporal, spatial, mathematical. The weakness of using measurements to prove complex theories lies thus not in the numbers, or even the sometimes impressive mathematics, but in the

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interpretation. French scholar Jean-Pierre Adam was able to show a French television audience in 1976 (as recorded in Le Monde) that the same process could be applied in using the dimensions of a National Lottery ticket seller’s booth on the Avenue de Wagram in Paris to correlate with chronological markers or features of the physical universe. Beyond this, pyramidologists weaken their conflicting arguments by their selectivity to make their case. They often focus on just one from the extended architectural tradition of over 120 Egyptian pyramids, that of Khufu (not the earliest, and only just the largest). Selectivity lies not just in the numbers used, but the setting for those numbers. And of the majority of pyramidologists who saw the pyramid as a human construction (rather than from divine or alien beings), few sought to explain the large scale at which this construction had been built, when the same geometry could be achieved at a different scale. To construct from stone a royal tomb of the complexity of the Old Kingdom pyramids demands a high level of skill in engineering and architecture, and therefore in applied mathematics. To complete a pyramid shape demands careful and confident planning in orientation, in preparation of the sites, in measuring each block and position, and in each internal feature or external finish. Thus when ancient Greek writers suggested that their world owed discoveries in science and mathematics to Egyptian predecessors, they were building on the highly probable. Current knowledge sees the Old Kingdom measure as a royal cubit of 523–5 mm (20.6 inches) with 28 subunits (18.7 mm or .74 inches). The four sides of the Great Pyramid are very close in length, less than 0.1 per cent difference, and oriented less than 6 minutes difference from true north. However not every measurement is certain: even the number of courses is not absolutely confirmed. The engineering of the Great Pyramid, and other pyramids, is a remarkable achievement, but in the context of a centralised power of a strong monarchy and a cult of the afterlife – not in a world of knowledge unattested in our other knowledge of the Old Kingdom. Following John Greaves’ early work, the tools for use and misuse of measurements of the Great Pyramid lay with a number of individuals. One of Napoleon’s team of savants in 1798, Edmé François Jomard, who continued as editor for the Description de l’Égypte, measured the Great Pyramid and proposed underlying units of measurement, while raising the question whether these were derived from observations of the earth. Britain’s Colonel Richard Howard-Vyse studied the pyramids in 1836–40 and reported his own measurements and calculations of the Khufu pyramid.

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The idea of the Egyptians encoding a record of astronomical observations emerged as early as 1852–6 with English writer John Wilson’s two-volume The Lost Solar System of the Ancients Discovered (1856). His view was that all the major Egyptian monuments contained secrets in their measurements. His was an early presentation of the idea that monuments’ exact dimensions (and those from other ancient societies) recorded astronomical measurements, for which he provided detailed mathematic presentations. A mathematical game had become a historical game, and a persistent agenda had been set. A similar approach, but restricted to the Great Pyramid, followed in 1859 from the (also English) writer John Taylor, with his book The Great Pyramid; Why Was It Built: & Who Built It? A revised edition appeared four years later and a companion volume The Battle of the Standards that same year, In the ratio of measurements (drawn mainly from Howard-Vyse) he found the value of pi, the solar year and more, and saw the purpose of the building as ‘to make a record of the measure of the earth’ (if rather a large one). Taylor put a Christian religious element into his model. The Royal Society declined his offer of a paper on his theories. Taylor was a publisher, but not a qualified scholar or scientist. An enthusiastic writer, he presents something of the image seen in modern writers of alternative histories: arguments for a strongly believed alternative taking precedence over measured evidence. An opinion has long been entertained, that the Pyramids of Gizeh were intended for the tombs of Kings, and that the Stone Coffers, found in them, were their Sarcophagi. But at the commencement of the present century, certain men of science […] endeavoured to show that the Great Pyramid might have had a scientific object […] The actual angle of the face, according to the casing stones, was 51° 50’. Can any proof be required more conclusive than this, that the reason which is here assigned for the building of the Great Pyramid, was the true reason? It was to make a Record of the measure of the Earth [original italics] that it was built.13

Scotland’s Astronomer Royal Charles Piazzi Smyth was impressed with Taylor’s work and corresponded with him. Smyth is an exemplar of figures who have built a scientific distinction in one field but also work in another, where their ideas go beyond those of specialists in that field. Anatomist Grafton Elliot Smith, discussed in Chapter 4, is another. Smyth was born in Italy to a British naval family. His career in astronomy led to a professorship at Edinburgh University alongside his role as Astronomer

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Royal. Different interests came together: he was an evangelical Christian; he was actively opposed to the proposal for the introduction of the ‘French’ metric system into British measurements; and therefore there was double attraction in Taylor’s suggestion that British measurements might be somehow linked to a divinely inspired standard seen in the Great Pyramid. Smyth took modern instruments to Giza and in 1865 provided pyramid measurements which persuaded him of a unit of the pyramid inch, satisfyingly close to the English inch, and with origins linked to early biblical figures. He was also able to persuade himself that the location of the Great Pyramid could be linked to a shifting 30° latitude. He had already, in 1864, published his defence of the pyramidology position in Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid, and after his own fieldwork the argument appeared in his three-volume Life and Work at the Great Pyramid (1867). His interpretations extended to the belief that the Great Pyramid not only mapped out space, with advanced knowledge of astronomy, but also time, and calculations based on pyramidal measurements could provide prophecies of the future. The Royal Society, which had elected Smyth a Fellow for his astronomical work, declined to publish a paper on his ideas. He was unable to carry conviction about his ideas to the scholarly community for whom new research into Egyptian antiquities and sites was now actively expanding, but he did attract a popular following. He considered: nearly all of the building to have the effect of constituting the Great Pyramid, – in its origin and before it was used for any sepulchral purposes – a metrological [author’s italics] monument; or, a grand commemoration in stone of a truly cosmopolitan system of weights and measures: extending through nearly all subjects, such as length, weight, heat, angle and time; with a wealth, too, as well as surpassing power, of exactness of reference to the great standards of Nature, – whether of the earth as a whole, or the precessional movements of the starry heavens.14

PYRAMID MEASUREMENTS AND INTERPRETATIONS AFTER PETRIE

When the future Egyptian archaeologist Flinders Petrie went to remeasure all the pyramids of Giza in 1880, he noted the presence of accurate construction and orientation alongside cruder finishes. The detailed measurements with modern instruments which he quickly published, alongside an explanation of what this

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Figure 2.3  The Great Pyramid as the geographical centre of the world, according to Charles Piazzi Smyth, 1877.

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showed about the building of the pyramids, eroded the basis of Smyth’s calculations, and appeared to undermine his argument. As to the results of the whole investigation, perhaps many theorists will agree with an American, who was a warm believer in Pyramid theories when he came to Gizeh. I had the pleasure of his company there for a couple of days, and at our last meal together he said to me in a saddened tone, – ‘Well, sir! I feel as if I had been to a funeral.’ By all means let the old theories have a decent burial; though we should take care that in our haste none of the wounded ones are buried alive.15

This project was inspired in part by Petrie’s father, a devout member of the evangelical Plymouth Brethren movement and a friend and admirer of Piazzi Smyth. Flinders Petrie applied his own surveying skills to the project his father had encouraged, a move which led him to commit to a life of archaeological research as the greatest fieldworker of his generation in Egypt. Ironically, though, Petrie’s revised measurements did not kill off pyramidology, as others would use his new numbers to create their own models of the hidden messages of the Great Pyramid. These ideas were adopted and adapted down to the present day. What differs is the argument of what the measurements and ratios of the pyramids, and specifically the Great Pyramid, actually represented. Was it primarily measurements of the earth, or astronomical knowledge of the universe? Was it a map of time which recorded both events before its construction and provided prophecies of the future? Or was it, somehow, all of these and more besides? And if a site of prophecy, did this prophecy exist through divine will? Did it have a purpose to inform mankind, which the modern interpreters had now revealed? Or was it a record of secular knowledge from a past civilisation, in which case what was the nature and origin of this ancient knowledge? Canadian Moses B. Cotsworth (1859–1943), a campaigner for the reform of the Western calendar, in his 1902 book The Rational Almanac adapted the idea of a mapped earth to argue that the Great Pyramid was designed to be a giant almanac for registering the changing seasons of the year, by the casting of shadows. Pyramidology has maintained strong belief in a relationship between pyramid measurements and an ancient detailed knowledge of our planet’s dimensions, form and solar cycle. Initially suggested by Jomard, and a core of Taylor’s and Smyth’s approach, this was echoed (alongside prophecy) in the ideas of David Davidson, mentioned below.

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Some pyramidologists claimed the Great Pyramid was deliberately built at the exact centre of the Egyptian state, or even at the exact centre of the land surface of the earth: an argument accepted by Rosicrucian H. Spencer Lewis (see Chapter 1) in his 1936 work The Symbolic Prophecy of the Great Pyramid. One of the very definite and startling facts about the location of the Great Pyramid is that it is not only in the centre of the great land of Egypt, and very nearly in the center of the most habitable portions of the ancient world known to the populace, but it is in the center of the land surface of the earth as it now exists […] if we take a map of the earth […] and draw lines upon it which are in accordance with the land surface areas, we shall find that these crossed lines indicate the center of the land surface of the earth as being precisely where the Great Pyramid is built.16

In the 1960s and 1970s, US-based ancient historian Livio Stecchini (1913–79) maintained the argument, seeing ancient Egyptians as possessing accurate knowledge of the dimensions of the Earth, and building their monuments exactly in line with these dimensions. Many authors have compared aspects of the orientation of the Great Pyramid’s lines with key areas of the night sky, seeing it as a record of ancient astronomical observation and knowledge. Argentine writer José Alvarez Lopez was able to argue in his Fisica u Creacionismo (1958) that the symbolism of the solar system was represented by external painting with a different colour for each planet. An extension of this symbolism was the idea that the pyramid was itself a practical observatory, a tribute granted by the English astronomer Richard Proctor in 1883, and echoed by supporters well into the twentieth century. In this version of pyramidology, the sloping sides of the Great Pyramid and also the angled internal passageways were functional surfaces for astronomical observations. The idea of the Great Pyramid as a record of astronomy was extended by some to give it a functional role for astrology: as the practical application of astronomy. But most of these ideas accepted early pharaonic Egyptians as the pyramid builders. Such astronomical ideas have been revived and revised recently, if in purely secular form. The new writers challenge all of established Egyptology and attribute the building of the Giza pyramids to an earlier, pre-pharaonic high civilisation that possessed a high degree of knowledge. Writer Robert Bauval in The Orion Mystery: Unlocking the Secrets of the Pyramids (co-authored with Adrian Gilbert, 1994) advanced an ‘Orion correlation theory’ which sees the different Giza pyramids constructed as part of a map of the constellation Orion at a date well before the

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Egyptian Old Kingdom. This has been supported by the widely publicised Graham Hancock, whose fame rests on multiple claims for exotic civilisations as yet undiscovered by conventional archaeology. The eleventh millennium date attributed to the origins of the pyramids is derived from a correlation of pyramid angles with modern knowledge of astronomy. Other publications, films and websites have taken up this viewpoint with enthusiasm, with varying identifications of who these early astronomers might have been. Use of the Great Pyramid as a tool of prophecy has been one of the most persistent of alternative sets of interpretations. The idea of pyramid measurements as prophecies emerged linked to religious and neo-religious beliefs; if less visible in recent print publication, it has an active web presence. The interpretation of the Great Pyramid as a time map of the future used Smyth’s figures and was advanced in the 1860s by his friend Robert Menzies, using one pyramid inch to the year, with the Christian era represented by the Grand Gallery. The United States Lutheran minister Joseph Seiss, a prolific author, was happy to link Christianity to a prophetic pyramidology in his A Miracle in Stone: Secrets and Advanced Knowledge (1877), which went into numerous reprints with some variation in title. Colonel John Garnier, in The Great Pyramid: Its Builder and its Prophecy (1905), used Petrie’s measurements to suggest imminent world changes, fitting in with the British Israelite movement’s concern with the timetable for the biblically foretold End of Days. He was followed by another Briton, the engineer David Davidson (1884–1956). In a series of books published between 1927 and 1943, Davidson expanded the prophetic model but with detailed calculations using Petrie’s revised numbers, and adopting different units of measurement. He too was drawn to the British Israelite movement (see Chapter 9) whose Covenant Publishing issued a number of his titles. Others would follow the ‘prophecy’ model but with different units and, more importantly, different start dates for the time span covered. This flexibility allowed a wider range of dates to be accommodated, with inevitable emphasis on events whose recency (such as the outbreak of the Great War) were uppermost in people’s minds. Some gave the time span mapped by pyramid measurements a late date (e.g. a scale from 4000 bce to an endpoint of 2045 ce) which could avoid challenge from reality, while those whose ‘end days’ lay in the 1920s soon found their predictions discredited. The Briton Adam Rutherford, also influential in the British Israelite tradition, named an Institute of Pyramidology based in England, and issued a range of publications including a four-volume Pyramidology published between 1957 and

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Figure 2.4  The Great Pyramid as a chronological chart.

1972, detailing this approach. He accepted the archaeological date in the twentysixth century bce for the Great Pyramid, and indeed claimed that radiocarbon dating of the adjacent boat discovery gave an exact date that fitted his prophetic timescale. The presence of mathematically exact measurements (such as pi) and geographical location (including ‘the Christ Angle’ which positioned it in relation to Bethlehem) proved a divine inspiration for the Great Pyramid, but his main interpretations were of a chronological sequence, using half a pyramid inch to equal one year. He was then able to track how specific points in the internal structure of the Khufu pyramid forecast the date of the Hebrew Exodus and the Crucifixion of Jesus. Pyramidology is the science which co-ordinates, combines and unifies science and religion, and is thus the meeting place of the two. When the Great Pyramid is properly understood and universally studied, false religions and erroneous scientific theories will alike vanish, and true religion and true science will be demonstrated to be harmonious.17

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This link to Christianity was an important part of Rutherford’s approach, but so was his emphasis on ‘the British race’ – by which he meant the central historical role of Britain, the British Empire and the United States. The two themes were linked in the Balfour Declaration by the British on behalf of the Jews, importantly marked in the Pyramid chronology. Somewhat unexpectedly, an Icelandic edition of his early work was issued, with an inclusion of Iceland as well as Palestine at the core of the divine message. His multi-volume Pyramidology gave much detail of

Figure 2.5  Pyramidology by Adam Rutherford, published by his Institute of Pyramidology, 1957–72.

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world history past and future as mapped by the Great Pyramid, but he summarised his arguments in a 1942 short volume with a long title: The Great Pyramid: its Christian message to all nations and its divine call to the British Empire and U.S.A. with Iceland, and in his Outline of Pyramidology (1957). Rutherford was, however, required to amend his presentation, as his 1942 volume used pyramid measurement to predict the date of the First Resurrection as 20 August 1953. When this did not happen, his details changed; the 1957 book omitted such prophecy but by 1966, in the third volume of Pyramidology, his new date for the expected start of the new era had moved to 1979. Morton Edgar was a Scottish-based member of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. He argued in publications from 1910 onwards that religious prophecies representing 6,000 years were to be seen in measurements, in which is shown how the Great Pyramid of Giza symbolically corroborates the philosophy of the divine plan of the ages as contained in the Holy Scriptures. This building is recognised to be not only a scientific monument but a prophetic [author emphasis] one also. This remarkable claim is well sustained by the numerous timemeasurements which are found to be embodied in the scientific dimensions of the Pyramid.18

This met initial approval in official Jehovah’s Witnesses publications such as Watch Tower, but divisions emerged in the movement over his interpretations and they were subsequently officially disowned by the movement from 1928. The same direction of enquiry has continued. In 1977 Peter Lemesurier, British author of books on Nostradamus and Armageddon, published The Great Pyramid Decoded (reissued 1996) which supports para-Christian prophecies in the measurements, with exact correlations of dates. The awareness of a Messianic World-plan […] permeates much of the Ancient World’s mythology. In particular we have observed its presence in the Hebrew, Egyptian and Mayan traditions, and have discovered clear evidence that it lies at the very root of the design of the Great Pyramid […] it is in the Pyramid that the Plan’s details are revealed most clearly and explicitly […] the Plan was once known in its entirety by a race of men […] whose civilisation was subsequently […] overwhelmed by some gigantic cataclysm which left few traces, apart from the knowledge enshrined in the Great Pyramid and a number of obscure folkmemories and esoteric traditions.19

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Most recently, a secular version of the same appeared within the films and writing of Californian David Willcock, ‘lecturer, filmmaker, and researcher of ancient civilizations, consciousness science, and new paradigms of matter and energy’,20 and author of The Source Field Investigations: The Hidden Science and Lost Civilizations Behind the 2012 Prophecies (2011). Current websites echo or develop with enthusiasm the use of measurements of the Great Pyramid as maps of space or time. They recur in documentary film and print, and doubtless will continue to do so. The complexities and dedication of the mathematical exercises of earlier generations of pyramidologists can only invite admiration, even if the (competing) significance of their calculations is not accepted. If the Great Pyramid was a repository of knowledge encoded in its form, how was this knowledge to be shared? This question led a number of people to see the purpose of the pyramid as a temple used for initiation into this knowledge, and into cult mysteries associated with them. This idea was adopted by the influential founder of the Theosophical movement H. D. Blavatsky in The Secret Doctrine (1888). The American Theosophist J. Ralston Skinner, in Key to the HebrewEgyptian Mystery (1894), was able to convince himself that these initiations into the Great Pyramid’s map of knowledge involved secrets of Jewish as well as Egyptian theologies. It therefore appears almost a return to scientific rationality – almost – to note a final group of alternative interpreters who see the measurements of the Great Pyramid not as the result of calculation for engineering purposes but as an instrument for calculation: recording mathematical calculations and insights well before they were attested elsewhere in the world, together with scientific information derived from these. Such arguments were advanced by Ch. Funck-Hellet, La Bible et la Grande Pyramide de l’Égypte, témoignages authentiques du metre et de pi (1956), Tons Brunés, The Secret of Ancient Geometry (1967) and J. A. West Serpent in the Sky: The High Wisdom of Ancient Egypt (1979). The work in the 1950s and 1960s from R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz, author of Le Miracle Égyptien (1963), argued such views with detailed demonstrations. But such approaches come closer to the alternative ‘functional’ roles for the pyramids which we reviewed earlier in this chapter.

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Figure 2.6  The nineteenth-century image: Pyramids of Geezeh, by David Roberts, 1838.

MAKING SENSE

Given the great diversity of ‘alternative’ interpretations of Khufu’s pyramid at Giza, and other pyramid sites, how do we make sense of the vast industry of pyramidologies, both metrical and non-metrical? The survival of the Egyptian pyramids – and the dramatic experience of every visitor to Giza – invites admiration and stimulates intellectual curiosity. There is thus more visual stimulus to develop new ideas and gain supporters than for a theory around some site in an inaccessible location known only through archaeological excavation or historical record. It is clear that the desire to invent and advance new theories which contradict those of scholarly research remains vigorous. Inspiration to complement Christian and para-Christian religions and cult movements has given way to arguments that compete in a society supposedly of secular scientific rationality. The greater the academic research on Egypt, the greater the enthusiasm for alternative ideas. The internet has allowed multiple websites advancing quasi-archaeological and quasi-historical theories and, equally important, ready communication to and between the followers of these ideas. This has allowed even greater innovation in the introduction and spread of alternative histories. With the World Wide Web

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it is no longer necessary to find a book publisher willing to gamble on the saleability of improbable ideas, or a television channel willing to run an ‘alternative’ documentary – though there is no shortage in both these categories. If the pyramid builders of pharaonic Egypt attract our admiration for their monumental constructions, the modern era’s pyramidologists must attract admiration for their creativity and imagination. While some are rather modest in their goals and presentation (a personal website with a few images and a text to present a theory), there is no lack of energy in someone who devotes a life to writing multiple volumes of mathematical calculations to show that pyramid measurements and ratios can be correlated to a timeline of events past and present, or the form of the earth, or the form of the universe. These achievements are remarkable; but unfortunately they fail to match the criteria by which society operates in the real world: those of truth. Scientific method at its best develops largely by creating testable hypotheses; examining and testing these in the light of all available evidence, and confirming, denying or amending and retesting the hypotheses. As new questions emerge, new data is found, or new methodologies are created, the same hypotheses can be further amended or replaced. Understanding of Egypt’s pyramids has grown with new data and studies not just of the pyramids themselves but of the period and society in which they were constructed. This limits interpretations, while not predetermining them or freezing them irrevocably. Despite the wide differences described above, most modern alternative pyramidologies thrive on a different approach. Context (archaeological, physical, chronological) is initially ignored; the Great Pyramid is selected as an artefact with no context or attributes beyond the most obvious – its size and its building materials (though even they have been questioned). In this framework any idea can be advanced; we have listed over 30 of them, each contradicting the next. Then selectivity can choose pieces of evidence which appear to support the new idea: from the site, from other elements of Egyptian history, from other parts of world history, from the physical universe or the creativity of the author. This approach has the advantage that it does not limit the creative imagination, but that too is a disadvantage; for the proponent of any one model (say, pyramid as alien landing marker) has to dismiss others (pyramid as prophetic time map, pyramid as water pump, pyramid as initiation centre) as fantasy, inventions. Clever creators can, of course, strengthen the appearance of logic in their argument by specifically name-calling their rival pyramidologists, and by suggesting their ideas are fantasies which lack credibility and evidence, imply their own are the valid ones.

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Some of the pyramid interpretations we have outlined appeared as subsidiary elements in a grand religious or para-religious approach – anything from Rosicrucianism and British Israelism to Kemetism and New Age movements. Here, arguably, denial of the validity of the pyramid claims does not serve to demolish the belief system as a whole. Christianity and Judaism survived the removal of Joseph as the grain-storing pyramid builder. But other authors of books, films and websites seek to thrive on an element of mystery. We know the Great Pyramid was not built by Old Kingdom Egyptians to mark a pharaonic tomb, but could it be an X, may it have powers of Y, or have been built by Z? Egyptologists are lying to us or ignorant; and the mystery remains. The hundreds of thousands of web pages that contain the phrase ‘Mystery of the Great Pyramid’ suggest this is a winning strategy. Further research and interpretation of the pyramids by Egyptologists are not going to change the scenario; still less are publications and websites arguing against alternative pyramidologies – for the function of these is not the same as that of science. They exist to inspire, or to distract, to entertain or fascinate. The range, scope, spread of alternative pyramidologies seems unlikely to abate. The pyramids remain one of the most fascinating aspects of ancient Egypt to the general public – matched only, perhaps, by interest in mummified human remains, which we will now consider.

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CHAPTER 3

MUMMIES AND THEIR CHANGING REPUTATION

The Egyptian mummy: a beneficial material for medical cure, an industrial era paint or even perhaps fuel, the terrifying source of a curse, the image of the walking dead bringing either good or evil fortune – and, of course, a highly skilled means of preserving a body after death for its future in the afterlife. The Egyptian mummy has been perceived and represented in a wide range of historical, literary and visual forms. Mummies have been one of the aspects of ancient Egyptian society most intensively studied and described by scholars and scientists. Since classical times Egyptian mummification process and ritual fascinated travellers: writers such as Herodotus detailed current practice. Mummies were robbed for their amulets and jewellery from ancient times – indeed at, or even before, their entombment. But through a curious set of circumstances, the mummified human remains from Egyptian deposits came to be seen and used for curative properties in medieval and later medical practice. Then, alongside the greater modern knowledge of ancient Egypt, came a new image: mummies which conveyed a curse on those who disturbed them, and – as the creative literature on mummies in fiction, then movies, developed – mummies which came to life not in the underworld but in this world, whether with beneficial results or with evil impact. The useful mummy of medical cure had become a source of fear, through a period when the West’s attitude to contemporary Egypt was also undergoing multiple transitions. This chapter reviews those images of the mummy which go beyond its role as a pious and practical religious tradition.

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HISTORICAL MUMMIFICATION

Ancient Egyptian mummification – the use of chemical and biological procedures together with rituals to help preserve the human body – has an astonishing continuity over 3,000 years. Techniques developed in effectiveness but also in complexity, with a high standard achieved in (and just after) the New Kingdom, and continuity into the periods when Egypt came under foreign occupation of Persians, Greeks and Romans. The mummification which fascinated Herodotus in the fifth century bce was not the peak of achievement. But even in Coptic Christian Egypt, despite rejection by religious leaders like third-century Saint Anthony (echoed in the condemnation of embalmment by Emperor Theodosius in 392), elements of mummification practice can be found in some Christian burials as late as the sixth century ce. The hot sands of Egypt had dried out and thus preserved some bodies in the predynastic period: the British Museum has long drawn visitors to stare at an exposed prehistoric corpse with its pottery grave goods. Such simple burials undoubtedly remained the pattern for most of the poor peasants and workers of the pharaonic age. But the ambition of those in ancient Egypt with position and wealth was to ensure their own survival in the afterlife by combining appropriate rituals with physical treatment of their bodies to limit decay after death. Initially, in Archaic Egypt, burial involved wrapping the body in shrouds but no or little treatment of the corpse itself. But with practice, the skills of mummification developed. Put simply, the embalmment processes involved reducing decomposition by removing some of the internal organs and drying out the interior and flesh of the body with appropriate salts before wrapping in linen bands. The body itself might be painted in resin to harden it, as might the shrouds, especially in later eras. The internal organs were removed and treated with salts. For much of the dynastic period these were placed in distinct ‘canopic’ jars located near the body. The brain itself was not considered of great significance to the afterlife and was treated without the ritual preservation of other organs. In earlier embalmment it was often left in situ, but from the 18th Dynasty (c.1550–1300 bce) it was removed. However, the heart, considered the centre of the individual’s intelligence, was treated and then left in the body cavity. The pattern of this changed over time, with new techniques, but the level of treatment also reflected the wealth of the deceased and their family. A high point came in the eleventh century bce during the 21st Dynasty, just after the end of the New Kingdom, when packing was added to the body and the viscera were treated

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before reinsertion in the body cavity itself. In later eras, mummification seems to have spread to classes other than the wealthy, providing a substantial number of the mummies visible to later visitors, and inevitably of a less lavish order than the mummification of the elite. At its fullest level, as represented in the royal and richest burials, the treatment of ancient Egyptian death involved multiple layers. Within the land were areas for elite or royal burials, just beyond the cultivable valley soils, and within these areas individuals built their own tomb complexes. In these, ideally, were several rooms, one of which was the burial chamber itself. Here would commonly be a sarcophagus, of stone for kings and in earlier time for others too, while wood came to replace stone for non-royal burials from the New Kingdom onwards. Inside the sarcophagus was a coffin, usually of wood, which was decorated in the style of the particular age and carried images and sometimes text, outside and inside. Wealthy burials since the Middle Kingdom might even have another coffin inside the first. Such a coffin is commonly described as the mummy case, but it is not the mummy itself. Through most Egyptian dynasties such coffins bore a human image of a face (which could be a separately created and applied mask) to signify the deceased, though in stylised form with head-dress. The shape of the body was suggested and at times arms were indicated; more rarely, details of feet Figure 3.1  ‘Graecoor even legs. A dramatic contrast came in the Roman Egyptian Mummy. period of Egypt where beautiful lifelike paintings of Unrolled April 6th 1833.’ healthy images of the buried person were included on The frontispiece from Thomas Pettigrew’s the wooden coffin. A History of Egyptian Within the coffin, the body was wrapped in linen Mummies, 1834. cloth, sometimes with resin added. At their most professional, the funerary services manipulated the shape of the padded body to emphasise the human shape, even to the point of facial features. Amulets were also included within the linen wrappings. In the genre of cinematic (usually horror) films, is it the shrouded figure that represents the iconic mummy, who can retain

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the linen wrappings even when coming back to life. In the earliest mummifications of the Archaic period, before embalmment was mastered, convincing shrouds can disguise very poorly preserved bodies. The funerary service wrapped the body in substantial quantities of cloth shroud; so when scientists (as in earlier times lay investigators) investigate a mummy, their first task is to unwrap the wrappings (unless they X-ray it: the first X-ray of a mummy dates to 1897). What remains within reflects the level and skill of each individual processing. Dried skin preserved with greater or lesser success, often coated in resin to toughen and help preserve it; the teeth of course visible, the skeleton preserved within, and decay depending on the thoroughness with which the soft organs had been removed and natron or other salts applied within the body cavities. Just occasionally unwrapping or X-ray can reveal a fraud in which the whole body has not been included in the wrapped shroud. Thus the term ‘mummy’ can apply to the body itself, or to the shrouded presentation of the body, or refer to the larger context of the coffin (or even the sarcophagus).

MUMIA: A HEALING POWER

The idea of grinding up human bodies and applying or even ingesting them for purposes of medical cure sounds improbable, but the medical use of what was described euphemistically as ‘mumia’ (with different spellings) was established practice in the later medieval and early modern world of the Islamic Middle East and Christian Europe. The practice evolved through stages of transformation: from the medical application of bitumen, to similar use of the viscous black substances which came from the wrappings of mummified bodies; then to the use of the ground-up mummified bodies themselves, and finally to a trade in fake mummies through the fraudulent use of relatively recent corpses. The sale of mumia for medicine had its peak in sixteenth-century Europe but continued even into the nineteenth century. The origins of this practice have been traced to an initial belief in the healing properties of bitumen (asphalt). Bitumen, known as an adhesive from the fifth millennium bce India, and in Persia from the third millennium bce, developed extended uses in the Middle East. From the 25th Dynasty of Egypt bitumen had indeed been used to coat some of the poorest mummies, but resin, or other chemicals which turned dark over time, were more commonly used to treat the skin of the corpse or the linen wrappings. Substantial numbers of mummified bodies, especially from late antiquity, survived in Egypt into medieval and modern

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times; indeed, the majority of mummies probably dated from the later eras of antiquity when mummification had spread to poorer classes, the population of Egypt had grown, and the relative recency improved the likelihood of survival. The resinous and other materials appeared as dark, viscous substances on the surface of linen wrappings. These were considered to have the same curative capacities that had been attributed to bitumen. The conventional view of scholars is that the name ‘mummy’ itself comes from this (mis)identification with bitumen of the black colour acquired by the resin used on ancient Egyptian corpses. In Persian the name for wax is mum or moom (adjective moomee) and that for bitumen (mineral asphalt) is moomia/mumiya. The same word was adopted by Arabic to mean bitumen as mumia/moumia/ moumiya (the orthography varies). Then, as the medical substance changed from bitumen to the resinous material on embalmed bodies, then to the body itself, the name was transferred to the substance made from the complete corpse, and then applied to the embalmed corpse itself. Bitumen proper was valued since the classical era for its supposed healing properties. Pliny the Elder noted its value for external and even internal use. It could help with cataracts and skin diseases, trachoma and gout, and healing wounds. Suitably mixed and imbibed, it could assist in the treatment of coughs and dysentery, blood clotting and back pain; Dioscorides in the first century ce endorsed its pharmaceutical value. This continued in the Islamic world: physicians al-Kindi (ninth century ce), Rhazes (tenth century) and Ibn Serapion (eleventh century) recommended it; while the distinguished Persian scholar and scientist Ibn Sina (Avicenna), writing in Arabic in the early eleventh century, attributed to it the ability, taken orally, to cure a very wide range of ailments both external and internal. The Arabic term was extended in Egypt to the black material associated with ancient bodies which we now know was most commonly resin. This identity was only confirmed by twentieth-century chemical analysis, so it unsurprising that many thought the substance to be bitumen (as indeed did Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus). It is hard to date the source of the shift between bitumen and burial-derived substances. In the twelfth century ce the physician el-Magar in Alexandria recommended the use of the mummy-derived substance in medicine. Abd al-Latif, based in Cairo in the early thirteenth century ce, described the substance called mummy found in ancient corpses and transported for sale in the city as a drug, which could be used as a medical substitute for bitumen.

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European medicine, much influenced at the time by the learning of the Islamic world, adopted the same belief and provided an export market for the substance, aided by some mistranslations into Latin of the early Arabic writings. Commonly the mumia sold in Europe would be a dried powder, thus making it easy to trade not just the dried resinous deposits but the ground bodies themselves. A legal case in Cairo in 1424 exposed the use and treatment of recent corpses as fake mummy to sell to the European market. Stories of the faking of recent corpses for the mummy trade continued. The trade (and therefore the fakery) was attributed by some to the Jewish community of Egypt acting as intermediaries with the European clients. By the sixteenth century Egyptian-derived mummy was an established medicine in much of Europe. It received literary references in Shakespeare, Webster, Beaumont and Fletcher, and it was clearly the human variety. Francis Bacon (1561–1626) wrote that ‘mummy hath great force in stanching of blood; which, as it may be ascribed to the mixture of balms that are glutinous; so it may also partake of a secret propriety, in that the blood draweth men’s flesh’.1 A physician from Genoa, Giovanni da Vigo (1450–1525) was clear in his description of mumia as ‘The flesh of a dead body that is embalmed […] it has virtue to incarne wounds and to staunch blood’. Catherine de Medici despatched her chaplain André Thevet in 1549 to secure mummy in Sakkara. In 1564 Guy de la Fontaine ran a similar errand to Alexandria for the King of Navarre, but, upon investigating, his trader further discovered that he was being offered fake mummy: recent bodies to which pitch had been applied. Francis I of France was an adherent of mummy cures and carried the substance with him on travels. More ambiguously, the German physician Paracelsus (1493–1541) prescribed mummy for medical purposes, but attributed its qualities not to its physical properties but to the intrinsic nature related to the source of the individual death, requiring someone otherwise healthy who dies an unnatural death. He devised both a ‘balsam of mummy’ and a ‘treacle of mummy’. Critics emerged, including lay citizens such as the traveller to Egypt (whose words were cited by Richard Hakluyt in 1599) revolted by the use of dead bodies – the practice where: are dayly digged the bodies of auncient men, not rotten, but all whole, the cause whereof is the qualitie of the Egyptian soile, which will not consume the flesh of man, but rather dry and harden the same, and so alwayes conserveth it. And these

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dead bodies are the Mummie which the Phisitians and Apothecaries doe against our willes make us to swallow.2

More expert medical writers questioned the link between bitumen and mumia, defending the first over the second, as well as questioning the authenticity of the mummy being sold in Europe. French military surgeon Ambroise Paré (1510–90) complained that ground-up mummy was ‘the very first and last medicine of almost all our practitioners’ and stated that ‘it causes great pain to their heart or stomachs, giving them evil smelling breath and brings about serious vomiting’. This was based on his own experience: initially he had accepted received wisdom and used mummy in his practice. Sir Thomas Browne (1660) noted the use of mummy from Egypt as merchandise to cure wounds while ‘Pharaoh is used for balsam’. Such criticism did not end its use. Even the great English experimental scientist Robert Boyle (1627–91), commenting on criticism against cannibalism of the ‘Indians’, observed that: Mummy is one of the usual Medicines commended and given by our Physicians for falls and bruises, and in other cases too. And if we plead that we use not Mummy for food, but Physick, the Indians may easily answer, that by our way of using man’s flesh, we do oftentimes but protract sickness and pain, whereas they by theirs maintain their health and vigour.3

By the seventeenth century ‘mummy’ was a commonplace treatment and concept in Europe. English literary works of the period have numerous references which make it clear that its origins were well understood: that ‘mummy’ was the ground-up remains of the Egyptian dead being used to sustain the living. This provided a framework of reference which writers could use with confidence, and put words of fear or fate into their characters’ speech and thought. But advances in medical knowledge in the eighteenth century favoured specific treatments for specific ailments. Claims for multivalent properties of a substance like mummy went out of fashion; a 1733 Dispensatory lists: Mummy-Mumia. This is the flesh of carcases which have been embalm’d. But altho’ it yet retains a place in medicinal catalogues, it is quite out of use in Prescription. What virtues have been ascribed to it are the same with Parmassity [sperm whale wax] and other balsamics of the kind.4

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Something described as Mumia (no longer ‘mummy’) would remain listed in pharmacopeia from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and possibly beyond in less formally medical contexts. Today imitation ‘mummy dust’ can still be bought online. The lost reputation of mummy as a cure may reflect improvements in practical medical knowledge, but it also ties in with a greater awareness in Europe of what mummies actually were. Into the eighteenth century, mummy arrived as a ground powder: no European pharmacist or medical patient need dwell on how the substance might have been created, even though its association with ancient human burials was not disguised. But with the importing to Europe of complete mummies by and for collectors from the late eighteenth century, the image of a mummy had changed. Given the public awareness of exactly what a mummified body was, the medical ingestion of mummy was no longer appealing. Dried mummies had other uses. The pigment ‘Mummy brown’ was made in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries from a mixture including ground-up mummies. It is unclear how long this continued; by the late nineteenth century sensitive English painters began to resist such manufacture. In 1964 a spokesman for artists’ colorman firm C. Roberson (founded 1810) advised Time Magazine (doubtless in jest) they had indeed run out of mummies. Although mummies were exported to Britain use as fertiliser, these would have been animal mummies which existed in huge quantities, as they were prepared for sale in ancient Egypt as votive offerings: half a million ibises at Sakkara, for example. Proposals were made in the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century to reuse the extensive linen wrappings on mummies in the manufacture of paper, but it remains unclear how far this proposal was taken. Another story is generated – in jest more probably than in truth – by Mark Twain, who reported in The Innocents Abroad (1869) that on Egyptian railways: I shall only say that the fuel they use for the locomotive is composed of mummies three thousand years old, purchased by the ton or by the graveyard for that purpose, and that sometimes one hears the profane engineer call out pettishly, ‘D – n these plebeians, they don’t burn worth a cent – pass out a King.5

His jokey remark has too long been cited as fact, ignoring his own note: ‘Stated to me for a fact. I only tell it as I got it. I am willing to believe it. I can believe any thing.’

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COLLECTORS AND ROMANTIC FICTION WRITERS

Few aspects of antiquity can have seen their modern image in Western society change so fast as the Egyptian mummy: from a medical cure for a vast range of ailments to a source of wonder and then of fear. The key for the transition was the same: the nineteenth-century arrival of physical mummies in Europe, in the European consciousness, in magazines and newspapers, and visibly in the growing number of public museums. Mummies began to be imported by wealthy collectors in European countries as curiosities and antiquities. There developed a new passion: that of displaying and unwrapping the ancient linen-wrapped bodies. The German physician Johann Blumenbach is associated with unwrappings in the 1790s, and explorers such as Giovanni Belzoni (1778–1823) brought antiquities from Egypt, especially to England, and organised public unwrappings. One of Belzoni’s associates, Thomas Pettigrew (nicknamed Mummy Pettigrew), turned mummy unwrapping into a commercial public spectacle in the 1830s (even though his writings also contributed to scientific and public knowledge). The stage directions were got up with great care, Mr Pettigrew and the mummy being in the centre […] Dr Pettigrew then sawed off the back part of the skull, to see what was inside, and found that the brains had been replaced by pitch. After an hour and a half ‘the mummy’, which proved to be that of a young man, was raised to its feet, and presented to the company, and was received with enthusiastic applause.6

The collection and public unwrapping of mummies served as a reminder than medical mumia was sourced from the dead. But the unwrapping created little respect for those deceased, as the wealthy entertained their friends with unwrappings and displayed mummified bodies in their private museums, and occasionally into the emerging world of the public museum. This had turned mumia into human mummies without restoring their humanity. The greater public awareness of mummification encouraged the emergence of a genre of literature in which a mummy was restored to life. Initially this was not necessarily a source of threat but of benefit: it served to humanise the mummy, and as public mummy unwrappings ended, the mummy developed still greater literary visibility. As literary scholar Nicholas Daly noted:

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By the end of the nineteenth century the vogue for the unrolling of mummies was long over, and the mummy’s power as spectacle was confined to the museum. At the same time, the appearance of mummy fiction as part of the romance revival indicates that the mummy retains its importance in the cultural imaginary of late Victorian and Edwardian Britain.7

An early literary use of the mummy is found in the 1827 youthful publication by British writer Jane Webb [Loudon] (1807–58), The Mummy! A Tale of the TwentySecond Century. The author of this book – issued nine years after Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein – was a pioneer in the genre of science fiction writing. Her story starts in 2126 and revolves around a technologically improved future world. Here the mummy of the Egyptian pharaoh of the Great Pyramid Cheops is revived by a scientist with a battery creating electric shock. At the end of the novel Cheops returns to death. Cheops’ reaction to his reanimation is recorded as one of alarm, but he subsequently proves to be a thoughtful guide to the world he has entered and he actively intervenes in the politics of the time, which are dominated by an unstable matriarchal monarchy. Cheops is thus an opportunity for the author to address (sometimes satirically) issues of social and political challenge and change. The appearance of Cheops, indeed, never failed to excite a deep and powerful interest in the minds of all who conversed with him, whilst his appalling laugh struck terror to the firmest breast, and even those who affected to despise his menaces could not prevent their minds from dwelling upon his words.8

Soon after the book’s appearance, a review in the Literary Review challenged the use of a mummy for the young author’s purposes, stating that ‘the great fault of Cheops, the animated mummy, is, that he does nothing but what any mortal could have done: and a striking title is certainly the why and wherefore of his resurrection’.9 A somewhat similar element appeared in a very short story, ‘Letter from a revived mummy’ in the New York Evening Mirror in 1832. The narrator has lived through numerous eras, received a blow on the head in the late 1600s, and was revived by a scientist who ‘applied the galvanic battery (as he called it) with so much success that at the third expedition I leaped on my feet’. Thus revived, he is able to comment on the change of contemporary world from what he knew over the ages.

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Figure 3.2  Public unwrapping of a mummy: an advertisement for an 1864 event in New York.

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In 1833 a one-act comic stage play appeared at London’s Lyceum Theatre from the British-based playwright William Bayle Bernard (1807–75) entitled The Mummy, or the Elixir of Life. Set in Berkshire, a character declares: I have followed here a charming creature, whom I accidentally met in London, and eternally gave my heart to. Her father, a retired merchant, has a passion for curiosities; he has spent a fortune in forming a museum; and having lately been so lucky as to buy a sarcophagus, the great object of his existence is now to get a mummy […] Well, under a suitable disguise I have introduced myself to him as an Eastern traveller that has brought over the veritable frame of King Cheops […] Here, I require a confederate – some one that will get into a black box I have at the inn, and put on a dress of calico bandages.10

The story is made a little more complex as a real mummy is also introduced to the plot. An elixir is used to test which is the real mummy, and of course succeeds. Such a play reflects an awareness of the collecting predilections of the time. The mummy genre had its impact on the American writer Edgar Allan Poe (1809–49), whose neatly composed satirical short story Some Words with a Mummy was published in 1845 in the American Review and reissued the same year in the Broadway Journal. By then the European fascination with the mummy had spread to North America. The plot revolves around a mummy unwrapping by a Dr Ponnonner in his private house, though possibly in the narrator’s dream. The mummy’s name is discovered to be Allamistakeo. After the unwrapping, those attending experiment with the use of an electric shock (as in Jane Webb’s novel). This succeeds in restoring the mummy to life, and after initial annoyance Allamistakeo debates the differences between the ancient world and modern America with his hosts, who are confident in the superiority of their world, but the mummy appears to have the upper hand in the argument. In contrast to Poe’s writings of the macabre, here he is using a potentially macabre topic for amusement and social satire. Meanwhile the narrator decides that he too will arrange to be embalmed. French writer Théophile Gautier (1811–72) was a pioneer of the mummy tale with a short story ‘Le pied de momie’ published first in 1840 in Le Musée des Familles. In 1846 it was republished as ‘La princesse Hermonthis’. The narrator purchases from an antiquarian dealer (initially for use as a paperweight) an embalmed foot from ancient Egypt, identified as that of princess Hermonthis,

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daughter of a pharaoh. But in his dream, the foot begins to move, and its owner arrives at his bedside to claim her foot. It was a young girl of a very deep coffee-brown complexion […] and possessing the purest Egyptian type of perfect beauty […] her nose was exquisitely chiselled, almost Greek in its delicacy of outline; and she might indeed have been taken for a Corinthian statue of bronze but for the prominence of her cheek-bones and the slightly African fulness of her lips, which compelled one to recognise her as belonging beyond all doubt to the hieroglyphic race which dwelt upon the banks of the Nile.11

He departs with her to ancient Egypt, where he asks the pharaoh for his daughter’s hand in marriage. This is refused, as he does not know how to preserve his body in the style of Egyptian embalmment. On waking, the narrator finds the foot has been replaced by a green idol the princess had given him in the dream. Some eighteen years later, in 1858, Gautier changed from playwriting and poetry to issue his second novel Le Roman de la momie, first translated into English by 1882. The importance of this book is signalled by its modern republication. Gautier had written a review that same year of a history of ancient burial customs by the Parisian Ernest Feydeau, to whom Gautier dedicated his novel. He used the latest research and publications to give the most accurate descriptions available to the ancient Egypt presented in his book. The last wrapping taken off, the young woman showed in the chaste nudity of her lovely form, preserving, in spite of so many centuries that had passed away, the fulness of her contours, and the easy grace of her pure lines. Her pose, an infrequent one in the case of mummies, was that of the Venus of Medici, as if the embalmers had wished to save this beautiful body from the set attitude of death and to soften the inflexible rigidity of the cadaver.12

In his romantic story, European explorers enter an Egyptian tomb and unwrap the mummy of a woman whose remnants appear quite lifelike. Associated with it was a papyrus which told of the woman’s life, and the ‘translation’ of this text is the bulk of the book, with biblical as well as historical references incorporated. Inspired by the story, one of the explorers, Lord Evandale, is haunted through life by a retrospective love for this woman. Thus both Gautier’s mummies were desirable: if they brought threat, it was that of love, not fear.

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The idea of a mobile mummy appears in an 1862 story by an unknown writer, ‘The Mummy’s Soul’ in The Knickerbocker, or New York Monthly Magazine. Here a female mummy removed to a modern house comes to life and terrifies its current owner. In another horror short story in Putnam’s Monthly Magazine in 1868 by American writer Jane G. Austin, ‘After Three Thousand Years’, a man responds to a young woman’s request: ‘I asked you to bring me some personal ornament from the mummy of a princess.’ It proves to carry a curse which kills her. In the same year, 1868, a five-act comic play by Australian Richard Capper, The Mummymakers of Egypt, has husbands and wives hiding in coffins and pretending death as part of a domestic merry-go-round. During the 1880s and 1890s professional Egyptology increased substantially, with museum experts and displays and expeditions to record and excavate in the Nile Valley and Delta. Britain’s Egypt Exploration Fund was founded in 1882, the year in which British influence in Egypt advanced into British occupation. But romantic mummy images continued. The Canadian-born Grant Allen (1848–99) published in 1890 ‘My New Year’s Eve among the Mummies’. Here the narrator falls in love with the resuscitated princess. During a visit to Egypt he finds a way into an unopened pyramid, where he encounters the still-living Egyptian king and his court. The princess Hatasou engages him in conversation and concedes that she and the others are mummies: ‘Is it possible,’ said Hatasou, ‘that you don’t really know the object of embalming? […] We are made into mummies in order to preserve our immortality. Once in every thousand years we wake up for twenty-four hours, recover our flesh and blood, and banquet once more upon the mummied dishes and other good things laid by for us in the Pyramid.’13

She is an engaging figure: ‘The more we talked, the more desperately did I fall in love, and the more utterly oblivious did I become of my duty to Editha Fitz-Simkins.’ He is put to sleep, awakes in hospital where he has been diagnosed with a fever, but considers the experience was a real one. Though nominally supernatural, this is a gentle and amusing story (except to Editha, who cancels the engagement). Another short work, ‘The Unseen Man’s Story’ by American writer Julian Hawthorne, is set in Egypt. In Thebes the narrator meets a Monsieur Carigliano, former member of a French scientific expedition. He tells a tale of discovering a

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tomb with a stone sarcophagus which hid a chamber. In that chamber were apparently still living ancient Egyptians: But, as I contemplated them, their apparent insensibility resolved itself into motion, and I saw that they were not carven images, but that the hearts which had begun to beat when Moses was an infant, still sent the blood through their veins, though in pulses as measured as the tides of ocean.14

The queen addressed the visitor, who now identified himself as Pantour, son of Amosis, a former lover of the queen before her untimely death. She has had to wait 3,000 years for his return and he now must die to be reunited with her. Pantour/ Carigliano does not think much of this idea and flees, but later regrets his action, and says he is about to return to the tomb, which according to the narrator he does. Here are the deceased with visible bodies active under the tomb, but the word ‘mummy’ does not occur in the text.

THE HORROR STORY

The establishment of the threatening mummy of English language fiction, and of film, is probably attributable to Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930). His 1892 horror story ‘Lot No. 249’ appeared in Harper’s Magazine the same year as the third of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes books. Given Conan Doyle’s vast readership, it may be seen as the inspiration for a succession of mummy horror tales. But this one is subtle, more frightening by being understated. Set in an Oxford college, a student of oriental languages, Edward Bellingham, owns a range of oriental antiquities including a mummy he has bought at auction (hence lot number 249). The mummy, of an excessively tall man, certainly lacks the humanity of earlier tales: The features, though horribly discoloured, were perfect, and two little nut-like eyes still lurked in the depths of the black, hollow sockets. The blotched skin was drawn tightly from bone to bone, and a tangled wrap of black, coarse hair fell over the ears. Two thin teeth, like those of a rat, overlay the shrivelled lower lip. In its crouching position, with bent joints and craned head, there was a suggestion of energy about the horrid thing which made Smith’s gorge rise. The gaunt ribs, with their parchment-like covering, were exposed, and the sunken, leaden-hued abdomen,

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with the long slit where the embalmer had left his mark; but the lower limbs were wrapped round with coarse, yellow bandages.15

Bellingham is found in his rooms in a state of terror. Later a student neighbour sees the mummy missing from its location, yet back there in a short time. He and other students suspect that Bellingham may be behind acts of violence in the town, by bringing the mummy to life. They confront Bellingham, forcing him to destroy the mummy. The creature crackled and snapped under every stab of the keen blade. A thick, yellow dust rose up from it. Spices and dried essences rained down upon the floor. Suddenly, with a rending crack, its backbone snapped asunder, and it fell, a brown heap of sprawling limbs, upon the floor.

Then (to his great panic) they force him to destroy a papyrus document they suspect provides him with the secrets to this reincarnation. Don’t burn that! Why, man, you don’t know what you do. It is unique; it contains wisdom which is nowhere else to be found […] I’ll share the knowledge with you. I’ll teach you all that is in it. Or, stay, let me only copy it before you burn it!

While the implication is that the mummy had indeed been revived to perform violent acts, it is never witnessed directly. The text alone retains the very slight possibility that it is Bellingham himself who is violent and deluded, but Harper’s Magazine removed any ambiguity with their commissioned crude illustration of a mummy running in pursuit of its victim. Conan Doyle’s own personal turn to spiritualism was still some years away, although he would claim these ideas began in 1886–7. Conan Doyle’s second mummy tale was published eight years later: ‘The Ring of Thoth’ in The Cornhill Magazine of 1890. It is rather less subtle a tale. An English scholar with a passion for Egyptology sleeps overnight in the Louvre Museum and wakes to see a man he thought was an attendant unwrap a mummy. Inside is a well-preserved body: First, a cascade of long, black, glossy tresses poured over the workman’s hands and arms. A second turn of the bandage revealed a low, white forehead, with a pair of delicately arched eyebrows. A third uncovered a pair of bright, deeply fringed eyes,

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Figure 3.3  The mummy comes alive: 1892 illustration from Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘Lot No. 249’.

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and a straight, well-cut nose, while a fourth and last showed a sweet, full, sensitive mouth, and a beautifully curved chin. The whole face was one of extraordinary loveliness.16

But soon: The action of the air had already undone all the art of the embalmer. The skin had fallen away, the eyes had sunk inwards, the discoloured lips had writhed away from the yellow teeth, and the brown mark upon the forehead alone showed that it was indeed the same face which had shown such youth and beauty a few short minutes before.

The Englishman speaks to the man, who tells his story. He was from ancient Egypt and had learned a chemical elixir which prolonged life, and which could only be reversed by a magic ring. His beloved, however, had died, with the ring buried in her shrouds. He uses it to die and join her in death. Thus though the story includes a mummy, there is no resuscitation of the dead woman, but indeed the reverse: the physical mummy is almost incidental to the story. Conan Doyle had invented the idea of the malevolent mummy come to life in ‘Lot No. 249’. But as with writer H. Rider Haggard’s image of ancient Africa, what began as authorial fantasy took hold as belief. When his friend Bertram Fletcher Robinson died (of typhoid) in 1907, Conan Doyle formed the view that this was due to Robinson’s study of a mummy in the British Museum collection. By this time Conan Doyle himself had begun his move to a belief in spiritualism. According to a talk given by Conan Doyle many years later, Robinson’s death: was caused by Egyptian ‘elementals’ guarding a female mummy, because Mr Robinson had begun an investigation of the stories of the mummy’s malevolence […] I warned Mr Robinson against concerning himself with the mummy at the British Museum. He persisted, and his death occurred […] I told him he was tempting fate by pursuing his enquiries […] The immediate cause of death was typhoid fever, but that is the way in which the elementals guarding the mummy might act.17

A female writer in the mummy genre was H. D. Everett, who used the pen name Theo Douglas to write most of her work. She published Iras: A Mystery in 1896. This retains the image of the beautiful woman from ancient Egypt and the love of a

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modern Egyptologist, Ralph Lavenham. He brings back to England a coffin within which lies the Egyptian woman. She has not been mummified but has been put in a trance and buried alive with the wrappings and coffin of a mummy – a slight echo of Verdi’s opera Aïda, which was first seen in Britain in 1876. The rotten shreds of tissue had been torn apart by the movement of the arm, and there within lay the sleeper in the perfect bloom of her young womanhood, white robed from throat to foot, the darkly fringed eyes still closed, the soft breathing just stirring the linen folds which veiled her breast. The face I looked upon was beautiful […] I knew my heart’s one love when I saw her face to face […] Was it moments or hours before I took the warm small hand in my own, before the red lips parted with a sigh, the dark-fringed eyelids lifted, and the eyes and the soul behind them looked into mine?18

He immediately falls in love with her (she takes the name Iras) and they marry and depart for Scotland, but she loses the pendants which have protected her life and she dies. Lavenham faints, and he is found in the company of a mummy into which Iris has turned. There is the suggestion that the whole relationship had been an illusion. A full-length novel about Egypt, Pharos, The Egyptian by Australian writer Guy Boothby was published in London in 1899, in instalments in the Windsor Magazine. Pharos is a contemporary Egyptian with occult powers which he uses for evil purposes, being the still living (rather than reincarnated) Ptahmes, magician to the pharaoh of the time of biblical Joseph who had been buried alive. The complex plot thus continues the idea of eternal life, although puzzlingly there is also a mummy of Ptahmes, even though he remains alive. This contradicts the image of the mummy as a body embalmed to maintain its existence. In a short story ‘A Professor of Egyptology’ (1904) Boothby has a modern woman transported back to ancient Egypt to solve a murder case. A short story by E. and H. Heron, ‘The Story of Baelbrow’ (1898), is more of a classic ghost story. The ghost appears to be from a mummy, brought to the haunted house, but which also was a vampire: I imagine you took off most of, or rather all, the outer bandages, thus leaving the limbs free, wrapped only in the inner bandages which were swathed round each separate limb. I fancy this mummy was preserved by the Theban method with aromatic spices which left the skin olive-coloured, dry and flexible, like tanned leather, the features remaining distinct, and the hair, teeth and eyebrows perfect.19

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The mummified body is destroyed: a rather bland ending to a rather bland plot. A malevolent, apparently Egyptian spirit of the dead features in the novel The Beetle: A Mystery by Richard Marsh, published in Britain in 1897, the same year as the more famous Dracula by Bram Stoker (1847–1912). The spirit has power of hypnosis and changing shape; it pursues a British politician and causes chaos. But the word mummy is not used. Of greater impact was the 1903 novel The Jewel of the Seven Stars by Irish writer Bram Stoker, author of Dracula six years earlier. The initially distressing and gruesome ending was changed for a subsequent edition in 1912. In establishing the now ‘classic’ image of the mummy, archaeologist Abel Trelawny attempts to resuscitate the mummy of an ancient Egyptian queen and ill-intentioned sorceress, Tera, which has been brought to Britain for this purpose. This exercise has the unwitting consequence of Trelawny’s daughter Margaret being possessed by Tera. The description of the body echoes the female descriptions of earlier work: a mummy hand, so perfect that it startled one to see it. A woman’s hand, fine and long […] In the embalming it had lost nothing of its beautiful shape; even the wrist seemed to maintain its pliability as the gentle curve lay on the cushion. The skin was of a rich creamy or old ivory colour; a dusky fair skin which suggested heat, but heat in shadow.20

In the final chapter of the original version, the mummy of the queen’s cat, her ‘familiar’, is unwrapped, revealing recent blood, before they burn the body. They then unwrap the queen herself, finding her in a wedding rather than funeral robe. The body of the queen resembles that of Margaret. All the pores of the body seemed to have been preserved in some wonderful way. The flesh was full and round, as in a living person; and the skin was as smooth as satin […] It was like ivory, new ivory; except where the right arm, with shattered, bloodstained wrist and missing hand had lain bare to exposure in the sarcophagus for so many tens of centuries.

An experiment is then undertaken to attempt the resuscitation of the queen, involving her body and a heptagonal coffer brought from Egypt and following ancient instructions. A glow emerges from the coffer, then black smoke. The narrator removes a woman’s body from the room, where it is replaced by the bridal robe and the queen’s jewels. Back in the room all are dead:

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I found them all where they had stood. They had sunk down on the floor, and were gazing upward with fixed eyes of unspeakable terror. Margaret had put her hands before her face, but the glassy stare of her eyes through her fingers was more terrible than an open glare.

Such an ending is much more satisfying for the twentieth century of mummy terror. But in the revised ending imposed on Stoker by his publishers following criticism of the first version, after the smoke and glow of the experiment, the narrator finds that Margaret is fine, the other men in the room unconscious but readily revived, and the queen’s body has disappeared. The narrator gets married to Margaret, who puts on the queen’s jewellery. Bram Stoker set a landmark in 1903: such works were celebrating not just the familiarity in museums of the mummy, but the familiarity in popular image of the archaeological explorer. A different style of novel was The Mummy of Thompson-Pratt by C. J. Cutliffe-Hyne (using the pen name of Weathersby Chesney), which appeared as part of the volume Atoms of Empire in 1904. Here are familiar characters: the Egyptologist Gobobave and his Cambridge academic colleagues, one of whom brings a mummy back from Egypt. It is revealed from bodily markings that a university laboratory demonstrator, Thompson-Pratt, is the descendant of the mummified man, Menen-Ra. Thompson-Pratt is hypnotised lying next to the mummy. The mummy speaks, though in the voice of ThompsonPratt, at length and of matters which appear insignificant to the listeners, before they revive Thompson-Pratt. Reincarnation was combined with time travel in The Mummy and Miss Nitocris by British science fiction writer George Griffith and published in the year of his death, 1906. Queen Nitocris contacts a modern professor (who has her mummy in his possession in England) and helps him use time travel to prevent a war; his daughter is a reincarnation of Nitocris, so this is not a true ‘mummy’ tale. But there was nothing supernatural in the novel from the prolific British detective fiction writer R. Austin Freeman (1862–1943). He published early in his writing career The Eye of Osiris in 1911. In this book John Bellingham (perhaps deliberately the same surname as in Conan Doyle’s story) is an archaeologist who brings the mummy of Sebekhotep from Egypt to present to the British Museum. The mummy arrives but Bellingham has disappeared. The mummy is eventually X-rayed and is found to be the body of the disappeared man. Meanwhile remnants of a body have been found scattered and are collected by the police.

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‘I take it,’ said Thorndyke, ‘that the remains of Sebekhotep, or at least a portion of them, are at present lying in the Woodford mortuary awaiting an adjourned inquest.’21

Another early mummy book came from the Australian writer Ambrose Pratt (1874–1944) whose book The Living Mummy was published both in London and New York in 1910. This too involves archaeologists working in Egypt. Here we have an invisible mummy (of high priest Ptahmes) come alive and serving as accomplice to a modern man, Dr Belleville, though the core argument is about modern individuals, with the mummy as an additional character. Reviews were mixed, with one from the US describing it as ‘a wild and extravagant story of a disinterred mummy which came to life again and was compelled to do the wicked will of its new master. It is an incongruous, incomprehensible compound of impossible nonsense.’22 The same source preferred Mary Gaunt’s The Mummy Moves (also 1910) set in West Africa. The great British adventure novelist H. Rider Haggard (1856–1925) engaged with the mummy themes, with his light and humorous novella Smith and the Pharaohs published in parts in the Strand Magazine between December 1912 and February 1913. This echoes Conan Doyle’s ‘Ring of Thoth’ story. James Ebenezer Smith becomes fascinated by Egyptology, inspired by the London cast of a woman’s head. The topic and inspiration for the story sounds very current, but it is presumably coincidental that the famous head of Nefertiti was uncovered by a German team in December 1912. While helping on an excavation Smith finds the tomb of the same woman, Queen Ma-Mee, and a mummified hand. Accidentally locked in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo overnight, he witnesses a meeting of Egyptian royals (since their bodies were stored in that museum). They notice Smith and accuse him of being a tomb robber. Ma-Mee comes to his defence, seeing in him the image of a former lover: ‘What ails your Majesty?’ asked the Pharaoh. ’Oh, naught,’ she answered. ‘Yet does this earth-dweller remind you of anyone?’ ‘Yes, he does,’ answered the Pharaoh. ‘He reminds me very much of that accursed sculptor about whom we had words.’23

Smith wakes in the morning, but is sure the ring he holds is not the one he had the night before, but one Ma-Mee has given him. Some literary scholars have read great meaning into this story, which otherwise appears just an entertaining and amusing fantasy.

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The discovery and recording of pharaoh Tutankhamen’s tomb between 1922 and 1930 had raised the popular interest in ancient Egypt. If Bram Stoker’s novel led to mummy movies, these movies in turn inspired the use of the mummy in numerous works of fiction from the 1930s onward. The range of mummy roles allowed their use in many different contexts and genres. This survey shows that the Egyptian mummy provided a suitable character for a range of fictional treatments in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century fiction. While the period saw the source of the horror image, it also provided humanising presentations, especially of the female mummy who was transformed by the author’s pen from a shrivelled corpse wrapped in linen shrouds to a beauty whose essential humanity was restored. The film genre and the myth of the mummy’s curse would reverse this. The diverse fictional and cinematic presentations of mummies contrast with the historical role and nature of the mummy in the belief system of the Egyptian elites (we know little of commoners’ beliefs). The deceased would never return to occupy and revive their corporeal body: given the removal of the internal organs (liver, stomach, intestines, lungs) into canopic jars, the body would not have been functional if it had been reoccupied. Instead, after 40 days of chemical treatment and another 30 days’ wait, the ‘opening of the mouth’ in the tomb set up a scenario in which the now-departed person could maintain a happy afterlife in the other world. The soul, the ba, might return to hover over the body but would never revive it or participate again in our material world. The Western literary and filmic idea of the resurrection of the mummified body may represent a misunderstanding of Egyptian religion, or just a convenient variance to suit the modern use of the mummy themes. But it also emerged in a period in which established Christian religion presented conflicting ambiguities about the afterlife. Catholic orthodoxy believed in the resurrection of the body at some future day of judgement. Protestant theology was more diverse: the afterlife and departure to heaven (or otherwise) might be more immediate, and not require the human body, nor a wait into a future millennial point at which the resurrection would happen. To a Western audience, short cuts to resurrection using ancient magic had their mystical appeal.

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MUMMY IN FILM

While fiction in print could suggest an appearance and behaviour for a revived mummy, the movie could present this on screen, either as a direct image or (more scarily) as hinted image and fleeting glance. The history of the mummy in cinema is a long and complex one: the Internet Movie Database lists over 130 films with ‘mummy’ in the title. The genre had impact in the era of the commercial silent film, from the early twentieth century to the end of the 1920s when sound movies came to dominate. There is a consistent plot theme in many, although comedy is as common as horror. The Haunted Curiosity Shop, a short British film directed by Michael Booth from 1901, includes in its special effects a mummy losing its wrappings, then its flesh, leaving just a skeleton. A French film is recorded from 1908 under the title La Momie/The Mummy, in which a professor buys a coffin with a mummy from an antiques shop, and his use of a knife to cut its wrapping alarms his housemaid. A pioneer of the genre is the ten-minute film, La Momie du roi (1909) directed by Swiss Gérard Bourgeois, distributed also as The Mummy of King Ramses. A professor brings a mummy to life – the definitive image for future films. In The Mummy (1911), another very short film (USA, Thanhouse), the mummy of an Egyptian princess is brought back to life by electrical current through an accident, and attempts romantic involvement with her rescuer. When he declines her approach, she has him mummified but then rescues him, and eventually marries an elderly professor instead. The same name The Mummy was used for a comedy the following year, 1912, directed by A. E. Coleby. In Vengeance of Egypt (1912) a mummy is removed from its tomb during Napoleon’s campaign. The ring on its finger is stolen, but brings a curse on its possessors until returned to the mummy. The 1913 American film When Soul meets Soul reverses the princess story, as the archaeologist discovers that he is the reincarnation of the lover of the princess whose mummy he has discovered. The US comedy The Dust of Egypt (1915) is based on a stage play. A man dreams that the mummified princess he is looking after comes to life, but after she causes chaos he wakes to find it was a dream. The Egyptian Mummy (1914) is another comedy in which a man is disguised as a mummy, to be sold for scientific experiments. Ernst Lubitch directed the German film Die Augen der Mumie Ma (The Eyes of the Mummy) in 1918. There is a curse on anyone who enters the tomb of Queen

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Ma. In the tomb the coffin appears to have living eyes: it turns out that this is a modern woman imprisoned by an evil Egyptian, who is rescued by the film’s hero. In The Avenging Hand, also known as The Wraith of the Tomb (1915, a British film directed by Charles Calvert), an archaeologist steals the mummified hand of an Egyptian princess whose ghost seeks her revenge. Other early movies recorded include the French Romance of The Mummy (1911), a comedy The Mummy and the Cowpuncher (1912), a comedy When the Mummy Cried for Help (1915) directed by Al Christie and Horace Davey, The Live Mummy (1915) in which a man poses as a mummy, a comedy directed by William Beaudine The Missing Mummy (1916), and Mercy, The Mummy Mumbled (1918), another American comedy, directed by R. W. Phillips. Later comic treatments included Mummy Love (USA, 1926, directed by Marel Perez). These were, of course, all silent films. Deservedly the most famous and influential of the earlier films, but now incorporating sound, is The Mummy (released at the end of 1932 with a copyright date of 1933), directed by Karl Freund for the US studio Universal Pictures. The wrapped mummy of a high priest, Imhotep, is discovered and seen to have been buried alive, not embalmed, as a punishment for illicit love. Despite a warning ‘curse’ against disturbing it, it is brought back to life by the incantation of an ancient spell from the Scroll of Thoth. Meanwhile a modern European woman, Helen, is revealed to be the reincarnation of the princess Imhotep loved, Ankhesenamon. As a modern man Imhotep locates her and seeks to regain her as his love. Helen is the daughter of the British governor of the Sudan – the territory had been a condominium of Britain and Egypt since 1899 (when Egypt itself was under British control). Cinematically this film has a high reputation, being made only three years after sound became common on movies. It also has scenes which seek to be authentic to Egyptian architecture and art (although ‘pharaoh’ is misspelt in the credits). The belief system represented in the script is, however, confused and contradictory. To allow a mummified person to exist today required two plot points: the body of Imhotep had not been eviscerated and treated chemically but a living, unprocessed person was wrapped in shrouds and buried alive, presumably dying as a result. Then the spells of the Scroll of Thoth were used to bring him back to life in this world, as a result of which this mummy removes its wrappings and presents a normal (if sinister) human appearance, unlike some later film mummies who remain shrouded. (A magical Book of Thoth to control a spirit had been used in the 1914 serialised story Brood of the Witch Queen by British novelist Sax Rohmer.)

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To this pattern is added a model distinct from both Egyptian and Western theology, as the princess Ankhesenamon is reincarnated in multiple subsequent lives, the most recent being the ‘romantic interest’ in the film, the British Helen. The internal logic of the film would have offered Imhotep two options to regain his lost princess: using the Scroll of Thoth to resuscitate the original princess’s body, or staying with Helen as her reincarnation. But neither would allow the dramatic requirements of a beautiful girl being rescued from mortal danger and the destruction of the being that threatened her. And in the final scene writer John Balderston (who had been present at the opening of Tutankhamen’s tomb) forced further complications. The beliefs and rationale now seem to get confused and confusing. The never-mummified Imhotep, raised from death by a spell, wants to transform the reincarnated princess into the original whom he loved. The princess had died and was conventionally mummified. But her soul is now reincarnated in Helen’s mortal body. Imhotep could use the Scroll of Thoth which ‘could bring thee back to life […] the spell that raises the dead’.24 But this does not seem enough. Imhotep states: ‘It is thy dead shell. I could raise it now but it would be a mere thing that moved to my will without a soul.’ He must first burn the mummy of the princess, thus removing that form: ‘I destroy this lifeless thing.’ He must then kill Helen with a knife, plunge her body (rather curiously) into a vat of natron. Then ‘the gods will receive into the underworld the spirit of Ankhesenamon, but not for long’. Helen pleads: ‘Save me from this mummy. It’s dead.’ ‘He’s going to kill her and make her a living mummy like herself,’ explains her friend Dr Muller. Imhotep declares to Helen that after destroying the mummy and killing her, ‘Thou shalt take its place but for a few moments, then rise again even as I have risen’. This complex means to regain the princess suggests the author had got lost in the technicalities of the plot. Fortunately it need go no further, since she prays to a statue of the goddess Isis, who intervenes and kills Imhotep. The Scroll of Thoth is seen burning and destroyed. Other mummy plots are simpler, if just as far from Egyptian religious beliefs. A series of 1940s films from Universal Studios featured the revived mummy of Kharis, played by Lon Chaney: The Mummy’s Hand (1940), The Mummy’s Tomb (1942), The Mummy’s Ghost (1944) and The Mummy’s Curse (1945). Kharis is another man who, as punishment for falling in love with an Egyptian princess, has been buried alive, wrapped in linen shrouds and buried before death. A cult involving magic leaves has kept him alive, and he moves through the world still largely wrapped in his linen shrouds. When mobile, Kharis seems committed

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Figure 3.4  Movie poster for The Mummy’s Curse, starring Lon Chaney, 1945.

to acts of violence and evil – the antithesis of the humanised female mummies of the earliest literature and film. One of his victims in the first film is museum archaeologist Dr Petrie (the real Egyptologist Sir Flinders Petrie died only in 1942, aged 89). This has little to do with ancient Egyptian mummification. Kharis is mainly just another roaming monster in the genre of roaming monster horror movies. Characters and plot elements from earlier films were resuscitated (if that is the right word) in colour by Britain’s Hammer Films, starting with The Mummy (1959). Again the revived mummy, buried alive rather than embalmed and brought back to life accidentally by the use of ancient spells, is still mainly wrapped in linen. Hammer then developed other plot lines involving mummies, without gaining much critical acclaim. In The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb (1964) the mummy is in fact dead before being revived by the spell on an amulet to spread killing and violence. Another character, Adam Beauchamp, is an ancient Egyptian whose curse has been eternal life, not death. The Mummy’s Shroud, made by Hammer in 1967, follows the familiar model in which a shrouded mummy comes back to life 98

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after the recitation of a sacred text. The mummy is not grateful for this and takes violent revenge on members of the expedition who have disturbed its tomb. The fourth Hammer film, Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb (1971), was based on Bram Stoker’s The Jewel of the Seven Stars, using names from his book but with some plot changes. Another film development from the same plot was Mike Newell’s British film The Awakening (1980). Later mummy movies have varied the plot line, but all have had to overcome the quandary that in Egyptian belief systems the mummified body could not revive on this earth. To overcome this, themes used by earlier films have often been reused. In Universal Studios’ The Mummy (1999), commercially if not critically successful, we again have the man revived by reading a spell from ‘the book of the dead’. References are to earlier mummy movies, not to ancient Egypt (the scarab beetles even eat human flesh and occasionally fly), and there is no attempt to work within a consistent belief system. In the words of the Washington Post reviewer, ‘As they infiltrate the tomb, an artificial plague of special effects rains down on them’.25 The evil mummy here has a decayed body but a minimum of linen wrappings: ‘He’s still juicy: he looks as if he’s still decomposing.’ But by acquiring organs from living humans the body becomes complete and modern, though immortal. Borrowing vaguely from the 1932 film, the living mummy Imhotep seems (briefly) to see the female Egyptologist Evelyn as his former love Anck-su-Namun and nearly slays her next to the princess’s own mummy, explaining ‘with your death Anck-suNamun shall live and I shall be invincible’. Finally an alternative spell renders Imhotep mortal (again) and he is killed. In sequels The Mummy Returns (2001) and The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (2008) the time and place were changed. Indeed the familiarity of the cinema mummy – vengeful and wrapped in linen shrouds – could be fitted into a wider range of films (most but not all in English language) in different genres, from comedy to horror, action and drama, without the need to revisit the ancient Egyptian beliefs about the afterlife.

THE CURSE

Given the efforts by ancient Egyptians to preserve the human body after death, and to supply the deceased with spells to help them in the afterlife, it might be reasonable to expect Egyptian tombs to hold further spells to protect the body from human desecration. But expert research has found very few – one authority

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citing just a couple, saying that to those who did evil to the tomb or entered it while unclean there would be judgement against them by the great god. The main safeguard against tomb destruction was to make access difficult: location in a hidden valley, with the actual burial well beyond or below the tomb entrance. But tomb robbery was not just restricted to treasure hunters modern or ancient, since clearly many tombs were robbed very soon after burial took place, or even by those involved in the construction and rites. A late tale from the Ptolemaic period featured a Book of Thoth, which is stolen by Setne Khamwas. It is this theft, rather than direct interference with a mummy, that generates a curse and a sequence of misfortunes. Where, then, did the concept emerge of a curse (sometimes described as the ‘Curse of the Pharaohs’) upon those such as archaeologists who disturbed the tomb of an ancient Egyptian? As Jasmine Day has noted, the result of much fictional writing was to ‘convert mummies from victims into villains by overloading them with signs of pollution and evil’.26 This theme of later fiction and film has an early appearance in an engaging 1869 short story by Louisa May Alcott. In ‘Lost on a Pyramid: the Mummy’s Curse’ two explorers, Forsyth and Professor Niles, set fire to a woman’s mummy in a tomb before taking away a box containing seeds which had been clasped in the woman’s hands. A text is found whose ‘inscription said that the mummy we had so ungallantly burned was that of a famous sorceress who bequeathed her curse to whoever should disturb her rest’.27 Some of the seeds flower and kill Niles, whose warning is: ‘Beware of the Mummy’s Curse, for this fatal flower has killed me’. Immediately after his wedding the flower affects his wife, who is sent into a coma, ‘a pale ghost’. This is a surprisingly grim story for a writer who, the year before, had published her children’s novel Little Women. The main entry of the supposed curse into popular belief followed the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamen in 1922, with excavation from 1923 through to late 1930. Many Egyptologists were involved in the work, and most lived on: Sir Alan Gardiner, for example, died in 1963 at the age of 84; Douglas Derry, who undertook medical examination of the body, died in 1969. Sponsor Lord Carnarvon caught public attention by his death from a blood infection soon after the tomb opening in 1923, but his daughter who accompanied him at the opening lived until 1980 and expedition director Howard Carter did not die until 1939. Media stories about the tomb of Tutankhamen were limited by Lord Carnarvon’s exclusive deal with The Times of London – though the Illustrated London News ran wonderful illustrated features with acknowledgement to The Times for most of

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the images. Other media, offended by the Times arrangement, thus had to present news acquired indirectly and the ‘curse’ story about Carnarvon’s death helped fill the gap. What are the sources of the curse myth? The illness of Lord Carnarvon followed by his death in Cairo on 5 April 1923 seems the main driver. While he was ill in Egypt, British popular novelist and mystic enthusiast Marie Corelli pronounced a story which reached the newspapers (though ignored by The Times), and while the sources may have been fabricated, her words resonated with her popular following. I cannot but think some risks are run by breaking into the last rest of a king in Egypt whose tomb is specially and solemnly guarded, and robbing him of his possessions. According to a rare book I possess […] entitled The Egyptian History of the Pyramids […] the most dire punishment follows any rash intruder into a sealed tomb. The book names ‘secret poisons enclosed in boxes in such wise that those who touch them shall not know how they come to suffer’. That is why I ask, Was it a mosquito bite that has so seriously infected Lord Carnarvon?28

Conan Doyle, by now a committed spiritualist, was interviewed by The Times of London immediately after Carnarvon’s death; his statement went out internationally via news agencies: Powerful elements of spirits placed on guard by ancient Egyptian priests to protect the tomb of King Tutankhamen may have caused the death of Lord Carnarvon. I consider it probable that, during the Tutankhamen era priests possessed the power to create guardian elements.29

Some of the press cited quite invented texts of curses supposedly associated with the tomb, and Howard Carter received letters warning him of dire consequences if he continued his investigations. A substantial industry of rumours, reports and myths developed about supposed effects of the curse, and would continue to develop for decades. The Tutankhamen opening inspired silent filmic treatment involving a curse. King Tut-Ankh-Amen’s Eighth Wife was a 1923 American film whose plot arose from a curse on those who disturbed the tomb. Three years later Made for Love was a US film in which a 2000 bce curse at a pharaoh’s tomb impacts on presentday Europeans and romance in Egypt. Meanwhile any misfortune that affected an

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Egyptologist or museum staffer in the presence of mummified material could be popularly attributed to a curse. An early story extended a mummy’s curse to the Titanic, which sank in April 1912. This invented story of ‘The Unlucky Mummy’ linked a series of misadventures to people and places associated with a coffin lid (not an actual mummy) that had indeed entered the collections of the British Museum in 1886 (accession number 22542). In versions of the myth, the coffin lid, or the associated mummy, was claimed to have been taken on board the Titanic on its fateful voyage. In response to periodic revivals of the curse story in the media, Metropolitan Museum Egyptologist Herbert Winlock made the trenchant observation: ‘If tourists are subject to the curse, it should be remembered that a large number of them are elderly people travelling in Egypt for their health.’ Despite this, references to a supposed curse of the pharaoh, or curse of the mummy, have become commonplace – in movies, adult and children’s books, even board and electronic games – and will certainly remain so. The mummy is a chemically treated cadaver, intended in ancient Egypt to assist the soul in its afterlife in the other world. But as this chapter has shown, the idea of ‘the mummy’ has been used and misused in a range of contexts. The abuse of the cadaver for medicine contrasts with the fictional use of the resuscitated female mummy in romantic fiction. But all fiction, whether print or cinema, had to circumvent the reality that the passage of ancient Egyptian souls from this life to the next was a one-way journey; the soul would not return as a ghost to reanimate the body. Different stretched plots were developed to overcome this problem. The humanising of the fictional mummy was overtaken by the fictionalised evil mummy, pursuing its own posthumous goals. Sometimes this was just revenge on those who had disturbed its rest. This linked to the newsworthy idea of a ‘curse’ attached to an ancient Egyptian tomb, where those who disturbed a burial or a mummy were afflicted with misfortune. Mummy myths and manias developed a momentum of their own, far from the gentle tribute to the body of a deceased family member and their intended afterlife which the devoted process of mummification reflected in ancient Egypt. Is there more to the fascination for mummies as it developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? This was the era of the ‘Orientalism’ described and critiqued by Edward Said, as many Western writers and scholars presented an image of the Islamic world of the Middle East that reflected the changing power relations of imperial powers and the lands where Ottoman rule had once been strong. Egypt had been a land of mystery to Western nations: it had become a

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land of strategic importance and economic value. British and French influence expanded, and what was effectively British rule from 1882 was met by nationalist challenges. A recognition of Egyptian independence in 1922 still kept British troops within its borders, controlling the Suez Canal zone until 1956. Did the seductive mummified princess of nineteenth-century fiction and the threatening mummy of twentieth-century film reflect changing Western attitudes to Egypt itself? Literary and cultural critics will continue to debate the case. But meanwhile, the zenith of the colonial era was the context for one of the most extreme alterative interpretations of ancient Egypt’s role in world history, which will be reviewed next.

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CHAPTER 4

EGYPTOCENTRISM: ILLUSIONS OF GLOBAL INFLUENCE

Western European imperialism had come to dominate the non-Western world economically and culturally by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The parallel idea was promoted that ancient Egyptian culture, too, had exercised a lasting influence on the world well beyond the region of its settlement and conquests. ‘Egyptocentrism’ is a term for the movement to credit ancient Egypt with far greater influence and more widespread activity than is allowed by conventional scholarly explanations. A fascination with the achievements of ancient Egypt, emphasised by the visibility of its stone monuments and its well-preserved art and artefacts, led some to exaggerate and assign it a unique role in the spread of world civilisation. Egypt would be credited with every innovation from stone building to embalmment, clothing style to personal decoration, religious deities to philosophy and science, and – more importantly – not just as the innovators but as the source from which all the rest of the world learnt these things. Thus invention led to dissemination (by diffusion or by migration of people from Egypt) and to theories of exclusive Egyptian origins for traits as far away as South America, China or the South Pacific. The climax of such ideas came at the high point of European imperialism. The civilisation, power and culture of Britain, France, Germany and Holland had spread to the furthest corners of the globe and had influenced material life, economies, social organisation and often beliefs. In some cases (like Australia) a European culture had been effectively transplanted with its language, religion,

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skills and social norms intact. Confidence in the power and strength of this kind of hegemony laid a basis for claiming a similar influence from an ancient society on the rest of the world, though by diffusion more than conquest. In this privileging of ancient Egypt above any other ancient society, Egyptocentrism contrasts with those ‘pyramidologists’ who chose to downplay ancient Egyptian achievement in favour of construction by aliens from space or citizens of a lost continent of Atlantis and other pre-pharaonic societies. But it also differs from pyramidology in the nature of many of the proponents of these ideas. It is easy enough to dismiss most alternative pyramid theorists as ‘pyramidiots’, even as people ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’. They have variously been categorised as creating wild ideas to fulfil religious and newer cultic obsessions, to make money from publishing improbable but attractive theories, or, driven by ego, to parade eccentric hypotheses on a national or world stage. One the other hand, those who argued for the extremes of Egyptocentrism sometimes came from respectable scholarly or scientific backgrounds in other fields, and let their imagination run wild as they entered another discipline not their own. But they had in common with the pyramidologists a view that the range of interpretations by professional Egyptologists were biased, misguided, or blind, and that they had understood something important about the ancient world that the specialists had missed. In some contexts this might all seem an abstract issue. But as with broader questions of racial and group identity, such historical questions can have resonance. They emerged from particular social settings, thrived in particular contexts of modern history, and had powerful ideological influences. By contrast, one must admire the patriotic vision of Cambridge graduate Robert Deverell (1760–1841), who hinted in private publications that the reverse was so and that ancient Egypt had been a colony of England (with the pyramids reflecting the triangular shape of Britain).

EGYPT’S ROLE IN THE WORLD

The importance of Egypt as innovator is, of course, not a new idea. Many writers and thinkers in the classical Greek and Roman world were well aware of the antiquity of Egyptian civilisation and its architectural achievements: buildings with a level of engineering and mathematical ability which preceded that of the Greek cities. It was reasonable to attribute to ancient Egypt sources of knowledge on which Greek citizens could improve.

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A fascination with exotic religions is nothing unusual and Greek travellers to Egypt were intrigued by the priests and their rites. But equally they could acknowledge correspondences between certain Egyptian deities and those of the Greek world, with a change of name, just as Roman gods could be identified with those of the Greeks. So an Egyptian origin of Greek religious beliefs seemed at least a possibility: Herodotus said the Egyptians first named ‘the twelve gods’. Under Persian rule (525–402 and 343–332 bce) and indeed under subsequent Macedonian and Roman rule, where political power was lost to the foreigner, the maintenance of Egyptian religious ritual cults was strengthened as part of people’s own identity, with strong ideological reasons for the priests to emphasise their cults’ antiquity and importance in world history. The priests and their activities were a major feature of the visit by Herodotus in the mid-fifth century. Diodorus Siculus – Greek historian in the Roman Empire – gave one of the fullest accounts of Egypt. He travelled up to the Nile to Nubia around 60 bce, late in the period of rule by the Macedonian Ptolemaic family and only a few years before Cleopatra came to the throne. In the perspective of his time, Egypt was the country where mythology places the origin of the gods, where the earliest observations of the stars are said to have been made, and where, furthermore, many noteworthy deeds of great men are recorded.1

In citing his sources – Greek writers and those people he met in Egypt – he does not necessarily accept their views about the primacy and achievements of ancient Egypt. He noted the supposed antiquity of Egypt (with sources varying from 10,000 to 23,000 years) and the idea (cited by Herodotus) of Greek hero Herakles coming originally from Egypt. He reported too the claims by Egypt that they had set up colonies in Greece before the rise of Greek civilisation, and even established Athens as a colony from the Egyptian city Saïs, but commented ‘they have no precise proof ’. Given the extended domination of Egypt by foreign rulers for half a millennium, such claims for historical importance are an unsurprising reaction. Perhaps more significant, he recorded the claim by Thebans (as by Herodotus before him) that they had invented scientific knowledge, and especially the accurate observations of astronomy. This perception of Egyptian knowledge was shared by many in the classical world. For many of the customs obtained in ancient days among the Egyptians have not only been accepted by the present inhabitants but have aroused no little admiration

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among the Greeks; and for that reason those men who have won the greatest repute in intellectual things have been eager to visit Egypt in order to acquaint themselves with its laws and institutions, which they considered to be worthy of note.2

Plato put into the mouth of Socrates a comment that must echo a widespread perception in fifth-century Athens: of Egypt as the source for arithmetic and geometry and astronomy and, indeed, writing. Ancient authors referred to libraries of medical books and the range of the medical profession in Egypt. It was possible both to acknowledge the debt to ancient Egypt and to emphasise how ‘our’ world of European civilisation had moved beyond them. Whatever the historic debt to Egypt, they were still considered barbarians. Recognising the role of Egyptian gods, Alexander the Great in his conquest of Egypt in 332 bce was able to be proclaimed as the son of the god Amun. The last of the Macedonian Ptolemaic dynasty Cleopatra (said to be the first who spoke Egyptian as well as Greek) followed a predecessor in suggesting identification with the goddess Isis. The obvious antiquity of Egypt compared to that of the Greek world underlay the acknowledgement by ancient writers of the debt that the art and architecture of the Greek world owed to its Egyptian forebears. Herodotus wrote of the influences on sculpture and architectural forms, while the Roman writer Pliny saw equal influences in classical painting. The visual links between archaic Greek sculpture and Egyptian styles has long been obvious, with some scholars suggesting it is artificial to draw a sharp line between different cultures when there were undoubtedly travelling artisans selling their services to clients in different areas of the eastern Mediterranean in the first millennium bce. This was not just a one-way trade with rising Greek city states looking to Egypt for expertise; Greek mercenary soldiers served Egyptian rulers, and significant numbers of these were settled in Egypt in the mid-seventh century. Martin Bernal (discussed in Chapter 6) in his influential Black Athena considered that the contribution of Egypt to Greek civilisation was fully acknowledged by Western scholars until the eighteenth century, and that as the associated ideologies of imperialism and race emerged, differentiation was stressed between European civilisations and their ‘oriental’ forebears. Certainly scholars of ancient Egypt have never underplayed the Egyptian influence on the classical world. The three largest religions which had their origins in the Middle East – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – had less reason to claim Egyptian influences. The Mosaic myths of enslavement and exodus sought simultaneously to place all the ancestors of Judah and Israel in Egypt for four or five centuries and leave them uninfluenced

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by Egyptian ideas and culture. Biblical narratives underplayed the dominant role Egypt had on the cultures of the Levant in the late second millennium bce, and this was echoed in the Jewish stories and images taken up in Christianity and Islam – though an oblique acknowledgement lay in the comment in I Kings 4.30 that ‘Solomon’s wisdom surpassed the wisdom of all the people of the east, and all the wisdom of Egypt’. Once Islam was established in Egypt, alongside the (now Christianised) descendants of ancient Egyptians, some interest emerged in a heritage of magical knowledge rather than other fields. To medieval Europe, much of the awareness of the ancient world came through Islamic sources. Here lay an acknowledgement of the important heritage of Egypt – especially in astronomy – but with some confusion between the pharaonic world and that of Alexandria with its central role as a centre of learning through Ptolemaic and Roman periods. By the fifteenth century, Europe’s knowledge of the classical authors was direct and European scholars began to take on those authors’ perception of ancient Egypt as a source for the arts and sciences. Such a perspective struggled in the framework of biblical chronology; to the ancient authors Egypt’s civilisation stretched back many millennia, while the orthodox biblical chronology of the world was short, representing less than six millennia. The growth of scientific discourse in Europe went alongside awareness of the ancient traditions. Isaac Newton (1642–1727) himself mused on the influence of Egypt, accepting their influence on Greek religion and art and arguing further that it was the Egyptians who spread the art of temple building around the Mediterranean, an argument that would be echoed later. Newton pressed his ideas of a universal religion spread from Egypt on his friend, British antiquarian William Stukeley (1687–1765) in his study of what he described as ‘the old sages & prophets of Egypt that first disseminated wisdom throughout the world’.3 Fellow antiquarian (and bishop) Richard Pococke (1704–65) suggested to him that the prehistoric stone monuments of Ireland may have been built by Egyptian colonists and Stukeley moved to accept such a view. Newton’s unorthodox religious beliefs may have offended some, but with the growing Enlightenment age and a spirit of enquiry independent from the established churches, there grew a model of human progress in history distant from that of traditional Judeo-Christian scriptures, which had attributed learning to divine revelation. To the much-travelled John Montagu Earl of Sandwich in the mid-eighteenth century, Egypt was the ‘origin of all arts and sciences’. The Egyptians had guided the ancient Greeks

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into the more occult sciences, teaching them the foundations of their religion, communicating to them their knowledge in astronomy, physic, and mathematics; and explaining to them the secrets and mysteries of nature.4

For a while it was open season for Egyptophiles. Near the end of his life, in 1717, French churchman Pierre Huet argued that the civilisations of India and China owed their origins to ancient Egypt. The idea was strengthened further when Englishman John Needham in 1761 argued that Egypt had colonised China, suggesting that Chinese writing had its origins in Egyptian hieroglyphs. Enquiries of the Jesuits based in Peking to test the idea dampened this enthusiasm; the writing, they said, had no discernible similarity, nor was there evidence for any connection. India, China, even the Americas were suggested as regions of Egyptian influence. Such ideas floated in and out of discourse through the eighteenth century. But greater Western scholarship in languages proved the strongest evidence against such models. Chinese became better known in the West, and the study of Sanskrit showed this to be a language in the same family as European languages. Following the work of Champollion after 1822, ancient Egyptian writings could be studied not just to show their linguistic connections but to provide cultural and historical documents on Egyptian history in the actors’ words, rather than through the mediation of the classical writers. Following the growth of historical research on ancient Egypt, the study of standing Figure 4.1  The title page of Isaac Newton’s The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended, 1728. monuments and antiquities grew through the nineteenth century.

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Auguste Mariette was appointed as director of a monuments service in 1858 and the collection which would develop into the Egyptian Museum was relocated to larger premises in the Bulaq district of Cairo in the same year. The growth of Western visitors to Egypt added not only awareness of the ancient world but new perspectives on the apparent poverty and backwardness of this corner of the Ottoman Empire. Egypt might still be a land of romantic Orient to some; to others it was a land subject to a culture inferior to that of the West. While governments might exercise the imperial prerogative and duty and impose order and European civilisation on its present and future, it was also the duty of Western scholarship to recover its deep past. The burst of archaeological fieldwork from the latter part of the nineteenth century produced enough knowledge (and enough specialists to study it) that Egypt could now be described and analysed in some detail. Yet despite this growth in scientific knowledge, there was expansion of some of the wild hypotheses about ancient Egypt’s influence. The growth of the era of European imperialism emphasised the values of European culture as opposed to those of ‘the native’. Science and philosophy – seen as originating in the classical world – came to the fore, while the Egyptian antecedents of this (like the Jewish antecedents of Christianity) were moved into the background. A special invented past has applied to the ‘rebel pharaoh’ Akhenaten. Acceding to his 17-year rule in the middle of the fourteenth century bce, Akhenaten emphasised worship of (and identified with) a single deity, the sun disc Aten. He established a new capital at Amarna in the fourth year of his reign. This early monotheism (perhaps more accurately monolatry) was rapidly reversed after Akhenaten’s death, but modern writers as diverse as Sigmund Freud and Immanuel Velikovsky have suggested his influence was longer-lasting, including using the idea that Moses gained from him directly or indirectly the monotheism that underlay Israelite theology. The late scholar Dominic Montserrat has described the broad range of racial, religious and other ideological overlays on the Akhenaten story, as well as the fictional treatment in over 70 novels and plays.

ELLIOT SMITH AND HYPERDIFFUSION

The most prominent campaign to place ancient Egypt at the centre of world history, as the source of social, economic, technological and religious development, was led

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by a distinguished scientist who turned to popular writing of alternative histories on the eve of World War I. For a quarter-century from 1911 Grafton Elliot Smith, supported by his protégé W. J. Perry and others, argued the Egyptocentric case to a receptive audience, especially in Britain, and despite strong opposition from specialists in Egyptology, archaeology and social anthropology who dismissed these ideas as illusory. Here were extreme ideas about Egypt emerging not from someone clearly on the ‘lunatic fringe’, but from a respected scientist who developed a sideline in challenging conventional views of world history. Sir Grafton Elliot Smith FRS (1871–1937) was a distinguished academic anatomist, respected teacher, and expert on the mammalian (and especially primate) brain. His contribution to this field was recognised by numerous public honours. He was considered ‘the world’s greatest comparative neurologist’, he inspired directly or indirectly a generation of researchers in anatomy and physical anthropology, and is credited with transforming the way anatomy was taught in British universities between World Wars I and II. As a professor of anatomy for 28 years (Cairo, Manchester and University College London) he was also involved in the description and interpretation of human remains found by archaeologists, from fossil hominids to Egyptian mummies. Unfortunately he also developed an obsessional personal sideline by which he became well known to a public audience and for which he is remembered with disfavour by archaeologists and historians – what archaeologist Timothy Champion called ‘an embarrassing episode in the history of the discipline’, with historian of the subject Glyn Daniel asking sharply: ‘Why does the world tolerate this academic rubbish?’ This approach is what Daniel named ‘hyperdiffusionism’. As it was proposed by Elliot Smith and those who followed his arguments, innovations in human history occurred only once, whether these were in economic practice, material culture, social and cultural practice or in beliefs. If the same phenomena were found in different places and times, this represented a process of transmission from the original source: diffusion from an advanced culture to a primitive one, not by independent development, however geographically distant the societies might be. To Elliot Smith, ancient Egypt was the single origin of much in the advancement of world culture throughout both Old and New Worlds. It was the source from which spread worldwide a vast range of innovations, including agriculture, metalworking and civilisation itself, traits such as embalmment and building in stone, and a pattern of mythology and belief. Travellers by land and sea, many in search of ‘the elixir of life’, voyaged worldwide and carried the innovations and cultural traits with them. The spread of cultural elements found in China, Polynesia, South America could be

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Figure 4.2  The worldwide diffusion of culture from Egypt according to Elliot Smith, 1929.

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traced back to Egypt. Once asked by his loyal ally W. J. Perry what he thought was happening in the rest of the world while Egypt was laying the basis of its civilising mission, he replied ‘Nothing’. Although the details of who did what, and when, were modified (or bypassed) in Elliot Smith’s different writings, the core belief remained. In a conference held by the Royal Zoological Society in 1972 to mark the centenary of Elliot Smith’s birth, phrases used about him and his work by the biomedical community included ‘enormous influence’, ‘dominated’, ‘first-class scientist’, ‘worldwide reputation’, ‘a great pioneer’, ‘the simplicity of greatness’ – as well as ‘immensely kind’. Those from archaeology and anthropology were markedly different: ‘very extreme and rigid’, ‘extravagant, ‘notorious’, ‘never taken seriously’, ‘crass ignorance’, ‘delusion’, ‘extraordinarily doctrinal’, ‘obviously fallacious’, ‘a mythological system’, ‘bizarre’. The interesting question is why a distinguished scientist developed such extreme ideas and why they generated followers and enthusiastic public supporters in the early part of the twentieth century, from the eve of World War I to the eve of World War II, and all this despite the consistent criticism of archaeology and anthropology scholars. Elliot Smith was born in the New South Wales town of Grafton, to an Australian mother and a father of British origin, and went to school at the elite government Sydney Boys High School after his father moved to be a school principal in Sydney. He studied at the medical school of Sydney University and after a year of hospital clinical work was appointed University Demonstrator in Anatomy. Alongside his doctoral thesis on the brain of the non-placental mammal (for which he received a University Gold Medal) he completed a dozen papers on neurological topics. Awarded a travel scholarship to Britain at the age of 25, he enrolled as a Research Student at the University of Cambridge and within three years had been elected to a Research Fellowship. Alongside his continuing research on the mammalian brain he prepared the descriptive catalogue of the mammalian and reptilian brains of the Royal College of Surgeons collection. In 1900 he took up a professorship in anatomy at the Government Medical School in Cairo, continuing his research there – Cairo somehow managing to offer what his Royal Society obituary described as ‘an almost unlimited provision of recent brain material’ – and in Britain, to which he was able to return in university vacations. By 1907, aged just 36, his reputation in neurological research and the evolution of the mammalian brain was sufficient for him to be elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (he would be Vice-President six years later) and in 1909 he returned permanently to Britain as Professor of Anatomy at the University of Manchester. During

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his nine years based in Egypt, after he initially ‘quite resisted the temptation to dabble in Egyptology’ as he would claim, he found links to his brain studies within archaeological material, and added a new field of research interest specifically on the techniques of mummification, publishing pioneering work in this field. His examination of Egyptian skeletal material from a wide range of periods gave him a basis for classifying this material into ‘racial’ groups and suggesting a sequence of population movements. In Manchester he initiated what would be described as a revolution in the teaching of anatomy, with traditional lectures supplemented by innovative laboratory and practical teaching (although Elliot Smith was said to be a lessthan-inspiring undergraduate teacher himself). Maintaining his studies of the evolution of the mammalian brain and his reports on mummification, in the Great War he also collaborated with psychologists in the study of shell shock, co-authoring in 1917 a monograph on Shell Shock and its Lessons with a plea for the humane medical recognition and treatment of the condition. He was already then a member of Britain’s General Medical Council. Working with psychologists also helped him consider further his specifically biological approach to the brain, and he remained highly critical of Freudian and other trends as applied in psychology. One of his last (co-authored) books was The Neural Basis of Thought. Moving to University College London in 1919 (where he remained until retiring in 1936) Elliot Smith secured funding to transform anatomy teaching (in a new 1923 anatomy school built with ancient Egyptian decorative and architectural elements), while sponsoring, inspiring and continuing research which extended the ambition of the discipline into human biology and what would later be called palaeoanthropology and physical anthropology. His knighthood in 1934 recognised his transformational role in anatomical teaching and research. Although it was not his area of direct research, as a leading academic anatomist Elliot Smith became involved in questions of the interpretation of the skeletal remains of fossil hominids: the evolution of mankind. This was constantly affected by new discoveries of skeletal material, some (like Australopithecus in 1925) reported by his own protégés. He acquired casts of materials for study and research in his own departments, wrote popular books on the topic and gave papers with his own overall interpretation of the human evolutionary pattern suggested by the emerging data. This was, unfortunately if inevitably, influenced by the Piltdown find of 1912 in Britain, where Elliot Smith had been one of those given the earliest access to the find. It was only confirmed as a forgery in 1953. Subsequent authors

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have sought to suggest many individuals as the forger, including Elliot Smith himself, but with neither evidence nor likelihood that this was the case.

A UNIVERSAL ROLE FOR ANCIENT EGYPT

Elliot Smith’s academic rise had been dramatic – from beginning researcher to full professor in just six years. A colleague observed: ‘In Cambridge he was a neuroanatomist pure and simple: in Cairo he was forced to be other things.’5 In Egypt his interest in the brain led him to look at ancient samples of mummified humans and this introduced him to the circle of Egyptologists. Ancient Egypt provides, of course, a remarkable set of research material in bodies preserved by mummification, while the dry sands of the Egyptian deserts contained burial grounds where desiccation could provide burials of unmummified bodies. Archaeologists turned to Elliot Smith as the man on the spot teaching human anatomy. They wanted analysis, reports, interpretation of the burials coming from current excavations, notably those from Reisner’s work in Nubia on sites to be flooded by the waters of the first Aswan Dam. Museum curators holding mummies of royals and officials from the pharaonic era sought inspection, investigation and description of these. Elliot Smith was therefore involved for nine years in teaching, in the maintenance of his own research on the brain, and in meeting the demands of Egyptology to apply his skills to remains from ancient Egypt. This he did, although the size of the task was such that he was never able to adequately publish the results of all his studies; there were reported to be 20,000 bodies recovered during the Nubian work alone. He made detailed observations of the nature and processes of mummification, showing the rationale behind its different elements and the changes that took place over time. But he also developed from his own observation views about the races of ancient Egypt. From the late nineteenth century until the 1930s racial difference and racial classification were of major interest to anthropology and adjacent fields of study, as outlined in Chapter 5. Every specialist had their own preferred classificatory scheme for present and past races and Elliot Smith sought to define the groups who had settled Egypt as agriculturalists, and those who had dominated in the pharaonic era. In his model ancient Egyptians were not black (negroid), although there was some admixture in Nubia. Elliot Smith believed he had found a sequence involving population movement of a brown-skinned Mediterranean race, as well as Armenoid and (European) Nordic races. In his general survey

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books on human evolution he expanded in more detail on his assumptions about racial difference, while emphasising at times that race and culture are not the same and need not correlate. When Elliot Smith moved to Manchester in 1909, he continued writing up the work he had undertaken in Egypt. He developed a popular book which set in the public arena for the first time ideas which must have emerged during his time in Cairo. The Ancient Egyptians and Their Influence Upon the Civilization of Europe was issued by Harper in London and New York in 1911, and made a committed argument for the idea of cultural diffusion from Egypt. Some of the book discussed his model of race in ancient Egypt. Before pharaonic Egypt, its people were already exploiting Southern Arabia and East Africa for resins and metals; the search for mining wealth was a major social driver. The large stone monuments of prehistoric Europe – the megalithic constructions – were influenced by Egypt, and its pyramid age. As Elliot Smith’s ideas developed (there was a revised edition in 1923) Egypt’s influence went further afield: to India, China, Japan, the Pacific and Australia, even the Americas. This was not just the passage of trade goods and ideas. The presentation of a grand theory of world history came almost as a brief afterword to his comments on Europe’s megalithic monuments and their Egyptian influence. Ideas and culture do not spread among uncivilized people except by the settlement among them of those who practice the new arts and hold the new beliefs. But these settlers need not be great in numbers.6

The mechanism to Elliot Smith was by ships of Egyptian design, going as far as Madagascar, Mozambique, Burma, Indonesia, Indo-China, with influences beyond that into the Pacific. The narrative had gone from the area of Elliot Smith’s experience (ancient Egyptian burials) to a specific hypothesis: that European prehistoric stone building owed its origins to ancient Egypt – a view still considered possible by others, until radiocarbon dating confirmed otherwise. But then, without presenting substantive evidence, this book made a major leap to present broader views of Egypt’s reach throughout the world. Considering how this diffusion was achieved, he commented: it is not necessary to postulate any great racial movement to explain such transmission of culture […] Yet the positive evidence […] inclines me to the view that the sudden change of custom in southern Italy was due to the active immigration of people.7

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Despite changing emphases, looseness of detail and inconsistencies in argument, the essential core of the argument by Elliot Smith and Perry remained the same for over a quarter of a century. While Elliot Smith’s work showed little self-criticism, his views did evolve (or rather deepen in their application and conviction), though there were inevitably discrepancies and contradictions. We can summarise what was his core argument, and the consequent line of thought. Each innovation in human history occurred once only and spread from the source of innovation, in technology, economic innovation, ritual, mythology and belief: they were not independently invented or developed (the model he attributed to his opponents). Where they are found in more than one place and time in the world the innovations have usually been transmitted, directly or indirectly, with or without modification, and where two or more unrelated such innovations are found at geographical distance this is a certain indicator of such a link. Ancient Egypt discovered agriculture, discovered metalworking, and developed a religious cult associated with the sun and marked by megalithic building. To Elliot Smith, the cult and many associated practices spread from Egypt north and west into Europe and east into Asia, by land and sea. Egyptian sea-going vessels were involved, as later were those of Phoenicians, but other ‘ancient mariners’ spread the complex of beliefs, associated practices and material innovations further. Indian and Chinese and American civilisations owed their existence to this diffusion. The innovations originally sourced in Egypt were spread to Australia, to the Pacific Islands and thence to the west coast of South and North America, although there was also cultural transmission from north-east Asia into the Americas. Consistently, though, neither Elliot Smith nor his followers ever accepted those who saw a pre-Columbian transatlantic transmission of ideas and peoples. Elliot Smith soon found support for his approach from individuals who would stay his allies. William James Perry had a personal interest in the ‘megalithic’ culture of Indonesia and would take up in his own writings Elliot Smith’s views of Egypt. The renowned psychologist and anthropologist W. H. R. Rivers was developing his own ideas about culture diffusion as a world system. A particular bugbear of Elliot Smith seems to be the interface of psychology with anthropology; as a specialist in the physical brain he had strong views on the limitations of the psychology discipline, so his support for and from Rivers was especially important. Thus encouraged, the distinguished Manchester anatomy professor and FRS took to the hustings. He presented his arguments with increasing conviction (and to substantial criticism) at annual meetings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science from 1912 on. Archaeologists and anthropologists were

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forced to engage with his ideas, even if they considered them as coming from an outsider to their specialist fields of knowledge and enquiry. To the annoyance of social anthropologists, he was invited to compile the entry on ‘Anthropology’ in the 1921 edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, which allowed him to present his marginal ideas as if mainstream. Ironically his move to University College London in 1919 brought him to the very centre of scientific archaeology of Egypt, where W. M. (later Sir) Flinders Petrie was Professor of Egyptian Archaeology from 1892 to 1933. They maintained their distance. According to his biographer Margaret Drower, Petrie, who had noted ‘much disgusted’ in his diary at hearing W. J. Perry and Elliot Smith at the 1915 British Association meeting, added marginal notes to his copy of Elliot Smith’s Ancient Egyptians: ‘Nonsense […] No, No! […] No evidence whatsoever.’ The 1914 meeting of the British Association was held in Elliot Smith’s native country, Australia. He planned to talk of the spread of mummification from Egypt, and before the talk he was shown an embalmed male of the nineteenth century from Darnley Island in the Torres Strait between New Guinea and the Australian mainland. This exhibited evidence of posthumous handling which Elliot Smith immediately linked to Egyptian mummification. His talk announced the newfound evidence for ancient Egypt’s direct influence on the traditions of the Torres Strait. Arguments by the anthropologist who had studied the region, A. C. Haddon, had no impact, although a student who heard Elliot Smith lecture during his visit, Raymond Dart, would be fascinated by the man who would become his mentor. The examination of the Torres Strait ‘mummy’ had important effects on Elliot Smith’s Figure 4.3  ‘Mummy’ from Torres Strait, Macleay Museum, Sydney, thinking. It confirmed his belief on the distance considered by Elliot Smith to be of influence, for he considered embalming could evidence for Egyptian influence in only have been invented once, and that in ancient the Pacific.

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Egypt. Therefore every example of embalming practices, from the Mediterranean to East Asia, the Pacific Islands to South America, had spread from an Egyptian source. But there were specific techniques in the Torres Strait body that were only introduced in Egypt after the 22nd Dynasty. From this alone Elliot Smith therefore concluded that the major spread of Egyptian culture that he had been preaching, eastwards to Asia and on to the Pacific and the Americas, had to be dated to after the ninth century bce. This weakened an already weak case. It might be difficult to prove or disprove the influence of early pharaonic Egypt on non-literate communities of European prehistory. But the period after the ninth century bce was an era of widespread literacy and increasingly well-studied documentation from civilisations of Asia and beyond, quite apart from the wealth of material from Egypt itself on administration, commerce and foreign relations. There are no records of expeditions to ship Egyptian culture to the east. Later, in The Diffusion of Culture (1933), Elliot Smith would compare the fast spread of his Egyptian cultural items with the rapid spread of Islam. But there was a major difference: numerous historical records show what did happen in early Islam; historical records equally show what did not happen in first-millennium bce Middle East, India and China. He would come to credit Phoenician sailors, using bases on the East African coast, with some of the initiative for the spread of Egyptian innovations. Elliot Smith presented an ambitious programmatic public statement of his views in the new, more recent chronology. Written first as a paper for the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society in 1915, Manchester University Press promptly recognised its wider appeal and issued it in book form the same year as The Migrations of Early Culture. It would be reissued without change in 1929. The subtitle was A study of the geographical distribution of the practice of mummification as evidence of the migration of peoples and the spread of certain customs and beliefs. In this book he brought East Asia and the Americas into the world influenced by diffusions originating in Egypt. The style is pugnacious, unapologetic and highly critical of those who did not accept his views. Yet the evidence presented is minimal, the data only suggestive, with unsourced statements and inconsistency on detail. A respected scientist like Elliot Smith would never have allowed such unsupported statements in the field of brain studies from a student, a colleague, nor indeed from himself. Medical patients of his anatomy students must have been glad their doctors were trained with greater attention to rigour and scientific method. Elliot Smith’s studies of the brain and reports on skeletal material and mummies are exact in details and methodology. The

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reputation from one kind of work was being used to give quite different kinds of argument. As if in response to the critics he had faced at British Association meetings, Elliot Smith attacked traditional scholarship head-on, with ‘An appeal to ethnologists to recognise the error of their ways and repent’. He wanted ‘to force scientific men to recognise and admit that in former ages knowledge and culture spread in much the same way as they are known to be diffused today. The only difference is that the pace of migration has become accelerated.’8 This reflected the experience of the boy from Grafton, Australia (established 1851), where British culture had been transplanted 17,000 kilometres from home. Elliot Smith cited earlier writers – though not in the tradition of scientific archaeology – who had noted commonalities between widely spread cultures and suggested these had spread from a single origin: for example, Miss A. W. Buckland, who had been writing in the 1880s and saw linkage of the practise of tattooing and ‘a disgusting mode of preparing fermented drinks’; or the American Zelia Nuttall, who had suggested links between Phoenicians and pre-Columbian Mexico. He willingly did battle with his contemporaries, seeking to show that the ‘fashionable doctrine of the independent development of human beliefs and practices […] is utterly false’.9 What was the model by which Egypt’s culture was spread across the world? This was now seen as ‘heliolithic’, after helios (sun) and lithos (stone, from the stone-built monuments). Linked in this imagined cult were the worship of sun and serpent, megalithic monuments as the sites for this, the swastika symbol, practices of ear piercing, tattooing, circumcision, couvade (male sympathetic pregnancy), massage and cranial deformation, with similar myths of creation, deluge, human petrifaction, the divine origin of kings, and of a chosen people emerging from an incestuous union. These elements were linked and their distribution was largely (but not entirely) correlated. The linking was created in Egypt, so that, wherever these peculiar customs or traditions make their appearance elsewhere in association the one with the other, it can confidently be regarded as a sure token of Egyptian influence, exerted directly or indirectly.10

The means by which Egyptian culture civilised the world are left implied and contradictory in Elliot Smith’s model. A colleague from Egypt suggesting that while he was admiring the reliefs of ships on Hatshepsut’s Temple at Deir el-Bahri, another vision of the ancient diffusion of culture was forming in his mind. Elliot

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Smith chose to overlook the absence of ocean-going craft from the Egyptian historical record; Egyptian evidence failed to prove support for them ever undertaking vast ocean-going journeys. While at times he suggested others as the ancient mariners, he stated that they reached India in ships ‘confirming in every respect to the peculiar type of vessel invented originally for navigation on the Nile in the Pyramid Age’.11 Once Elliot Smith had decided the main eastern migration was after the ninth century (‘shortly before 800 bce’) he shifted responsibility to the Phoenicians: ‘The ancient mariners […] exerted an influence upon the history of civilization and achieved marvels of maritime daring.’12 But this had to bypass their Mediterranean base. Elliot Smith was certain that those responsible for carrying Egyptian culture eastwards to Asia and beyond set out from the East African coast. The heliolithic had been taken to India not later than the early seventh century bce. Other voyagers might then have taken the Egyptian innovations on through Indonesia to the Pacific and the Americas. Although the Toltecs and Aztecs of Meso-America got their ideas of the dead from ancient Egypt, he conceded that some of the culture spread to the Americas could have been via north-east Asia and the Aleutian route. Yet in his book In the Beginning: The Origins of Civilisation (1928, revised in 1934) he would still label an illustration of an Egyptian ship ‘the chief instrument of diffusion’.13 The image and model grew, but Elliot Smith could retain his popular audience by emphasising the outcomes (boomerangs reaching Australia, Indian religious iconography reaching South America, Roman helmets in the Pacific or Egyptian royal headdresses in the Americas) rather than worrying too much about the mechanism. Was it diffusion of culture, from community to community, or was it actual migrations of people? A diagram in his book The Migrations of Early Culture labels the routes taken in the migrations of the culture-bearers: starting in Egypt, ending in inner China, New Zealand, South America, North America. In a series of subsequent articles, and books for popular audiences, Elliot Smith expanded on aspects of his argument for widespread cultural diffusion from Egypt as the basis for human historical change. While his belief in the model was not weakened, he did not augment it with more detail. The 1920s and 1930s were periods of great empirical research in archaeology, but his inspiration came not from this but from the writings of Rivers and Perry in other disciplines. Book publishers were quick to pick up on popular interest in the past and Elliot Smith proved an eager proselytiser of his views, and a quick writer, accepting numerous contracts to write popular books. His writing style remained attractive and open. Among a list of 434 publications, many of them ground-breaking scientific papers

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on the mammalian brain, are his popular books on human evolution, on his ideas of cultural spread, even on Tutankhamen. The early book The Evolution of the Dragon (1919) had several themes, including tracing dragon imagery as a framework for arguing the worldwide spread of religious iconography: ‘The American rain god was transmitted across the Pacific from India via Cambodia.’ In this book he specifically argued that ‘the essential elements of Chinese civilization were derived from the West’.14 Another book, Elephants and Ethnologists (1924) was inspired by the idea that an elephant (considered by others a macaw) was represented in the Mayan sculptures of Copan in Honduras. His final statement, The Diffusion of Culture, published in 1933 four years before his death, took battle with the ideas of nineteenth-century ethnography, but left room for a few more hints on his thinking. This repeated the arguments that Egypt was where agriculture was invented, and Egyptians were the first people to discover the use of metal. Kingship itself, as well as mummification, came from Egypt. He reminded his readers that Egypt had invented writing, the boomerang, inlay jewellery and the decoration of ships’ bows with an eye, and the distribution of these elsewhere in the world was attributable to their spread from the Nile Valley. Even the idea of animals on royal standards had spread outwards from Egypt. Despite this varied list, he stated that he did not claim that all world arts and crafts and beliefs came from Egypt. The broad sweep survey Human History (1930) summarised his views, seeking to integrate his work on human evolution and race, his broader philosophical thoughts, and his specific diffusionist model. Although not everything diffused in culture had Egyptian roots, he did note that ‘as we look into the constituent elements of civilization one after another […] the search almost invariably leads us back to Egypt as the place of origin’.15 Although over the years since Egypt the details of his ideas and diffusionist model had fluctuated, he never abandoned the Nile Valley as first source.

THE BATTLE OF IDEAS

Elliot Smith secured some vocal supporters. An early ally was W. H. R. Rivers, a Cambridge-based psychology academic whose interests had spread into ethnology (social anthropology) and who encouraged Elliot Smith in his diffusionist paradigm. Elliot Smith would note that in 1918

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Dr Rivers went the whole way with me in recognising the initiative of Egypt in the creation of civilization […] the fortunate circumstances of his change of opinion in 1911 played a very material part in securing any hearing at all for my heresies.16

Most important was William James Perry, who took up Elliot Smith’s ideas and spun them out more fully in some remarkable lengthy writing which achieved popular appeal. Elliot Smith and Perry’s diffusionist writings contained lavish tributes to the inspiration of each other. Elliot Smith had discovered Perry living and writing in Manchester and secured for him, first, a position at the University as Reader in Comparative Religion, then a position as Reader in Cultural Anthropology in Elliot Smith’s Anatomy Department at University College London. Perry’s lengthy books, emboldened by Elliot Smith’s support, advanced a more detailed complex story of cults and travellers spreading these beliefs worldwide from an Egyptian origin. The lengthy The Children of the Sun: A Study in the Early History of Civilization appeared in 1923 and The Origin of Magic and Religion in the same year. These were major exercises in writing. The Growth of Civilisation was issued in 1924 as a shorter summary of these views but received wider readership when Penguin Books reissued the second edition in 1937 as one of the very first books in their non-fiction Pelican imprint. Perry’s interest was in the spread of ideas, beliefs and associated rituals rather than material culture or economic advances. This was all solidly within the model of diffusionism of ‘the Archaic Civilization’ and he confidently traced its sources back to ancient Egypt. The list of the supposed characteristics of this culture was substantial, and bears limited resemblance to the Egypt studied by the specialists. Egypt was credited with the invention of agriculture, technologies, even the invention of shaving! The ancient Near East derived its civilisation from Egypt, and ‘all the great civilizations of the world derived their cultural capital, directly or indirectly, from the Ancient Near East’.17 The rationale for expansion lay in the search for an ‘earthly paradise’, but inspired by beliefs in a ‘Great Mother’. The cult was marked by megalithic monuments; and since stone building was an Egyptian invention, all megalithic construction throughout the world could be linked back not just to Egypt but to the expansion of the cult. Like Elliot Smith, Perry credited Phoenicians with some but not all of the eastward spread of ideas. They were typical of ‘the hypothetical communities originated in the Indian Ocean, as the result of Egyptian enterprise, which, by continuous segmentation, produced a long chain of daughter settlements’.18 In Perry’s books there seemed no limit to travel by the agents of diffusion.

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Elliot Smith implied that religion was among the cultural elements carried by the maritime voyagers, not that they travelled inspired by religion. His comparison with the spread of Islam was a purely historical one; he did not examine the spread of Christianity, which arguably had less immediate impact on all the other cultural elements of societies which became Christianised. Early in his career Elliot Smith declined to apply for a position where he would have had to sign acquiescence to Christian articles of faith, and he may well have seen his arguments as a secular model of historical development. In an early work he suggested the voyagers may have travelled far because they were searching for the ‘elixir of life’, to give vitality to the dead that not even mummification could give.

BACKGROUND TO THE IDEAS

At the start of his nine years in Egypt, Elliot Smith resisted involvement in the study of ancient Egypt, but he was drawn in by the availability of desiccated brains from burials and by the special study of mummies. The latter study showed him complexities of a process he considered could only have been invented once, leading him to believe in its diffusion from Egypt to wherever in the world embalmment could be found. Living within easy reach of the Giza pyramids must also have stimulated his thoughts of a technology of building with large stone blocks being transferred to Europe as well as eastwards. After his return from Cairo to Manchester, though, it was an Egypt of the imagination which fascinated him. The idea of innovation always spreading from ‘higher’ to ‘lower’ cultures could be seen as reflecting Elliot Smith’s own background and career. The establishment by France of a Government Medical School in Cairo in 1827 was an initiative to spread Western medical ideas to Egypt. When British administrators – in authority in Egypt from 1882 – took it over in 1893, they sought to improve its teaching with the initiatives that included Elliot Smith’s appointment. He would be able to witness the influence and diffusion of external culture at its most influential period in Egypt. Elliot Smith’s own background was even more dramatic a display of cultural change arriving from outside. The country town of Grafton, where Elliot Smith was born in 1871, had placed into inland Australia a totally new culture that was fundamentally British, from the English language to the Anglican Church, to social structure and practices. Forty years earlier this area was unknown to

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Europeans, the exclusive territory of nomadic hunter-gatherers of the Bundjalung and Gumbainggir peoples. There can be few examples more extreme than nineteenth-century inland Australia in showing cultural change through external introduction rather than through local development. The identification of Australia with Britain was most emphatically demonstrated in the Great War, when graziers’ sons from Australia’s rural outback in 1915 volunteered to take on the Ottoman Empire in the Dardanelles in the name of a dispute between Britain and Germany’s ally. When Elliot Smith travelled to England, 17,000 kilometres from his Australian home, he encountered a world in which much was familiar. All this suggests that Elliot Smith, not alone among other ‘colonials’ coming to mother England at the time, was ‘more British than the British’ in his enthusiasm for the imperial model. In the years when Elliot Smith developed and presented his diffusionist paradigm (c.1911–34) European empires were at their height with Britain’s dominions and colonies covering a quarter of the world’s land surface. The world was one of cultural diffusion (and local adaptation of that culture) and the imperial model, in its ideological underpinnings, was one which preached the benefits of enforced modernisation over indigenous development. As early as his 1915 statement quoted above, ‘in former ages knowledge and culture spread in much the same way as they are known to be diffused today. The only difference is that the pace of migration has become accelerated.’19 There is also the question of personality. The opposition which greeted Elliot Smith’s diffusionist theories from the start would have discouraged many people, especially those who considered themselves within rather than opposed to the world of academic research. The greater the opposition, the greater his enthusiasm, with Elliot Smith in Culture: The Diffusionist Controversy (1928) adopting the label used to criticise him as ‘we of the Diffusionist School’. This must in part reflect his natural personality but also the unbroken success of his career. His meteoric rise in the world of science, as outlined above, was not even stayed by war; he continued his teaching and research uninterrupted by the Great War except to add further research on shell shock to his panoply. It seems that few had ever said anything but ‘yes’ to the bright young scientist. And while some British scientists in the early twentieth century might be awed by the stratification of class and background, to him as to many other colonials, family background and perceived class provided neither interest nor inhibition. Elliot Smith was helped by his forceful personality alongside his ‘charm and imposing presence’. He was a confident and articulate public speaker, though the

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neat order he imposed on world history was not reflected in his chaotic office. One his most active critics, Glyn Daniel, asked: ‘Why did Elliot Smith himself not listen to criticism?’ but provides no answer. It seems clear that the more he was criticised, the more enthusiastic he was to pursue ‘all my heresies’: a self-confidence that denied the validity of opposite views. In the 1928 book in which he was involved to present his views alongside those of opponents he was at his most dogmatic and unapologetic. It is curious that someone dedicated to research and training researchers in anatomy should in this context have ‘abandoned caution in his aggressive defence against contemporary criticisms’.20

THE APPEAL

Elliot Smith was an engaging and readable author and publishers continued to pursue him for survey volumes. Some were on more specific parts of his model, some general surveys, culminating in Human History (1930). The specific claims grew. Opposition to his ideas on human history from the established scholars in archaeology, history and anthropology had no effect in reducing his enthusiasm to advance his ideas: ‘preaching his gospel’, as he would call it. Why did Elliot Smith’s views attract such a popular following, especially in Britain, in the interwar years? This was a period with growing scientific research on the human past but still one of grand discoveries, like Tutankhamen’s tomb (1922–32) and the Royal City of Ur (1922–34). But it was also an era in which people were searching for grand but non-religious theories in a world that had produced the tragedy and illogicality of the Great War, with a growing sense that the era of European empires might not be as permanent or stable as had been assured and assumed. The argument about Egypt stated in Elliot Smith’s 1915 volume echoed Rivers’ observations: ‘how a small group of wanderers bringing the elements of a higher culture can exert a profound and far-reaching influence upon a large uncultured population’.21 Here was the imperial ethos presented straight, with the benediction of antiquity, as reassurance to a world in the era of competing global powers. Elliot Smith’s books were issued in English only, not translated into European languages, and by British publishers primarily for a British (and dominions) readership. Human History had a US edition and Harper, publisher in Britain of Ancient Egyptians, had both UK and US offices. Although he did undertake a brief visiting lecture tour in the USA in 1924, US attention to him seems more

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in criticism from anthropology (such as R. H. Lowie’s The History of Ethnological Theory in 1937) than in original support for his ideas. In the period of Elliot Smith’s diffusionist writing, the United States was in the ascendant (the Great Depression notwithstanding) and its reading public had limited enthusiasm for theories of history that echoed the claims of imperialist nations. The ideology of empire may have inspired Elliot Smith’s model of diffusion of culture; it certainly inspired his British readers. The Great War had, of course, challenged European citizens’ confidence in the values of Western civilisation, and the 1920s and 1930s saw the growth of resistance to these benefits in the largest of colonies, British India. The attraction of diffusionism to a reading public is that it suggested all human progress was based on the blessings than derived and spread from an advanced civilisation. The ethical face of imperialism – bringing the benefits and values of Western civilisation to the world – was echoed in the arguments of Elliot Smith and Perry that this was the natural order in the past, when Egypt (rather than Britain or France or Holland or Spain) had been the source. Such a perspective appeared to confirm the positive benefits of the colonial model, but also reassured those concerned with the decline of one major colonial empire (that of Germany) and the question of what long-term future lay with Britain’s largest colony, India, whose original civilisation was, according to Elliot Smith, itself derived from Egypt. Alongside the political appeal of a diffusionist model was the attraction of the exotic and mysterious. Pre-war confidence in national destiny may have been dented, and pre-war certainties in religious faith were certainly changing among many of the ‘reading classes’ in Britain. Fundamentalist Christianity in Britain may have fought a losing battle against science by the end of the nineteenth century, while the interwar years saw an openness to new ideas emerging from scientists. With Elliot Smith here was a scientist whose views were appealing (even if not appealing to those whose scientific field was archaeology or anthropology). Thus they combined apparent rationalism – an explanation of human history outside of teleological religious models – with the frisson of remaining mystery. In the troubled ideological conflicts and social challenges of the 1920s and 1930s in Britain, we can also see the appeal of the rebel scientist, the establishment man who is prepared to take on the rest of the establishment in what he sees as a truth being hidden from view by conventional thinkers. Reviews in The Times Literary Supplement of Elliot Smith’s earlier popular books on history were respectful and complimentary while not necessarily endorsing his conclusions. But by 1930 a less obsequious tone had entered: their review of Human History was assigned to a contemporary opponent of Elliot

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Smith’s views, whose review concluded that the reader ‘is bound to welcome so masterly a synthesis, even if his immediate reaction is to try to pull it to pieces’.22 The core argument would be named diffusionism by its supporters, and hyperdiffusionism and Egyptocentrism by its opponents – ‘hyper’ because archaeology and social anthropology in the interwar years certainly saw diffusion as a crucial part of the human story. The prehistory of Europe had been the subject of major syntheses by Gordon Childe – also a British-based Australian – tracking Europe’s first agriculture and metalworking back to origins in South-West Asia. Megalithic architecture in western Europe would continue to be linked to possible Egyptian progenitors until the emergence, then recalibration of radiocarbon dates showed it to precede Egyptian building. In the light of knowledge when Elliot Smith began his writing, Egypt could have been the first civilisation rather than Mesopotamia (as Gordon Childe thought). The issue was the nature, extent and origin of diffusions. Many prehistorians and cultural historians would invoke a specific diffusion (from a range of sources) to explain a specific innovation. Today any culture sequence is interpreted and discussed by evaluating the different contributions of local innovation, population movement and diffusion of ideas between adjacent populations. As Malinowski wrote in response to Elliot Smith as far back as 1928, ‘diffusion and invention are always mixed’. The Elliot Smith story contrasts with that of most writers who advance a theory from outside the relevant discipline at odds with the current range of scholarly interpretations. These are typically dismissed as pseudoscientists, and are ignored in the literature and scholarly debates. Occasionally an exasperated academic takes a major writer to task. But generally the proponents of these ideas are not seen as part of scholarly discourse. Specialists did find it necessary to take seriously and combat Elliot Smith’s ideas because of his scientific distinction in anatomy, as well as the popular following his ideas achieved. He was ‘one of us’ to be criticised, rather than a voice from the outer fringes to be ignored. A combination of personality, personal background and context, and a public audience open to challenging ideas in a particular era, set the framework in which a brilliant anatomist could issue and maintain a challenge to scholarship in another field of study. Of course, authority in one area can lead to a reputation in another. As the Chief Justice of Elliot Smith’s native country has observed: Experts who venture ‘opinions’, (sometimes merely their own inference of fact), outside their field of specialised knowledge may invest those opinions with a

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spurious appearance of authority, and legitimate processes of fact-finding may be subverted.23

Towards the end of Elliot Smith’s life, the changing politics of 1930s Europe presented challenges to the confidence with which scientists (including Elliot Smith himself) had incorporated racial models in the narrative of past and present human societies, including those of the ancient world. In 1934 he was among those anatomists and physical anthropologists who began to see and resist what could happen when scholarly discourse and popular Western books about the supposedly lesser races were transformed into a core of political action by Nazi ideologues. The next chapter explores some of the issues around the use of racial categories in the history of the ancient world. Elliot Smith died with a heritage that attributed historical change to the inventions by, and spread from, one ancient society and people: a heliolithic Egyptocentric diffusion that created a world culture and underlay the growth of civilisation. Consider some of his statements: Egypt was not only the inventor of civilization, but for several millennia afterwards it continued to be the inspiration of the progressive development of her original heritage to the world […] attempting a new appreciation of the achievement of Ancient Egyptians in laying the foundations of civilization and of the precise rȏle this interesting and much misunderstood people played in moulding the history of the world […] it is idle to refuse the due recognition of the claim made for Egypt of having forged the instruments that raised civilization out of the slough of the Stone Age […] Thus Egypt brought her influence to bear […] not by the violent imposition of an alien culture […] but by raising the members of her own family group of peoples to a higher plane of knowledge and skill by inoculating them with the germs of her own culture.24

If we change 2500 bce (or 900 bce) to the late nineteenth century and the decades of Elliot Smith’s youth in Australia, and substitute ‘the British Empire’ for ‘Ancient Egypt’, we are in a territory of more familiar rhetoric. Such claims for the past sound less anomalous in the setting which generated, supported and listened to the extreme diffusionism of Elliot Smith.

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CHAPTER 5

THE BLIGHT OF ‘RACE’

Descriptions and interpretations of the ancient history of the Middle East, and especially of ancient Egypt, were long blighted by simplified images and interpretations of physical ‘race’. The character of ancient Egypt was discussed in a framework which reflected contemporary images and assumptions well into the twentieth century, including the model that biological identity was associated with cultural identity and achievements. Assignment of a racial classification often reflected assumptions about a cultural hierarchy that represented innate abilities correlated with physical race. Such approaches, reflecting the social and political context of those who created them, have at times cast a blight on the interpretation and understanding of the ancient world, as ideologies dominated their historical narratives. The region of the Middle East spans the continental borders of Africa, Asia and Europe, and provides the pathways through which people must pass to travel from one continent to another. It is therefore an area prone to mixture, not isolation. Yet ideas about its past peoples, especially ideas developed within the conceptual models of Western societies of recent centuries, have sought to simplify complex demographics and trends, and to fit social processes into preconceived stereotypes. Thus there developed an idea of Hamitic peoples emerging from South-West Asia to civilise black Africa. Complex narratives were constructed of successive migrations of different racial groups. By the mid-twentieth century, after Nazism confronted physical anthropology with the implications of traditional racial models, the idea of physical race and racial classification was gradually eroded in science, though racial terms continued to be applied to social groups. But this did not end a century and a half of debates

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over whether Egypt was a white or a black civilisation. Among some descendants of the African diaspora – mainly, but not exclusively, in the United States – there continued a tradition of emphasis on, and identification with, a racially black ancient Egypt, as will be discussed in Chapter 6.

IDENTITY, ETHNICITY, RACE

Underlying many of the arguments is the confusion of different ways of classifying individuals and groups. Individuals can be attributed, or can emphasise, one of multiple identities, including those elements of visible physical make-up traditionally described as ‘race’, or a less visible physical make-up demonstrated by scientific genetics. Each person holds multiple identities: language group, physical type, ethnic origin, current residence, marital status, sexual orientation, religious affiliation, profession, personality, self-description. The Indian-born economist and Nobel prize-winner Amartya Sen has written powerfully about the dangers that arise when outsiders privilege one identity of another person over others, critiquing especially the selection of religious affiliation to label and therefore emphasise animosity to another individual. In his argument, there is: a big conceptual confusion about people’s identities, which turns multidimensional human beings into one-dimensional creatures […] To see a person exclusively in terms of only one of his or her many identities is a deeply crude intellectual move […] and yet, judging from its effectiveness, it is evidently easy to champion and promote […] Forcing people into boxes of singular identity is a feature also of many of the high theories of cultures and civilisations that are quite influential right now.1

Since individuals hold multiple identities, they can choose which to use in different contexts. But so can others – wishing to embrace commonality with them or to emphasise distance. Ethnicity – ethnic identity – is primarily a matter of political or social grouping. It may be a self-definition or it may be defined by others, and these categorisations may be different. It is an identity that can change, whether in an ordinary citizen or a public figure. An individual might marry into another community and now become a member of that community. Someone may migrate: a Ukrainian becomes an American, an ancient Libyan becomes an Egyptian. And an ethnic identity might be

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Figure 5.1  Human races according to Ernst Haeckel, 1868.

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merged into a larger entity, or split into fragments, and a political ethnicity redefined. A group from ancient Egypt became Hebrews; a group of Israelites merged into the Persian Empire; Greek Ptolemy became Egyptian; Saladin, born a Kurd, was proclaimed an Arab leader. In the migratory world of traders and pastoralists in the ancient Middle East, movement from one ethnic identity to adopt another would be far from unusual. The ethnicity of birth need not be the ethnicity at death. These ethnic identities feature in the art and literature of the ancient world. Egypt herself had pharaohs whose origins lay in Libya to the west, or Kush to the south. Iconography of temple bas-reliefs shows (often standardised) representations of other people in their traditional dress, presented as tributaries to the Egyptian court or as enemies defeated in battle, and Egyptian ideology emphasised homogeneity of Egyptian society and stereotypical identities for foreigners. A recent survey of ethnic identity in ancient Egypt concluded: Any notion that the ancient Egyptian population was ethnically uniform in any period should be abandoned as a fiction projected by the dominant ideology and often largely accepted by Egyptologists.2

The literature of classical Greece and Rome is centrally concerned with foreign political units whose people came into trading contact or military conflict with Greek-speaking cities or Roman military expansion. But these were typically ethnic polities, not physical races. What was important was whether a people was ‘us’ – Athenians, Greek-speakers, Romans, citizens of the Roman Empire – or classed in some other external group of barbarians. It has been argued that the concept of ‘race’ as a means of using physical features to classify and subdivide humanity has very recent origins. In his survey Race: The History of an Idea in the West, Ivan Hannaford provided evidence that the existence of racial thought is almost entirely the invention of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century historians and pseudohistorians. Earlier uses of the term ‘race’ were in relation to ethnic identity. To Greeks, the distinction between Greek and Barbarian was paramount. To the early Hebrews, it was the difference between those within the chosen people and those beyond it. Saint Augustine emphasised that the different communities descended from Shem, Ham or Japheth were allegorical, reflecting not immutable divisions but separation of those who lived according to divine guidance and those who did not. In writings up to the seventeenth century in Europe, ‘race’ was used in diverse ways, social and political, including the conception of a noble race of natural

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rulers. Political loyalty and, very frequently, religious affiliation were the dominant concerns, alongside the cultural divide between the Christian world and those peoples being encountered by Europeans in an era of worldwide exploration and incipient colonisation. Hostility to people of distant heathen groups was commonplace, but arguably this was cultural, not biologically racial, prejudice. With the first steps of scientific rationality and the Enlightenment, attempts were made to fit physical difference into an explanatory schema, and the term race could be found applied to this schema instead of just to social and political ethnic affiliations. The problem created was, of course, the challenge of fitting very broad diversity into neat boxes. The belief in racial subdivisions was a major concern of anthropologists and others into the middle of the twentieth century. But with the rise of Nazism and its extreme racial ideology, these ideas were re-examined and the apparent convenience of a racial classification was rejected by most scientists in the postwar era of the 1950s. The more that a population is genetically isolated and has limited migration to change the breeding population, the more likely it is to develop over time certain physical characteristics across a limited geographical range. When Europeans encountered Native Americans, or Central Africans, or ‘Hottentots’ of the Cape, and later Aboriginal Australians, they met people whose genetic make-up reflected long periods of reproduction with limited genetic input from outsiders. Europeans voyaging to trade with Japan or the Pacific Islands encountered people physically quite different from themselves. A different conceptual image may have emerged if the explorers and writers of travel narratives had come from areas with more gradual trends in physical type: South-East Asia, Central Asia, even the eastern Mediterranean. Such areas serve to demonstrate the inadequacy of attempts to divide the human species into distinct races with distinct ancestry. The classification of mankind into subcategories essentially does not work when applied to the large region we call the Middle East, either in modern times or in the past. But it emerged to fit an era when the wider world was being explored and colonised. In Judeo-Christian tradition, Noah was the only survivor of the Flood and all humanity descended through his three sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth. Therefore, as George Best argued in 1578, all mankind after Noah’s flood was originally white, but Satanic intervention tempted Ham (Cham) to sin, and God punished him with the black skin of Ham’s descendants. And the most probable cause to my judgement is, that this blacknesse proceedeth of some natural infection of the first inhabitants of that Countrey, and so all the whole

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progenie of them descended, are still polluted with the same blot of infection […] all the sundry discents that until this present day have inhabited the whole earth, must needes come of the off-spring either of Sem, Cham, or Japhet, as the onely sonnes of Noe, who all three being white, and their wives also, by course of nature should have begotten and brought foorth white children. But the envie of our great and continuall enemie the wicked Spirite is such, that […] hee so caused one of them to transgresse and disobey his fathers commaundement, that after him all his posteritie should bee accursed […] as an example for contempt of Almightie God, and disobedience of parents, God would a sonne should bee borne whose name was Chus, who would not onely it selfe, but all his posteritie after him should bee so blacke and lothsome, that it might remaine a spectacle of disobedience to all the worlde […] Sem chose that part of the land to inhabite in, which now is called Asia, and Japhet had that which now is called Europa, wherein wee dwell, and Africa remained for Cham and his blacke sonne Chus, and was called Chamesis after the fathers name, being perhaps a cursed, dry, sandy, and unfruitfull ground, fit for such a generation to inhabite in.3

Attempts to divide the human species by race saw great variability. Thus French traveller and physician François Bernier in 1684 argued a ‘new division of the earth by the different types or races [espèces ou races] which live in it’ with four divisions: Africa, Asia, Lapps, and a group combining Europe, South Asia, North Africa and America. The fundamentals of biological taxonomy were laid down by Swede Carl Linnaeus who, ahead of his complete system, in Systema Naturae (1735) combined physical with personality in a fivefold division of mankind: the white European, the black African, the [Native] American, the Asian, and Homo ferus – wild savage man. He would add Homo sapiens monstrosus as a catch-all for others. A sixfold division was proposed by French George-Louis Leclerc (Comte de Buffon) in his Histoire Naturelle (1749–88) which acknowledged the flexibility of biological change and classification. Tracing all human variation back to a white ancestry, he identified in modern communities the Europeans, the [Negroid] Ethiopian, the [Native] American, [Asian] Tartar, South Asian and Lapps. More influentially, German Johann Friedrich Blumenbach in 1775 initially proposed a fourfold division of Europe, Africa, Asia and America, but revised this by 1795 to distinguish what he now called Caucasian (Europeans, including the Lapps and Western Asia as well as the Eskimo), Mongolian [Asians], Ethiopian [Africans], American and Malay – the last reflecting the growing awareness of

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the differences from conventional models presented by South-East Asia. He too acknowledged these were overlapping and not immutable divisions: a beginning towards scientific study of human variability. This was at least an improvement on the simple division by German philosopher Christoph Meiners in 1775, who distinguished just two groups: the beautiful (i.e. the white race) and the ugly (everyone else).

GOBINEAU AND AFTER

As Amartya Sen notes, ‘cultivated theory can bolster uncomplicated bigotry’.4 Discussions about the range and characteristics of humanity developed with philosophers and literati as much as from scientists leading the debates. A new approach, recognisably ‘racist’ in intent, came with the emphasis on race by Frenchman Arthur de Gobineau. Gobineau had spent time in Persia and had literary enthusiasms. His 1853–5 multi-volume Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines argued that race is all. Physical race determined culture and thus the hierarchy of cultural values reflected a hierarchy of physical type. His model was unambiguous: after the initial creation of the human species, just three pure primary and physically separate races emerged – white, black and yellow – of which white was superior and black the lowest: ‘The idea of an original, clear-cut and permanent inequality among the different races is one of the oldest and most widely held opinions in the world’.5 Only subsequently was there racial mixture between these pure races, leading inevitably to cultural decline wherever it occurred, which included South-West Asia and North Africa, but also southern parts of Europe. Unlike his later followers, Gobineau was happy to include Semitic and specifically Jewish culture at the core of the white race, though he saw an Aryan group within the white race as the ideal – a part of his argument which was taken up by Nazi ideology. This model was as neat in its simplicity as it was illogical, acknowledging a single origin of the human species but requiring the three races to occupy isolated regions before they met and the negative impact of frequent racial mixture began. Like Meiners, Gobineau emphasised that it was the white race alone which possessed beauty (and was physically strongest), which fails to explain the enthusiasm with which the white race embraced the lesser races to create the racial mixture Gobineau described. Despite their origin in an era shortly before the expansion of archaeological and philological studies of the ancient Middle East, the influence of Gobineau’s

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Figure 5.2  Arthur de Gobineau (1816–82), the ‘founder of scientific racism’.

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ideas spread, with German translation of the first volume of his work in 1897, but English much earlier in 1856, with a new translation of the first volume issued in 1915. This gave wider access to a summary of his views, rather than to the full 1,800 pages of history in the French edition. The simple model became more strained and weaker with his detailed rewriting of history, not always with consistency, in the later volumes of the series. To fit his model, Gobineau needed to present the great civilisations of the world as white and to tie the decline of great civilisations to racial mixing: degeneration through blood. ‘The purer a race keeps its blood, the less will its social foundations be liable to attack.’6 He could readily attribute ancient Indian culture to (white) Aryans, as Sanskrit had been recognised since William Jones’ work in 1788 as the same language family as European languages (called Indo-European by Thomas Young in 1813). Gobineau had particular admiration for Indian cultures of the past. A flow of successive white cultures spread civilisation; Gobineau used divisions which others would consider linguistic. A white Hamitic migration spread from Central Asia south-west to the Arabian peninsula, then into North-East Africa, breeding with the black race so that eventually Hamitic societies were black. As discussed below, this idea maintained longevity. A Semitic race migrated from Armenia and the Caucasus into South-West Asia, where its achievements included the dynamism of the Phoenicians, as well as the Jewish peoples, and the Abrahamic story of the Bible reflects this movement. The Hebrews were among the Semitic people who were least infused with (now mixed) Hamitic blood. To Gobineau, Semitic migrants overlaying early white Hamites inspired the Assyrian civilisation (today’s Iraq) and many of the citizens of ancient Assyria resembled those in the area today. The Aryan people with origins in India, men ‘of superior energy’, had the greatest influence among groups in the white race. Spreading westwards around 2000 bce, the Medes were an early Aryan civilisation, as were the Greeks, though with some Semitic elements, and European cultures were attributed to this Aryan spread. Ancient Egyptian civilisation was contemporary with what Gobineau called Assyrian. Its origins lay with white migrants, even Aryans from India with an Indian influence that was described as Sanskrit-Egyptian. But interestingly – and unlike many other commentators of this and later periods – Gobineau did not see ancient Egyptian society as a purely white group. He identified many negroid characteristics in the imagery of ancient Egypt and considered the white creators had early bred with members of the black race to create a society that was mixed. Indeed he would blame the static nature of Egyptian civilisation, and what he saw

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as its failure to become conquerors, on the same impact of racial mixing as was responsible for the decline or downfall of other great civilisations. The further Gobineau extended his model, the more he struggled with historical evidence. Chinese civilisation had to be assigned to white Aryan origins migrating from India; even the ancient states of the Americas might have been formed by arriving Aryans: a small number of Scandinavians. The vigour and style with which Gobineau argued his case, especially in his first volume, was evidence enough that the model was by no means universally acceptable; the argument that physical variation arose from local environmental pressures was already there, even before Charles Darwin suggested a mechanism for this in his 1859 On the Origin of Species. The detailed history in such a model might easily be undermined or rejected in the wider world of orientalist scholarship which was booming from the mid-nineteenth century. Yet the essential model remained: an idea of distinct races, within which the white race had a natural superiority. There were separate historical groups in which ethnicity and language (and possibly character) were linked: the original white Hamites, the Semites and the broad group Gobineau had called Aryans. The simplicity of the division into black, white and yellow races would be complicated by the presence of ‘yellow’ people in the south-west of Africa (‘Hottentots’ and ‘Bushmen’), communities of black people in parts of South-East Asia (‘Negritos’) and the ambiguities of the peoples of the Pacific Islands and Australia.

AFTER GOBINEAU

Other racial classificatory models were advanced to deal with this complexity, and competed for acceptance. The German biologist Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919) had a schema of ten races, while in 1870 the great British biologist (and champion of Darwinism) Thomas Henry Huxley proposed a ninefold classification. As the profession of biology grew and was applied to humans, the emphasis in racial classification shifted to a typology based on skull measurements and ratios, believed to provide a more ‘scientific’ and objective taxonomy. By the end of the nineteenth century the assumption was embedded in science that racial classification of individuals and populations was possible, objective, and a meaningful basis for discussing diversity in human groups on a social and cultural level. Such an assumption would last until the middle of the twentieth century.

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Absent from Gobineau but an emerging theme in European culture was antiSemitism, and specifically hostility to the Jewish communities within Europe. Much discussion of ‘race’ moved from questions of racial classification, and the historic origins of physical types, to debates on racial policy. Successful expansion of colonial empires served to emphasise superiority of European culture or of European races. More problematic issues arose over slavery (whether the dominance of whites over blacks was natural or inhuman), and over the influence of the Jewish section of European society: whether the abilities and success of the Jewish minority were inevitable or resistible. Writers such as Anglo-German Houston Stewart Chamberlain in Die Grundlagen des Neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (1899) emphasised arguments that focused on competing Europe-based groups. The racial model had identified a single superior White (also called Caucasian or Caucasoid) race, but further subdivisions (Hamitic, Semitic, Aryan) had been suggested by Gobineau, using terms applied to language groups. Other subdivisions emerged. In 1899 American writer William Ripley, though not an anthropologist, presented in The Races of Europe a model with a threefold division into Teutonic (or Nordic), Alpine and Mediterranean, the latter including the populations of South-West Asia and North Africa, and characterised by dark hair and swarthy complexion. This brought challenges to one of the assumptions of racial taxonomy: the hierarchy which had placed white ‘Caucasoid’ above yellow ‘Mongoloid’ above black ‘Negroid’. Who was superior within white groups? Racial theorists favoured the Nordic subdivision represented in Germany and north-west Europe, yet it was the people of the Mediterranean who had created the first European civilisations. Then the position of Semitic people – and specifically the Jewish people in Europe, who were over-represented in successful elites – confronted the racial theorists. Supposed science gave way to simplified ideologies. With the rise of Nazism – from 1933 no longer an uneducated extremist sect but the government of Germany – the real-world impact of the scientific idea of separate and hierarchical races was revealed. European and North American scientists saw a model that had seemed unthreatening and acceptable when it was applied to European rule over black Africans now suddenly turned against their own Jewish colleagues in Germany. Their reaction was variable in speed and commitment. It would take some areas of formal scholarship another 20 years or more to turn their backs on the whole idea of physical race. But others moved more quickly. In 1936 Julian Huxley and A. C. Haddon’s book We Europeans stated that ‘the term race as applied to human

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groups should be dropped from the vocabulary of science’.7 In 1938 the American Anthropological Association endorsed a statement against racial discrimination while retaining belief in the existence of race. A ‘Race and Culture Committee’ developed by Britain’s Royal Anthropological Institute from 1934, the year following the Nazi accession to power in Germany, struggled to agree a public position that would clarify why the Nazi ideology of an Aryan race was wrong. At the end of his working life anatomist Sir Grafton Elliot Smith, discussed in Chapter 4, took a leading role in an initiative which gained him high respect in the views of biographers old and new: the denunciation of the Nazi concept of the Aryan race and the cultural implications behind this. He worked in the hope that the Race and Culture Committee would take a clear public stand on the Aryan question. This was by no means a universally supported cause: the scholarly community was quite divided in mobilizing against racism in this way. Even after the Nazi defeat in 1945 the question of how to address race remained contested, with UNESCO (now directed by Huxley) seeking public presentations that matched scientific perception. While some argued that race as a concept had outlived its use, or applied only to cultural and political units, others saw physical taxonomies (less their discriminatory baggage) as still useful: a more radical statement in 1950 was replaced by a more cautious one in 1951. Most scientists would now exercise extreme care in their treatment of racial categories and characterisations. Meanwhile, the abstract promotion of principles of eugenics – as popular with liberal and socialist reformers as with their rightwing counterparts – had died alongside the victims of its most direct applications in Nazi death camps. Social scientists continued to use the term race – indeed, there was an explosion in research and writing about what was described as race relations, racial groups and the study of racism, where ‘race’ meant ‘ethnicity’ or ‘identity’. Meanwhile, most physical anthropologists ceased to find racial classification, or even ‘race’ itself, a useful category. A summary was provided in 1962 by Frank Livingstone’s phrasing ‘There are no races, there are only clines’. He continued: If one genetic character is used, it is possible to divide a species into subspecies according to the variation in this character. If two characters are used, it may still be possible, but there will be some ‘problem populations,’ which, if you are an anthropologist, will be labelled composite or mixed. As the number of characters increases it becomes more nearly impossible to determine what the ‘actual races really are’.8

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Probably the final nail in the coffin of traditional racial classification came from genetics. Gene frequencies were shown not to follow along the sharp lines of traditional racial classifications, and useful classificatory systems on genetic grounds did not correlate with those traditional from skin colour, skull shape and other external features. As physical anthropologist Christopher Stringer notes, old racial categories have been abandoned by science ‘because they are not meaningful descriptors of levels of biological variation’.9

EGYPT

The lands of the Middle East provide pathways between continents. The Nile Valley provides pathways for agricultural produce, trade goods and gene flow in populations between the Mediterranean and areas of Africa that lie in the tropical savannah. The variations in physical human form along the Nile are today highly variable, and from all available evidence have been throughout history, but such continuities in variability did not match the emerging racial models of European culture. Europe’s colonial expansion of the nineteenth century raised direct questions of the superiority of cultural and biological race and these fed back into debates over the ancient worlds of the Middle East. But for most of the area and history of the region other than Egypt, discussions were not about physical race; at most they were about language groups. The broad linguistic links of Western Asia with the Semitic family allowed many writers to assign these a common origin. In syntheses of the early history of Mesopotamia, writers could argue about the social processes which saw a third-millennium Akkad with a Semitic language and a Sumer to its south with a non-Semitic language. Yet it was generally understood that language change need not imply massive population migrations and the essential coherence of the physical types of South-West Asia was not at issue. Egypt, a civilisation lying entirely within the African continent, presented different problems. As noted above, Gobineau had recognised a large negroid element in ancient Egypt despite ascribing an Aryan origin to its civilisation. Other scholars had emphasised its Africanness. As early as 1795, French writer and political activist Constantin de Volney noted the achievements in Egypt of ‘A race of men now rejected from society for their sable skin and frizzled hair, founded on the study of the laws of nature, those civil and religious systems which still govern the universe’.10 French priest Henri Grégoire was an influential public

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figure and active anti-slavery campaigner who proposed in the post-revolutionary assembly the recognition of rights for property-owning free black residents of French possessions. In his 1808 book De la littérature des nègres he paid tribute to Volney and others and cited support for the ‘negro’ element in ancient Egypt: ‘it is to the black race, today enslaved, that we owe our arts, our sciences, even the art of speech’.11 But in response, quite contrasting views labelled the ancient Egyptians as white or specifically European in physical type. The racial identity of ancient Egypt became important in the discussions of the Société ethnologique de Paris. A commission on racial issues in 1847 generated input from a French activist in the anti-slavery movement, Victor Schoelcher (1804–93), who used the argument that ancient Egypt had been a black or partly black society, but intellectually equal to white societies. He cited evidence from the visual representations on monuments alongside the statements of ancient authors. Ethnologist Charles Lenormant and racial theorist Victor Courtet de l’Isle responded with arguments that the leading influences on the upper class in Egypt were from external whites, and that painted images showed lower-class Egyptians as darker than their rulers, or that a study of ancient crania (by American Samuel Morton) showed only 8 per cent to be ‘negroid’. The racial identity of ancient Egypt was not just an abstract academic debate; it fed into official and scholarly ideas of the nature of humanity itself. It was not just post-revolutionary France that embraced European ideas of a black Egyptian past. John Stuart Mill in his 1850 essay The Negro Question wrote: It is curious withal, that the earliest known civilization was, we have the strongest reason to believe, a negro civilization. The original Egyptians are inferred, from the evidence of their sculptures, to have been a negro race: it was from negroes, therefore, that the Greeks learnt their first lessons in civilization; and to the records and traditions of these negroes did the Greek philosophers to the very end of their career resort (I do not say with much fruit) as a treasury of mysterious wisdom.12

Doubts about the mix and colour of ancient Egyptians remained, providing egalitarians with an argument and some challenge to the racial supremacists. Educator and cleric Frederic Farrar, in an 1867 paper to the Ethnological Society of London on ‘Aptitudes of Races’, stated in convoluted phrasing: Of the seven or eight civilisations not one, if we except the Egyptians – which has been grossly exaggerated, which was probably due, such as it was, to Semitic and

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Aryan influences, and which was deeply marked by the Negritian stains of cruelty and Fetichism – not one has been achieved by a black race.13

Increasingly, with the expanding fascination for ancient Egypt among European publics, a ‘negroid’ element of ancient Egypt was omitted and an indigenous North African origin downplayed, as a belief in its essential ‘whiteness’ grew. With challenges to the literalism of the Judeo-Christian biblical tradition there strengthened the vision of a line of white civilisation leading from ancient Egypt through Greece and Rome to the great European world empires of the contemporary era in the late nineteenth century. Commentators had their own take on what the art of Egypt showed, and while the consensus saw ancient Egypt as a white society, more nuanced interpretations were advanced. One of the most widely read and ambitious early English language books on ancient Egypt, J. Gardner Wilkinson’s A Popular Account of the Ancient Egyptians (1854, revised 1871) stated they ‘were undoubtedly from Asia; as is proved by the form of the skull, which is that of the Caucasian race, by their features, hair and other evidences’.14 He suggested there had been a small ‘aboriginal’ population in Egypt before this Asian colonisation, but whatever its physical make-up this was swamped by the new arrivals. This was not universally followed. George Rawlinson, Professor of Ancient History at Oxford University, in his 1890 popular history The Story of Ancient Egypt, stated that the idea that ancient Egyptians came from Asia was no more than a conjecture and their physical type was unlike any Asiatic nation. The fundamental character of the Egyptian is respect of physical type, language and tone of thought, is Nigritic. The Egyptians were not negroes, but they bore a resemblance to the negro which is indisputable. Their type differs from the Caucasian in exactly those respects which when exaggerated produce the negro.15

This would be echoed after much more research some 60 years later, when American Egyptologist John A. Wilson would write of continuity in his survey, The Culture of Ancient Egypt. Changes of race in the early Nile Valley, he noted, were negligible in quantity or quality. ‘For the most part there was an “Egyptian”, short, slight, long-headed and dark, a mongrel of Africa, Asia and the Mediterranean.’16 If new people arrived at the beginning of the dynastic period, that cannot prove a physical conquest or imply a movement of new populations.

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But the model of invading superior populations, developed at the height of the imperial era, had its strong proponents. British Egyptologist and popular historian of Egypt Sir Wallis Budge would state in his Egypt in the Neolithic and Archaic Periods (1902) that the predynastic Egyptians sprang from one of the indigenous non-negroid races of North-East Africa, followed by immigration of the conquering people from Asia. The great British Egyptian archaeologist Flinders Petrie would write of a ‘Dynastic Race’. Petrie (1853–1942) was a strong believer in racial models and identities, devoting efforts in the earlier part of his career to collecting evidence for different races in Egyptian artistic representation, and maintaining views of the impact of the migrations of different racial groups on Egypt’s early history. This approach went alongside his views of contemporary society and politics, in which he was influenced by the eugenicist ideas advanced by his friend Francis Galton. And specifically James H. Breasted – to become the first Egyptology professor in the United States – gave a more detailed account in his History of Egypt (1905, revised 1909). He identified an original Egyptian population related to the Libyans of North Africa and the Galla, Somali and Bega of eastern Africa. Then ‘an invasion of the Nile Valley by Semitic nomads of Asia, stamped its essential character unmistakeably upon the language of the African people there’. He specifically stressed: The conclusion once maintained by some historians, that the Egyptian was of Africa negro origins, is now refuted; and evidently indicated that at most he may have been slightly tinctured with negro blood, in addition to the other elements already mentioned.17

Of even greater influence was the high school textbook Breasted wrote in 1916 with a revised edition in 1935, under the title Ancient Times. The label ‘Great White Race’ in the 1935 edition reflected a view of both racial identity and historical dynamics that would dominate the ideas of more than a generation. Italian anthropologist Giuseppe Sergi (1841–1936) in his 1901 book The Mediterranean Race effectively reversed Gobineau’s migration model by placing in North-East Africa the origins of a highly creative Mediterranean race which created the first European civilisation, with the north European Nordic race subsequently derived from them. As mentioned in the previous chapter, anatomist Grafton Elliot Smith, while based in Cairo from 1900 to 1909, had the opportunity to study a large sample of

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skeletal and mummified material from Egypt. While declaring a belief in the cultural advantages that arose from the admixture of races, his model emphasized that ‘difference of race implies a real and deep-rooted distinction in physical, mental and moral qualities’.18 In writings from 1911 on, he went beyond earlier views and even beyond Sergi’s ideas in determining a ‘Brown Race’ in prehistoric Egypt. This Brown Race – which was not negroid – settled all around the Mediterranean and spread east as far as India, but in time was differentiated into an Ethiopian branch (in tropical North-East Africa) and a Mediterranean branch. Then, around the beginning of the Egyptian First Dynasty (i.e. around 3000 bce) there arrived an influx from South-West Asia of people of a new racial type. These Elliot Smith called Armenoid, but saw the ancestral (white) Armenoid population as having itself split into two groups: the Alpine, who settled into much of Europe; and the Maritime, who settled around parts of the Mediterranean. This added to the population mix in Egypt, rather than supplanting the original population. At the same time a ‘small negro’ group entered the Nile Valley at the south, seen in Nubian skeletal material. Thus Elliot Smith’s ancient Egypt was ethnically diverse, but was not at all a black society. The standard racial classification was not only absolute but ranked hierarchically. Although Elliot Smith stressed in later work that race and the culture of a race are two different things, he assigned characteristics to race. At the top was the white Nordic Race. He wrote: ‘European civilization has attained its commanding position in the world […] by reason of the virility of her own people, and especially of those belonging to the blond Nordic Race.’19 In his earlier summaries, the Australians (Aborigines) were the most primitive race, followed next by the negro race: The Negro is a very primitive member of the human family […] The average size of the brain is much smaller than that of the peoples of Europe and Asia […] Affinities with the apes are commoner than they are in most other peoples.20

Because Elliot Smith had anatomical qualifications which most Egyptologists did not, it was hard to argue with his conclusions. The idea of invading white civilisers of Egypt from Asia only retreated as the racial model of human development and the imperialist model of historical progress fell out of favour. A 1993 re-examination by C. Loring Brace and others of the skeletal material using modern methodologies helped to bury the racial approach in its own terms, showing the predynastic and late dynastic Egyptians belonged to similar populations, closer to each other than any external group.

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We conclude that the Egyptians have been in place since back in the Pleistocene and have been largely unaffected by either invasions or migrations. As others have noted, Egyptians are Egyptians, and they were so in the past as well […] there is a gradient of skin color in the Nile valley from north to south. Pigmentation becomes more intense upstream as one goes south into Nubia and toward the equator […] as was recognized in the descriptions and portrayals of ancient Egypt.21

None of this denies the arrival of new individuals into the population from the north-east (Asia), west (Libya) or south (Nubia/Sudan/sub-Saharan Africa/Punt). Africa itself could create illusions of racial separation. The Sahara – drying out from 6,000 years ago – created a trend to reduce genetic flow between populations to its Mediterranean north and those to its savannah south. But while these communities might be described as non-negroid and negroid, the Nile Valley remained a corridor between the regions. Genes as well as trade goods moved up and down the Nile, so that a cline between whiter and blacker individuals extended in the past as it does today. An extreme element of the civilising invasion model for Egypt was the ‘Hamitic hypothesis’ which credited white invaders from Asia with not just Egyptian civilisation, but a wide range of cultural developments throughout North-East and East Africa. The term ‘Hamitic’ reflected an assumed linguistic as well as population identity; it had moved a long way from the simplistic biblical association of the descendants of Noah’s cursed son Ham. Infamously, anthropologist C. G. Seligman’s 1930 book Races of Africa, which was unambiguous in its promotion of this approach, continued in new editions as late as 1966, with reprints thereafter. Seligman blurred the difference between language groups and physical classifications: the linguistic terms Hamitic and Semitic, to which he attributed a common origin, thus became assigned to racially different groups. To the north of the dividing line lay people who were ‘white or light skinned, inhabited by Hamites and Semites of “European” type’, while the south of this line was essentially Negro, but all Negro types carry some Hamitic blood and culture. Thus he created a history – and a prehistory – based on some very specific assumptions, in which ‘many waves’ of Hamites had entered Africa; Egypt, as far back as the predynastic, reflected this group. Elsewhere Seligman dismissed ideas that African ideas of divine (and sometimes sacrificial) kingship came directly from ancient Egypt, saying both derived a common idea from a common Hamitic root. More significant still, Seligman’s study suggested that:

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Apart from relatively late Semitic influence […] the civilizations of Africa are the civilizations of the Hamites […] who are ‘European’, i.e. belong to the same great branch of mankind as the Whites.22

The study of ancient Egypt has therefore witnessed a mixture of views on the physical characteristics of ancient Egyptians: whether and how much there was a negroid element within those populations; whether influences from South-East Asia implied migrations of a small influential elite or a larger population; and, if so, whether such a population was primarily of Aryan, Hamitic or Semitic language groups (and by analogy, ethnic subdivision of a white race). Mixture and diversity were recognised. As will be discussed in Chapter 6, however, some of the most dogmatic views on a unified ancient Egyptian physical ‘race’ have emerged not from the traditions of European scholarship but in reaction to it: the Afrocentrist movements, some of which have defined ancient Egypt as a racially black, negroid society.

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CHAPTER 6

RACE REVERSED: THE AFROCENTRIC CHALLENGE

Popular interpretations and understanding of history reflect the interests of their times, places and groups. Just as the educated elites of nineteenth-century Western societies would typically consider ancient Egypt (like the classical world) the ‘white’ progenitors of their own traditions of civilisation, so many in the African diaspora, especially African Americans, would argue for ancient Egypt as a ‘black’ civilisation, and indeed one which had provided the foundations for classical, then wider civilisation. Such an argument has continued vigorously to the present day. If Western scholars and writers believed in physically distinguishable ‘races’ as late as the 1940s and 1950s, a conventional assumption was that the rulers and bulk of the population of ancient Egypt were Mediterranean, European or white in appearance, or at least physically not black and African. Thereafter histories of the land would cease to discuss the racial characteristics and mix of pharaonic society: indeed, almost self-consciously, the ‘appearance’ of ancient Egyptians is omitted from modern surveys. But a long tradition of intellectuals, writers and activists who identified with a black community would present a different perspective on ancient Egypt. These lines of argument emphasise the indigenous origins of civilisation in Egypt and therefore within the African continent; the Egyptian contribution to Greek and subsequent civilisation; and often specifically argue for a physical black, wholly or partly ‘negroid’ race of ancient Egypt responsible for its innovations. However, within this genre there is a range in the strength and emphasis of the arguments, with varied approaches in the treatment of physical appearance.

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To some, the discussion revolves around a ‘pure’ black African racial category, with additional elements subsequently diluting this. To others, there is more of a social category: just as the underclass once defined as the ‘American negro’ has racial variability, so the ‘fundamentally negro’ characteristics of ancient Egypt were within a mixed society. Thus different writers would vary from a total to a moderate version of the narrative which would come to be defined as ‘Afrocentrist’ and with variation in detail and degree. The development of these alternative ideas began as a challenge to the racial bias of the Western establishment and continued as part of identity politics. Afrocentric positions are drawn from within a series of linked arguments, which can be summarised thus. • Ancient Greek civilisation, from which European/Western culture developed, derived much (or most) of its cultural background from Egypt. • Egypt is in Africa and should therefore be described as an African civilisation. • The Nile Valley population at the origins of ancient Egypt was black (or ‘negroid’). • White (‘caucasoid’, Asian, Semitic) individuals arrived in the northern Nile Valley from South-West Asia to settle in the Nile Valley (at different times, in numbers seen as small or larger). • The population of ancient Egypt remained largely/fundamentally/partially black despite these arrivals. • Most/many/some pharaohs were black (‘negroid’). • Egypt’s black civilisation had real, lasting and positive influences on other parts of black Africa. • African (including Egyptian) culture represents a positive/feminine/non-violent contrast to white/European culture. • The black community of North America/the Americas/sub-Saharan Africa are the heirs to this tradition. A prominent argument in this genre was developed in Paris during the 1950s by Senegalese physicist and scholar Cheikh Anta Diop. Initially influential among Francophone readers, a 1974 translation of his work into English joined a substantial set of writings in the United States which fall into the genre labelled Afrocentrism: arguments primarily influential within the population of African descent. And since 1987 the work of the late US-based British historian Martin Bernal was also included within this discourse, although he himself was primarily

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arguing the influence of Egypt and Semitic-speaking South-West Asia on Greek culture, rather than the racial characteristics of ancient Egypt. While the origins of this ‘black Egypt’ movement paralleled and countered popular images of white Egypt in European society, much of its growth and strength have been from the 1950s to now, a period when ideas of separate physical races were rapidly losing their scientific usage. In the United States, where culture and education long emphasised European roots and culture, it is unsurprising that some within the population of African descent (today estimated as 12 per cent of the total US population) would develop alternative models and foci of history and of identity. The term ‘Afrocentrism’ covers a broad spread of ideas and developments, and is used by both critics and proselytisers. Attitudes to an African past, and within this to an Egyptian past, reflect modern power and modern social structures and the development of identity (or identities) within the African American communities. (Note that in this chapter, where the term ‘negro’ was used in past discourse it is retained.)

AFRICAN AMERICAN WRITINGS

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries emphasis on a black African element of ancient Egyptian civilisation came mainly from white progressives, arguing against slavery in the Americas and against some of the worst impacts of the colonialist view of the world elsewhere. Little was known and less was understood in Europe or America about Africa’s pre-colonial states and the societies from which the slave population of the Americas had been removed, but Egypt within Africa was historically visible. Ancient Egypt was a theme of fascination to Americans of European descent in the nineteenth century, both from its biblical references and from travellers’ accounts. There was a boom in Egyptian-style building in the 1830s and 1840s and the names for new settlements included Memphis and Cairo. Celebrations of ancient Egypt among the US population of African descent also have early origins. Stephen Howe’s 1998 study of Afrocentrism identified numerous nineteenth- and twentieth-century African American writers and speakers who advanced aspects of the Afrocentrist model, with an emphasis he described as ‘vindicationist’, noting that many of the earlier writers were clergymen. In the African American community, the inspiration of ancient Egypt seems initially stimulated by white abolitionists’ arguments (French writer Constantin

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Figure 6.1  Freedom’s Journal, launched 1827 and considered the first African American newspaper in the United States.

Volney being particularly often cited). Freedom’s Journal, published in New York from 1827 to 1828 and probably the first newspaper from the African American community, contained features on ancient Egypt, including lengthy writing by US (white) reformer Alexander Everett on the ‘negro’ basis of Egypt. Everett would also write that ‘the great Assyrian empires of Babylon and Nineveh, hardly less illustrious than Egypt in arts and arms, were founded by Ethiopian colonies, and peopled by blacks’.1 Other contributors to Freedom’s Journal discussed the relation of Egyptians to the biblical family of Noah, but generally celebrated past black achievements in Egypt. ‘As a descendent of Cush, I could not but mourn […] upon the present condition of a people, who, for more than one thousand years, were the most civilised and enlightened’.2 Such celebratory treatment of Egypt makes a marked contrast to the image of pharaonic Egypt as the great oppressor of the Hebrews with whom many in black Christian churches would identify. The African American propagandist David Walker in his Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1829) compared American slavery with the more benign captivity of the Israelites in Egypt, while acknowledging some physical links to Egypt: I would only mention that the Egyptians, were Africans or coloured people, such as we are – some of them yellow and others dark – a mixture of Ethiopians and the natives of Egypt – about the same as you see the coloured people of the United States at the present day.3

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In an 1837 publication Connecticut minister Hosea Easton, of partial African American descent, argued a theme that would be taken up by Diop and other modern writers. Instead of celebrating (black) Egypt as the source for Western civilisations – though his chronological treatment did emphasise this – he contrasted natural venal cultures of white race and society with the positive values of black people as exemplified in Egypt. Ham was the founder of the African race: It is evident from the best authority extant, that the arts and sciences flourished among this branch of the great family of man, long before its benefits were known to any other.4

Not long before the American Civil War the influential African American advocate (and escapee from slavery) Frederick Douglass (1818–95) would echo the earlier arguments. In an 1854 address at the Western Reserve College in Ohio, printed the same year for wider distribution, he discussed at some length the relationship of ‘the present enslaved and degraded Negroes, and the ancient highly civilized and wonderfully endowed Egyptians’. Noting similarities in physical appearance, he affirmed ‘that a strong affinity and a direct relationship may be claimed by the Negro race, to that grandest of all nations of antiquity, the builders of the pyramids’. He gave over a significant part of his talk to this topic, including a review of ‘Authorities as to the Resemblance of the Egyptians to Negroes’. His review of ideas is a sophisticated and nuanced one, in which the comparison was made more effective by comparing the Egyptians not to the inhabitants of distant Africa, but to the American negro population of which he was part, a community whose ancestry attested miscegenation between slave and slave-owner: while it may not be claimed that the ancient Egyptians were negroes, – viz: – answering, in all respects, to the nations and tribes ranged under the general appellation, negro; still, it may safely be affirmed, that a strong affinity and a direct relationship may be claimed by the negro race, to that grandest of all the nations of antiquity, the builders of the pyramids.’5

He noted the conclusions of Samuel Morton from cranial studies, but, citing Morton’s description of the ancient Egyptian, commented that: ‘A man, in our day, with brown complexion, “nose rounded and wide, lips thick, hair black and curly,” would, I think, have no difficulty in getting himself recognized as a negro!!’6 He cited the classical authors and those recent writers who had argued the similarity

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as part of the anti-slavery campaign, as well as the claims (which were not to persist) for linguistic similarities across Africa, which he extended to argue for the unity of African people despite wide variation in physical appearance. Douglass’ speech was widely quoted. The New York Tribune reported it promptly, noting: He went back beyond the days of the pyramids and brought forth his race from the regions of the Nile, the cradle of civilization and art, and thus established its identity with the Egyptians. Physiological peculiarities do not prove a dissimilarity of origin.7

In his writings and speeches Douglass would return to the heritage of now-enslaved ‘negroes’ within history, exemplified by the achievements of ancient Egypt in particular. This did not lead him to extreme views about a supposed negroid racial purity in Egypt – quite the reverse. In 1873, speaking to farmers in Tennessee, he reminded them of the Egyptian and therefore African origin of agriculture itself. The writings of Douglass would long remain influential in American thinking about questions of race and the rights of the African American community. With the conflicts and ideas in the United States which preceded and followed the 1865 abolition of slavery at the end of the Civil War, some of the discourse in American society emulated that in Europe which emphasised the whiteness of ancient Egypt. It was helped by the growing Christian religious movements within African American society, in which Egypt of the pharaohs was seen as the oppressor of the Israelites (an emphasis of Booker T. Washington). But the alternative image raised by Frederic Douglass did not disappear as the fight for the rights of the African American community took new paths. Two generations after Douglass, Washington’s ideological rival, radical author, scholar, activist and National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) co-founder W. E. B. Du Bois would take a more combative and passionate path. Du Bois was born in 1868, three years after the end of the American Civil War and died in 1963, just a year before the Civil Rights Act. He would write in his pathbreaking work The Souls of Black Folk (1903) that ‘The shadow of a mighty Negro past flits through the tale of Ethiopia the Shadowy and Egypt the Sphinx’.8 But this was not to imply the later idea of ‘black Egypt’, just the black presence in ancient Egypt, whose oppression of the Israelites served as analogy for black servitude: Du Bois referred to part of Georgia as ‘the Egypt of the Confederacy’.

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In his subsequent work The Negro (1915), which would have long-term influence, Du Bois attempted a detailed integrated study of African and African American history, combining academic presentation with political and ideological intent. He traced black populations of Africa and black populations of South-East Asia and the Pacific to an ancestral black Asian negro, noting: it seems probable now that from the primitive Negroid stock evolved in Asia the Semites either by local variation or intermingling with other stocks; later there developed the Mediterranean race, with Negroid characteristics, and the modern Negroes […] The last word on this development has not yet been said, and there is still much to learn and explain; but it is certainly proved to-day beyond doubt that the so-called Hamites of Africa, the brown and black curly and frizzly-haired inhabitants of North and East Africa, are not ‘white’ men if we draw the line between white and black in any logical way.9

His explanation of race in Africa and ancient Egypt was complex. The initial invasion of negroid peoples from Asia was followed after 30,000 years by a new invasion from Asia of a Mediterranean type, ‘Negroid in many characteristics, but lighter and straighter haired than the primitive Negroes’. The further south people settled the darker they were, but in all contexts intermingling was the norm. ‘The mistake is continually made of considering these types as transitions between absolute Caucasians and absolute Negroes. No such absolute type ever existed on either side.’ This was a substantive challenge to the now-conventional model of racial classification, but by putting human origins in Asia, not Africa, he was reflecting the scientific view that remained dominant into the 1930s; he was just changing the basic colour of the early humans, and conflating the chronology. As seen in the work of later authors, Du Bois maintained some ambiguity in writing about population (racial) mixture and the use of the term ‘negroid’. With mulatto Egypt black Africa was always in closest touch, so much so that to some all evidence of Negro uplift seem Egyptian in origin. The truth is, rather, that Egypt was herself always palpably Negroid, and from her vantage ground as almost the only African gateway received and transmitted Negro ideals.

He did, however, consider that ancient Egyptians themselves had black slaves. Discussing Egypt in more detail, the negroid aspects were emphasised with greater importance, identifying certain pharaohs as ‘Negro’ and Nefertari as ‘a Negress

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of great beauty’. This might reflect American usage, in which individuals in the ‘negro’ race might typically have mixed ancestry. Coincidentally, Du Bois and British Egyptologist Flinders Petrie corresponded on the issue of race after they met in London – documents published in the US journal The Crisis: Record of the Darker Races in 1912. But their exchange addressed their different attitudes to race relations in the United States, modern Egypt and the European world of influence, not the ancient Nile Valley. Du Bois was among those who paid special attention to the ‘rebel’ pharaoh Akhenaten, whose 17-year rule in the fourteenth century bce introduced a temporary worship of a single deity, Aten. Akhenaten has been the victim of numerous reconstructions to fit different modern ideological moulds. In the 1930s W. D. Fard, teacher of more influential Elijah Muhammad, emphasised a heroic role for a black Akhenaten, and this image has recurred in Afrocentric historiography, including that of Asante discussed below. Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey (1887–1940) was influential in some of the same circles as Du Bois, though his ‘back to Africa’ movement was viewed with disfavour by Du Bois. One of his presentations makes clear the distinction (and subsequently confusion) between the use of ‘negro’ as a scientific term in physical anthropology, and its meaning as a social classification for darkskinned Americans, whose ancestry includes people of African origin. In his 1923 statement ‘Who and what is a negro?’ Garvey challenged ‘the statement of the French that Moroccan and Algerian troops used in the invasion of Germany were not to be classified as Negroes, because they were not of that race’. A negro is a ‘person of dark complexion or race’ and oppressed or misused as such. Every student of history, of impartial mind, knows that the Negro once ruled the world, when white men were savages and barbarians living in caves; that thousands of Negro professors at that time taught in the universities in Alexandria, then the seat of learning; that ancient Egypt gave to the world civilization and that Greece and Rome have robbed Egypt of her arts and letters, and taken all the credit to themselves.10

This serves to suggest that many of the debates about the race of ancient Egypt were at cross purposes. If all communities with many people of darker skin are negroes, as the African American community, then clearly ancient Egypt was a negro society; if only people with the physical characteristics of sub-Saharan West Africa are negroid, then clearly ancient Egypt was not a ‘negro’ society. Both sides

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could argue the details of their case because they were using terms with different meanings. Ancient Egypt could be a ‘negro’ society without being a ‘negroid’ population. And if the implications of European writings were that ancient Egyptians looked like Europeans, a contrary view was inevitable. Today the community identifying as African American is variously estimated to have between 10 and 20 per cent European ancestry. A genetic study of New York women identifying as ‘Black’ had 77.6 per cent African ancestry, 12.2 per cent Native American and 10.2 per cent European; those identifying as ‘White’ had 6.6 per cent African ancestry. Over long periods the dominant culture of the United States considered as ‘negro’ or ‘black’ those identified as of mixed ancestry (the infamous phrase ‘one drop of blood’), a usage which continues with descriptors used to celebrate the 2008 election of President Obama.

CHEIKH ANTA DIOP

An influential individual, rather than a member of a large movement, was the Senegalese scientist and intellectual Cheikh Anta Diop (1923–86). Diop studied physics in France from 1946 and maintained his career as a physicist, including significant service as director of Senegal’s radiocarbon-dating laboratory. Influenced by the progressive intellectual movements of Paris in the 1950s, he produced pioneering works reinterpreting African history. These adopted the model of ancient Egypt as a black negroid society, and emphasised both its influence on ancient Greece (and derived cultures) but also on black Africa. In 1955 he published Nations nègres et culture, followed in 1959 by L’Unité culturelle de l’Afrique noire. A further study was published in 1960 as Étude comparée des systèmes politiques et sociaux de l’Europe et de l’Afrique and in 1967, Antériorité des civilisations nègres. The significance of these ideas to the anti-colonial movement in France and its colonies was substantial: they appeared at a similar time to the work of Martiniquan Frantz Fanon (1925–61) whose Peau noire, masques blancs was issued in 1952 and Les Damnés de la Terre in 1961, but Fanon seems to have shown little enthusiasm for a racialised pattern of thought and Diop’s approach. Progressive Francophone intellectuals (though not specialists in Egyptian or Greek history) would hail Diop’s creative contribution, and his involvement in the politics of his native Senegal enhanced his reputation. The black physical character of ancient Egyptian and their rulers was echoed throughout Diop’s writings. In arguing that ancient Egyptians were negroid, his

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Figure 6.2  Cheikh Anta Diop, honoured at a 2006 conference in his native Senegal.

evidence was selective. He identified a mixture of links and features to link Egypt to other African areas: linguistic coincidences, an eclectic choice of social, political and cultural similarities. Artistic representations were cited: ‘it is impossible to find […] a single representation of the white race or the Semitic race. It is impossible to find anyone there except Negroes of the same species as all indigenous Africans.’11 The same selective approach applied to place names, linking apparently similar sounds to give a common origin. Diop suggested that ancient Egypt was physically and culturally part of a larger African context than others had allowed, and contrasted the values of a patriarchal and harsh European culture with more enlightened values of a broadly matriarchal Africa. After constructing a range of African ‘norms’ in Egypt, he attributed to this a range of positive influences on Greece and beyond. Diop maintained his arguments about the racial characteristics of ancient Egypt in the face of opposition from Eurocentric traditionalists and from changing scholarship. When UNESCO (based in Paris) developed a multi-volume General History of Africa they put emphasis on African editorships and contributors. Diop was given the opportunity to contribute to the second volume on Ancient

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Civilizations of Africa (published in 1981). But the isolation of his views became clear during the development of the book, and the editor had to acknowledge the diversity of opinions. The volume included the proceedings of a symposium of Egyptologists held in 1974 primarily to discuss and evaluate the racial issue; while Diop bravely stood his ground, the conference, including its Egyptian members, distanced themselves from his approach and argued the line that racial identity was not a relevant question in the contemporary study of ancient Egypt. The growth of the American Afrocentrist movement allowed the publication of an English language volume in 1974, combining chapters from two of Diop’s books as The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality. In a foreword to this volume Diop stated his goal was ‘restore the historical consciousness of the African people’.12 Further translations into English appeared in subsequent years. But the context in which Diop had undertaken most of his writing was within the final two decades of French colonialism. His emphasis on racial homogeneity, and the unity of race and culture, took over and reversed the application of ideas which had long dominated Eurocentric scholarship and science, but were now rejected as unacceptable, unscientific and naive by the scholarship of those same Western cultures. Indeed much of Diop’s work suggests he was doing ideological battle not with the intellectual and cultural present but with the ideas of the past, while using that battle as part of a political and cultural movement to change the future. Today, Diop has become an icon in the American Afrocentrist movement.

MODERN AMERICAN AFROCENTRISM

With the increase in political activism among African Americans after World War II – in which many of them served – ideologies of identity and resistance grew and also diversified within that community. Many activists had interest only in the present and future of that community within the United States context, and felt little interest (or need) to reflect on ancient achievements of people of black skin colour. But others revisited and revived the interest in the African past and some of these emphasised the alternative interpretations of ancient Egyptian society. After 1964 – and the Federal US Civil Rights Act – ideological and political questions within the African American community took new and diverse directions. These writers influenced each other; they also in due course influenced some of the educational curricula within institutions which focused on the needs of African Americans. This move from political polemics to educational

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alternatives also served to irritate the broader academic establishment, producing responses (including some from scholars with an African American background) denouncing the ideas as unscholarly, educationally misleading, or just wrong. African history and the role of ancient Egypt were not central to the growth of courses in what was commonly labelled Black Studies, and which were popular in the United States from the late 1960s to the 1980s. And to some extent – like many scholarly discourses – these revisionist approaches became arguments within the academy rather than an idea system embraced by the wider community. Historian Wilson Jeremiah Moses in 1998 referred to ‘the obsession with ancient Egypt, “Egyptocentrism”, which has dominated much discussion of African American folk-historiography in recent years’.13 A different take is within the wild and satirical novel Mumbo Jumbo (1972) by Ishmael Reed, which interweaves multiple trends in African American culture and ideas. Origins of the modern movement have been credited to the Caribbean writer of African descent George James, from Guyana, who would be described by Martin Bernal in Black Athena as ‘a pioneer’. He was a university teacher in Arkansas when he published in 1954 a book with the unambiguous subtitle: Stolen Legacy: the Greeks were not the authors of Greek Philosophy, but the people of North Africa, commonly called the Egyptians. James was a career academic and his book was published in New York by the innovative Philosophical Library. His emphasis (as with Bernal) was the influence of ancient Egypt on Greek and classical civilisation: he described an ‘Egyptian Mystery System’ as the basis of these beliefs. His interest was therefore in cultural history, not in physical race. Despite the book being initially ignored by scholars, then subject to hostile attack, it is a serious (if highly controversial) argument by a qualified classical scholar, in a book which gained later prominence. Only in his final chapter does James write of the Egyptian contribution as African (which geographically it was) and then of ‘the Black people of North Africa, the Egyptians’. This is presented as a commonplace assumption, not a core theme. He advances no argument about physical type or appearance, but uses the term as another means of describing ancient Egyptians, as if an afterthought. The primary argument would have the same power if the phrase used in the conclusion had been omitted: the same could be said of Martin Bernal. By contrast another Guyanan of African descent, Ivan Van Sertima (1935– 2009) would write works that are close to the classic image of ‘pseudohistory’ and ‘pseudoarchaeology’, although he held an academic position in African History at Rutgers University in the USA. The argument of these books was therefore

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initially historical rather than specifically political. Van Sertima’s early work described Africans voyaging across the Atlantic to found civilisation in Mexico, and he then sought to position himself in the emerging Afrocentric culture of the United States. They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America was published in 1976, gaining a substantial readership. Among sources, he cited as support for the feasibility of early Egyptian travels the 1969 and 1970 travels of Thor Heyerdahl in Egyptian-style papyrus boats from Morocco to the Caribbean. Van Sertima was perhaps the boldest of the revisionists, though he was able to find others to endorse and expand his ideas of transatlantic voyagers to contribute to a volume entitled African Presence in Early America. A major claim in They Came Before Columbus was for a fourteenth-century ce fleet of 200 vessels from the West African state of Mali. But within his book he dealt also with the ancient Nile Valley, following the line that the term ‘negro’ was applicable in Nubia. He extended it to Egypt, but with caution on the racial identity as negroid, noting a ‘mixed and confused racial situation’ during certain dynasties. Van Sertima declared that his emphasis was due to ‘the attempt, deliberate and sustained over the centuries, to deny the contribution of the black African to Egyptian civilization’.14 His review of the ‘black’ characteristics of ancient Egypt selects the usual sources. In his model Egypt had a negroid base to which Asians and ‘Caucasians’ were added, making the Nile ‘the meeting place of races, but the NegroAfrican element both before and during several of the dynasties was a dominant racial element’,15 with some (the 25th Dynasty rulers of the late eighth to early seventh centuries bce) blacker than others. To Van Sertima the modern Egyptian population is quite different from the mainly black society through the pharaonic era, because of ‘the massive Arab movement into the north’ which transformed Egypt. Van Sertima attributed to the black 25th Dynasty a seventh-century bce voyage (with Phoenician helpers) to the Americas, contributing to the subsequent presence of African negroid features in the cultures of Meso-America. He criticised another ‘alternative’ view of Constance Irwin that Phoenicians arrived in the America with black African captives. Among features of Egyptian culture transported to the Americas were pyramids (despite the time-lapse before the 25th Dynasty) and mummification, reversing Elliot Smith’s mantra that mummification spread eastwards from Egypt. By identifying ancient Egypt as an African negroid culture using Phoenician helpers, Van Sertima was able to feature similarities with both cultures which he could identify in Mexican Olmec and Peruvian and other

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American civilisations. Others creating narratives in the ‘pseudoarchaeological’ genre had to choose between African or Egyptian or Phoenician voyagers. Though Van Sertima never abandoned his claims for black African influences in pre-Columbian America, he broadened his interests to African influences worldwide, editing a series of volumes published as a Journal of African Civilizations. These allowed scholars and writers from the African American community to argue issues including many around the image of black African Egypt. In a 1994 volume Egypt: Child of Africa he noted that the discussion on ancient Egypt ‘is the most hotly debated issue in the field of world civilization studies’;16 this discussion was whether the ancient Egyptians were predominantly African or ‘Africoid’ in physical form during dynastic times. A contributor to the volume, K. W. Crawford, presented physical anthropological evidence that this population was related to other Nile Valley and tropical African populations more closely than to any other population outside Africa, while acknowledging ‘Caucasoid’ gene flow into Egypt, especially in the first and second intermediate periods (respectively about the twenty-first and sixteenth centuries bce) and the late Dynastic. Meanwhile a United States author, Chancellor Williams (1898–1992) had published in 1971 a book which became influential among some in the African American community, especially with its reissue as a new edition in 1987, The Destruction of Black Civilization: Great Issues of a Race Between 4500 B.C. and 2000 A.D. This was a survey of the history of the African continent leading to a politically charged final section with an activist call. By 1971 African History as an academic discipline had begun to flourish and Williams would complete his career as a history professor at Howard University in Washington DC, long noted for its education of African American students. What marked out Williams’ book was not just its celebratory approach but its emphasis on the racial identities of ancient Egypt and his interpretation of these. To Williams there had been an ‘All-Black’ Egypt, but the arrival through the north of white people from Asia changed the nature of the population: ‘For generations Memphis was almost entirely an all-African city, with white Asian villages growing up around the outskirts.’17 There developed a mixed racial population which, by analogy with South Africa, Williams called the ‘Coloured’ population: ‘In Egypt the “Coloureds” gradually became the majority and more and more whites came in and more and more Blacks moved southwards.’18 This is a nuanced interpretation of Egypt, away from those who saw continuity of black race throughout its history, although the illustrator to his book chose to redraw Egyptian pharaohs with sub-Saharan physical features.

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A contemporary of Williams, St Clair Drake from Virginia (1911–90) followed a more conventional academic career which included a period at Stanford University. He had been critical of some of the more extreme historical claims, including those by Van Sertima. In his Black Folk Here and There (1987–90) he provided an informed and critical discussion still sympathetic to the drive behind Afrocentric approaches. Here he sought to bridge the gap between arguments supported by strong scholarly research and those of a more imaginary past which played a role in identity politics. Numerous writers, speakers and activists contributed to the growth of modern ‘Afrocentrism’ with variable influence. In his 1998 study of the phenomenon, Stephen Howe credited the academic Molefi Kete Asante (born Arthur Lee Smith in 1942 in Georgia) as ‘the godfather of Afrocentrism’, especially with his 1980 book Afrocentricity: The Theory of Social Change, followed in 1987 by The Afrocentric Idea. Here Asante declared a range of influences, from critical theory of the Frankfurt School to Cheikh Anta Diop, and distinguished himself from some in the African American tradition: ‘Du Bois, of course, was not an Afrocentrist; he was, pre-eminently, a Eurocentrist.’ In this volume Asante used a considered analytical approach to present a philosophical position for Afrocentrism, a ‘search for transcendence’, but weakened the argument by including claims such as a link of West Africa’s Efik writing symbols to ancient Egyptian. As if to anticipate some of the criticisms that would come his way on definitions of race, he stated: Blackness is more than a biological fact; indeed, it is more than color; it functions as a commitment to a historical project that places the African person back on centre and, as such, it becomes an escape to sanity.19

In his writings such as Kemet, Afrocentricity, and Knowledge (1990) Asante created an image of ancient Egyptian belief systems as a model for the present generation, modelled on Ma’at: ‘a social, ethical and rhetorical term […] Ma’at functions as the celebration of harmony and balance in the life of African people.’20 The book echoed the central placing of ancient Egypt (Kemet) but without the crudely racial classifications and models. Much of this book is focused on ideas, though based on images of the African past – ‘I am most keenly a Diopian’21 – and he argued that following half a millennium of Eurocentrism it should now be possible to view the world from the point of view of the African. Attempts were made to draw links between ancient Egypt and later West Africa; Asante claimed an ancient tradition of African writing, and supported

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Van Sertima and Michael Bradley’s case for pre-Columbian arrivals from Africa. Predynastic Badarian culture in Egypt was ‘a black African people’ and it was ‘with the conquest of Kemet by Alexander that the methods of Kemet passed to the Greeks’ – a contradiction of the normal Afrocentric view of much earlier influence on classical Greece. He echoed an older style of historiography in his emphasis on the northern state societies where ‘the Africalogist’ must ‘begin analysis from the primacy of the classical African civilizations, namely Kemet (Egypt), Nubia, Axum, and Meroe’,22 a contrast to the growing emphasis of African history on the breadth and diversity of African societies. Asante’s books weave multiple aspects of the Egyptian story into a mixture of ideology and history. Importantly Asante is not just a writer but a highly active promoter of a complex ideology linking ideas and activism. His later writings remained committed to the overall model, celebrating his iconic position in the Afrocentrist movement. In a group of essays published in 2007 he defined Afrocentricity as ‘a paradigmatic intellectual perspective that privileges African agency within the context of African history and culture transcontinentally and trans-generationally’. He defended the use of a racial model: ‘there is nothing but race for African Americans, no ethnicity’, but then added the line: ‘In Egypt, for example, the black people who are the original ancient Egyptians have been marginalised by the Arab rulers.’23 In an ambitious one-volume history of Africa, also published in 2007, Asante draws (if uncritically) on a wide range of available secondary literature, while maintaining a celebratory tone that would be out of favour in other contemporary historical surveys. Here too is a confusing model of what it means to be black: Prior to 2000 bce all the people of northern Africa were black in color. Furthermore, before the seventh century ce, North Africa was peopled mainly by black people and people who migrated from Europe in the ninth century bce.24

In other work the interest is in the historical role of African societies – including Egypt, being located in Africa – rather than in physical race as such. Asante does state ‘Ancient Egyptians were black people’, but expands: The main point made by Afrocentrists is that Greece owes a substantial debt to Egypt and that Egypt was anterior to Greece and should be considered a major contributor to our current knowledge. I think I can say without a doubt that Afrocentrists do not spend time arguing that either Socrates or Cleopatra were black.25

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Figure 6.3  Poster advertising a 2009 talk by Molefi Kete Asante, a leading figure in US Afrocentrism.

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Maulana Karenga, born 1941 in Maryland, has been both an academic and a prominent radical activist. His book Maat, The Moral Ideal in Ancient Egypt: A Study in Classical African Ethics (2004) is concerned to use Egypt in a different way from most Afrocentrism, though the link is there, and the book includes an enthusiastic foreword from a European Egyptologist, Jan Assmann from Heidelberg. A monograph about Karenga has been written by Molefi Kete Asante. Some of the sharpest criticism of Afrocentrism and an idealised Egypt comes from African American scholars, seeing their own academic standards in need of defence. Clarence E. Walker defined Afrocentrism as ‘a popular form of black cultural nationalism’ and ‘a mythology that is racist, reactionary and essentially therapeutic’.26 One of his major criticisms of the idealised Egyptian society is its evidently unequal nature, a feature which has been overlooked by those who defined a ‘Kemetic’ civilisation to which disadvantaged black Americans should look. Even if Egypt was not primarily a slave society itself, the society which provided a pharaoh with the labour required to build a pyramid complex or mortuary temple is not the world of the idealised African civilisation. Walker critiqued the bona fides of the intellectual adherents of a conceptual Afrocentrism and their followers in suggesting that ‘In their effort to create a usable and glorious past for today’s black Americans, the Afrocentrists have read modern racial categories back into a world where they had no meaning’.27 Commentator Algernon Austin assigned the main phase of a formal ‘Afrocentrism’ to the 1980s, while noting that ‘race’ and indeed black identity effectively represented a social, not a biological identity. The key period he placed as 1988–98, with a landmark being a Newsweek magazine cover in September 1991 reading ‘Was Cleopatra Black?’ He observed: ‘Ultimately Afrocentrist thought teaches us more about American racial relations than about Africa.’28 African American political movements may have evolved, changed and diversified in the decades since the 1980s, but there are continuities as well. The themes of Afrocentrism and the cultural impact of images of black Egypt remained. In 1984 in Atlanta a ‘Nile Valley Conference’ brought together many members of the African American community with interests in these themes: Van Sertima reported an audience up to 2,500 for one public session. In 2011, some 27 years later, a second Atlanta ‘Nile Valley Conference’ would emerge from intellectuals in the African American community. It would honour pioneers like Van Sertima and Cheikh Anta Diop (with a presentation by his disciple Théophile Obenga), and featured a talk by an outsider to the community, the proselytiser of quasiarchaeological alternatives Robert Schoch (see Chapter 2). Many of the speakers

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would be active with writing, teaching, research or websites advancing ‘black alternative’ views of Egypt. The number of websites advancing aspects of the ‘black Egypt’ argument had grown at a vast rate. The same year, 2011, would see the 28th Ancient Kemetic (Egyptian) Studies Conference, held at Howard University under the auspices of the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations. This may not be the populist ideology of the African American movements of a generation back, but it does represent the continuity of powerful ideas about the nature, role and importance of ancient Egypt. The Egypt of the African American community has maintained its presence for almost two centuries, from a weapon in the attack on slavery to an alternative academic subdiscipline whose numerous popular spinoffs in education and internet and more gave a sense of distant heritage and achievement to parts of a community of some 40 million people. Where it retains or echoes dated ideas of separate physical races, the argument is weakened. But where it uses a civilisation within the African continent to counterbalance Eurocentric images and claims for ancient Egypt, such Afrocentrism cannot be dismissed as just another pseudohistory. The Afrocentrist movement has carried the real and lasting values of challenging simplistic assumptions about a single white trajectory of culture from Memphis Egypt to Memphis Tennessee, and has promoted a historic pride in the African continent to those who identified as African Americans.

MARTIN BERNAL AND BLACK ATHENA

Given the quantity and range of African American writing (together with Diop and his disciples) on the Egyptian influence on Greek civilisation, it is ironic that the theme was taken most seriously by its opponents when a white Englishman advanced the same arguments. Books and numerous articles have appeared in mainstream publishing contexts critiquing and criticising his work. Martin Bernal (1937–2013) had been a specialist in Chinese history from a distinguished British Marxist family, though he was also the grandson of the establishment Egyptologist Sir Alan Gardiner. Bernal came to wider prominence with the publication of his work Black Athena: Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilisation. His conclusions were published in the first volume (1987); four years later he published some of his more detailed evidence in a second volume on The Archaeological and Documentary Evidence, while the more crucial third volume on The Linguistic Evidence was not issued until 2006, by which time attitudes to his

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ideas were solidly entrenched, and his extended arguments raised relatively little response. In many ways it is anomalous to include Martin Bernal in a discussion of Afrocentric views of race in Egypt. Black Athena is a mixture of polemics and scholarship – sometimes very specialised and even obscure scholarship. His own defined priorities within the book appear to be the restoration of understanding the non-European roots of Greek civilisation by emphasising in particular the Semitic influences which came from South-West Asia and the influences from ancient Egypt. In general such claims are unexceptional, and in line with much that had been said by earlier students of the classical world and by specialists in the ancient Middle East. However, the more Bernal went into detail on his hypotheses, the more they were rejected by critical scholars. By contrast, many non-specialist readers, especially in the African American community, embraced him as a supporter of their ideas. They ignored his emphasis on Semitic roots in favour of the sections on Egypt. Indeed, this has been selected for emphasis by his publishers, who insisted on an anomalous and contentious title, presumably (and accurately) to help with sales and marketing, though a title which he was willing to embrace. In emphasising Egyptian sources for Greek and classical civilisation Bernal was echoing, if exaggerating, commonplace ideas, even if he was embellishing them with a chronology and details that others saw as extending beyond the scholarly evidence. In seeking to reverse a perceived bias towards considering ancient Egypt a white population, he made brief references to the black elements in ancient Egypt, but at no point did he state that the ancient Egyptians were classically negroid in physical type. He did, however, briefly argue that among the different influences and incursions into Egypt, some – including some ruling elites – were blacker than others. His arguments seem no different from most contemporary conservative Egyptologists: that physical race is not a useful classification for ancient Egypt, and that ‘the population of Egypt has contained African, South-West Asian and Mediterranean types […] the further south, or up the Nile, one goes the blacker and more Caucasoid the population becomes’.29 But emphasising the fundamentally African nature of Egypt – a phrase which alone contrasted with the archaic idea of Asian colonisation – he added that ‘Many of the most powerful Egyptian dynasties which were based in Upper Egypt – the 1st, 11th, 12th and 18th – were made up of pharaohs whom one can usefully call black’. This modest statement, relevant to the book’s title more than to the lengthy

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three-volume argument, was picked up and simplified by some supporters. Inspired or even enraged by such support, critics took Bernal to task for preaching ahistorical Afrocentrism and supporting the myth of a racially distinct ‘negroid’ ancient Egypt. Essays and books denounced Bernal and he replied in kind in articles and a 2001 volume. To some extent he accepted the role in which he had been placed by his critics and therefore argued the case on that basis. He conceded that non-academic Afrocentrist writers made factual mistakes, but sympathised with the difficulties facing such writers and with their overall goals. In the introduction to his first volume, he had concluded: ‘The political purpose of Black Athena is, of course, to lessen European cultural arrogance.’30 In a 1999 review of Bernal’s work and impact, Jacques Berlinerblau reminded readers that Bernal was not an Afrocentrist in the terms in which that concept had developed: with an emphasis on physical race. It was seven years later that Bernal published the third volume to provide the supporting evidence for his case – and which his specialist critics might have taken as the basis for undermining his case. This volume attracted minimal sales and attention compared to all that had gone before.

AFRICAN AMERICAN VISIONS

Like many movements of ideas, statements about the role and nature of an ancient black Egypt have ranged from the interesting and challenging through the illusory and extraordinary; from carefully worded pride in achievements of a shared African continent to extreme claims about a racially unified past and its heritage. But the political positions warping historical evidence as adopted by some vociferous individuals and their followers should not disguise the force of a pride in the past achievements of a continent, and a wish to identify with that continent. It could be seen as an unfortunate irony that the debate about the contribution of the African continent to world history has been muddied with the use of a model of physical race that has departed from physical anthropology and Egyptian archaeology, and with the conflation of culture and physical population. As American archaeologist Kathryn Bard commented: It is disturbing to me as an archaeologist that archaeological evidence […] has

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been identified with race and racial issues. Racial issues, which in all fairness have arisen because of racial inequalities in the United States and elsewhere, have been imposed on the material remains of a culture even though these remains do not in themselves denote race.’31

The longevity and range of African American visions of ancient Egypt may not tell the wider world much about that civilisation, but they tell us a great deal about American history, politics and social relations. Like much in the foregoing discussions of ‘alternative’ Egypts, these have been minority views, while the majority of the Western audience, if they have any awareness of the early history of the Nile Valley, are more likely to go along with the more conventional images presented in museums, textbooks and documentaries, reflecting the scholarly consensus. But a different relationship between scholarship and popular images can be suggested for the adjacent region of the ‘Holy Land’ and the countries of the Levant and the eastern Mediterranean coast. Here the expanding scholarly and scientific understanding of the history of the region can contrast with what were long the cultural (as well as religious and political) influences from Judeo-Christian literature and traditions. In the next chapters we explore some questions around this relationship.

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CHAPTER 7

CREATING NARRATIVES OF ‘THE HOLY LAND’

The lands to the east of the Mediterranean, including what is often called ‘the Holy Land’, represent a part of the ancient Middle East where alternative ideas of the past often appear to be in conflict. Previous chapters have examined the development of ideas which have challenged and contradicted the viewpoints of science and scholarship on ancient Egypt. Such ideas reflect a range of contexts and motivations: older religions and their modern revivals; new belief systems; enthusiasms for the mystical; political pressures to reinvent a past to fit in with the present; and secular yearnings to rewrite history. But the perceptions of most people interested in ancient Egypt probably reflect, very broadly, the models and interpretations of scholarship. Numerous popular books and other media present a conventional view of Egypt’s past to which most specialists would broadly assent. There are substantial minority alternative views, but they remain minorities and diverse: mystical Egyptosophies, New Age Hermeticism, Kemetism, multiple pyramidologies, Afrocentrism and more. If Western images of Egypt were once dominated by those created by biblical narratives – Joseph, Moses, the flight of Jesus’ family – new knowledge came to replace these. When we move east into South-West Asia a similar contrast can be seen between the perceptions that have emerged from scientific and scholarly research and alternative views. The past of the Levant – today’s Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon – has been the subject of substantial detailed research and interpretation by archaeologists, historians, language and literary scholars. That

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past can also be a battleground of ideas and ideologies. This is visible in the contested identity politics, ethnic and national conflicts of the region, where heritage, land and identity are interwoven and the deep past may be revived in debates about the future of one of the most tense regions of the world. But other persistent ideas reflect the influence of religious faith and organisation, either directly or through the cultural impact of Judaism, Christianity and Islam on arts, literature and tradition. There remain many whose faith asserts that the biblical narratives provide reliable statements of fact, in contrast to foundational myths of other traditions. This presents something of a reversal of what we have seen for images of ancient Egypt, where the ‘alternative’ histories are still a minority in the face of widespread acceptance of the broad picture of Egyptian history established by scholarship. The archaeology and history of ‘the Holy Land’ established by scholarship and scientific study are arguably less pervasive than the images presented by the biblical narratives, or their modern adaptations. Religious narratives of ancient Israel have been fundamental to the development of Judaism and Christianity, and more selectively and indirectly in the origins of Islam. The characters and events described in biblical literature have been central influences on literature and art forms across numerous later societies, and the concept of historical entitlement of the ancient Israelites has its political resonances in world politics today. A collection of writings including some of the greatest literature of the ancient world has inspired powerful and abiding (if frequently modified) faiths and belief systems. Meanwhile, erosion of the historical reliability of the Hebrew Bible (the Tanakh, or Old Testament) for the period before the seventh century bce has continued through the revelations of natural sciences, linguistic and literary criticism, historical studies and especially archaeology. In this chapter we review what is now understood about the origins of the Hebrew Bible, and refer to the historical and ever-expanding detailed archaeological picture of the region. We summarise the context in which a theology and a linked national identity were developed in antiquity, and reflected in subsequent eras. The subsequent chapter discusses modern tensions between scientific history and the adherents to traditional biblical views on the past of Israel/Palestine and neighbouring regions. Such conflicting approaches have their resonance in religious communities but also in national and international politics, and we consider the influences on politics which different views of the past engender. The biblical narrative as presented in the biblical texts has served important religious and community purposes. Over two and a half millennia there have been changing attitudes by religious communities and their leaders to the use and

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interpretation of biblical literature, with a distinction often made today between faith and science. In the modern ambivalence between the Bible as religious document and the ‘Bible as history’, archaeology was initially seen as a means by which the truth of the Bible could be proven – not least to confront the interpretations of the texts by late nineteenth-century literary analysis. For a period, archaeological discoveries were interpreted as supporting biblical literalism, but newer research, especially since the 1980s, has reversed this, while presenting a clearer image of the early history of Israel and its residents.

THE EMERGENCE OF THE BIBLICAL TEXTS

The image of ancient Israel presented in the Old Testament is widely known, with variable emphasis. The fundamental thread is the covenant between Yahweh and the Jewish people. The historical tale, though in different voices and narrative detail, moves from patriarchs and the Israelites’ sojourn in Egypt, through the Exodus led by Moses, until a Promised Land in Palestine (Canaan) is conquered under the leadership of Joshua with the help of Yahweh. Following the kingship established by Saul, David and his son Solomon rule from Jerusalem a powerful and wealthy kingdom uniting the areas described as Judah and Israel. After Solomon’s death the kingdom is divided into Israel, ruled from Samaria (until Israel’s conquest and destruction by Assyria in 722 bce) and Judah, ruled from Jerusalem. Following the

Figure 7.1  Jerusalem at the time of the destruction by the Babylonians: a fifteenth-century conception.

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Neo-Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem in 597 bce and the destruction of that city in 586 bce, the elite of Judah are sent into exile in Babylon until its conquest by the Persian Cyrus releases them to re-establish the cult and temple of Yahweh in Judea, and the Jewish people regain their promised land. The rise and fall and rise again of the Jewish people are correlated with their willingness (and specifically that of their royal courts) to honour the covenant with Yahweh and consider him their only deity. The strength of this story lies in the remarkable literary underpinning which makes up the Hebrew Bible – the Old Testament. But what is now known of the historical background to the creation of this literature? In 539 bce the Achaemenid Persian conqueror Cyrus II (‘Cyrus the Great’) followed his conquest of the Median kingdom (in modern Iran), occupation of Asia Minor (in Turkey) and defeat of Elam (in Iran and southern Iraq) with successful occupation of Babylon. Control of the capital of the Neo-Babylonian Empire gave him control of its territories to the west, which included what were later called Palestine and Syria. Cyrus’ regime promoted itself as welcomed by the city deity of Babylon, Marduk. In his conquests Cyrus made efforts to appease the diverse religious loyalties of the populations who fell within his new empire, rather than seek to impose a new state religion. But highly influential in Persian culture of the time, and increasingly the official religion of the Persian rulers, was the monotheistic religion of Zoroastrianism, the worship of Ahura Mazda as sole deity, with beliefs traced back to the preaching of the prophet Zarathustra, now thought to have lived around the eleventh century bce. The Persian Empire – which continued for two further centuries until the conquests by the Macedonian Alexander in 333–330 – was host to the development and formalisation of another monotheistic religion, Judaism. The formal canon of the body of Jewish scriptures was not defined before the second century bce, and no written texts from any part of the Hebrew Bible have survived from before the second (or very late third) century bce – those within the Dead Sea Scrolls. But literary analysis has placed the compilation or editing of most of the books back in earlier centuries. Only a minority of books – Daniel and books categorised in the Christian Apocrypha – are of Hellenistic (i.e. post-Persian) date. One strand of scholarly argument – which critics categorise as a ‘minimalist’ school – would date the creation of most Hebrew scriptures to the very end of the Persian period or within the early Hellenistic era. However, the internal contradictions of the historical and mythological accounts, and the stylistic diversity within biblical narratives, suggest the compilation of the substantial body of biblical literature was edited over a somewhat longer period.

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The framework for the ‘redaction’ (editing) or compilation of the bulk of Hebrew scriptures, and the foundation of a continuous tradition of what we would now recognise as Jewish monotheistic theology, was tied to Persian imperial policy. Loyalty was gained from conquered peoples by combining direct political and administrative rule with freedoms in other areas, especially in religious cults. Soon after his conquest of Babylon, Cyrus gave authority to return to Jerusalem to members of the group who identified as descendants of a forced exile from there two generations earlier. Jerusalem was within the province the Persians (following their Neo-Babylonian predecessors) named Yehud, which they administered from the town of Mizpah. Cyrus authorised this same group to build a temple in Jerusalem to their god Yahweh, and manage his cult. There were delays in persuading the then current residents of the Jerusalem area to accede to this; Darius I, a successor of Cyrus, strengthened the decision and the temple was built by about 516 bce, as a centre of the Yahweh cult, though Jerusalem itself remained a small town with just a few thousand residents. Not until the reign of Artaxerxes I in the mid-fifth century did Jerusalem become the administrative centre of Yehud. Literary, historiographical, theological and eventually organisational achievements of Judaism can be credited to this sixth-century community which had been exiled to Babylon from Jerusalem and the surrounding area of Judea for some 50 years until the conquest by Cyrus. The Neo-Babylonian Empire had conquered Jerusalem, as capital of Judah, in 597 bce and had taken thousands of the city’s elite and skilled citizens into captivity. Their client ruler rebelled and in 586 bce the city was subject to further attack and destruction, after which a further number of Judah’s elite were taken into exile in Babylon; the total may have reached many thousands. This exiled Judean community was the context for literary and theological development, which provided a basis for the re-creation of religious life and identity after Cyrus’ grant to return. However, only some of the Jewish exiled community would choose to return to live in Jerusalem or the province of Yehud. Throughout the Persian period, and afterwards, Jewish communities could be found settled elsewhere across the countries of the Middle East. Their identity and religious practice confirmed their relationship to Jerusalem, a focus forged in the exilic period itself, and analogous with the continuity of Jewish identity in the diaspora which has continued to today. Whatever the size of the Judean exilic community, the 50-year exile in and around Babylon provided a time to ask: ‘How did this come about?’ In the literature that emerged as the ethnic and religious canon, the key questions were why

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Yahweh had allowed his followers to be removed from their land; how a chosen people, given conquest and occupation over a promised land, were then removed from it; and how they could rebuild their covenant with their god to ensure future security. And high within the concerns of the Judean theologians and writers was not just the conquest by Neo-Babylonians in 597 and 586 bce, but the dramatic destruction of their northern neighbours, the kingdom of Israel and its capital Samaria, seven generations earlier in 722 bce, when the Assyrians had followed occupation and destruction by massive and permanent dispersal of the resident populations: the ten ‘lost tribes’ of Israel (discussed in Chapter 9). In editing the texts which formed the basis of Jewish religion in the Persian period, a broadly coherent theology was needed both to unite the Judean residents and the dispersed Jewish adherents of the Yahweh cult, and to emphasise the authority of the priestly class. To create coherence out of the trauma of exile, teaching and written texts could not afford to dispense conflicting and diverse theologies, religious practices and practical beliefs. Nevertheless the redactors of the texts had to incorporate and accommodate a wide range of oral and written stories which were familiar to different members of their target community – acceptance of the familiar was more important than a single narrative. Thus some books of the Hebrew Bible weave together different sources (for example Genesis, Exodus or Isaiah), allowing internal contradiction in narrative detail, while others are more unified compositions. Much earlier sources have been woven into the books of the Hebrew Bible known today. Within the books ascribed to the Prophets are narratives located in the period before the destruction of Israel or the exile of the Judean elite: warnings in the words of the prophets of future historical events yet to happen, but in the past at the time of the editing. Apart from Chronicles, Ezra and Nehemiah (all originating in the late Persian period of the fourth century), narratives from different sources are woven into the specifically historical books: the Pentateuch (or Books of Moses), Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings. Modern scholarship considers that the most substantive redaction of these historical books, in a form that led to the versions found in later manuscripts, took place in the middle to later Persian period around 450 bce. What were the sources, verbal and written, given the sequence of the Judean kingdom, the 50-year Judean exile, and the staged return to Jerusalem and Yehud over the subsequent 90 years? The importance and variety of oral tradition cannot be underestimated. Written Hebrew is found sparsely in the archaeological record in the tenth and

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ninth centuries bce. The growth in written Hebrew seems to have dated from the eighth century onwards, and this correlates with the period which saw the growth of Judah in importance after the destruction of the northern kingdom of Israel. The later history of the Judean kingdom before the exile could seem the most reliable part of oral tradition. But continuity of style and emphasis suggest earlier written sources too – especially the work of the author known as the ‘Deuteronomist’ in all these histories except for the first four books of Moses. This source highly praises the devotion to Yahweh of Judean king Josiah (c.639–609 bce) so its origins may lie in part from this period. Some scholars see the sources of the material which led to the Deuteronomist writings as linked more to the northern kingdom of Israel. Textual analysis has long shown that different sources have been woven into the first four books of the Pentateuch: Genesis, Exodus, Numbers and Leviticus, including a post-exilic ‘Priestly source’ that emphasises the importance of the priesthood in religious observance. In the earliest versions of Genesis we see influences that come directly from the mythologies of Mesopotamia where the exiles lived: in creation stories, the location of early patriarchs and events like the Tower of Babel, as well as the story of mankind surviving a widespread divinely imposed flood – a Mesopotamian narrative over at least a millennium. The sources of the earlier tales – those of Moses and the Exodus, the sojourn in Egypt by Joseph and his descendants, and the earlier travels of the patriarchs – are considered by scholars to incorporate traditions earlier than the reign of Josiah and from both Judah and Israel. The genius of the Hebrew Bible lies in three areas: religious, literary and historical. There is the creation, during the period of the Babylonian exile and the subsequent period of resettlement in Persian Yehud, of a profound theology built around commitment to, and covenant with, just one deity: Yahweh. Within the religious texts lie not just instructions on ritual and religious observance but basic laws and the beginnings of personal ethics. The biblical laws are not a single nor indeed comprehensive legal code, but were presented as laws of divine inspiration. As with other societies of first-millennium bce South-West Asia, breaking of the law brings harsh punishment, while loyalty to the community’s deity brings its rewards. But as a literature of a community that was at times the loser, not the victor, in history, the results of disloyalty to the deity feature large. This inspired a range of literary forms which help make parts of the Hebrew Bible far more appealing literature than the exultant or administrative texts of Judea’s Near Eastern neighbours. In the books of the Prophets, in the inspiration of the wisdom literature, or the beauty of poetry like the Psalms or the Song of Songs, and in the

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imaginative narratives about individuals like Ruth or Job, emerged a literature that has permeated subsequent cultures on its own merits. The editors of the historical books used their skills to weave together into broadly coherent threads stories from diverse communities of the Palestine area (and beyond), including the use of sources such as the Deuteronomist. Widely different ethnicities were linked together as children of Noah; selected societies were identified as the children of Abraham; the ethnic groups in former Judah and the earlier Israel were linked as the twelve sons of one father, Jacob. The Jews were attributed a common ancestry by being linked to another exile (Egypt rather than Babylon) and an Exodus (led by Moses rather than authorised by Cyrus). The occupation of the land was a direct result of a covenant with Yahweh (or the Israelite god Elohim) and their temporary loss of the land a direct result of the rulers’ or people’s betrayal of that covenant. History, literature and religious teaching were irrevocably intertwined and, in turn, created an identity which was not tied to occupation of a territory, but maintained by widely scattered Jewish communities.

CREATING A THEOLOGICAL PAST

There is thus a clear logic to the biblical narrative: the Hebrew scriptures as edited in the exilic and post-exilic period create both a theology and an ethnicity whose strength and vitality is attested by the maintenance of identity of dispersed Jewish communities through the Persian, Hellenistic and Roman periods and the maintenance of this identity and faith after the Roman destruction of Jerusalem and its Second Temple in 70 ce. The purpose of the editors was faith, not history, and faith was a daily reality, while history was not. What were the major themes created in this literature? Within this theological framework, key emphases are reiterated in the different books of the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible. These are linked to events described as historical, in a sequence traced back from the return to Jerusalem through the exile, the heritage of prophets, rulers of divided kingdoms, rulers of a united kingdom, conquest of the land, Exodus, sojourn in Egypt, patriarchal origins, the origins of human diversity and back to creation, with the primary role of Yahweh featured throughout. Such a complex of events woven into a single story is common in mythology and basic to the belief systems of many religions. In the Old Testament it serves also to create an ethnic identity: the Jewish people, whose

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role as the chosen people of Yahweh outlives both their frequent departure from the principles of or commitment to his worship, and their dispersal from a unified territory. The historical ‘accuracy’ of the texts can therefore be considered far less essential to the theology as it evolved, and even less relevant to the influence of Judaism on Islam (with its numerous references to Jewish prophets and events) or Christianity (which incorporated the books of the Tanakh into its own religious anthology as the Old Testament). But in forging a new society in Yehud, a society which maintained identity through Persian, Hellenistic and Roman imperial control, citation of historical process was essential. The power of Yahweh, the antiquity of the patriarchs, the laws of Moses, the covenants with the people and Yahweh’s resultant help to conquer the land, the dire effects of breaking the covenant – all this went alongside a secular pride in the image of a powerful past nation state ruled from a mighty Jerusalem by David, then by Solomon. More recent history – with the destruction of Israel and the exile from Judah – was a challenge to the concept of a Chosen People, Promised Land. Such history of destruction by powerful external forces is largely confirmed by both regional archaeology and the historical records of the conquerors. It could logically best be interpreted in Jewish texts and teaching by a sequence in which kings and their people strayed from their duty and devotion to their deity, prophets warned without success of the likely outcome, and the kingdoms fell. Held in high regard in the biblical narrative is the 30-year reign of Josiah, king of Judah from around 80 years after the fall of Israel. Scholars place within his reign the original text for the Deuteronomist, which underlay a sequence of historical books, and consider that a shift to Yahwist monotheism belongs to this period. Judah and its administrative centre Jerusalem are shown by archaeological fieldwork and research and landscape studies to have grown in prosperity and population following the fall of Israel. In time Jerusalem, centre of the restored Yawhist cult in Persian Yehud, was given a greater role in the historical stories. There the tenth-century bce rulers of Jerusalem, whose names are given in the Bible as David and Solomon, were credited with power over the whole area of the ‘twelve tribes’ of Israel in a united kingdom whose control was claimed to fill a regional power gap between the great empires of Egypt and Mesopotamia. According to the biblical narrative, Solomon’s wealth and authority led to the creation of a magnificent palace and temple to Yahweh in Jerusalem, as the cult centre, though the biblical narrative concedes that he built temples to other gods too. More crucial to Jewish ethnic identity than

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to the monotheistic theology of Judaism, the stories of David and Solomon have not found support in the increasing archaeological work in the area. The archaeology of tenth-century Jerusalem indicates no mighty city, temple or palace, and the economic power and population, reflecting agricultural potential, lay not in the southern kingdom of Judah but to the north in Israel and its capital, Samaria until the Assyrian destruction of 722 privileged Israel’s southern neighbour. But the biblical image of powerful kings of Jerusalem strengthened the city’s claim to religious and political importance. Over 500 years separate the major editing of the biblical texts from the supposed period of ‘David, King of Jerusalem’, just as 400 years separated Homer from the supposed period of ‘Priam, King of Troy’ and 450 years separated the Annales Cambriae narrative from the supposed period of ‘Arthur, King of the Britons’. Meanwhile oral tradition filled the gaps and built the story. Biblical stories of the conquest of the Promised Land under the leadership of Joshua and his successors represent a common phenomenon in national traditions. The history of some becomes the history of many; communities borrow and integrate each other’s traditions; social process is personalised with narratives woven around heroes; and the more distant past is redefined to explain the recent past or the real or imagined present. Substantial archaeological work in the Levant region has traced the transformation from Bronze Age to Iron Age societies, a period of transition before about 1150 bce. Some scholars have found it convenient to refer to the later Bronze Age communities of the Palestine region as Canaanites and their earlier Iron Age communities as Israelites. But the cultural continuity across this period, and the study of economic and landscape archaeology, give a picture of gradual transition rather than violent invasion, a change that has led some analysts to state that in terms of descent and relationships, the Canaanites were the Israelites. The emergence of new economies, new settlement patterns in the cultivable lands of Israel and Judah and beyond, were real and significant. Such changes in economy could naturally lead to changes in political structures: regional state formations which correspond to the definition of kingships. Such changes would also lead to changes in religious practice, although the archaeology of the regions which became the kingdoms of Judah and Israel confirms the biblical history (and prophets’ accusations) of polytheism, of cults which included Yahweh but not exclusively so, and which could even assign to Yahweh a consort, Asherah. The books of Joshua and Judges which present a narrative of Israelite conquest under Yahweh’s guidance are recognised as part of the Deuteronomist history.

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Edited in the period of Persian Yehud, probably rewritten in the preceding period of the Babylonian exile, their origin may be traced back to Josiah’s reign of Judah after the fall of Israel. While Josiah’s reign saw political, economic and religious growth, its world was overshadowed by the empires of Mesopotamia and Egypt (to which Josiah himself fell victim). Thus the literature recording exultant victory originated and was revised in periods of quite different reality: the books describe an idealised past world. The world of the prophets – warning of destruction because of disloyalty to Yahweh – is a closer reflection of reality that that of the Deuteronomic histories where Yahweh promises victory and land to the twelve tribes of Israel and Judah. Otherwise, the literature does reflect the early victories of the Israelites in glowing terms. Yahweh promises that cities will fall, helps with strategies and tricks to secure their defeat, and instructs the Israelites to show no mercy to their inhabitants. At Jericho ‘they devoted to destruction by the edge of the sword all in the city, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep and donkeys’ (Josh. 6.21). At Ai ‘Israel struck them down until no-one was left who survived or escaped’ (Josh. 8.22) – 12,000 men and women. This reflected the Mosaic instruction, far from inconsistent with ancient military practice, to kill all the males of conquered cities but take the women, children and livestock as booty (Deut. 20.13–14). In this construction, Yahweh is presented as merciless and violent as any other Middle Eastern potentate’s deity. ‘You shall annihilate them – the Hittites, and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites – just as the Lord has commanded’ (Deut. 20.17). Yahweh kills more Gibeonites with hailstones than the Israelites did with weapons. Unlike the conquest literature of the great empires, Egypt, Hittite, Assyrian, where real victories are celebrated (though often exaggerated) in propagandist inscriptions, documents and monuments, that of Israel emerged while they were vassals of other nations. In distinction to the defeats that had destroyed Israel and defeated Judah, blamed on breaking the covenant with Yahweh, the literature presented a story of a past powerful military strength and conquests delivered as a result of honouring that covenant. While possession of the land and the power of the state might be attributed to the community’s commitment to Yahweh, individuals’ responsibility lay in the formalised laws, a set of rules which covered personal, commercial and religious behaviours. Legislative codes were well established in Middle Eastern societies, such as those of Ur-Nammu in twenty-second-century bce Sumer, and eighteenth-century Babylonian Hammurabi. There could be contradiction in

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Figure 7.2  The Battle of Jericho, Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld, 1853.

historical narrative, and some ambiguity in theology, but there was no room for uncertainty in society’s laws. The legal code enshrined in the biblical Pentateuch was given the authority of Moses and of divine instructions through him, at a time when the twelve tribes of Israel were still on their way from Egypt to the Promised Land in Canaan. As with other legal codes of the time, with its unforgiving set of laws, harsh punishment was prescribed for those who broke social codes, sometimes extending to families so that a collective responsibility existed to uphold legal requirements. The Mosaic laws cover a very wide spread of religious, social and economic practice, extending beyond behaviour necessary for civil society to more direct family matters; striking or cursing a parent, for example, is punishable by death. The writings in Deuteronomy, edited and revised in the exile and post-exile periods, held high legal importance. Later texts, especially those in Leviticus, had detailed religious and civil laws, and earlier traditions seem to be included in Exodus (including of course the Ten Commandments) and Numbers. The

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power of the laws is increased with the implication that they were dictated directly by Yahweh. In all cases the divine authority of Yahweh is combined with the historical antiquity of Moses and their universal applicability across the twelve tribes. In this way the importance of the laws is emphasised in the long sequence of the Exodus, which took 40 years to cross Sinai, a journey regularly criss-crossed by traders and herders, travellers and refugees, who could traverse 200 kilometres in a matter of days. The theological and legal message of the Exodus outweighs the lack of historical support for any large migration from Egypt to Israel, an event which would have carried elements of Egyptian cultural material into Palestine, and would have had some echo in the historical and archaeological record.

FAITH AND HISTORY

Popular images of the past of the region, and especially ‘the Holy Land’ (Israel/ Palestine), even in today’s developed world, are arguably still led by those in the religious books of Judaism’s Tanakh, recognised as the formal canon of Judaism perhaps already by the second century bce. While different denominations of the Christian Church would add apocryphal books, this list has remained the Old Testament in modern versions of the Bible. It is also the source of many references in the Qur’an. Biblical images of the past of the area are retained by those who are active in their faith, but also by those who encountered religious teaching and biblical stories in their youth and as part of cultural and literary background. And when people either become inactive in their religious devotions or adopt a secular position, their awareness of historical depictions of the region is often minimal; rather than move to an active interest in up-to-date knowledge of the history and archaeology of ‘the Holy Land’, their focus lies elsewhere. There have been periods of passionate denunciation of religion and religious institutions: the early days of the French Revolution, the communist revolutions of Russia and China, a burst of English language books on atheism in the early twenty-first century. More broadly, though, scholars and scientists have chosen to see the faith of others as a private matter and of no great interest if they were not themselves religious; thus science and scholarship have often ceased to tackle religious claims head-on. This ‘lack of interest’ has reduced the clash between those defending the historicity of biblical texts and those following science and scholarship.

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Ironically, much of the scholarly knowledge of the region’s past, despite its contradiction of the Bible as a historical account of the early history of the region, has come from the work of individuals (linguists, literary scholars, historians, archaeologists) whose background or affiliation lay in formal religious institutions. And within the modern secular state of Israel, it is the exceptionally high standards of Israel’s professional archaeology that have eroded the traditional narrative of the origins of ancient Israel. Learned theologians may hold high office in a religious denomination, or may maintain their religious affiliation while based in academic institutions, keeping high standards of intellectual rigour and enquiry which have continue to unravel the historical and prehistorical narratives. They can be reconciled to the fact that members of their congregation, church or movement may hold much less sophisticated ideas about biblical historicity. The difference lies between faith and history, faith and science. Faith provides spiritual succour, moral guidance and an institutional framework for this. Religious faith is not primarily about historical enquiry. Given the length of the texts (23,000 verses in the Hebrew Bible, equivalent to around 600,000 words in English translation), religious teachers could select what they wished to emphasise: a point of belief or practice or behaviour. Preachers from all faiths, whether they are regarded as ‘fundamentalist’ or modernist, can select from biblical writings those texts which apply to matters of faith and belief and morality, referring to some as helpful myth and leaving others without such a label, while not necessarily offending their colleagues who have researched the historical background to these documents. Relatively few Christian or Jewish denominations would today require belief in the historical truth (rather than theological truth) of every story in the Hebrew Bible from the Creation through to Daniel in the lion’s den. However, even those who consider the whole Bible as the word of God and accept its historical accuracy bypass the more curious legal injunctions – what Judaism classifies as Chukim. Rare would be the ‘fundamentalist’ or orthodox believer who avoids clothing with more than one fabric (Lev. 19.19), supports the execution of those who curse a parent (20.9) and all male homosexuals (20.13) and psychics (20.27), or accepts the morality of ancient modes of warfare. Selectivity lies not just in emphasis but in belief: faith belongs in the present, not the past. But faith in the Old Testament as the divinely given and literal truth remains. The Baptist Faith and Message statement of the old established Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant Christian body in the USA with 16 million members, holds as its first article:

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The Holy Bible was written by men divinely inspired and is God’s revelation of Himself to man. It is a perfect treasure of divine instruction. It has God for its author, salvation for its end, and truth, without any mixture of error, for its matter. Therefore, all Scripture is totally true and trustworthy. It reveals the principles by which God judges us, and therefore is, and will remain to the end of the world, the true center of Christian union, and the supreme standard by which all human conduct, creeds, and religious opinions should be tried. All Scripture is a testimony to Christ, who is Himself the focus of divine revelation.1

While statistics in the area of belief are unreliable, the 2012 Gallup Poll in the USA logged 46 per cent agreeing with the statement that ‘God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so’. This is an increase on the 40 per cent recorded two years earlier, and indeed a similar figure to that of 30 years earlier.

Figure 7.3  Image of the Jewish people in captivity: Eugene Delacroix, La Captivité à Babylone, Palais Bourbon, Paris, 1838.

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With regard to the Hebrew Bible, other issues come into play. Given the horrors which anti-Semitism delivered on the modern world, from the Russian pogroms to the Nazi Holocaust, there is a natural sensitivity to anything that might be perceived or misinterpreted as generically anti-Semitic. Thus criticisms raised in societies with predominantly Christian heritage hold back on public discussion about the core documents of other religions. With the rise of Islamist movements claiming political authority from a fundamental commitment to their perception of Islam, other anxieties have arisen. It is easier for those in societies of predominantly or historically Christian heritage to be critical of the teachings and practices of Christian churches than of other faiths or cultures, even though modern scholarship in those cultures may take on board textual criticism and modern archaeology without such inhibitions.

CRITICAL THOUGHT AND SCHOLARSHIP

While the gap between the historical evidence and the biblical narratives has grown with recent research, questions about the historicity of the Bible are not new: from religious arguments as well as from more secular approaches. We can distinguish different approaches over time: those who insist that biblical texts can only be used and useful for religious purposes when interpreted by religious leaders; those who see the biblical texts as the literal truth and word of God; those who adapt their theology to changing knowledge and understanding of the context in which biblical writings emerge (though often with a gap between the perceptions of the intellectual hierarchy and those of many laypeople); and those who take historical inaccuracy in biblical literature as a primary argument against the validity of a religion. The first Christians to be burnt as heretics by the Roman Catholic Church, at Orleans in 1092, appear to have cast doubt on the value of the written word over direct divine inspiration: You may tell all this to those who are learned in earthly things, who believe the fabrications which men have written on the skins of animals. We believe in the law written within us by the Holy Spirit, and hold everything else, except what we have learnt from God, the maker of all things, empty, unnecessary and remote from divinity.2

Protestantism provided a different heresy: by challenging the authority of church priesthood, the early Protestants placed emphasis instead on the authority of the

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Bible – an authority which has remained in some groups until today (such as the US Southern Baptists, cited above). The secondary role of the Bible in medieval Catholic orthodoxy had been emphasised by the burning at the stake of those like Wycliffe and Hus who translated the Bible into the common tongue. To John Calvin (1509–64) scripture was the word of God; it was not up to a human priesthood to pick and choose: the Scriptures are the only records in which God has been pleased to consign his truth to perpetual remembrance, the full authority which they ought to possess with the faithful is not recognised, unless they are believed to have come from heaven, as directly as if God had been heard giving utterance to them.3

The long tradition of examining the significance of biblical writings and attempting to integrate them with the classical authors occupied numerous writers and theologians, from rabbinical and monastic scholars through to Enlightenment contexts. For example, the story of Adam and Eve was acknowledged as allegorical by early Jewish theologians. Even early Judaic writers questioned whether Moses was the sole writer of all the Torah. The internal contradictions in the Bible led to many early scholarly comments on its writing. The Jewish philosopher and Torah scholar Maimonides (1135–1204) discussed the issue in his great work Guide for the Perplexed: We do not reject the Eternity of the Universe, because certain passages in Scripture confirm the Creation; for such passages are not more numerous than those in which God is represented as a corporeal being […] those passages in the Bible, which in their literal sense contain statements that can be refuted by proof, must and can be interpreted otherwise. But the Eternity of the Universe has not been proved; a mere argument in favour of a certain theory is not sufficient reason for rejecting the literal meaning of a Biblical text, and explaining it figuratively, when the opposite theory can be supported by an equally good argument.4

One of the clearest statements of an emerging critical approach is that of the Dutch Jewish philosopher Spinoza in 1670: All this makes it clearer than the noonday sun that the Pentateuch was written not by Moses but by someone who lived many generations after him […] I conclude, therefore, that all the books I have enumerated so far were written by someone

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other than the person whose name they bear, and relate the things contained in them as having happened long before […] The conclusion is clear: before the time of the Maccabees there was no canon of sacred books; the books we now have were selected from many others by the Pharisees of the second temple, who also instituted the formulas for prayers, and these books were accepted only because they decided to accept them.5

The relationship between the historical accounts in the Tanakh/Old Testament and knowledge of the times it purports to represent has changed dramatically over the past century and a half. Literary scholarship, the study of written sources from other societies of the ancient Middle East and archaeological field research (including excavation and landscape surveys and analysis) have all had their impact. Biblical literature provides a useful source alongside archaeology and other historical materials for much of the periods of the separate kingdoms of Israel and Judah, as well as the conquest of Babylon by Cyrus which led to the liberation of the Jewish elite from exile, and the post-exilic period. Here modern knowledge is augmented by much of the biblical story. It is the earlier periods – patriarchal, Egyptian period, Exodus, conquest and the united kingdom of David and Solomon – where history and archaeology diverge from the biblical narrative. The clash between biblical doctrine and the science derived from ancient Greece and Rome was the focus of much early attention in the early modern world, with conflicting cosmological models. But the emergence of geology, and the associated fossil studies which would develop into palaeontology, gave a more formal challenge. The model of a short creation some six millennia old fell victim to the new research, with stratigraphic principles being understood gradually in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, though the great antiquity of the earth was calculated only by the mid-nineteenth century. The Noachian flood was integrated into some of the new geological schemas, with ‘ante-diluvian’ a chronological marker. The recovery and study of fossils was long interpreted as evidence of a universal destructive inundation. In his 1820 inaugural lecture as Oxford’s Professor of Geology, William Buckland said evidence for it was ‘decisive and incontrovertible’, until over the next two decades more sophisticated and widespread stratigraphical fieldwork eroded the idea of a universal deluge, and built a long chronology for the formation of the earth and its occupants. Literary analysis of biblical texts added new perspectives to existing texts; there have been disappointingly few finds of earlier manuscripts of the biblical books to analyse and expand the story. While textual criticism of the Old Testament had

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Figure 7.4  Cyrus Restoring the Vessels of the Temple: the image created by Gustave Doré, c.1866.

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a long heritage in writers of both Jewish and Christian societies, a major stage was reached with the influential work of German scholar Julius Wellhausen first published in 1878. Wellhausen’s work was a landmark in the analysis of the history of compiling the biblical documents: In the following pages the Jehovistic history-book is denoted by the symbol JE, its Jehovistic part by J, and the Elohistic by E; the ‘main stock’ pure and simple, which is distinguished by its systematising history and is seen unalloyed in Genesis, is called the Book of the Four Covenants and is symbolised by Q; for the ‘main stock’ as a whole (as modified by an editorial process) the title of Priestly Code and the symbol RQ (Q and Revisers) are employed.6

And this helped to determine the theological and historical framework for their creation: When we take the community of the second temple and compare it with the ancient people of Israel, we are at once able to realise how far removed was the latter from so-called Mosaism. The Jews themselves were thoroughly conscious of the distance. The revision of the books of Judges, Samuel, and Kings, undertaken towards the end of the Babylonian exile, a revision much more thorough than is commonly assumed, condemns as heretical the whole age of the Kings […] The Book of Chronicles shows in what manner it was necessary to deal with the history of bygone times when it was assumed that the Mosaic hierocracy was their fundamental institution.7

By tracing multiple sources woven into the Pentateuch, and reflecting contradictory narratives and theological details, some confidence in the authority of the biblical books appeared to be threatened. But over subsequent decades this critical textual approach gained strength. Some of those whose faith in the integrity of the Bible seemed challenged by such analyses considered that the best support for the truth of the biblical message would come from archaeological exploration, evidence and study – a phenomenon examined in Chapter 8.

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CHAPTER 8

CONFLICTED PASTS OF ISRAEL: POLITICS, RELIGION, IDENTITY

This chapter examines some of the relationships of science and faith in the motivation and interpretation of archaeological research, especially of work undertaken in the area of ancient Judea (Palestine). We look further at political questions that have arisen since the creation of the modern state of Israel – issues that use the past in debates about identity and land by Jewish Israelis, by Palestinian and Israeli Arabs, but also by outside groups. Research in the region long gained support by using the phrase ‘biblical archaeology’. This was applied by some who found it a useful label for fundraising and publicity, and by others whose religious faith led them to hope that detailed archaeological work would confirm historical details of the Bible and reverse some of the doubts arising from the literary analysis of the texts. Finds were often dated and interpreted to fit the biblical narrative. Then, with the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, archaeology came to play a role in nation-building for both secular and religious Jewish Israelis. Archaeological research during the last 30 years in particular has undermined many of the previously established assumptions, but the past of Israel and the Palestinian territories remains highly contested in a context which has seen funding continue to support political or religious purposes.

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BIBLICAL ARCHAEOLOGY AND ARCHAEOLOGY OF ‘BIBLICAL’ LANDS

Archaeology can provide evidence more hard-edged than a literary text: a wall, a burial pit, a shrine, and a link across time or space shown by continuity in a ceramic decorative tradition. The survival of remnants of material culture has created a detailed, if still expanding, picture of the region’s prehistory and history. The practice of archaeology reflects the questions being asked by archaeologists and the context in which they are asking them. Awareness of the subjectivity and variety of archaeological interpretation has grown. But this is not a reason to reject hard evidence, nor to support an unproven historical hypothesis with a confidence that the archaeological data must exist but has yet to be found. In the Middle East, archaeology has expanded massively in a century and a half and has seen very professional technical approaches applied across Israel, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan: in 2013 alone Israel granted 415 new and continuing permits for excavations and surveys. In turn, archaeology has uncovered inscriptions and other historical evidence that flesh out the understanding of the region and of the empires and states – Egyptian, Anatolian, Mesopotamian, Persian and more – that dominated its history across the millennia covered by the biblical narratives. Archaeological research was attracted to the region by biblical interests, and also appealed to religious faith when seeking funding. Patriarchal stories from the Old Testament retained their appeal in Western Christian societies, especially as the geography of the lands through which they travelled became better known by explorers and pioneer archaeologists in (Ottoman-controlled) South-West Asia. It was mainly Christian rather than Jewish initiatives that began ‘biblical archaeology’ in the nineteenth century. The British-based Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF) – still in active existence – dates from 1865, founded in the midst of Britain’s scientific revolution, and with broad goals to sponsor investigations in the Holy Land both for their own sake and for the purposes of biblical illustration. Its founders included academics and clergymen and funding requests were focused especially on the British Protestant clergy. The initial prospectus stated: No country should be of so much interest to us as that in which the documents of our Faith were written, and the momentous events they describe enacted. At the same time no country more urgently requires illustration […] It is proposed to raise a fund to be applied for the purposes of investigating the Holy Land, by employing competent persons to examine the following points:- Archaeology […] Manners and Customs […] Topography […] Geology […] Natural Sciences.1

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Figure 8.1  Members of the British Jerusalem Party in 1867.

Pioneer archaeologist R. A. S. Macalister undertook important excavations for the PEF including the mound (tell) considered the site of the biblical Gezer. To secure funding for continuing his research he cited biblical references energetically, including links to Abraham and even the possibility of discovering Philistine giants who fought with Goliath. The PEF reflected the non-evangelical intellectual interests associated with the Anglican establishment. While meetings would be chaired by the Archbishop of York or the Dean of Westminster, it was left to the occasional ordinary member to wax passionate on religious matters, praising the PEF fieldwork for ‘elucidations and confirmations of the documents which form the basis of our faith and hope in Christ’.2 When an American equivalent Palestine Exploration Society was established in 1870, its religious goals were more central: The work proposed by the Palestine Exploration Society appeals to the religious sentiment alike of the Christian and the Jews […] Its supreme importance is for the illustration and defense of the Bible. Modern scepticism assails the Bible at

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the point of reality, the question of fact. Hence whatever goes to verify the Bible history as real, in time, place, and circumstances, is a refutation of unbelief […] The Committee feels that they have in trust a sacred service for science and religion.3

In both contexts, the biblical emphasis was the inspiration for reasonably successful fundraising. The US endeavour in Palestine had its strongest links to the resident missionary movement. The Society for Biblical Archaeology (SBA) was established in Britain in 1870 under the presidency of Egyptologist Samuel Birch with ‘gentlemen interested in the antiquities and philology of Egypt, Palestine and Western Asia’. The name was clearly to attract supporters, but the scope was quite different: the study of the antiquities of the entire ancient Middle East. George Smith was able to reward their supporters’ interests in 1872 with his presentation of a translation of the Assyrian story of a great flood. The Proceedings for the Society of Biblical Archaeology encompassed 30 volumes from 1878 to 1918; they included some papers related to biblical matters, but the majority were not. Indeed, the first papers published by the society were on a solar eclipse in the reign of Assurbanipal and a hieroglyphic tablet of Alexander. In his first presidential address, Samuel Birch sought support by noting that an ‘intimate connection exists between the study of Biblical literature and the advance made in the decipherment and interpretation of Egyptian, Assyrian, Phoenician, and other cognate Semitic monuments’. On the new society, he emphasised ‘its scope is archaeology, not theology’.4 The SBA was primarily a body to study, publish and present lectures on this growing area of interest where Britain was competing with other European scholarly groups. But without the official funding available in some European countries or the fundraising appeal of excavations and surveys, its financial base crumbled; just before folding in 1917 the society reported net funds of less than three pounds. By contrast, the German research in Palestine had managed to acquire substantial official funding. The Deutscher Palästina Verein, founded in 1877, became a major beneficiary of the diplomatic and strategic initiatives of the German government towards the Ottoman Empire, as marked by the Kaiser’s visit to Jerusalem in 1898. Work at the site of Megiddo in Palestine was of particular importance and prominence, given its biblical references. The alliance of Germany and the Ottoman Empire and the armistice at the end of the Great War would remove the influence of both nations on the archaeology of Palestine and Syria.

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Britain’s Egypt Exploration Fund (later Society) was founded in 1882 to research the antiquities of Egypt as Britain gained control over Egypt, and is still the umbrella organisation for most British work in the Nile Valley. It emerged with enthusiastic backers whose interest was historical and antiquarian, not religious, yet it started with work in the Delta, not in the heartland of accessible sites. As the society itself states: The early emphasis on work in the Nile Delta was intended to attract sponsorship from those interested in finding evidence to support biblical stories concerned with ancient Egypt, and many of the Fund’s early donors were members of the clergy.5

In fact, the original plan was to call the fund ‘The Society for the Promotion of Excavation in the Delta of the Nile’. This reflected an awareness of the stimulus for funding sources, not the real enthusiasms of co-founders Reginald Poole and Amelia Edwards, whose passion for Egypt lay in its valley heartland. But their announcement in seeking support was to explore the Delta ‘where the documents of a lost period of Biblical history must lie concealed’. The aim was to secure the records of the Hebrew sojourn in Egypt and the capital of the land of Goshem, with the cities of the oppression, Pithom and Raamses. Their first field project was led by Edouard Naville, whose rapidly produced report The store-city of Pithom and the route of the Exodus satisfied financial supporters with its confirmation that he had indeed found Pithom and the land of Goshen. He discussed in detail the likely route of Moses’ Israelites out of Egypt. A more professional approach to archaeological fieldwork emerged as Flinders Petrie took over the Fund’s Delta research and focused on more archaeological matters, and his two publications on the Tanis excavations bypassed biblical references or relevance. He did baulk at the request from London that he ship back 1,000 mud bricks from the excavation ‘made without straw by an Israelite in bondage’ so that pious funders’ donations could be acknowledged with a tangible reward. Once established, the Egypt Exploration Society could move to more mainstream Egyptological excavations and recording, as could the independent fund Flinders Petrie set up to support his own Egyptian research. Much of the funding of Nile Valley excavations came from museums who would receive a share of the finds, thus bypassing the need for biblical references in Egyptian research support. But after the spectacular discoveries at the tomb of Tutankhamen in 1922, the year when Egypt gained self-rule, Egypt’s legal regime for the export of antiquities was changed and Petrie moved to work in Palestine where he

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Figure 8.2  Edouard Naville excavating at Bubastis (Tell Basta) c.1886–9.

had briefly worked in 1889–90. Here Petrie was aware that his subscribers were anxious to fund archaeological proofs of the literal truth of the Bible, which led him to choose a site identified with the biblical Gerar. In 1934, after a disagreement with the (British) authorities in Palestine, he planned work in Syria, and his wife invoked the biblical links once more in fundraising, launching a Biblical Research Account: ‘Interest in the early peoples of the Biblical record […] should surely prove an incentive towards sending assistance.’ Having escaped early from the model of ‘biblical archaeology’, Petrie was pulled back to it by necessity at the end of his distinguished career, and, ironically, some obituaries to the greatest student of ancient Egypt of his generation instead spoke of him ‘proving the truth of the Bible’. That in The Times was more measured: ‘when he left the Egyptian field to embark on others (such as Biblical matters) he was not always so happily inspired.’6 The wealth of American museums, universities and especially the power and wealth of major philanthropists gave the United States a major advantage over other nations in undertaking archaeological fieldwork in the Middle East. Egypt and Mesopotamia received major expeditions from the end of the nineteenth

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century. In the region of greatest relevance to biblical texts, sponsorship by the Jewish philanthropist Jacob Henry Schiff enabled work from 1908 at the site of Samaria, known biblically as the capital of the northern kingdom of Israel. But the American Protestant community was more central to most US archaeological work in the area. The founding of the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR), with operations in Jerusalem from 1900, was in some ways the opposite of Britain’s Society for Biblical Archaeology – using a generalised non-religious title but with a stated commitment at the time to biblical archaeology research, though with a clearly non-denominational approach. The distinguished American archaeologist William F. Albright (and his pupil George E. Wright) aimed to create a scientific archaeology in Palestine based on enthusiasm to prove biblical truths in the face of challenges from literary analysis of the Bible. Thus Albright sought to identify tell sites with biblical locations and interpreted some of his finds in the light of biblical history. They would soon proclaim success in what they were seeking: Iron Age Israelites replacing Bronze Age Canaanites; destruction levels marking Joshua’s conquest of the land; settlements of the empire of David and buildings of the reign of Solomon; as well as the sites of later settlement of Israel and Judah before and after the exile. Very valuable work was done, and excellent records now exist for sites and buildings and finds. But much of the biblical linkage has proved to be wishful thinking. In searching for finds which gave credence to Solomon’s power, a circular logic was used to assign sites to the period of his reign. Hopes for evidence of destruction levels from Joshua attributed destruction layers to Joshua’s agency. The wish to find evidence of a powerful kingdom of Solomon attributed city gates to the tenth century, which were later redated to subsequent centuries. It is far easier to appraise the careers of the Patriarchs, of Joshua, Gideon and Samson, of Samuel, Saul, David and Solomon, than it formerly was. The scanty light now shed on the building operations of Saul and David, and the rich new information bearing on the constructions of Solomon […] are most welcome aids to our understanding of the evolution of Israelite material culture under these rulers of United Israel, who thus become more tangible figures than they were.7

Albright initially worked in Palestine in 1922 and his institution and activity dominated much of the American work in Palestine in the interwar years. He was dependent on US funding sources which put him at a distance from the British. They ran the antiquities services of Palestine (and until 1928 Transjordan) under

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the British Mandate, just as the French ran the equivalent bodies in the mandated territory of Syria. It was therefore more important for Albright and ASOR to undertake work that would have wide appeal and support in the United States. ASOR received significant money from religious institutions and individual donors such as religious writer Melvin Grove Kyle. The magazine of the organisation he once directed, the American Schools of Oriental Research’s Biblical Archaeologist, started in 1938, was only renamed as Near Eastern Archaeology in 1968. A large sum that bypassed Albright was John D. Rockefeller’s support of the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago and their excavations at the biblical site of Megiddo. The irony is that much can be learned from archaeology about the period for which biblical history is correlated with other historical sources, especially the post-exilic period of Persian, Hellenistic and Roman rule. But this is not the period which has interested many outsiders stimulated by Christian religious beliefs; for them it is the narratives describing earlier periods which attracted attention. The scientific work of the American Schools of Oriental Research would become ecumenical in nature, with a Jewish director in the 1930s and 1940s, but the lack of interest by Christian sponsors in the post-exilic Jewish state persisted. The period 1925–48 has been seen as ‘the golden age of biblical archaeology’. As historian of this period of archaeological work, Roger Moorey, has observed: In retrospect the years between the World Wars have come to be seen as the time when biblical archaeology, particularly through men like Albright and Glueck, had an academic status and a self-confidence that it had not enjoyed before and was rarely to achieve again. As often in the infancy of a new branch of study, the advocates and optimists proposed simple archaeological answers to complex Biblical questions. It now seems that premature or immature conclusions were drawn from the necessarily restricted range of information offered by the new fieldwork […] Ingenious hypotheses based upon a minimal sample of the archaeological evidence all too easily appeared to be persuasive solutions to long debated biblical issues.8

MODERN RESEARCH AND THE IMPACT ON BIBLICAL ARCHAEOLOGY

The international successors to Albright and Wright in the region’s archaeology have sought to distance themselves professionally from a theological or evangelical

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motivation in their work, while maintaining the ‘biblical’ audience in popular writings. Despite a move by professional researchers to call themselves Levantine or Syro-Palestine archaeologists, there has been no reduction of amateur interest in ‘biblical archaeology’, nor of funding sources inspired by religious motivation, from Baptists in the 1950s to Seventh Day Adventists in the 1970s to wealthy United States citizens in the twenty-first century. There remain enthusiasts to fund surveys in Sinai inspired by interest in the route of the Exodus, or excavations in tell sites mentioned as Israelite conquests, or in Jerusalem to map out the City of David. However, those whose passions and financial support seek to locate the resting place of Noah’s Ark have found they need to go to assistance outside of archaeology. Biblical links – or claims for these – remain a good way for foreign scholars to secure funding from sources other than official research councils, and for researchers based in the region – especially in Israel – to gain additional support. And of newer impact are those donors who wish to find evidence to support not their religious faith, but a political belief. At a public level, the United States popular magazine Biblical Archaeology Review, published since 1975 by the US Biblical Archaeology Society, now claims to be ‘the largest paid-circulation archaeology magazine in the world’ – a claim hard to ignore. And a suggested religious link has marketing value. A publisher can expect to sell more copies of a book that includes ‘the Holy Land’ or ‘the Bible’ in its title than if it stated that it is primarily a prehistory of the Levant. Even a television documentary from the highly respected WGBH Boston used the title The Bible’s Buried Secrets (2008) to present the scholarly knowledge of the region that bypasses the biblical narrative. There is still debate about the significance of different archaeological sites, some of it reflecting professional differences, some with a different agenda. But the image of ancient Palestine unveiled by archaeology today has given a nuanced picture of social, economic and political change in the periods covered by the biblical narrative. The defeat and destruction of Canaanite cities by invading Israelites has gone. So has the idea of a powerful tenth-century Jerusalem with wealthy palace and temple ruling a united kingdom of Israel and Judah and spreading its power to fill the gap between Mesopotamia and Egypt. Religion and ritual do not yet present us with an early monotheistic society. But instead we see increased population and development in Jerusalem and surrounding Judah in the seventh century bce, following the destruction of neighbouring Israel; we see the

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impact of the Persian conquest of Babylon and establishment of their province of Yehud housing the growth of the cult of Yahweh based at Jerusalem; and in due course the development there of the temple, priesthood and ritual which underlay the Jewish identity. The substantial archaeological research since the 1980s has eroded the image of Israelite military invasion of ‘the promised land’ and the conquests led by Joshua and his successors. In the burst of interwar archaeological work, sites of destruction were attributed to Joshua or an Israelite invasion, but subsequent relative dating and absolute radiocarbon chronology undermined such claims. Archaeological excavation of numerous tells has shown the absence of destruction levels in the required time and places. It has revealed instead the decline of Bronze Age ‘Canaanite’ city states around 1200 bce, and the emergence of a different economy and society based on small-scale communities which evolved into the highland Iron Age settlements located in the areas of Israel and Judah. Some scholars find it convenient to use the term ‘Canaanites’ for the Bronze Age societies and ‘Israelites’ (or proto-Israelites) for the Iron Age groups, although archaeologists of other regions eschew ethnic labels. The single reference to ysrỉr in the stele of Merneptah (c.1210 bce) is read by most scholars as a reference to a people called Israel and provides justification for this usage. But the now-substantial archaeological record shows cultural continuity between the two periods, and the probability that the ‘Israelites’ had Canaanite rather than external origins. One of the last areas to be challenged by new research was the concept of a United Kingdom, described in biblical texts as ruled (after the reign of Saul from Gibeah) by David and his son Solomon from a rich and powerful Jerusalem in the tenth century bce. This remains partly contested ground, as some archaeologists seek to identify Iron Age construction with a Solomonic or United Kingdom period, within a disputed chronology. Iron Age fortified and other constructions were often attributed to a ‘Solomonic period’, then used to define the power and reach of the United Kingdom – a circular argument. But no remains of Solomon’s mighty temple to Yahweh have been found in Jerusalem; nor, for that matter, of the temples he is said to have built to a range of other deities. The Jerusalem of the period of biblical David and Solomon now seems quite different from that which fifth-century bce theologians required it to be. Despite many decades of searching for something more substantial, the archaeological record suggests Jerusalem was a small community in an unfortified hill country town, among other communities in the southern highland zone, with neither wealth, economic nor political power, until a growth of Jerusalem around the time of the conquest of the northern

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kingdom by Assyria. If there were tenth-century chiefs with names such as David or Solomon, they were not ruling widespread wealthy kingdoms. The external support for a Davidic royal line comes from the ninth or eighth century Tel Dan stele which refers to bytdwd, translated by most (but not all) scholars as ‘House of David’. Otherwise there is ‘a gap in extra-biblical witnesses for this time’ and ‘no appropriate piece of writing from tenth-century Palestine’.9 Future archaeological work in Jerusalem is sure to expand the knowledge and understanding of the city during the period attributed to David and Solomon; the process of historical analysis and debate is not over. The significance of the archaeologically ‘missing’ Israelite military conquests, and the ‘missing’ Davidic/Solomonic empire, is strengthened by the powerful corroboration between archaeological work, biblical history and historical records from other regional sources for the period of the ninth century bce onwards, which confirm the strength and defeat of the northern kingdom of Israel (centred on Samaria) and the subsequent brief blossoming of Judah and Jerusalem. The crucial formative period of Jewish history and Jewish monotheism, that of the Persian province of Yehud, is well represented in the archaeological record. Our now-substantial knowledge of the prehistory and history of the region reflects the density of archaeological sites in and around the areas of the ancient Judah and Israel; the substantial amount of archaeological research there over a century and a half, but especially in the last 40 years; and the technical proficiency applied in the field to much of this work in modern Israel, which has attracted archaeologists with the highest professional skills. We thus have far more data from the archaeological sequence of an area of the Levant, perhaps 135 kilometres west– east and 200 kilometres north–south, than from almost any other area of this size. An impressive record has been created for the period in which Jewish monotheism was codified and Jewish ethnic identity was consolidated. In this the material evidence of archaeological survey and excavation can usefully be correlated with the texts for later periods of pre-conquest Judah and post-exile Yehud from biblical and from non-Hebrew sources – texts closer to the time in which the books of the Bible were edited in the form available to us. This is being amplified by new research, new techniques of study and new analysis and interpretation in Syro-Palestinian archaeology. In this context, a truly ‘biblical archaeology’ of the Iron Age after the ninth century, tied in closely with historical studies of the region, can expect a strong, professional and resilient future. However, for a century and a half a priority of ‘biblical archaeology’, this era was not a major priority. Led for much of the period by Christian enthusiasm, more

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interest lay in locating sites correlated with a supposed historicity of earlier periods of Jewish history – patriarchal, or the conquest period, or mighty kingdoms of Saul, David and Solomon and their immediate successors – to help confound the textual critics by demonstrating the historical accuracy of the biblical narrative. Religion was leading science. But today subjectivities can also be found, as constructions of the past have become of major importance in the politics of the region.

POLITICAL NATIONALISM

While some external researchers showed only modest interest in the creation of the historical Jewish state of Persian, Hellenistic and Roman times, interest from the Jewish community did begin to fill this gap. A Jewish ‘Palestine Exploration Society’ had its origins in 1914, although their initial work in 1920–2 was on a Byzantine period town of Hammath-Tiberias. After the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, this organisation under the new name Israel Exploration Society played an important role in sponsoring excavations and fieldwork across a broader range of periods. Pioneering work by Jewish researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (where archaeology began in 1934 and remains strong today) studied later periods of Jewish settlement: those of the Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine periods. The state of Israel undertook major research on these important periods in the history of Palestine’s Jewish community, with archaeological work such as that at Masada in 1963–5 achieving iconic national and international status. Significantly, there was a close relation between the political elites of the newly formed state and archaeological workers, much of whose focus was initially in areas which reflected the national agenda of regaining the land of Israel. Important archaeological work was undertaken by Yigael Yadin (1917–84), the son of an archaeologist, after his period as Israel’s Chief of the Defense Forces and before his return as Deputy Prime Minister. Benjamin Mazar (1906–95), one of the most influential interpreters of the archaeological record as endorsing much biblical narrative, was a political associate of Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben Gurion and brother-in-law of Israel’s president. Moshe Dayan, another Chief of the Defense Forces, was a passionate supporter of archaeology. Modern Israel developed its historical, archaeological and textual studies in the context of a secular state. Many of the founders of the Zionist movement which ultimately led to the creation of Israel were non-religious, or not moved primarily

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Figure 8.3  Archaeologist Benjamin Mazar, with granddaughter and future archaeologist Eilat Mazar at the 1970s excavations at the foot of Temple Mount, Jerusalem.

by religious faith, but were able to use the idea of the Promised Land in the context of building support for the movement from others, especially when alternative proposals for a Jewish homeland in Argentina, Uganda or Cyprus fell away. The biblical covenant from Yahweh to the patriarch Abram (Abraham) had stated: To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates, the land of the Kenites, the Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Rephraim, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites, and the Jebusites.10

The use of the image for both religious and non-religious support has its echoes among in secular Israel today, a position summarised in the title of an article by Jerusalem historian Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin: ‘There is no God, but He promised us the land.’11 Once established in 1948 with a name and location that was drawn from history, the new state of Israel would succeed in uniting religious and less religious Jewish citizens, and their overseas supporters, around an identity forged by that early history as represented in the biblical narrative.

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In the arguments over territory between the Jewish population of Israel and the Palestinian and other Arab communities, history (and archaeology) have therefore taken on new dimensions. Although in reality it is world politics and allegiances that will decide Middle Eastern outcomes, ideologically many Israelis – secular and religious – have continued to put strong emphasis on questions of distant heritage. Weaving ancient beliefs into modern disputes may have little effect on practical outcomes, but it has had an impact on morale and ethnic self-confidence. As a result, perhaps inevitably, much of the historical and archaeological discourse in Israel and Palestine has been intertwined with the politics of possession and of national identity. As Tel Aviv archaeologist Israel Finkelstein notes, ‘In the 1950s, biblical archaeology served as an important element in the development of the modern Israeli ethos’.12 Israeli claims to the land have been debated in terms of long history, as have those of its challengers. One of the leading Western revisionist scholars, Keith Whitelam, suggested in 1996 that the ancient history of Palestine had been overtaken by the history of Israel and that the subject now lay in the domain of religion and theology rather than that of history. But this was nothing new. What had changed was that the issue had become locked up with debates of contemporary nationhood, and thus had greater impact than the theological issues of 20 or 50 or 70 years before. Presaging the support given to the Israeli state from many in the US, writings of the archaeologist W. F. Albright would celebrate the extreme destruction of the Canaanites by ancient Israel. From the impartial standpoint of the philosopher of history, it often seems necessary that a people of markedly inferior type before a people of superior potentialities, since there is a point beyond which racial mixture cannot go without disaster […] It is fortunate for the future of monotheism that the Israelites of the Conquest were a wild folk, endowed with primitive energy and ruthless will to exist, since the resulting decimation of the Canaanites prevented the complete fusion of the two kindred folk […] Thus the Canaanites, with their orgiastic nature worship, their cult of fertility […] and their gross mythology, were replaced by Israel, with its pastoral simplicity and purity of life, its lofty monotheism, and its severe code of ethics.13

Palestinian Arabs at times have linked their own historical identity to that of Canaanites, though many Israeli Arabs were said to exhibit a lack of interest in

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the past of the land where they lived. The ‘Canaanite’ ancestry serves the purpose of affirming the antiquity of settlement (distinguishing it from the arrival of Islam from Arabia in the seventh century ce). But it can also stimulate identification with those who biblical literature says were defeated at the hands of Israel some 3,200 years ago. Given the importance attributed to claims for Jewish historical entitlement to the land of Israel, use of the same paradigm can be seen within the more extreme Palestinian groups such as Hamas, using Islamic theology to back claims for Israel as Muslim Arab territory: The Islamic Resistance Movement believes that the land of Palestine is an Islamic waqf [religious endowment] entrusted to the Muslim generations until Judgement Day. No one may renounce all or even part of it […] Those who are on the land have the right to land’s benefit only. This waqf remains as long as earth and heaven last. Any action taken in contradiction to Islamic sharia with respect to Palestine is unacceptable action to be rescinded by its claimants.14

Conflicts over archaeology in the state of Israel have not just been between Jewish Zionists and Palestinian Arab nationalists, but have reflected the tensions between a secular state and religious groups. Muslim sensitivities have played a large part in limiting research on the Temple Mount, allowing some to suggest that the ‘missing’ Solomonic temple may underlie this unexcavated site. Poorly supervised construction work on Temple Mount by the Muslim authorities, without proper archaeological monitoring, attracted scientific criticism. And substantial public and political conflict has reflected the concern by orthodox Jewish religious groups and archaeologists over the removal of human remains from excavations. These have been at their strongest in Jerusalem itself, and included threats of violence to archaeologists. Challenging the idea of a Jewish community unified by genealogical descent from a first-century ce exile, Israeli historian Shlomo Sand suggests (though in rather simplified terms) a common view among his fellow citizens: They know for a certainty that a Jewish nation has been in existence since Moses received the tablets of the law on Mount Sinai, and that they are direct and exclusive descendants (except for the ten tribes, who are yet to be located). They are convinced that this nation ‘came out’ of Egypt; conquered and settled ‘the Land of Israel’ which had been famously promised by its deity; created the magnificent kingdom of David and Solomon, which then split into kingdoms of Judah and Israel.15

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Sand notes that the erosion of the historical underpinning of biblical literature affected not just those with religious commitment but is a core of secular education in Israel: According to this teaching, the people of Israel were no longer made up of those chosen by God, but became a nation issuing from the seed of Abraham. And so when modern archaeology began to show that there had not been an Exodus from Egypt, and that the great, unified monarchy of David and Solomon never existed, it met with a bitter and embarrassed reaction from the secular Israeli public.16

JERUSALEM

Much in the identity politics of Israel relates to ancient Jerusalem: the historical reality, regional power and political roles of David and Solomon, and the First Temple and palace of Solomon’s reign, all of which have brought issues of the past into a

Figure 8.4  The Jerusalem Archaeological Park.

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modern battleground. With Israel’s control of East Jerusalem since the 1967 war, ownership of the past and ownership of the present have been closely intertwined. General media and scholarly discourse have paid close attention to archaeological interpretations of early Jerusalem. From 1961 to 1967 a group led by British archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon worked on sites there, though she died before her work was fully published. Israeli work took place under Yigal Shiloh in 1978–85. Archaeology long failed to provide solid evidence to support the biblical image of the tenth-century United Kingdom. Jerusalem has been excavated time and again – and with a particular intense period of investigation of Bronze and Iron Age remains […] at the city of David, the original urban core of Jerusalem […] Surprisingly […] fieldwork there and in other parts of biblical Jerusalem failed to provide significant evidence for a tenth century occupation […] The most optimistic assessment of this negative evidence is that tenth century Jerusalem was rather limited in extent, perhaps not more than a typical hill country village […] Despite Judah’s prominence in the Bible, however, there is no archaeological indication until the eighth century bce that this small and rather isolated highland area, surrounded by arid steppe land on both east and south, possessed any particular importance.17

The most recent work has been controversial, both because it has taken place in East Jerusalem (not recognised by the United Nations as part of Israel) and because of the claims made for the dating and biblical significance of the finds. Eilat Mazar made discoveries in 2005 which she identified as tenth-century and thus contemporary with the biblical United Kingdom, but this dating was challenged by others. Five years later, her tenth-century dating of a city wall was similarly controversial. In 2013 archaeologists from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem announced to the media that they had discovered a palace of King David at Khirbet Qeiyafa, west of Jerusalem; this was criticised by other archaeologists. As excavators in Jerusalem seek to identify finds with the ancient city of David, financial support has come from private local and overseas sources. External support for archaeology reflects both political and religious sympathies. Excavations in the Silwan area of East Jerusalem are being financed by the politically strong Ir David (City of David) Foundation (also called the Elad Foundation) as part of their general support for Judaicizing the city; another ambitious goal has been acquiring Palestinian homes for Jewish settlement. A critical account suggests:

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Ir David Foundation is considered one of the wealthiest right-wing NGOs, with a budget bigger than the combined budget of Israel’s seven largest left-wing and human rights NGOs. However, the Ir David Foundation received a special permit from the Israeli NGO Registry to keep the names of its donors secret […] In August 2012, an Israeli court ruled that the Israeli Nature and Parks Authority has wrongfully favored the Ir David Foundation in awarding the management of the national park in Silwan, and ruled that the Nature and Parks Authority should re-open the agreement and either begin a new tender, or go through due process in explaining why the Ir David Foundation should be exempt of a tender […] Nevertheless, the Jerusalem Municipality decided to build a bridge to help the foundation with its archeological digs in Silwan, while restricting the movement of the local resident.18

The foundation’s funds have been invaluable to Israeli archaeologists working in East Jerusalem and the foundation has been rewarded with claims for early evidence of the United Kingdom that have not won overall acceptance in the archaeological community. In the US, the Friends of Ir David Inc. have contributed $5–7 million annually to Elad’s projects. Other funding of archaeological work in Jerusalem has come from the avowedly conservative American businessman Roger Hertog. But while the motivation for some funding might be political rather than religious, the structure of the funding differs little from the private support used by archaeological field workers since the nineteenth century. Some, like Tel Aviv archaeologist Raphael Greenberg, have suggested the majority of funding for Israeli archaeology in Israel and Palestine comes from sources inspired by religion. Substantial support for Israel’s security and identity comes from the USA and their support lies not just with the Jewish community but with Protestant Christians, especially from the more fundamentalist groups. The most extreme of these follow a belief that the second coming of Jesus can only happen when the Jews have rebuilt Jerusalem, the approach called Christian Zionism, so their support for Israeli occupation and settlement of East Jerusalem has indirect intentions. The Scriptures also reveal that this age of peace will be preceded by the restoration of Israel, which will come in the midst of great conflict and distress, as the nations resist and oppose the Jewish return to Zion […] Thus, we admonish all nations and peoples that those who seek to dislodge the Jewish people from any part of Jerusalem, to disinvest Israel of her bequeathed inheritance, or to divide the Land of Israel are placing themselves in conflict with the God of the Bible […] Ultimately,

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we affirm that the restoration of Israel will usher in the coming of the Messiah to the Mount of Olives […] and bring rest to God’s people and the entire world.19

Although it is now seeing fast growth in the United States, Christian Zionism has a long history, and included lobbyists for the support of early Jewish Zionist goals, both to British governments before the Balfour Declaration and in the years leading up to the creation of the state of Israel. A debate in the Biblical Archaeology Review addressed criticism that excavation in the City of David area of East Jerusalem was funded by Elad for Zionist political purposes. A critic’s argument was the revealing comment that ‘a tie with Biblical history makes a site more appealing to the philanthropist, than a prehistoric or Islamic period site ever can’. The editor’s comment on this debate concedes that ‘much archaeology in Israel, for example, is funded by evangelical Christians’.20 Another writer comments that archaeologists have ‘learned to become dependent upon publicity as a means to increase funds for future research. That is the major reason why so many of them are complicit in labelling their finds as biblical regardless of their own personal views on the subject.’21 The situation seems close to that of earlier biblical archaeology, where archaeological work needs as wide support as it can receive, either by private donations or by public funding which has the backing of taxpayers and voters. Thus the politicisation of archaeology in Israel includes a pragmatic element that funds are needed, whatever the motivation behind the funders. Meanwhile, a website has been launched to argue the claims of archaeology to help positive relations between Israelis and Palestinians. Jerusalem is contested ground, and the past has become hostage to this contest, with each side trying to tell a story that excludes the other. Historically, archaeology has been used in such situations by interested parties […] In Jerusalem, the influence of ideological sponsors on archaeology has been strongly felt, causing many doubts about the veracity of the finds presented and the degree to which all periods receive equal treatment […] A free and professional archaeology should be measured by its independence […] The archaeology of Jerusalem, spanning 7000 years, should tell a far more complex, diverse, interesting and broadly relevant tale than that created to support a particular political creed.22

There is thus an established critique that groups and individuals motivated by rightwing politics or religious fundamentalism are supporting Israeli archaeological

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work in order to strengthen Jewish claims to the land of Israel and to the occupied territories of Palestine on the West Bank and in East Jerusalem. While this may indeed be their motivation, there seem some flaws in the emphasis given to this. In international affairs, the framework where any resolution of the future of Israel and Palestine is likely to be resolved, historical and archaeological arguments are unlikely to have much influence. Those who had an unquestioned historical occupation or control of part or all Israel/Palestine in the past include Canaanites and Jews and Philistines and Phoenicians, the ancient peoples of Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Macedonia, Syria, Rome, Byzantium, Arabia, crusaders from all the countries of western Europe, Arabs, Ottoman Turks and the British Mandate. In such a context, the claim in international politics for the territorial boundaries of the state of Israel are unlikely to be affected by evidence that Judean kingdoms operated from the thirteenth or tenth century rather than the ninth or sixth century bce. Equally, those among Jewish Zionists and their Christian supporters who consider Israel’s territorial rights were granted by God in the third or second millennium bce rather than by the Balfour Declaration of 1917 are unlikely to have their views shaken by the variable dating of archaeological levels in urban settlements of the highland Iron Age. And the claim by Israeli Jewish groups for a right to settle in Palestinian areas of East Jerusalem is unlikely to be strengthened or weakened by dating archaeological discoveries that back the tradition of the ancient temple site. The present may be filled with imagined constructions of the deep past, which may reinforce individuals’ perceptions, but in international affairs the future is likely to have other determinants.

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CHAPTER 9

LOST TRIBES

One of the strangest phenomena of historical invention is the search for the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. Little else has seen so much effort over such a long time and broad geographical spread to resolve an imaginary problem. The search for the supposed Ten Tribes of Israel (‘lost’ since the eighth century bce) inspired many Jewish writers from as far back as the Hellenistic period. But European Christian groups enthusiastically sought and found Lost Tribes all over the world, a movement which linked in with expanding imperialism. A third cycle was of people who saw themselves as descendants of one (or more) of the Lost Tribes, a phenomenon which has continued actively today. One of the most vigorous self-identifiers is the British Israelite movement which has seen growth over three centuries. To avoid confusion it is important to clarify the concept and note who the Lost Tribes of Israel were not. They were not the various groups who adopted Judaism as their own religion in or after the first millennium ce. They were not the descendants of Jewish people who may have left Palestine after the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70 ce. They were not the strong Jewish communities which retained their religion and identity in diverse locations across the Middle East in the Persian period (and its successors) after the Babylonian exile from the southern kingdom of Judah, and its capital Jerusalem. The concept of the ‘Ten Lost Tribes’ applies specifically to the notion of people who were said by biblical sources to have been removed from the northern kingdom of Israel after its defeat by the Assyrian Empire. The first group of captives resulted from a campaign by Assyrian ruler Tiglath-Pileser (2 Kgs 15.29). Then around 722 bce came a further defeat: in the model of the later biblical texts,

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leaving two of the original twelve tribes in the southern kingdom of Judah. The biblical account was presented from the viewpoint of the Judeans, celebrating their own survival (for the time being) and loyalty to Yahweh: King Shalmaneser of Assyria came up against him [King Ahaz]; Hoshea became his vassal and paid him tribute. But the king of Assyria found treachery in Hoshea; for he had sent messages to King So of Egypt, and offered no tributes to the king of Assyria, as he had done year by year; therefore the king of Assyria confined him and imprisoned him. Then the king of Assyria invaded all the land and came to Samaria; for three years he besieged it. In the ninth year of Hoshea the king of Assyria captured Samaria; he carried the Israelites away to Assyria. He placed them in Halah, on the Habor, the river of Gozan, and in the cities of the Medes. This occurred because the people of Israel had sinned against the Lord their God.1

The Assyrian records boast of this event, in damaged inscriptions of King Sargon II: I besieged and conquered Samerina, led away as booty 27,290 inhabitants of it. I formed from among them a contingent of 50 chariots and made remaining inhabitants assume their social positions. I installed over them an officer of mine and imposed upon them the tribute of the former king.2

And paraphrased in another text: The town I rebuilt better than it was before and settled therein people from countries which I myself had conquered.3

Knowledge of the pattern of Assyrian imperial administration – and indeed, both the numbers quoted and common sense – suggests that not every resident of the conquered territory could or would have been removed. But the ruling elites were gone and the political structure demolished, as well as the identity of what are biblically described as individual tribes. Whereas the later exiles to Babylon, the elite of Judea, would retain and strengthen their identity and religion for the shorter period of their exile, those removed from the territories of the northern kingdom (condemned in the biblical texts for their lack of loyalty to Yahweh) were dispersed, absorbed into the Assyrian Empire and disappear from history. The historical narrative in the Bible does not refer to ‘the Ten Tribes’ but in time this became a fixed phrase across Jewish and then Christian cultures.

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Figure 9.1  The fall of Jerusalem, a sixteenth-century German image.

References to the Ten Tribes can be found in the Jewish literature dated later than the return of the Judean exiles from Babylon, although the area identified as ruled from Samaria excluded those ‘tribes’ who lived on the East Bank of the Jordan. This was a theological issue as much as a geographical one, with the hope that the twelve tribes of the conquest of Canaan could again be reunited. The apocryphal book 2 Esdras named ‘Arzareth’ as the current location of the Ten Tribes in exile and this name would even be used in early modern maps, though in widely different locations. Jewish rabbinical writers in the centuries after the destruction of Jerusalem would put emphasis on this reuniting, and the concept of the Ten Tribes would remain through later Jewish thought. When a Jewish traveller called Eldad ha-Dani arrived in the Maghreb in the late ninth century ce and reported his origins as a member of the tribe of Dan in a Jewish community within eastern Africa, the story spread widely that here was evidence of the Lost Tribes. The twelfth-century Jewish traveller from Spain, Benjamin of Tudela, travelled to Persia and identified local mountain people there as members of the Lost Tribes, as did other Jewish travellers in the following centuries; Benjamin also located the Lost Tribes in Yemen. Medieval Christian Europe followed this fascination and used it to try and make sense of a changing world. Thirteenth-century English monk Matthew

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Paris identified the powerful Mongol armies spreading westwards as descended from the Ten Tribes, having abandoned their beliefs. Stories of a distant Christian Kingdom ruled by ‘Prester John’ associated him with rule over descendants of the Lost Tribes. One part of this approach sought to identify as the Lost Tribes groups who had only recently been ‘found’ by exploration and expanding colonial enterprise: the Lost Tribes appear a feature through the whole extent of European colonialism. To sixteenth-century French scholar Guillaume Postel they were located in Central Asia. To some they were to be found in the other direction, in the Canary Islands of the Atlantic. Europeans sought to fit the newly encountered peoples of the Americas into the Old Testament framework of human history, which would require them to be descendants of one of Noah’s sons. An early and persistent idea emerged that Native Americans might include the Lost Tribes. The Jewish Portuguese traveller Antonio de Montezinos (Aharon ha-Levi) declared in the 1640s that he had encountered members of the Lost Tribes in South America and confirmed their Judaic links. Subsequent claims would assert that the Lost Tribes could be found in Mexico and North America, including a suggested route of their travels through the polar region. The Book of Mormon, published in the state of New York by Joseph Smith in 1830, presented a different model of migrations from the ancient Near East to North America. Smith was well aware of the traditions which identified the Lost Tribes within the Native American population. A migration from Jerusalem led by Levi, shortly before the Babylonian destruction of the city (i.e. not the Lost Tribes of the northern kingdom), formed a core revelation in his book, which included a prophecy of the regathering of the tribes of Israel. However, the Book of Mormon also recorded a much earlier migration from the region when a group led by Jared left to settled America in the dispersal that followed the construction of the Tower of Babel. Five years later, as mentioned in Chapter 1, Smith issued a volume said to be a translation from Egyptian papyri, recording Israelite patriarchal history. Protestant Christianity had turned its back on Roman authority, and with it the bones and relics of the saints and martyrs. With few exceptions (such as Joseph of Arimathea, to be discussed in Chapter 9) they lacked their own fables of origin. Instead they could turn back to the Old Testament, stimulating a Western Christian enthusiasm for the Lost Tribes. Asahel Grant in the 1830s spent time among the Nestorian Christians in and near Persia (Iran) and in 1841 proclaimed them as descended from

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the Ten Tribes, just one among an increasing number of nineteenth-century explorers searching the world for the Lost Tribes. But many claims were much further afield: Japan, China and other areas received similar claims, even Pacific Islanders. They were linked to the Lost Tribes myth by travellers who thought they saw similarities in practice, ritual, language or physiognomy with contemporary or historical Jews. As outsiders suggested that some of these far-flung people were of Jewish descent, groups within these communities came to accept and develop the story that they were indeed descended from the Lost Tribes. A number of groups have identified with Judaism (sometimes via an initial conversion to Christianity), and have incorporated the ‘Lost Tribes’ story to explain this transformation. The Lemba of Southern Africa have such a tradition, the Rusape of Zimbabwe and Abayudaya in Uganda have held similar approaches, and since the 1980s groups in other parts of Africa have followed suit. The Ethiopian Jews (Beta Israel), notable for their migration to Israel in the 1980s, have various traditions about their origins, including a link to the tribe of Dan. The Bnei Menashe of north-east India have identified as descendants of the tribe of Menasseh, recognition of which has also allowed some of them to migrate to Israel. A survey in 1905 noted that: With the beginning of their captivity they seem to have passed from human knowledge, and the mystery of the Lost Tribes has almost from that day to this been the lode-stone that has attracted and bewildered students of many races and varied beliefs. The total absence of all evidence of their fate has cleared the ground for innumerable theories, and in no district of the earth’s surface have not the Tribes at one time or another been located; no race has escaped the honour, or the suspicion, of being descended from the subjects of Jeroboam. The discovery of the Lost Tribes has, at different times, been announced in all the continents, and it has even been suggested that they were involved in the destruction of Atlantis. In China, in Tartary, in Afghanistan, in the Sahara indisputable proofs of their settlement have been produced. By turns, the English, the Irish, the North American Indians, and the Hottentots we have been assured are of Hebrew descent.4

If the descendants of the twelve tribes of ancient Israel and Judah were the Chosen People of God, there was a particular appeal in being among those descendants. From the sixteenth century, movements of Western Christians also began to identify themselves as the Lost Tribes.

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Figure 9.2  Tracing the Lost Tribes of Israel into the British Isles: a map from 1885.

One of the longest-surviving narratives of the Lost Tribes is that of British Israelism. The inner logic of this movement reflects both religious and political ideologies. Since the British Empire (and, more recently, the United States) are mighty god-fearing powers, then they must be inheritors of the divine blessing of the Chosen Race, a blessing which has moved from the ancient Israelites to the modern descendants of the Ten Tribes in exile. British Israelism has produced a substantial literature (and inspired a critical literature in response). Since the seventeenth century, arguments appeared in print that the English represented descent from the people of ancient Israel. An eccentric early identification of the British with the Lost Tribes was by Richard Brothers (1757–1824) with a prophetic book in 1794, reprinted in the United States three years later. In A Revealed Knowledge of the Prophecies and Times he gave himself a central role in the reuniting of Israel. It is fifteen hundred years since my family was separated from the Jews, and lost all knowledge of its origin; the last on record, in the Scripture, is James: chap. xiii. 55 ver. of St. Matthew. Told me by revelation. The government of the Jewish nation will, under the Lord God, be committed to me, that the everlasting covenant from him to David may be manifested in the visible Prince and Governor of the Jews.5

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More reasoned arguments blossomed in the nineteenth century, with variously the Anglo-Saxons, the English, the British, the English-speaking people or a wider group of Europeans identified as the Lost Tribes: a mixture of religious, linguistic and historical information being mined to support the popular case. John Wilson’s Lectures on Our Israelitish Origin, first published in 1840, continued in multiple editions as something of a founding text for the movement. The author declared that he: sees nothing to shake his confidence in that which he has long maintained, that ‘Israel’s grave was the Saxon’s birthplace’; that the English, although not Jews, are yet sprung from the outcasts of Israel, after whom the Word of God was sent to the north country, and to these ‘isles far off ’.6

The growing strength of the British Empire appeared to give weight to the argument which in turn provided justification for imperial power, notwithstanding a pervasive anti-Semitism in some ruling circles. This was a phenomenon which began generations before the parallel of a powerful ancient Egypt was used as an analogy for imperial influence (as discussed in Chapter 4). In Chapter 2 we mentioned pyramidologies, relating specifically to prophetic interpretations of pyramid measurements, which were created by supporters of British Israelism: Piazzi Smyth in the 1860s, John Garnier at the beginning of the twentieth century, and the prolific Adam Rutherford with his Institute of Pyramidology in the mid-twentieth century. Numerous groups supporting British Israelism emerged in the later nineteenth century in Britain and the United States, in Canada, Australia, New Zealand – even in South Africa, where the other white community, the Afrikaners, had long adopted their own forms of Old Testament analogy. The British-Israel-World Federation was founded at the end of the Great War in 1919, and remains active today. Its members see themselves solidly as part of the Christian tradition, and its supporters have included many leading military, political, even religious names. One strand of argument is that the present British royal family are lineal descendants of King David. Critics see aspects of British Israelism as not just nationalistic, or religiously heterodox, but echoing racial prejudice. The federation summarises its beliefs thus: The Federation believes that Christ is our personal Saviour and Redeemer of the nation. We also believe that the descendants of the so-called ‘Lost Ten Tribes’

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Figure 9.3  British Israelite family tree.

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of the Northern House of Israel are to be found in the Anglo-Saxon-Celtic and kindred peoples of today. As the Federation believes in the whole Bible it therefore believes the Covenants made between God and Abraham, Isaac and Jacob-Israel are everlasting and that the British nation plays an important part of God’s great plan for world order.7

And they quote one of their earlier supporters: Admiral of the Fleet, Lord Fisher, 1st Baron Fisher of Kilverstone (1841-1920), once remarked: ‘We are a wonderful nation. Astounding how we muddle through. There is only one explanation – we are the Lost Ten Tribes.’

While scholarship may no longer seek out the ultimate location of a vast dispersed population of Israelite exiles and their descendants, the study of those who claim such an identity today remains one of continuing interest. And the yearning of individuals as well as groups throughout the world to identify as descendants of an eighth-century bce exile from Israel represents one of the most persistent of imagined worlds relating to the ancient Middle East. Narratives of the ‘Lost Tribes’ and their identification with widely dispersed modern peoples presents one of the more extreme contrasts between scholarly interpretation and popular alternatives applied to the history of ‘the Holy Land’ and South-West Asia. But a different migration has developed into a series of complex accounts over the last two millennia: that of apostolic voyagers from Palestine, discussed in the next chapter.

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CHAPTER 10

DISTANT LINKS: APOSTOLIC TRAVELLERS

Medieval European maps placed Jerusalem at the centre of the world; it was the spiritual centre of Judaism, the foundational place in Christian history, and one of the three holy cities of Islam. Islam would conquer Jerusalem and Christian crusaders would fight to control it. As discussed in Chapter 9, people worldwide would seek for themselves or others the supposed ‘Lost Tribes’ dispersed from ancient Israel in the eighth century bce. But as Christianity grew, there was development of another theme linking widely spread Christian churches back to the Middle East: stories which attributed the origins of the local church directly to first-century travellers from the apostolic age of ‘the Holy Land’. The highest basis for authority lay with such apostolic origins: beliefs that Christianity had first been preached in a particular area by one of Jesus’ own disciples, or by an early mission inspired and appointed by a contemporary from that era. Claimed links to the very beginnings of Christianity in Judea would emphasise not just antiquity but the inherited authority of the local church. A suggestion that local Christianity began with apostolic missionary work could develop over the centuries into a complex set of detailed legends, which were strengthened by claims of local burial of the bones of the martyred saint, and the rituals of the associated shrine. Such traditions of apostolic origins developed widely across Christianity, attributing first-century missionary journeys from Judea to regions as far as India and England. In the mid-thirteenth century, the Italian Jacobus de Voragine was able to draw on (and expand with literary skill) a broad range of folk tales and oral traditions,

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apocryphal and canonical books, and writings by church fathers and lay authors, to write at length accounts of numerous saints and martyrs. Copies of this book The Golden Legend were widely circulated for two centuries, after which it became one of Europe’s bestsellers (in translations) with the new technique of printed books. The stories in The Golden Legend would then feed back into oral tradition. A commitment to an ideology – a religious faith, a political loyalty, an ethnic or national identity – can be reinforced by emphasis on heritage, on precedent and antiquity. This claim to heritage may be developed and deepened over time. In previous chapters we examined how many different sets of beliefs were reinforced by constructions of the past: Hermeticism, Rosicrucianism, Afrocentrism, the development of ancient Judaism or modern Israeli nationalism, and more. While not all religious movements depend on antiquity, their growth can often be marked by increased emphasis on suggested historical origins and documents. To early Islam, the authenticity of traditions was all important: Hadith, non-Qur’anic sayings or acts of the Prophet Muhammad, were classified by the reliability of their chain of transmittal. Issues of authenticity underlay the selection of the Jewish scriptural canon after the second century bce, and the formalising of the Christian New Testament Canon by the fourth century ce. The spread of Christianity in and beyond the Roman Empire quickly established congregations far from its origins in Judea. The stories of the life and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth were followed over the first millennium by another set of narratives. These attributed to his earliest followers journeys to the sometimes distant places Christianity had reached, as Christian communities attributed their origins to first-century ce journeys of disciples named in the New Testament books, and now considered as saints by the Christian Church. In many cases their local death and burial was also claimed, although the secondary market in dismembered bones or relics associated with saints would have much wider application, as these were placed in reliquaries within churches, or (from the thirteenth century) exposed to view. The growth of Christian beliefs and institutions in a particular place would gain authenticity by the identification of its origins with the earliest Christians and with figures mentioned in the New Testament texts, especially ones whose own faith arose from direct contact with Jesus or with the disciples who knew him. The sequence and timescale varied for the development of such legends.

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BACKGROUND TO THE SPREAD OF CHRISTIANITY

Tracing the development of Christian institutions and beliefs relies on early documents, a selection of which was recognised by third-century ce church leaders and formally approved as the present list of New Testament books in the fourth century. Early Christian writings needed to play different, if potentially conflicting, roles. They needed to reflect the current theology as it had developed by the time a document was put in written form, but its content also gained strength by the sense of authenticity and tradition it presented. Once a document was circulating, changes to its contents in the existing language could only be limited. This was less an issue for translations, which could reflect current church teaching and practice. Thus the translaters of the King James Version in English could choose to translate ekklesia as ‘Church’, putting emphasis on the institution, and late twentieth-century translations could opt for gender-neutral language to replace the masculine of the time of writing. Scholarly dissection has unravelled the most probable dates of the books in the New Testament. Their authorship remains unknown to modern scholarship other than the fact that they were not, generally, written by those whose names became attached to them, apart from a majority of the letters of Paul. Most scholars consider the four ‘canonical’ gospels were written from 40 to 70 years after the death of Jesus, presenting stories transmitted of Jesus’ life and teaching in the frameworks of the theology and practice that had evolved in the early church. The spread of Christian beliefs and communities owes particular origins to the educated Jew called Saul (in Greek, Saulos) from Tarsus in southern Anatolia. He was aware of a small group of heretical Jews in Palestine, who were followers of a charismatic preacher Yeshua (in Greek, Iesos; Latin, Iesus/Jesus) who had recently (around 30 ce) been killed by crucifixion on the urging of the Jewish religious authorities in Jerusalem. About five years after the crucifixion of Jesus, Saul moved from being a persecutor of this group to being an active proselytiser and innovator in their movement, changing his name to Paulos (Paul) and becoming the most influential and creative theologian of the early cult. The origins of his conversion lay not with Jesus’ apostles but with a direct revelation. Paul continued his religious teaching and organisation for another 30 years, with his death perhaps around 65 ce, earlier than the siege of Jerusalem by the army of Rome which led to the destruction of its temple in 70. A key feature of Paul’s teaching approach was to seek followers not just from the Jewish communities spread around and beyond the eastern Mediterranean,

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but from other groups within the Roman Empire, whose attitude to the religion of their colonisers left them open to a new set of beliefs. The size and diversity of the Roman Empire led to much movement into Rome and between other cities: traders, soldiers, free, slave and freed labour. Alongside official religion there developed adherence to numerous other cults from around the empire, including Egyptian cults of Isis, Hermeticism, the Persian cult of Mithras, conversion to Judaism or to Christianity. Although subject to some editing in the versions which have come down to us, the earliest written documents of Christianity appear to be copies of letters written by Paul. In these he developed ideas of behaviour, of church organisation, and of theological destiny, citing the authority of Jesus/Yeshua and his followers. Meanwhile those who had been followers of Jesus in his period of teaching (about 26–30 ce) and their own immediate converts were also spreading their message, though with more emphasis initially on converting those within the Jewish faith, in which the apostle Peter is given particular status in the gospels. Historical studies show that the traditions of healing, raising the dead and performing miracles of nature were associated with other ‘prophets’ in the Jewish community of first-century bce and first-century ce Judea. Others, too, had spread teaching of ethical values which went beyond the adherence to religious practice emphasised by the Jewish religious authorities. But the lasting influence of Jesus contrasted with that of his predecessors and contemporaries. The most important supplement to the narratives of his teaching and of charismatic and miraculous acts in his lifetime was the belief that he had returned to life three days after his crucifixion and spent 40 days bodily on earth before his ascension to heaven. The theological beliefs of the Christian communities developed under the influence of Paul and other major early preachers. To the Jewish community, the emphasis was that Jesus was in fact the Messiah (Greek Christos, ‘anointed’) expected in Hebrew scriptures. Under Paul’s influence grew the belief that Jesus was not just a messenger of God, but that he himself had divine attributes after his death. The image gradually developed that he was the ‘Son of God’ in a more specific way than the rest of humanity, and he himself became an object of worship. Such belief in the essential divinity of Jesus was a particular emphasis of the fourth gospel (John) written by the beginning of the second century ce. In the last decades of the first century ce, when those associated directly with Jesus were no longer alive, stories of his life were gathered into documents influenced by the interpretations and beliefs of their authors, including four gospels which would

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(by the fourth century) be accepted in the orthodox scriptures, despite some conflicting details between them: those which would carry the names of Matthew, Mark and Luke (compiled, with some shared sources and probably some later editorial additions, in the last decades of the first century), and John (compiled in the late first or very early second century). As the religion grew in the first centuries ce, so did the belief in, and worship of, Jesus as God himself, not just as the messenger of God, either from the time of his incarnation or from all time; and the emergence of a Holy Trinity of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Issues of political organisation and relations with secular state authorities were important, and especially with the official recognition of Christianity under Roman Emperor Constantine in the early fourth century. Questions of authenticity, authority and heritage would be highly important. Thus the origins of the Christian Church in a particular area of the Roman Empire and its successor states loomed large in the consciousness of clergy and laity.

SAINT PETER IN ROME

Matthew’s gospel ends with Jesus instructing his disciples: ‘Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you’ (Mt. 28.19). It is therefore unsurprising if members of established Christian communities would later link their origins to activities of the earliest disciples. As such a model developed in the church, it would be presented as a historical fact in the writing of church historian Eusebius in the early fourth century: Meanwhile the holy apostles and disciples of our Saviour were dispersed throughout the world. Parthia, according to tradition, was allotted to Thomas as his field of labor, Scythia to Andrew, and Asia to John, who, after he had lived some time there, died at Ephesus. Peter appears to have preached in Pontus, Galatia, Bithynia, Cappadocia, and Asia to the Jews of the dispersion. And at last, having come to Rome, he was crucified head-downwards; for he had requested that he might suffer in this way. What do we need to say concerning Paul, who preached the Gospel of Christ from Jerusalem to Illyricum, and afterwards suffered martyrdom in Rome under Nero?1

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The biblical apostles and disciples were Jewish residents in and around Judea, and most were men of faith rather than learning. Travel around the Levant was still within the Roman Empire, and distances were not great. Jewish communities were scattered throughout the region and beyond; the biblical book Acts shows a world in which the disciples could visit Jewish people with whom they shared a common language, and present the variant of Judaism which Christianity initially provided. But the later church traditions emphasised long-distance, multilingual conversions. In 416 Pope Innocent I affirmed that all regions in the west (i.e. the west of the Roman Empire) had been converted by Peter or his disciples, to emphasise that it was to Peter’s Rome that Christians owed their allegiance. Paul, as an educated man, Greek speaker and Roman citizen, represented a model of an itinerant preacher and organiser. Alongside his letters, the Acts of the Apostles presents a narrative of his travels, his ‘missionary journeys’. These included the Levant, southern Anatolia (Asia Minor) in Turkey (whence he originated), Cyprus and eastern Greece. His final journey as reported in Acts was to Rome. Having written to the emerging Christian community that he wished to visit them, it was under legal orders of the Roman authorities that he finally secured this visit: ‘This man could have been set free if he had not appealed to the emperor’.2 Acts ends with him operating successfully in Rome for two years: He lived there two whole years at his own expense and welcomed all who came to him, proclaiming the kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ with all boldness and without hindrance.3

Later Christian traditions reported him executed there, while other traditions attributed to him visits to Spain, and even to Britain, before a final execution by beheading in Rome. Another pervasive early church tradition as cited by Eusebius above, but not mentioned in the Bible, brought the apostle Peter to Rome, to reside there as head of the Christian community as first Bishop of Rome, until he was executed. This would have placed him at the centre of the Empire at the same time as Paul; by the third century, a tradition was established that he was Bishop of Rome for 25 years. Some scholars of early Christianity have argued that the first Christian communities were small informal groups, and that the Church in Rome would not have had a single formal leader until a century after the time of Peter’s death. In many early Christian writings listing bishops, Peter was considered as founder (with Paul) of Christianity in Rome, who appointed a bishop but was not a bishop himself.

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Figure 10.1  The crucifixion of St Peter, in the fresco by Michelangelo, Vatican Palace, Rome, c.1546–50.

Clement’s Epistle to the Corinthians, sent from Rome and now dated towards the end of the first century, referred to the martyrdom of Paul and Peter, but with no location. Peter, through unrighteous envy, endured not one or two, but numerous labours, and when he had finally suffered martyrdom, departed to the place of glory due to him. Owing to envy, Paul also obtained the reward of patient endurance, after being seven times thrown into captivity, compelled to flee, and stoned.4

Irinaeus, writing in France in the later second century, refers to ‘the very great, the very ancient, and universally known Church founded and organized at Rome by the two most glorious apostles, Peter and Paul’.5

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A further indirect source is found in fourth-century Eusebius, citing a now-lost interpretation by Clement of Alexandria (c.150–215) of the origin of the Gospel of Saint Mark: Again, in the same books, Clement gives the tradition of the earliest presbyters, as to the order of the Gospels, in the following manner: The Gospels containing the genealogies, he says, were written first. The Gospel according to Mark had this occasion. As Peter had preached the Word publicly at Rome, and declared the Gospel by the Spirit, many who were present requested that Mark, who had followed him for a long time and remembered his sayings, should write them out. And having composed the Gospel he gave it to those who had requested it. When Peter learned of this, he neither directly forbade nor encouraged it.6

The early date of these sources would support the authenticity of the tradition that Peter died in Rome. Against this is the biblical account of Peter as a Galilean fisherman, with John ‘uneducated and ordinary men’ (Acts 4.13) whose faith (and oratory) outweighed any lack of education, and whose focus was reported as being on the Jewish community. How multilingual were the Judean apostles is a matter of some debate. Hints in early literature about the possibility of Peter in Rome became a solid tradition. By the thirteenth century the author of The Golden Legend felt able to present a detailed narrative of Peter’s time in Rome, for 25 years, his activities, conflict with Nero, relationship with Paul, miracles in life and afterwards, and execution. He had thought to leave the city and reached the gates. Then being aware that the hour of his martyrdom was at hand, he went back to Rome, where he was seized by Nero’s ministers, and brought to the prefect Agrippa: and Linus relates that his face shone with joy. The prefect said to him: ‘Art thou then the man who is pleased to dwell among the common folk, and who persuades the women of the faubourgs to leave their husbands’ beds?’ Peter answered ‘Naught pleases me but the Cross of Christ’. Then being an alien, he was condemned to die on the cross, whereas Paul being a Roman citizen was condemned to be beheaded.7

The truth or otherwise of the story of Peter as Bishop as Rome is less relevant than the symbolism to the early church, which brought the leading apostle away from the old centre of religion (Jerusalem) to the heart of the Empire. With Rome the new centre of the church, it was necessary to have Peter also in Rome, as the first

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apostle appointed by Jesus and identified with ‘on this rock I will build my church’ (Mt. 16.18). As the authoritative survey of Christian theology by Jaroslav Pelikan describes it: The explanation for this record of Old Rome as ‘foundation of orthodoxy’ was not difficult to find. It lay in the promise and the commission of Christ to Peter, and through him to his successors […] an acknowledgement of Roman orthodoxy, fundamental though it was, was not an adequate exegesis of the promise of Christ, according to the spokesmen of the Latin church. That promise laid down certain conditions that would guarantee the church against the gates of hell: the church, the entire church, had to be built on the rock. That rock was Peter. To be built on the rock, the church must show that it stood in the succession of Peter and that it was an heir of the promises given to him.8

The Roman Catholic Church maintained the claim for the apostle Peter as the first Bishop of Rome, and therefore the first Pope, in support of the power and role of the papacy. Challenges to this idea from outside Roman Catholic orthodoxy appeared as early as the twelfth century. Later Protestant challenges questioned the history of Peter in Rome as a means of challenging Catholic primacy. In 1687 British propagandist and active anti-Catholic Henry Care (1646–88) published A Modest Enquiry whether St. Peter were ever at Rome and Bishop of that Church as a challenge to the role and rule of Rome; he suggested in a detailed argument not only that Peter had never been to Rome, but that the early church in Rome had authority more widely spread than under a single bishop. If St. Peter’s being Bishop of Rome, or so much as ever there, be not provable by Scripture, not any other Convincing Arguments; but whatsoever can be said for it, is easily Answered, and rendered not so much as Probable; If the Witnesses of the story are at Open Wars and Contradictions in the Circumstances, yet all pretending to a most punctual Exactness; and the Learned’st and most Subtle Advocates of the Party Sweat in vain, to invent so much as Colours to Reconcile them; If from Scripture and History, and a due Comparison of all Circumstances, it is most improbable to the Highest Degree, That ever Peter was at Rome, much more that he was Bishop thereof: If the story depend on Counterfeit Authors, or such as justly are of little Credit, and abundance of shameful Forgeries haven been invented and made us of to assert it: If it be Derogatory to the Honour of St. Peter’s Memory to assert it […] I conceive the Noise of St Peters Chair and Peters Successors, will

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henceforth abate somewhat of its Influences; or indeed signify very little, unless it be to Expose their Confidence that Use it.9

Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome was first built in the fourth century on the supposed site of Saint Peter’s burial. Archaeological work under the basilica since 1939 has uncovered human bones assigned to Saint Peter, although the church itself sits on the site of pagan mausolea. The archaeologist at the site, Margherita Guarducci expressed confidence in the authenticity of the basilica as the burial site of a historical Peter, though this had preceded the excavations themselves. Pope Pius XII in 1950 cast some doubt on identification of individual bones as those of Peter. Pope Paul VI in June 1968 was more confident about the identity of bones found: strengthened by the judgment of the talented and prudent people responsible, I positively trust: St. Peter’s relics have also been identified in a way I consider convincing […] The research, verification, discussions and debate will continue, but it seems that I have a duty, at the present state of archaeological and scientific conclusions, to give you and the Church this happy news, bound as we are to honor the sacred relics that have been subjected to a series of tests to establish their authenticity. In the present case, we must be all the more eager and exultant since we have reason to maintain that we have found a few of the most holy mortal remains of the Prince of the Apostles, Simon, son of Jonah, the fisherman Christ called Peter, whom the Lord chose to be the foundation of his Church and to whom the Lord entrusted the keys of his kingdom, with the mission of shepherding and reuniting his flock.10

The bones were then returned to privacy. Dissent over this claim will inevitably continue.

SANTIAGO: SAINT JAMES IN SPAIN

James (in Biblical Greek, Iakobos, i.e. Jakob), son of Zebedee and brother of John, was one of the first apostles called by Jesus, and has a special role in the Christianity and history of Spain as Santiago. The stories vary, but developed to attest that James himself brought Christianity to Spain, and his bones were later returned from Jerusalem for burial in Compostela, Galicia (north-west Spain). The role of Saint James (Sant Iago, elided as Santiago) was important in the period when

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Christian princes were fighting Muslim entities in Spain, and a vision of James (Iago) intervened to lead and inspire in battle. He appeared too at later stages in Spanish overseas expansion. The shrine around his supposed burial place became an important site of European pilgrimage in medieval Spain and remains so today, with tens of thousands of religious pilgrims and secular travellers following the Camino de Santiago. A shrine and ritual around the supposed bones of a saint and martyr is less remarkable than the story that emerged of his preaching in Spain. In the biblical literature considered canonical and therefore included in the New Testament, James was one of Jesus’ first apostles, and also one of the first Christian martyrs: ‘About that time King Herod laid violent hands upon some who had belonged to the church. He had James, the brother of John, killed with the sword’ (Acts 12.1). Scholars suggest this would be at a date around 42–44 ce, some 12 to 14 years after Jesus’ death. Later literature distinguished him as James the Great(er). Apocryphal Christian literature – that is, books which were not accepted into the official New Testament canon – provide a vast range of accounts of exploits and teachings of Jesus, his apostles and their followers, with ambitious and conflicting accounts of their travels. Some of these stories influenced the writings of early church historians and chroniclers despite their non-canonical sources. Some such sources (originating in Eastern Christianity) provide lists of apostles with missionary regions (or even languages) assigned to them, but for the first 600 years of Christianity James was not associated with such a distant journey as Spain. The suggestion that James travelled to preach in Spain first appears in the seventh century. Locally this would take precedence over the story that Saint Paul visited Spain, the inspiration of which may be traced to his intention (Rom. 15.22–9) of travelling to Rome via Spain. The reference in the Pauline letter suggests the presence of a Christian community in this part of Rome’s Mediterranean Empire, even if continuity to the Spain of the subsequent Visigoths was complex and cannot be demonstrated. Archaeological evidence of Christianity emerges from the fourth century, though a letter of Bishop Cyprian in 254 refers to sees of bishops in Spain. James’ preaching work ‘in Spain and other western sites’ was mentioned in a Latin manuscript, the Breviarium apostolorum, whose date appears to be seventh century; the same source brought Saint Philip to Gaul. Echoes of such a tradition for James are seen in other texts: an early eighth-century document by Aldhelm of Malmesbury, and an eighth-century addition to a text from the earlier Archbishop Isidore of Seville. These were brief attributions.

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Figure 10.2  Santiago (St James) as pilgrim: sculpted figure from S. Marta de Tera, Zemer, 1129.

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Enthusiasm for James’ identification with Spain developed after the ninthcentury claim, detailed below, for his reburial in Galicia. In subsequent centuries the accounts of his preaching activities in Spain saw substantial (if diverse) development as well as geographical distribution, tracking a journey away from the Mediterranean to Galicia in the north-west and consecrating bishops there. Compostela might appropriate him in death, but other communities could claim him in life. In the expanded story he converted a small number of local people in the east at Zaragoza, and while praying with them the Virgin Mary visited (in person) from Jerusalem, standing between angels on a marble pillar which remains in today’s basilica on the site of a church built by James on Mary’s instruction. James then returned to his preaching in Judea. The Golden Legend of the thirteenth century did not pick up the Zaragoza story; here James first preached in Judea and Samaria, then went to Spain to sow the word of God. But when he saw that his labours in Spain were unavailing, and that he had been able to garner only nine disciples there, he left two disciples to preach, and returned to Judea with the other seven. John Beleth, however, says that he made only one conversion in Spain.11

Whatever the level of belief in a Spanish missionary visit by the apostle James, the biblical narrative placed his death firmly back in Jerusalem. The tradition that James’ body was brought back to Spain from Jerusalem emerged at a crucial time in the history of Iberian Christianity, and after most of the peninsula had come under Muslim rule in the eighth century. Christian kingdoms were limited to the north, from where began the long series of territorial battles that would come to be linked as the Reconquista. Enthusiasm for the cult of James was promoted by ninth-century Christian rulers of Asturias, on the north coast of Spain, which lay outside the area of Muslim control. A religious as well as political incentive for engaging with the Muslim world was assisted by the ‘discovery’ of the apostle’s burial, though necessarily far from the Mediterranean coast which was now under Muslim rule. Lists and details of saints and martyrs were a common literary form in early medieval Europe, with much copying, editing and revision. The first sources to state that the apostle James’ body was brought to Spain from Jerusalem were not from Spain itself, but in the Martyrology of French monk Usuard (c.865). Usuard himself had visited Cordoba in southern Spain and brought back bones of recent

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martyrs, so may have heard there a story of the reported discovery of James’ burial, at the other end of Iberia. His most sacred bones being conveyed from Jerusalem to Spain, and buried in their furthest territory, they developed the most honoured respect of those peoples.12

Another possible source is a martyrology attributed to Ado from Vienne in southern France, though there are doubts about the date of a reference to James. The tradition reported by Usuard was mentioned in the Martyrology of Swiss monk Notker of Saint Gall in the late ninth century, when he reported the reburial of Saint James in Spain. The supposed body was ‘discovered’ in the Christian-controlled north. It seems there was indeed an early Christian burial site in Compostela, to which the presence of James could be added. There may have been a cult in the area dedicated to James before the claim for an actual burial was made. The announcement that Saint Iago (James, Iakobos) was buried in Compostela, in Christian-ruled Iberia, was a stimulus for the political authority of Alfonso II (c.760–842), king of Asturias from 791. Alfonso sought and received assistance from Charlemagne and the claim for an apostolic burial in Spain was influential in France, where it had first been reported. Theodemir, the local bishop of Iria in Galicia from 818, is credited with announcing the discovery of James’ body in Compostela at some stage during Alfonso’s reign, and would himself be buried in the church built to honour James. As the story later developed, angels had guided a hermit to the site with music and an unnatural light; the uncovered grave revealed the saint with no bodily decay. Later development of the story detailed the seven-day journey that brought the body from Jerusalem to the Spanish coast, and miraculous events that followed. Alfonso III, whose rule of Asturias and Galicia began in 866, built up the cult of Santiago around the cult in Compostela, asserting in public documents that the saint had helped make him a great king. The political value of James to Spain showed in narratives of his miraculous reappearance in time of need. In the late twelfth century James was proclaimed as patron saint for Spain by the king of Galicia, about the same time that a legend emerged that he had appeared from the clouds on a white horse to inspire and lead the troops and secure victory for the king of Asturias in a battle at Clavijo in 844 against the Emir of Cordoba, with the death of 70,000 enemy soldiers. He was now

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Santiago Matamoros, Saint James the Moor-slayer. As the James cult grew, so did taxes levied in his name, the Voto de Santiago. James would become a powerful symbol for Spanish conquistadores in the Americas, being similarly sighted in a number of military actions against the indigenous peoples. He was now Santiago Mataindios: Saint James the Indianslayer. However, his first reported sighting, helping Cortes in Mexico in 1519, was of some ambiguity: Gomara says that previous to the arrival of the main body of the cavalry under Cortes, Francisco de Morla appeared in the field upon a grey dappled horse, and that it was one of the holy apostles, St. Peter or St. Jago, disguised under his person […] But although I, unworthy sinner that I am, was unfit to behold either of these holy apostles, upwards of four hundred of us were present, let their testimony be taken […] until I read the chronicle of Gonmara I never heard of it; nor was it ever mentioned amongst the conquerors who were then present.13

Figure 10.3  St James as the slayer of Moors: statue of Santiago Matamoros in the cathedral of Burgos.

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Santiago appeared in subsequent battles, with his name used as a battle cry. The gentle appointed preacher of the Christian message was now an activist in the violence that affected the Americas. While over 50 places in Spain carry the name of Santiago, almost 600 in the Americas carry his name. Santiago was no less significant to the prosperity of the region of Compostela as it became the destination of Europe’s greatest medieval pilgrimage. Pilgrims were already recorded by the ninth century, overtaking the cult in Galicia of Martin of Tours, and the pilgrimage to Compostela built up numbers by the eleventh century, drawing Christians from well beyond the region. In fact its popularity remained strong through the period of the Crusades, when the support of Saint James was considered invaluable. The twelfth-century Liber Sancti Jacobi was a pioneering guidebook for travellers. This book gave the full expansion of the stories that had developed around Santiago in life and death. This religious and political impact in the period of the Crusades would continue in later centuries. In a papal bull Omnipotens Deus delivered by Leo XIII in November 1884, the Roman Catholic Church asserted the recognition of Compostela as the burial place of Saint James, and of the relics rediscovered in 1879. Today around 200,000 pilgrims arrive each year, providing major economic stimulus to the region. Santiago/Saint James has maintained his miraculous contribution to Spain. A survey of the sources by a specialist historian observes on the story of Saint James: A legend which may possibly be based on falsehood, but which has obtained more real power thereby than could ever have been provided by truth. Proof that St James is not buried in Spain would not deter a single pilgrim […] The quest for the origins of the Spanish James-tradition leads along paths full of confusion and uncertainty.14

SAINT THOMAS IN INDIA

Christianity has a long history in India, as a minority religion, though in India ‘minority’ still means a large number (over 25 million). Its self-confidence has been strengthened by a persistent belief that Indian Christianity was founded as the result of local missionary work by one of Jesus’ twelve apostles, Thomas. Members of one of the largest Christian communities, in Kerala on the west coast,

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are commonly called the Saint Thomas Christians, while a tomb acclaimed by the sixteenth-century Portuguese voyagers as that of Saint Thomas lies on the east coast, and Indian records from Christian India only date from the same period. Maritime trade from the ancient Mediterranean world brought new trading settlements to the west and east coasts of India, and these included people of both Jewish and Christian faith, presumably intermarrying with local Indians. There is evidence for a Christian presence by at least the fourth century, with communities well attested by the sixth century. They would know the tradition of the Eastern (Syriac) Church that the apostle Thomas had travelled overland to north-west India and in time this story was adopted by the coastal communities as the origin of their own Indian Christianity. In the developed story, Thomas came to India, first to the north then to the west coast, where he preached and formed the Christian congregation which continues until today. He was then martyred on the east coast. His remains were said to have been returned westwards and buried in northern Mesopotamia, though relics of Thomas are also claimed by Ortona in the Abruzzo region of Italy after being removed from Chios in the Aegean in the mid-thirteenth century. No preaching activities of Thomas (also called Didymus) are recorded in the New Testament canon, and this allowed a number of later claims to be made for his movements. There is also a range of apocryphal literature in his name. In some early traditions Thomas’ preaching is said to have taken place in Parthia (the empire which covered the area of Iran), as recorded by the fourthcentury Christian historian and bishop Eusebius. The same attribution was given by Origen, Rufinus and other early writers. The Gospel of Thomas, a Gnostic text from the early second century, makes no reference to exotic travels. (It may be noted that European travellers would later advance arguments that a visit by Saint Thomas to the Americas was reflected in local traditions.) The document titled Acts of Thomas did provide the claim for Thomas in what is termed ‘India’ (though the definition of that term has varied greatly in different contexts). Thought to have been composed in Syriac, this document probably originated around 220–230 ce in Edessa in northern Mesopotamia (eastern ancient Syria, modern Turkey) where there was a tradition that Thomas was buried. The text uses the name of Gundaphorus, an actual first-century ruler of the Indo-Parthian kingdom which included parts of today’s Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and the far north-west of India (but which had ended by the time the Acts of Thomas was written).

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At that season all we the apostles were at Jerusalem […] and we divided the regions of the world, that every one of us should go unto the region that fell to him and unto the nation whereunto the Lord sent him. According to the lot, therefore, India fell unto Judas Thomas, which is also the twin: but he would not go, saying that by reason of the weakness of the flesh he could not travel, and ‘I am an Hebrew man; how can I go amongst the Indians and preach the truth?’ And as he thus reasoned and spake, the Saviour appeared unto him by night and saith to him: Fear not, Thomas, go thou unto India and preach the word there, for my grace is with thee.15

Jesus hears that ‘Abbanes, a merchant of Gundaphorus, king of the Indians’ is in Jerusalem to acquire a carpenter for his ruler; Jesus introduces himself as son of a carpenter and sells Thomas as a slave who is thus transported to India. Thomas uses the construction funds given him by the king as alms for the poor while he is preaching and eventually he converts and baptises the king, then leaves the realm of Gundaphorus to preach elsewhere in India. The narrative covers Thomas’ preaching, miracles and eventual martyrdom at the hands of the monarch Misdaeus, after which his bones are removed to Mesopotamia and Misdaeus repents and embraces Christianity. And he went and opened the sepulchre, but found not the apostle there, for one of the brethren had stolen him away and taken him unto Mesopotamia; but from that place where the bones of the apostle had lain Misdaeus took dust and put it about his son’s neck, saying: I believe on thee, Jesu Christ, now that he hath left me which troubleth men and opposeth them lest they should see thee. And when he had hung it upon his son, the lad became whole. Misdaeus the king therefore was also gathered among the brethren […] and he was gathered with the multitude of them that had believed in Christ, glorifying the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost.16

Although the book was not included in the canonical list of gospels as defined in the third century, it was widely enough known for its story of Indian (or Indo-Parthian) links to have entered the broader traditions. The Syriac edition was translated into Greek and, with adaptations, also into Latin, Ethiopic, Armenian, Coptic and other languages. By extending Thomas’ missionary field overland further east into or beyond the Parthian domain to modern Pakistan, it served to emphasise the history and role of the Syriac Church of Christianity centred on Edessa. The tradition that the apostle Thomas had preached beyond Parthia into India remained strong in the Syriac community in Edessa; this gave them a claim

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to historical outreach for which there is no direct evidence in north-west India of the period. Catholic and Eastern Church writers from the fifth century onwards accepted the narrative that Thomas had preached as far as India and had been martyred there. To some, like Gregory of Tours, the body was returned to Edessa; to others it remained buried in India. The story was, however, later adopted by coastal Christian groups. A Christian community that claims links to Thomas lies well beyond the north-west India of the Acts of Thomas, in the Malabar region in Kerala on the west coast of the subcontinent. Known as the Syrian Malabar Nasranis (or Mar Thoma Nazranis), they form the largest Christian community in India. The origin of their Christianity is considered by historians as most likely from coastal contacts of trade from Arabia or the Persian Gulf. But, at some stage, they knew of the Edessa tradition of Saint Thomas, and Thomas’ supposed mission work was extended southwards of the earlier tradition to the Malabar coast. The sixteenth-century Portuguese who travelled to India with the goal of replacing Muslim dominance of the region’s trade hoped to find Christian communities with whom to ally; stories of the Christian kingdom of ‘Prester John’ had located him in different areas of Africa and Asia. They endorsed the idea of the

Figure 10.4  The tomb of St Thomas in Mylapore, Chennai.

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Malabar community as heirs of Thomas’ mission work. The Portuguese adopted the view that Mylapore, on the east coast of India, was the place of Thomas’ burial. Thirteenth-century overland visitors from Europe had reported Christian worshippers in Mylapore. A tomb in Mylapore was identified by the Portuguese as the tomb of Thomas. Diego Fernandez in 1543 reported that 20 years earlier he had visited the tomb thus identified, opened it and found bones and a lance head, which are now in the San Thome Basilica built on the site. Given the rival claims for Thomas’ bones in Ortona, the Catholic Church has been non-committal on his identification. But this location of Mylapore has been absorbed into some of the Thomas Christian tradition. Other Indian Christian traditions retain Thomas as founder of Indian Christians but bring him by sea (from Arabia) rather than the overland journey of Acts of Thomas, and have him martyred by religious rivals rather than by an offended king. In a letter from the community in 1721, the local bishop told of Thomas brought by an angel from Edessa to India, dying finally at Mylapore, with his body returned by an angel to Edessa. The Margam Kali song from the 1730s has Thomas preaching in Malacca (Indonesia) and China as well as India, where he reached until his death at the hand of Brahman priests, a story which includes elements of the Acts. Key churches are associated with Thomas’ foundation, though these differed between accounts. Individual stories of Thomas are associated locally with individual sites. A possibly eighteenth- or nineteenth-century song, the Thomma Parvam, brought Thomas from Arabia to near Cochin, then to Quilon and elsewhere, and has echoes of Acts relocated south. Pope Benedict XVI, in an audience in 2006, mentioned the older tradition of Thomas in north-west India, adding ‘from where Christianity also reached South India’. Following protests from Indian Christians the text was amended: Lastly, let us remember that an ancient tradition claims that Thomas first evangelized Syria and Persia (mentioned by Origen, according to Eusebius of Caesarea, Ecclesiastical History 3,1) then went on to Western India (cf. Acts of Thomas 1–2 and 17ff.), from where also he [sic] finally reached Southern India. Let us end our reflection in this missionary perspective, expressing the hope that Thomas’ example will never fail to strengthen our faith in Jesus Christ, Our Lord and Our God.17

It seems likely that Christian communities developed in different parts of India as a result of contact with coastal traders and inland travellers, those of Kerala,

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Mylapore and north-west India being separate foundations, and indeed there were also Jewish communities around the Indian coast. In time these Christian communities learnt of the traditions of Saint Thomas in the literature of the Syriac Church and the Catholic Church, and new syntheses developed to merge in different ways time, place and event. The very different locations of different sources for Thomas’ activity have not provided conflict as much as an opportunity for a new history. Thomas Christians of the west coast have generally come to believe that Thomas’ death and tomb were indeed in Mylapore on the east coast. Far less influential and persistent is the early tradition that Bartholomew, also one of the original twelve apostles, had also undertaken mission work in India, as reported in fourth-century writings by Eusebius and Jerome. Such a belief was not adopted by the Syriac Church or by the Christian communities in India itself. Bartholomew was also the subject of traditions that he preached in Armenia, Ethiopia and Parthia. Nevertheless, by the thirteenth century The Golden Legend was able to record a detailed account of his work in India. Finally, narratives have developed of Jesus in India. There is the Ahmadiyya tradition, recorded in the eighteenth century, that Jesus himself survived his crucifixion and went to Kashmir (possibly with his mother Mary and with Thomas), where under the name of Yuz Azaf he died of natural causes at a great age. Suggestions have developed in other parts of the world for Jesus’ own travels (either before his active preaching, or after surviving his crucifixion, or after resurrection), but most of these have emerged from individual authors in the last two centuries, and some very recently.

SAINT JOSEPH OF ARIMATHEA IN BRITAIN

One of the best-loved songs in Britain sets to music the verse of William Blake: And did those feet in ancient time Walk upon England’s mountains green: And was the holy Lamb of God, On England’s pleasant pastures seen! And did the Countenance Divine, Shine forth upon our clouded hills? And was Jerusalem builded here, Among these dark Satanic Mills?18

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This verse from 1804 reflected the later medieval legend that Jesus had visited Britain in the company of Joseph of Arimathea before the period of his preaching in Judea. Blake was also attracted to the ideas that would develop as British Israelism (see Chapter 9). Such a story was the most extreme adaptation of another narrative: that Joseph of Arimathea, after Jesus’ death, was sent by the apostle Philip (then in Gaul) to bring Christianity to Britain, where he founded its first church building in Glastonbury. As a legend that developed in late medieval times, it provides a well-documented example of how a story was created of an apostolic mission from Judea. But rather than a single emerging narrative, there was a complex interweaving of different overlapping themes in and beyond the British Isles, as Joseph of Arimathea and Glastonbury were linked to stories of a magic or sacred vessel (the Grail), to King Arthur and knights associated with the Arthurian legend. There was a panoply of syncretic stories, religious and secular, which selected and mingled diverse strands. Joseph of Arimathea is mentioned in the New Testament gospels as the man who acquired Jesus’ body after his crucifixion and donated his own tomb for Jesus’ burial. The fourth-century Gospel of Nicodemus (incorporating the Acts of Pilate)

Figure 10.5  Joseph of Arimathea Preaching to the Inhabitants of Britain, by William Blake, 1796.

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details his imprisonment, but with no exotic journeys. Joseph recurs in other apocryphal literature, but his introduction into British beliefs is relatively late. His supposed travels are not mentioned in The Golden Legend. The Christian Church was present in Britain by the third century, though given the spread of Christianity within the Roman Empire there would have been individual earlier Christian believers. A later tradition attributed the origins of British Christianity to a mission sent by Pope Eleutherius (in office 174–189) at the request of a ‘King Lucius’, which may be a transferral (or copyist’s error) of a Christian King Lucius of Edessa, which was also known as Britium. Celtic-influenced Christianity was supplemented by the mission of Augustine to Anglo-Saxon England in 596. A chronicle of French history written in the ninth century by a bishop of Lisieux in France, Freculphus (Freculf), at least in the redacted version that survived, included the claim that Saint Philip and Saint James had evangelised in Gaul, and had sent 12 of their disciples on to Britain. By the seventh century there was a monastic foundation at Glastonbury Abbey in south-west England, which continued after Saxon conquest of the area. Its importance grew with the appointment of (later Saint) Dunstan as Abbot in 940, and his subsequent establishment there of Benedictine monasticism. Its history was surveyed by the twelfth-century writer William of Malmesbury, who wrote books on English kings, on Dunstan, and around 1130 a book on Glastonbury itself. Here William (following Bede) reported British Christian origins under Pope Eleutherius and cautiously noted that there existed a story of earlier apostolic origins. In none of his own legitimate texts does he mention Joseph of Arimathea. The monks of Glastonbury seem to have used William’s text to emphasise their institution’s importance but were not satisfied with the historian’s caution, so after his death they amended his text and gave their foundation a new origin. In this, Saint Philip in Gaul sent Joseph of Arimathea to Britain (with a date identified as 63) and built a church. The revised text read: Now St Philip, as Freculfus declares in the fourth chapter of his second book, came to the country of the Franks, and by his gracious preaching turned many to the faith and baptized them. Then desiring that the word of Christ should be yet further spread abroad, he chose twelve of his disciples and sent them to Britain to proclaim the word of life and preach the Incarnation of Jesus Christ […] and over them he appointed, it is said, his dearest friend, Joseph of Arimathea who had buried the Lord. They arrived in Britain in the sixty-third year from the Incarnation of the

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Lord […] These saints were admonished by the archangel Gabriel to build a church in honour of the Blessed Virgin. They made it of twisted wattles, in the thirty-first year after the Lord’s Passion […] The church of Glastonbury did none other men’s hands make, but actual disciples of Christ built it […] for if the Apostle Philip preached to the Gauls, as Freculfus says in the fourth chapter of his second book, it may be believed that he cast the seeds of his doctrine across the sea as well.19

Meanwhile another strand of British legendary history was developed in the writing of Geoffrey of Monmouth. His history of British kings, Historia Regum Britanniae, dates from the 1130s. It brings into a long and imaginative sequence the rule of King Arthur, who defeats invading Saxons and conquers much of north-west Europe, and in the end is mortally wounded, being carried ‘to the isle of Avalon’ in the year 542. But there was no mention of Joseph of Arimathea; King Lucius is credited with bringing Christianity to Britain: As he had made so good a beginning, he was willing to make a better end: for which purpose he sent letters to Pope Eleutherius, desiring him to be instructed by him in the Christian religion. For the miracles which Christ’s disciples performed in several nations, wrought a conviction in his mind; so that being inflamed with an ardent love of the true faith, he obtained the accomplishment of his pious request.20

The importance of tying Glastonbury to broader popular traditions was emphasised after the monastic buildings were destroyed by fire in 1184, and though rebuilding began, its funding was affected by the death of Henry II in 1189. Donations from pilgrims and others were insufficient to maintain the work. This problem was reversed when the monks announced in 1191 that they had discovered the bodies of King Arthur and his queen, Guinevere, within the abbey grounds. In case of doubt, they were accompanied by a cross with the inscription: ‘Hic jacet sepultus inclitus rex Arthurus in insula Avalonia’ (Here lies buried the famous King Arthur on the Isle of Avalon). Visitors and their donations grew and the reconstruction was completed. The contemporary report by Gerald of Wales affirmed the identity of Avalon with Glastonbury. Joseph was the later reintroduced into the narrative with the monks’ editorial additions to William of Malmesbury’s history. Added later to the story was his connection to a Holy Grail, which itself had become a feature of Arthurian legends. The Grail was a vessel with special properties: pagan Celtic mythology had such a vessel. In the Christian literary use of the Grail, it became a vessel than had caught the blood of Christ, and in the

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developed story, a dish or cup that had been used at the Last Supper which Jesus held with his disciples, acquired by Joseph of Arimathea, and used by Joseph to hold Jesus’ blood when he came to Britain and brought it with him. In French, the San Gréal (or Holy Grail) was also the Sang Réal (Royal Blood). The quest to find or see the Holy Grail was a theme in much Arthurian storytelling. The Grail had its most influential literary presentation in Perceval, le Conte del Graal, of French poet Chrétien de Troyes, writing in the late twelfth century, which was completed by later authors. This is the first written telling of the Grail, a concept reflecting both western European and eastern Christian ideas of a vessel with magic power or sacred meaning. Joseph of Arimathea was introduced in the version developed by the later authors, and it is Joseph’s relatives who take away the Grail. Another slightly later French poet, Robert de Boron expanded this story to involve Joseph. In his Roman de l’estoire dou Graal (also known as Joseph d’Arimathe), the Grail takes on its role as the vessel from the Last Supper with which Joseph of Arimathea collects Jesus’ blood and which, following his imprisonment, he takes away from Jerusalem. But here it is Joseph’s brother-in-law, Bron, who carries it far away to Britain, not Joseph himself; and it is Bron’s descendants who stay in Britain. Medieval historian Daniel Scavone has traced the Christian Grail narrative and its connection to Joseph to legends of a burial shroud (rather than vessel) in Byzantine Constantinople. In the writing of Cistercian monk Helinand of Froidmont in the early thirteenth century: At this time in Britain, there was shown to a hermit, through the help of an angel, a miraculous vision of Joseph the decurion who took the Lord’s body from the cross, and concerning the vessel in which the Lord ate from with his disciples […] The Grail […] is a wide and deep saucer.21

And the Estoire del Saint Graal, from 1215–30, brought Joseph and his son, also Joseph, to Britain to establish Christianity. By contrast, a French poem from about 1350, probably following a French original story, has Joseph departing Jerusalem after 42 years’ imprisonment with the sacred dish continuing Jesus’ blood and going to the King of Sarras, not Britain. In later mythology of Glastonbury, Joseph’s association with the Grail grew. The monks suggested that not only was Joseph buried in Glastonbury, but with him were two vials containing the blood and water taken from his side at Jesus’

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crucifixion. In 1345 John Blome gained royal permission to excavate in the monastery precinct to seek ‘the venerable body of the noble Decurion Joseph of Arimathea, which rests in Christ buried within the monastery of Glastonbury’. When John of Glastonbury wrote his history of the abbey around 1400 he was certain Joseph lay buried at Glastonbury, but the exact location remained unknown (to him the Grail was a reliquary, not a vessel from the Last Supper). Even more ambitious, Robert of Avesbury’s Historiae Edwardi III suggested Arthur was a descendant of Joseph of Arimathea (while Malory would make Joseph the ancestor of Lancelot and Galahad). The apostolic history of Glastonbury would also be invoked in ecclesiastical conflicts in the English Church. By the sixteenth century a ‘Glastonbury Thorn’ growing nearby on Wearyall Hill was believed to have been planted by Joseph himself, growing where he planted his staff – in some versions, sprouting from fragments of the True Cross – but it fell foul of the Puritan Revolution. The story of Joseph would be retold (or expanded) by writers through to much later times. Reformation critics would cast doubt on it, stimulating defenders. To others in Protestant England, there was advantage in showing that Christianity had been brought from Judea to England directly in the apostolic age, rather than by delegates of Rome. New claims emerged. Richard Broughton, in his Ecclesiastical History of Great Britain (1633), had chapters he summarised as follows: Of the coming of S. Joseph of Arimathia, who buryed Christ, into this our Britaine; And how it is made doubtfull, or denyed by many writers, but without either reason or Authoritie […] Wherein is proved by all kinds of testimonies, and authorities, that for certaine, S. Joseph of Arimathia, with divers other holy Associates, came into, preached, lyved, dyed, and was buryed in Britayne, at the place now called Glastenbury in Summersetshire.22

The seventeenth-century antiquarian Sir William Dugdale was happy to begin his Monasticon Anglicanum with the tradition: The Monastery of Glastonbury in Somersetshire. In the 31st year after our Saviour’s Passion, twelve Disciples of St. Philip the Apostle, among whom Joseph of Arimathea was one, came to this place, and preacht the Christian Religion to King Arviragus. They obtained of that King the Ground where the Monastery afterwards stood, and twelve Hides of Land, and built there the first Church of the Kingdom,

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in a poor and homely manner. They lived here in a kind of hermetical life, and converted many Pagans to the Faith of Christ […] In this Church did rest and lie buried the twelve Disciples of the Apostle Philip, above mentioned, whose chief was Joseph of Arimathea, with his son Josephus.23

It would be left to nineteenth-century scholarship to challenge the story by tracing its origins. Meanwhile the tradition has continued to have appeal. And the extension – that Jesus himself accompanied his uncle Joseph of Arimathea before his preaching – has not vanished. A British documentary film by Ted Harrison and Scottish clergyman Gordon Strachan in 2009 called And did those feet? claimed that: Dr Strachan believes it is ‘plausible’ Jesus came to England for his studies, as it was the forefront of learning 2,000 years ago. ‘Coming this far wasn’t in fact that far in the olden days,’ Dr Strachan told BBC Radio 4’s The World at One. ‘The Romans came here at the same time and they found it quite easy.’ Dr Strachan added that Jesus had ‘plenty of time’ to do the journey, as little was known about his life before the age of 30.24

FURTHER JOURNEYS FROM THE APOSTOLIC AGE

The examples of Peter, Santiago (James the Greater), Thomas Didymus and Joseph of Arimathea show a range across time and place of traditions which attribute local Christian origins to the wide movements of early preachers in the decades after Jesus’ death. We have mentioned others; the story that Bartholomew went to India (and also Armenia), or that Philip went to France. The latter may be a mistranscription from a document that placed his preaching in Gallia (Gaul) rather than Galatia in Turkey (visited by Paul in his second journey). For others there are competing claims. Mark, disciple and travel companion of Peter (whose name would later be attached to one of the canonical gospels) is seen by the Egyptian Coptic Church as the founder of Egyptian Christianity and the first Bishop of Alexandria, being martyred there, although he is also associated with Peter in Rome. Venice laid claim to his bones. One account saw them as stolen from Alexandria in the ninth century, though in the thirteenth-century Golden Legend his bones had been removed to Venice in the fifth century and he undertook posthumous miracles

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there. Apostle Simon (Zealotes) was associated with Egypt as well as Persia. Apostle Matthew was associated with both Persia and ‘Ethiopia’, a term which the ancient world typically applied to Africa beyond Egypt. In western Europe there emerged a medieval story that Mary Magdalene, in the company of Lazarus and Martha, had sailed to Marseille to preach Christianity in France and then died there. The sources for this story lie with eleventh-century monks in Vézelay, who claimed her bones were buried there and developed a narrative to explain their presence, though a conflict developed between them and the monastery of Saint Maximin, which also claimed to possess her body. Certainly a truthful history of many things has her depart with St. Lazarus, her brother and St. Martha, her sister, during the persecution of the people by the Jews, just as the rest of the apostles […] After she left the seaport, she came to the city of Marseille, where she was strengthened in the company of the remaining saints, with those who were welcome company, as it is recorded by the inhabitants of that place in the writings of those ancients and confirmed up to the present by the narration of the entire community. She came to Marseille to spread the word of God to the people.25

The slightly later compilation of The Golden Legend expands on this approach with a lengthy and detailed account of their activities in France. The Saint Maximinus, Mary Magdalene, Lazarus, Martha, Martilla and Saint Cedonius […] were thrown by the infidels into a ship without a rudder and launched into the deep, in the hope that in this way they would all be drowned at once. But the ship was guided by the power of God, and made port in good estate in Marseilles. And when Mary Magdalene saw the pagans going into the temple to offer sacrifice to their gods, she arose with calm mine and prudent tongue, and began to draw them away from the worship of idols and to preach Christ to them.26

The text continues with sending a sceptical local ruler off to Rome to meet Saint Peter. Then the citizens of Marseilles tore down all the temples of the idols, and built Christian churches in their stead; and by common consent they chose Lazarus to be bishop of Marseille. Then Mary Magdalen and her followers went on to Aix, where by many miracles they converted the people to the faith of Christ, and Saint Maximinus was elected bishop.27

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Finally, the travels of the apostle Andrew, brother of Peter, were the subject of a number of rival traditions which came to be influenced by church politics, notably the creation of a narrative that saw him preaching and appointing the first bishop in Byzantium (the future Constantinople) as the rivalry grew between different centres of the Christian Church. In the fourth century Eusebius identified the mission field assigned to Andrew as Scythia: the region north of the Black Sea and the Caspian. Andrew has also been linked to Romania, Cyprus and Malta. He was more persistently associated with the Greek Peloponnese, with a tradition that he was martyred in Patras. This reflects the narrative of the apocryphal Acts of Andrew which dates from the second (or possibly early third) century. We have no complete manuscript of this text, but a summary by sixth-century Bishop Gregory of Tours gave a brief mention to his transit through the future capital of the eastern Roman Empire: Embarking on a ship he sailed into the Hellespont, on the way to Byzantium. There was a great storm. Andrew prayed and there was calm. They reached Byzantium. Thence proceeding through Thrace.28

The author of The Golden Legend strived to accommodate different traditions, but not that of Byzantium, and drew on another apocryphal work, the Acts of Andrew and Matthew among the Cannibals. In this, Andrew goes first to Scythia, then to Ethiopia, where fellow apostle Matthew has been blinded and imprisoned; he rescues Matthew but is captured, then freed and departs, this time for Greece. His blood flowed freely; yet he prayed to God unceasingly for his tormentors, with the result that in the end he converted them. And it was after this that he set out for Greece. This, at any rate, is the common story; but I for one find it very hard to believe, for the fact of the deliverance and cure of Matthew by Andrew would imply – and this is very unlikely – that the great evangelist and apostle was unable to obtain for himself what his brother secured for him so easily.29

He continues to Nicaea in north-west Anatolia (Turkey) before settling in Achaea (the Greek Peloponnese) where he ‘filled the whole region with churches’, and was martyred there. The Golden Legend reflected the centrality of Rome. However, Andrew’s afterlife was influenced by the religious and political changes that swept the Roman Empire

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Distant links: apostolic travellers

and the Church. The Church in Rome had Saint Peter; in time, the Eastern Church centred on Constantinople needed his brother, Saint Andrew. Initially the church fathers said nothing of Andrew preaching in Byzantium, beyond the brief transit mentioned in Acts of Andrew; even by the early fifth century there was no suggestion that Andrew had been associated with the city. Byzantium had become capital of the Empire in 330, as Emperor Constantine moved his administration from Rome. His Christian mother Helena – the Augusta Imperatrix – brought from Palestine a number of relics which reinforced the religious as well as political authority of the city. Jerome recorded that Constantine II (337–361) had the bones of Andrew moved from Patras to a new resting place of the Church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople (though claims for bones and relics of Andrew are even more widely spread than tradition of his mission journeys, including locations in Greece, Italy, Poland and Scotland). Church authority in Rome continued to emphasise the city’s supremacy on the basis of its apostolic foundation (by Peter). The Church in Egypt could claim some similar authority based on Mark. The Eastern churches had variable attitudes to the supremacy of Rome, and gradually a narrative developed that credited Peter’s brother Andrew with a mission to preach in Byzantium, create a church community there and appoint its first bishop, named Stachys. It requires detailed examination of the early texts to establish the origins of the story. Until the beginning of the seventh century, the account of the apostolic origin of Byzantium […] was not known either in Rome or in Constantinople. All of these considerations point to the end of the sixth and the beginning of the seventh centuries as the possible terminus a quo for the definitive formation of the legendary Andrew tradition concerning Byzantium. The new controversy as to the title of the oecumenical patriarch, which aroused ecclesiastics in Rome and Constantinople, might have suggested to some anonymous zealot in Constantinople the idea of enhancing the prestige of the see of the residential city by promoting it to an apostolic foundation. In this way the only great prerogative held by Rome over Constantinople would be levelled, and the two cities would be equal in every respect. Actually, insofar as can be determined, the first documents attributing an apostolic character to the see of Constantinople also date from the beginning of the seventh century.30

The seventh-century story was presented in fuller version in a text called the Martyrium sancti Apostoli Andreae, which named Stachys as Andrew’s newly

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appointed bishop. The story spread only slowly and it took until the tenth or eleventh century before it was widely accepted through the Eastern Church, as the schism between the Roman and Eastern Churches developed. In this survey of selected apostolic traditions we can see variations in time and significance of the different individuals and contexts. There is, however, a broadly common pattern. An early writer of church history may refer to a story which was omitted from the New Testament canon and derived from one of the apocryphal books which were to be considered fictional (or even heretical). A theologically or politically desirable link could be considered a possibility, then a probability, and a key source (not necessarily local) would cite it as a fact. This story would be elaborated, would feed into oral tradition and thence back into further writings. The story could expand in detail and in theological impact until a full narrative became commonplace. A detailed descriptive account might be found in a work such as The Golden Legend, which would work its way back further into multiple oral traditions. The journeys of apostles are journeys through the local history of late antiquity and medieval worlds and tell us much about faith, church and state politics. This and previous chapters have examined examples of histories imagined, created, believed about the ancient Middle East. These have been contrasted, by implication, with ideas, models and understanding that have emerged through scholarly and scientific disciplines. The final chapter will address briefly the nature of those approaches.

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CHAPTER 11

CHANGING IMAGES: HISTORY AND PREHISTORY IN EGYPT AND THE ANCIENT NEAR EAST

The previous chapters have surveyed ideas of the past which conflict with the scholarly models: models that emerged from the research, thinking and writing of qualified professional archaeologists, historians and specialists in ancient literatures and languages. This presentation reflects the author’s partiality and background, both in professional archaeology and as a publisher of world history. But scholarly discourse itself reflects subjectivities and limitations, as it has developed (and in some cases failed to develop) and continues to change. Traditionalists seek to distinguish and disengage ideology from ‘objectivity’ in scholarly research, drawing attention to the dangers created by ideas which exist to serve some purpose different from independent truth. Post-modern critiques argue that such an approach is naive: that all research operates within an ideological framework. But this is not just a post-modernist argument credited to (or blamed on) modern continental European humanists. It was Albert Einstein in 1926 who said to Werner Heisenberg: ‘It is the theory which decides what can be observed’. In the fuller context of Heisenberg’s recollections (as he paraphrased): ‘Oh yes’, he said, ‘I may have used it, but it is complete nonsense!’ Einstein explained to me that it was really the other way round. He said ‘Whether you can observe a thing or not depends on the theory which you use. It is the theory which decides what can be observed’. His argument was like this: ‘Observation means that we

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construct some connection between a phenomenon and our realization of the phenomenon’ […] So he insisted that it was the theory which decides what can be observed. This remark of Einstein was very important for me.1

Historians have available numerous written sources from which they can select those that appear to them relevant to the investigations they are making and the arguments they are advancing. In archaeology, a traditional approach to reporting on field studies, excavation or description of materials has been to separate data from interpretation. A traditional excavation report presents the geographical context of the site, the excavation strategy, plans and stratigraphy, with detailed descriptions of the structures, artefacts, economic and other materials found. The best efforts at explanation follow: the excavators’ interpretation and construal of the site and how it fits into the broader cultural setting as currently understood. The expectation is that in 50 years’ time the description of the artefacts, structures and (usually) the stratigraphic contexts will remain useful, but the interpretations will be far less permanent as models and questions change and other comparable data emerges. The challenge is that data rarely exists independent of the researcher’s interests; what is reported is not data (given) but capta (taken). In excavations of Middle Eastern sites in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was the culture of the ancient elites which attracted the excavators’ attention and it was their structures and material remains that were retrieved, studied and described (not least to satisfy the needs of museums that funded the research). Only much later would excavators take from a site evidence of other social classes and human activities, or undertake regional survey to provide information of groups other than the elites. It is not uncommon for a modern field investigation at a previously excavated Middle Eastern site to begin by re-excavating the areas that had previously been dug, or by excavating the ‘spoil heap’ where the early excavators had dumped what did not interest them: say, the pottery vessels or masonry materials or the animal bones of food waste. Multidisciplinary scientific methodology is the norm in a complex modern survey or excavation. This uses the answers offered (and the questions raised) by specialists from different disciplines in physical and biological sciences, from soil scientists to microbiologists. The last 50 years have seen a massive growth of economic and environmental archaeology, typically applied to the prehistory of the Middle East more frequently and rigorously than to historical sites of the region. Data now includes animal bones and microfauna, shellfish fragments,

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seeds, food deposits on pottery and charcoal. Sieving and flotation of deposits as they are excavated generates samples for analysis, description and problem solving. Microscopic analysis of food waste, DNA testing on human bones, microbotanical and physical studies of the contents of soils, all present capta that was not data to excavators of one or two generations back. The ‘data’ emerges from the questions we ask, alongside the methods we can use. In another 50 years’ time current excavations will seem limited and some will seem slapdash. This is a different matter from the presence of errors. All researchers and writers can make mistakes – readers are sure to find them within this book. Documents may be mistranscribed, descriptions and contexts misunderstood, technical analyses subject to error, a familiar fact forgotten or misremembered. The pragmatic reality of human error in matters of details does not undermine a commitment to scientific method, for method can only be applied by individual humans. The subjectivity of interpretation, of course, goes well beyond the uses of data. While post-modernist critiques have had different impacts on contemporary scholarship, a major impact in archaeology lies in approaches which have been (sometimes inappropriately) lumped together under the term post-processualism. Such a term implies an approach to how human societies operated in the past and the breadth of issues we engage with to understand those societies. But the literature has also included perceptions of the many subjectivities that underlie scholarly enquiry, both in archaeology and the broader range of disciplines that (hopefully) work together to interpret the past. In this line of argument, we only receive answers to questions we ask; ideology is not an overlay on some objectivity independent of the enquirer, but is intrinsic to the process. The time and place determine the questions and therefore the answers; so too do the class, the gender, the religious beliefs, the personal and social context of the enquirer. That has been adequately illustrated in the descriptions, in earlier chapters, of the many different attempts to create a narrative in and of the ancient Middle East. Not all who generated an imagined Middle Eastern past were doing so as a focused campaign against some conventional scholarship. As noted in the quote from Einstein above, a post-modernist, critical perspective is not new. Already in the mid-nineteenth century Marx could argue about society at large, not just the scholarly sector: In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be

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determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic – in short, ideological forms […] Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life […] Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation.2

CHANGING AND UNCHANGING NARRATIVES

The development of literary and linguistic studies of the ancient Middle East has been dramatic in the past century and a half, with significant expansion of related historical studies. The number of universities teaching the past cultures of the region has continued to grow worldwide. Archaeological fieldwork has reached levels unimaginable to the pioneers of the subject, but is of course subject to the very fluid political circumstances of individual countries. The quality of scientific methodology has changed alongside the increased quantity of research, with some of the methodological advances in research techniques pioneered, or adopted early, in work carried out in the Middle East. However, as noted in several contexts in this book, questions and interpretative narratives in investigation have, inevitably, reflected the context of writers and researchers. Those from outside the Middle East were drawn to specific aspects of the societies under study. The religious significance of the countries of the Middle East attracted research enquiry which, as discussed in Chapter 8, could lead to some biased interpretations as well as influencing the areas of study. But it also allowed fundraising and support from religiously inspired donors for scientific enquiry into other aspects of the region’s past which had no direct ‘biblical’ relevance. We have discussed in Chapters 4 and 5 some of the assumptions in the grand narratives of Egypt and the ancient Near East. At the peak of the era of European colonialism (and echoed in the rising power of North America) the study of ‘great civilisations’ inspired writers and readers. The common narrative traced a line from modern Western cultures of Europe and North America back through classical civilisation to the ancient Middle East, with a frequent implication that this demonstrated the innate abilities of a dominant white race.

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Many of the synthetic histories of ancient civilisations from the nineteenth century until well into the twentieth focused on their elites: political history rather than social or economic history, the lives of the ruling groups, the architecture and ritual of state religion, and so on. The top-down model of Egyptian histories may have developed through the era of Brugsch and Budge, then Breasted (his History was in numerous reprints from 1905 to 1964), but still in the 1960s the magisterial and unambiguously named Egypt of the Pharaohs by Sir Alan Gardiner maintained a clear focus on politics and rulers. The ancient world was not only fascinating in itself, but an exemplar of the power of a centralised and militarily powerful state. In Egyptological parlance, any time the pharaohs were not powerful was an ‘Intermediate Period’. A different agenda of enquiry in the region emerged not by challenges to the dominant paradigm of state societies but in addressing the pre-literate periods. A diverse range of field studies in Iraq (Mesopotamia), Iran (Persia), Turkey, the countries of the Levant, and Egypt itself had uncovered evidence of the agricultural societies which preceded the literate urban civilisations, those within South-West Asia notably distributed around what would be called the Fertile Crescent. With their early domestication of plants and animals, these came to be seen as the source of the European Neolithic. The great prehistorian Vere Gordon Childe helped give the ancient Middle East this starring role in the human story with his book The Most Ancient East, published in 1928. The speed of new discoveries required a 1934 edition, called New Light of the Most Ancient East. His other influential syntheses of Eurasian prehistory placed the formative role of the Middle East at the forefront of the human narrative, as the location of the Neolithic (i.e. agricultural) Revolution and a subsequent Urban Revolution which brought towns, writing, specialisation and state formation to the world. While Childe would not accept the detail of Elliot Smith’s diffusionism (see Chapter 4), his model of economic and cultural diffusion from the Middle East into Europe was a persistent paradigm in archaeology. One thread is clearly discernible running through the dark and tangled tale of these prehistoric Europeans: the westward spread, adoption, and transformation of the inventions of the Orient […] For on the Nile and in Mesopotamia the clear light of written history illumines our path for fully fifty centuries, and looking down that vista we already descry at its farther end ordered government, urban life, writing and conscious art […] European prehistory […] is at first mainly the story of the imitation, or at best adaptation, of Oriental achievements.3

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New discoveries across the later decades of the twentieth century shifted the emphasis in this dominant narrative. Radiocarbon dating from the 1950s onwards demonstrated European innovations (in turn undermining claims that European megalithic construction derived from Middle Eastern models) and also served to stretch out the stages of animal and plant domestication. The non-specialist and pre-metallic society of Çatal Höyük in Anatolian Turkey, urban from the eighth millennium bce, would challenge the Childe model, and excavations in the 1950s–60s were followed by studies over the last 20 years which have involved many of the newer approaches of archaeological thought. Even more dramatically, further east in Anatolia the settlement of Göbekli Tepe presented urban characteristics dated to the tenth millennium bce. But inevitably, most ‘grand narratives’ were published for a broader than specialist audience, and publishers needed to judge what would appeal to a paying audience. ‘Great discoveries’ in archaeology would fit that description. There is remarkable continuity in the pattern of general surveys of Egypt in the English language book market, as themes recur in text and image. The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt (2000) begins with a critical observation that Gardiner’s Egypt Under the Pharaohs was concerned mainly with kings and the ruling elite, but then proceeds exclusively within a structure of dynastic periods. Barry J. Kemp’s Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilisation (2006) is one of the rare surveys than escapes the framework of royal dynasties. In the last few decades, intellectual life in the humanities and social sciences has lived with vibrant, creative and conflicting paradigms, interpretative models and stimuli for new questions which have fed into historical debates. These frameworks have included structuralism, critical theory, post-modernism, feminism, deconstruction, post-structuralism, post-colonial theory, queer theory and the emergence of cultural studies and gender studies, together with specifically historical and archaeological remodelling, such as annalistes, subaltern studies, behavioural archaeology, processual archaeology and middle-range theory, cognitive archaeology and post-processual archaeology. However, despite these revolutions of enquiry that penetrated the historical and humanistic scholarship through the second half of the twentieth century, they bypassed many of the scholarly narratives of the ancient Middle East over the same period. Where the new methods and approaches of archaeology were applied to the Middle East these were largely on the prehistoric periods. Those who sought to interpret and describe the historical societies of the ancient Middle Eastern civilisations in the light of broader perspectives were a small, if distinguished, minority,

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although scholarship has increasingly brought the study of the ancient civilisations of Mesopotamia (Iraq) into a comparative and sometimes more theoretically nuanced framework. This pattern has begun to change, though not universally. One landmark event for the Nile Valley was the conference ‘Encounters with Ancient Egypt’ at University College London in 2000 and the resulting eight volumes. The foreword by series editor Peter Ucko stated a goal as: the overall attempt to move the study of Ancient Egypt into the mainstream of recent advances in archaeological and anthropological practice and interpretation […] Egyptology has been rightly criticized for often being insular; the methodologies and conclusions of the discipline have been seen by others as having developed with little awareness of archaeology elsewhere.4

We can acknowledge subjectivities and changing paradigms in scholarly and scientific approaches to the ancient Middle East. But that range of interpretation does not undermine the strength of the basic methodologies, in which there are constant advances in the tools available to examine and describe materials from those societies: written texts, artefacts, art, architectural structures, settlement evidence. Fundamental to scholarship is the importance of re-examining current hypotheses, generating and testing new ones. Recent years have seen a broadening in questions being asked about the ancient Middle East from a scholarly and scientific perspective, and this trend can be expected to generate new understanding. What it is not likely to do is give further credence to the perspectives and interpretations of the ‘alternative’ quasihistories, quasi-archaeologies and faith-based narratives discussed in the chapters of this book. But it may enable further understanding of the social frameworks which generate and support such ideas.

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REFERENCES FOR QUOTATIONS

CHAPTER 1: MYSTICAL ROLES FOR ANCIENT EGYPT  1  2  3  4   5   6  7  8  9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

Herodotus, The Histories, Book II, trans. A. de Sélincourt, London: Penguin, 1954, pp. 103, 116, 122. Diodorus Siculus, The Library of History, vol. I: 9, ed. C. H. Oldfather, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933. Diodorus Siculus, vol. I: 96. Asclepius 24, Hermetica, trans. Brian P. Copenhaver, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, p. 81. Erik Iversen, The Myth of Egypt and its Hieroglyphs, Copenhagen: GEC Gad Publishers, 1961, p. 59. Frances A. Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, London: Routledge, 1972, p. xi. [Jean Terrasson], The Life of Sethos Taken from Private Memoirs of the Ancient Egyptians, trans. Mr. Lediard, London: J. Walthoe, 1732, pp. i–ii. Emanuel Schikaneder, libretto for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, The Magic Flute. Book of Mormon 9: 32–3. H. P. Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled: A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology, Pasadena: Theosophical University Press, 1999, vol. I, p. 573. AMORC, ‘Our traditional and chronological history’, www.rosicrucian.org/about/ mastery/mastery08history.html. Ignatius Donnelly, Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, New York: Harper, 1882, pp. 361–2. ‘About the Ausar Auset Society’, ausarauset40th.com/about-the-ausar-auset-society. ‘Church of the Eternal Source’, www.cesidaho.org. John Anthony West, Serpent in the Sky: The High Wisdom of Ancient Egypt, 2nd edn, Wheaton IL: Theosophical Publishing House, 1979, p. 1. ‘Magical Egypt Tours’, www.jawest.com. ‘Megalithomania 2013 in Glastonbury, UK!’, www.robertschoch.com/appearances.html. Robert Bauval and Graham Hancock, Keeper of Genesis: A Quest for the Hidden Legacy of Mankind, London: Heinemann, 1996, p. 6. Robert Bauval and Ahmed Osman, Breaking the Mirror of Heaven: The Conspiracy to Suppress the Voice of Ancient Egypt, Rochester VT: Bear & Co., 2012, Introduction. ‘The Pyramid Code’, www.pyramidcode.com/About.html.

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CHAPTER 2: PYRAMIDOLOGIES AND PYRAMID MYSTERIES Pliny the Elder, Natural History 35: 95, trans. John F. Healy, London: Penguin, 1991. Diodorus Siculus, The Library of History, vol. I: 64, ed. C. H. Oldfather, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933.  3 Josephus, The Antiquities of the Jews, Book I, 9: 1.  4 Genesis 41:48–9. Translation New Revised Standard Version.  5 Qur’an 12:55, trans. Muhammad Asad, The Message of the Qur’ān, Gibraltar: al-Andalus, 1980.  6 Qur’an 28:38.  7 The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela, ed. Marcus Nathan Adler, New York: Feldheim, 1965, p. 102.  8 The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, ed. C. W. R. D. Moseley, London: Penguin, 2005, p. 66.  9 George Stanley Faber, The Origin of Pagan Idolatry Ascertained from Historical Testimony and Circumstantial Evidence, vol. III, London: Rivingtons, 1816, p. 12. 10 Paul Brunton, A Search in Ancient Egypt, New York: Dutton, 1935, pp. 27–8. 11 Robert Ballard, The Solution of the Pyramid Problem, New York: Wiley, 1882, pp. 41–2. 12 John Greaves, Miscellaneous Works of Mr. John Greaves, vol. I, London: Hughes, 1737, pp. 159–60. 13 John Taylor, The Battle of the Standards: The Ancient, of Four Thousand Years, Against the Modern, of the Last Fifty Years – the Less Perfect of the Two, London: Longman, 1864, p. 26. 14 C. Piazzi Smyth, Life and Work at the Great Pyramid During the Months of January, February, March, and April, A.D. 1865, Edinburgh: Edmonston, 1867, p. 13. 15 W. M. Flinders Petrie, The Pyramids and Temples of Gizeh, London: Field & Tuer, 1883, p. xvi. 16 H. Spencer Lewis, The Symbolic Prophecy of the Great Pyramid, 3rd edn, San Jose, CA: AMORC, 1945, p. 75. 17 Adam Rutherford, New Revelation in the Great Pyramid, London: Institute of Pyramidology, 1946, p. vi. 18 Morton Edgar, The Great Pyramid and Its Time Features, Glasgow: Bone & Hulley, 1924, p. 16. 19 Peter Lemesurier, The Great Pyramid Decoded, London: Compton Russell, 1977, p. 289. 20 www.divinecosmos.com.  1  2

CHAPTER 3: MUMMIES AND THEIR CHANGING REPUTATION   1   2   3   4   5  6

Frances Bacon, The Works of Francis Bacon, vol. II, London: Baynes, para. 980. Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of the English Nation, vol. IX: Asia, part 2. Robert Boyle, Occasional Reflections upon Several Subjects: with a Discourse about Such Kind of Thoughts, Oxford: Parker, 1848, p. 349. James Alleyne, New English Dispensatory, London: Astley & Austin, 1733, p. 152. Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad: The New Pilgrims’ Progress, New York: Harper & Row, 1869, p. 632. British Archaeological Association 1844, described in The Pictorial Ties, cited in ‘The humours of archaeology’, Journal of the British Archaeological Association 38, 1932, pp. 193–234.

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  7   8  9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

Nicholas Daly, Modernism, Romance and the Fin de Siècle: Popular Fiction and British Culture 1880-1914, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, p. 85. Mrs Loudon [Jane Webb], The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century, vol. III, London: Colburn, 1828, pp. 112–13. Literary Review 1827, p. 660. Bayle Bernard, The Mummy: A Farce in One Act, London: Lacy, 1836. Théophile Gautier, ‘The mummy’s foot’, trans. Lafcadio Hearn, in Tales from Gautier, London: Nash & Grayson, 1927. Theophile Gautier, ‘The romance of the mummy’, The Works of Théophile Gautier, vol. V, trans. F. C. de Sumichrast, New York: Athenaeum Society, 1901, p. 60. Grant Allen, ‘My New Year’s Eve among the mummies’, Belgravia, 1880. Julian Hawthorne, Six Cent Sam’s, St Paul: Price-McGill, 1893, p. 243. Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘Lot No. 249’, Harper’s Magazine, September 1892. Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Ring of Thoth’, The Cornhill Magazine, January 1890. Daily Express, 7 April 1923. Theo Douglas, Iras, A Mystery, Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1896, p. 89. E. and H. Heron [Katherine and Hesketh Prichard], ‘The Story of Baelbrow’, Pearson’s Monthly Magazine 5, 1898. Bram Stoker, The Jewel of the Seven Stars, London: Heinemann, 1903. R. Austin Freeman, The Eye of Osiris, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1911, Ch. 20 (reissued as The Vanishing Man). Review of Reviews 42, 1910, p. 408. H. Rider Haggard, ‘Smith and the pharaohs’, part II, Strand Magazine, February 1913. John L. Balderston (screenplay), The Mummy, Universal Studios, 1932. Desson Howe, ‘A humdrum mummy’, Washington Post, 7 May 1999. Jasmine Day, The Mummy’s Curse: Mummymania in the English-Speaking World, Abingdon: Routledge, 2006, p. 8. Louisa May Alcott, ‘Lost in a pyramid, or the mummy’s curse’, The New World, 16 January 1869. Marie Corelli, ‘Pharaoh guarded by poisons’, Daily Express, 24 March 1923. ‘Lord Carnarvon’s death: superstition aroused’, The Argus (Melbourne), 7 April 1923, p. 25.

CHAPTER 4: EGYPTOCENTRISM: ILLUSIONS OF GLOBAL INFLUENCE  1   2   3   4  5   6

Diodorus Siculus, The Library of History, vol. I: 9, ed. C. H. Oldfather, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933. Diodorus Siculus, The Library of History, vol. I: 69. William Stukeley, The Commentarys, Diary, & Common-Place Book of William Stukeley & Selected Letters, London: Doppler Press, 1980, p. 140. John Montagu, A Voyage Performed by the Late Earl of Sandwich Round the Mediterranean in the Years 1738 and 1739, London: Cadell, 1799, pp. 410–11. Frederic Wood-Jones, cited in Warren R. Dawson (ed.), Sir Grafton Elliot Smith: A Biographical Record by his Colleagues, London: Jonathan Cape, 1938. G. Elliot Smith, The Ancient Egyptians and the Origins of Civilization, 2nd edn, London: Harper, 1923, p. 185.

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G. Elliot Smith, The Ancient Egyptians and Their Influence Upon the Civilization of Europe, 1st edn, London: Harper, 1911, p. 16.   8 G. Elliot Smith, The Migrations of Early Culture, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1915, p. v.   9 G. Elliot Smith, The Evolution of the Dragon, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1919, p. 73. 10 Smith, Evolution of the Dragon, p. 49. 11 G. Elliot Smith, Bronislaw Malinowski, Herbert J. Spinden and Alexander Goldenweiser, Culture: The Diffusion Controversy, London: Kegan Paul, 1928, p. 16. 12 Smith, Migrations, p. vii. 13 G. Elliot Smith, In the Beginning: The Origins of Civilisation, 2nd edn, London: Watts, 1934, p. 99, fig. 8. 14 Smith, Evolution of the Dragon, pp. vi, 49. 15 G. Elliot Smith, Human History, London: Jonathan Cape, 1930, p. 376. 16 Smith, The Ancient Egyptians, 2nd edn, p. vii. 17 W. J. Perry, Origin of Magic and Religion, London: Methuen, 1923, pp. 99–100. 18 W. J. Perry, The Children of the Sun: A Study in the Early History of Civilization, London: Methuen, 1923, p. 502. 19 Smith, Migrations, p. v. 20 Wang Gungwu, ‘Chinese civilization and the diffusion of culture’, in A. P. Elkin and N. W. G. Macintosh (eds), Grafton Elliot Smith: The Man and his Work, Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1974, pp. 197–209, 200. 21 Smith, Migrations, p. 12. 22 [Robert R. Marett], ‘Human history’, Times Literary Supplement 1470, 3 April 1930, p. 287. 23 Chief Justice Murray Gleeson: legal case reference is HG v The Queen [1999] HCA 2; (1999) 197 CLR 414. 24 Smith, Ancient Egyptians, 2nd edn, pp. 1–2, 12, 26, 200.   7

CHAPTER 5: THE BLIGHT OF ‘RACE’  1   2   3

 4   5  6   7   8

Amartya Sen, ‘Finding our common ground’, in Identity and Violence, New York: Norton and London: Penguin, 2006, p. 175. Christina Riggs and John Baines, ‘Ethnicity’, UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, online at http://escholarship.org/uc/item/32r9x0jr. George Best, ‘A true discourse of the three voyages of discoverie, for the finding of a passage to Cathaya […]’ (1578), in Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations Voyages Traffiques & Discoveries of the English Nation, vol. VII, Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, 1903–5, pp. 261–5. Sen, Identity and Violence, p. 44. Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (1853), trans. A. Collins, London: Heinemann, 1915, p. 76. Gobineau, Essay, p. 89. Julian S. Huxley and A. C. Haddon, We Europeans: A Survey of ‘Racial’ Problems, London: Cape, 1935, pp. 107–8. Frank B. Livingstone, ‘On the non-existence of human races’, Current Anthropology 3 (3), 1962, pp. 279–81, 279.

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  9 Christopher Stringer, Lone Survivors, New York: Henry Holt, 2012, p. 189. 10 C. F. Volney, The Ruins, or, Meditation on the Revolutions of Empires: and the Law of Nature, New York: Twentieth Century Pub. Co., 1890, Ch. 4. 11 H. Grégoire, De la Littérature des nègres, ou Recherches sur leurs facultés intellectuelles, leurs qualités morales et leur literature, Paris: Maradan, 1808. 12 John Stuart Mill, ‘The Negro question’, Fraser’s Magazine 41, January 1850, pp. 25–31, reprinted in The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XXI – Essays on Equality, Law, and Education, ed. John M. Robson, London: Routledge, 1984. 13 Transactions of the Ethnological Society 5, 1867, pp. 115–21 (119–20), reproduced in M. D. Biddiss (ed.), Images of Race, Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1979, p. 148. 14 J. Gardner Wilkinson, A Popular Account of the Ancient Egyptians, rev. edn, vol. I, London: John Murray, p. 302. 15 George Rawlinson, The Story of Ancient Egypt, New York: Putnam, 1897 and London: Unwin, 1890, p. 24. 16 John A. Wilson, The Culture of Ancient Egypt, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1951, pp. 23–4. 17 James H. Breasted, History of Egypt, 2nd edn, London: Hodder, 1909, p. 26. 18 G. Elliot Smith, ‘Influences of racial admixture in Egypt’, Eugenics Review 7 (3), 1915, p. 166. 19 G. Elliot Smith, The Ancient Egyptians and Their Influence Upon the Civilization of Europe, 1st edn, London: Harper, p. 182. 20 G. Elliot Smith, Human History, London: Jonathan Cape, 1930 p. 136. 21 C. Loring Brace, David P. Tracer, Lucia Allen Yaroch, John Robb, Kari Brandt and A. Russell Nelson, ‘Clines and clusters versus “Race”: a test in ancient Egypt and the case of a death on the Nile,’ American Journal of Physical Anthropology 36, Issue Supplement 17, 1993, abstract and p. 16. 22 C. G. Seligman, Races of Africa, 3rd edn, London: Oxford University Press, 1957, pp. 42–3, 85.

CHAPTER 6: RACE REVERSED: THE AFROCENTRIC CHALLENGE  1   2   3   4   5  6   7   8   9 10 11

Alexander Hill Everett, America: Or a General Survey, Philadelphia: Carey & Lea, 1827, p. 215. John B. Russworm, Freedom’s Journal, 6 April 1827. David Walker, Walker’s Appeal, in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, Boston: the author, 1830, p. 10. Hosea Easton, A Treatise on the Intellectual Character and Civil and Political Condition of the Colored People […], Boston: Knapp, 1837, p. 8. Frederick Douglass, The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered, Rochester, NY: Lee, Mann, 1854, p. 25. Douglass, Claims, p. 18. ‘Frederick Douglass’ Speech at Western Reserve College’, New-York Tribune, 31 July 1854. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches, Chicago: McClurg, 1903, Ch. 1. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Negro, New York: Holt, 1915, Ch. 2. Marcus Garvey, ‘Who and what is a negro?’, Negro World, 16 April 1923. Cheikh Anta Diop, The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality, New York: Lawrence Hill, 1974, p. 53.

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REFERENCES FOR PAGES 159–90

12 Diop, African Origin, p. xv. 13 Wilson Jeremiah Moses, Afrotopia: The Roots of African American Popular History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 1. 14 Ivan Van Sertima, They Came Before Columbus, New York: Random House, 1976, p. xvii. 15 Van Sertima, They Came, pp. 113, 122. 16 Ivan van Sertima (ed.), Egypt: Child of Africa, New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1994, p. 1. 17 Chancellor James Williams, The Destruction of Black Civilization, rev. edn, Chicago: Third World Press, 1987, p. 71. 18 Williams, Destruction, p. 311. 19 Molefi Kete Asante, The Afrocentric Idea, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987, p. 125. 20 Molefi Kete Asante, Kemet, Afrocentricity, and Knowledge, Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1990, pp. 83, 89. 21 Asante, Kemet, p. v. 22 Asante, Kemet, p. 14. 23 Molefi Kete Asante, An Afrocentric Manifesto, Cambridge UK: Polity, 2007, pp. 2, 20, 69. 24 Molefi Kete Asante, The History of Africa: The Quest for Eternal Harmony, New York: Routledge, 2007. 25 Molefi Kete Asante, ‘Race in antiquity: truly out of Africa’, May 2009, online at http://www. asante.net/articles/19/race-in-antiquity-truly-out-of-africa/. 26 Clarence E. Walker, We Can’t Go Home Again: An Argument about Afrocentrism, New York: Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. xvii, 3. 27 Walker, We Can’t, p. 46. 28 Algernon Austin, Achieving Blacks: Race, Black Nationalism, and Afrocentrism in the Twentieth Century, New York: New York University Press, 2006, p. 122. 29 Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, vol. I, London: Free Association Press and New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987, pp. 241–2. 20 Bernal, Black Athena, vol. I, p. 73. 31 Kathryn A. Bard, ‘Ancient Egyptians and this issue of race’, in Mary R. Lefkowitz and Guy MacLean Rogers (eds), Black Athena Revisited, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1996, p. 106.

CHAPTER 7: CREATING NARRATIVES OF ‘THE HOLY LAND’  1   2   3  4   5   6  7

Southern Baptist Convention, ‘Basic Beliefs’, http://www.sbc.net/aboutus/basicbeliefs.asp. Paul de Saint-Père, Gesta Synodi Aurelianensis, trans. Robert I. Moore, The Birth of Popular Heresy, Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1995, p. 14. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Ch. 7. Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed, trans. M. Friedlander, New York: Dover, 1904, Ch. 2.25. Baruch Spinoza, Tractatus theologico-politicus, 1670, Ch. 8. Julius Wellhausen, Prolegomena to the History of Ancient Israel, Edinburgh: A & C Black, 1885, p. 8 note 2. Wellhausen, Prolegomena, p. 5.

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CHAPTER 8: CONFLICTED PASTS OF ISRAEL: POLITICS, RELIGION, IDENTITY George Grove, ‘From the original prospectus’, Palestine Exploration Fund, Quarterly Statement, January 1869, pp. 1–2.   2 Rev. Dr S. Manning, during Annual General Meeting: Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly Statement for 1874, pp. 228–33.   3 Palestine Exploration Society 1870, cited in Wendy M. K. Shaw, Possessors and Possessed: Museums, Archaeology and the Visualisation of History on the Late Ottoman Empire, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003, p. 61.   4 Samuel Birch, ‘Progress of biblical archaeology: an address’, Transactions, Society of Biblical Archaeology 1 (1), 1872, p. iv.   5 Egypt Exploration Society, ‘The history of the society’, online at www.ees.ac.uk/about-us/ history.html.   6 ‘Prof. Sir Flinders Petrie, F.R.S.’, The Times 49301, 30 July 1942, p. 7.   7 William F. Albright, The Archaeology of Palestine, London: Penguin, 1956, p. 230.   8 P. R. S. Moorey, A Century of Biblical Archaeology, London: Lutterworth Press, 1991, p. 55.   9 Walter Dietrich, The Early Monarchy of Israel: The Tenth Century B.C.E., Leiden: Brill, 2007, pp. 115, 145. 10 Genesis 15.18–21. 11 Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, Mita’am 3, 2005, pp. 71–6. 12 Israel Finkelstein, in I. Finkelstein and A. Mazar, ed. B. B. Schmidt, The Quest for the Historical Israel: Debating Archaeology and the History of Early Israel, Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2007, p. 187. 13 W. F. Albright, From the Stone Age to Christianity: Monotheism and the Historical Process, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1940, p. 214. 14 Hamas, The Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement, 1988, Article 11, online at http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hamas.asp. 15 Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People, London: Verso, 2009, p. 16. 16 Sand, Invention, p. 316. 17 Israel Finkelstein and Neil A. Silberman, The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of its Sacred Texts, New York: Free Press, 2001, pp. 133, 230. 18 Shir Hever, The Economy of the Occupation: A Socioeconomic Bulletin, Jerusalem: Alternative Information Centre, online at http://www.alternativenews.org/english/images/ stories/PDF/pdf_reports/EOO29-30%20Web%20%281%29.pdf. 19 ‘Proclamation of the Fourth International Christian Congress on Biblical Zionism’, February 2001, online at http://christianactionforisrael.org/4thcongress3_pf.html. 20 D. Ilan, ‘Archaeology adding to the powder keg’, Biblical Archaeology Review 34 (6), 2008, p. 36; R. Hallote, ‘Who pays for excavations? Religious and political agendas in the funding of “biblical’ archaeology’, Biblical Archaeology Review 35 (2), 2009, p. 22; H. Shanks, [editorial], Biblical Archaeological Review 36 (1), 2010, p. 6. 21 Sandra Scham, ‘Diplomacy and desired pasts’, Journal of Social Archaeology, 9, 2009, p. 182. 22 Emek Shavah, ‘Jerusalem – Old City’, online at www.alt-arch.org.  1

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CHAPTER 9: LOST TRIBES 1 2

2 Kings 17.3–7. James B. Pritchard, The Ancient Near East: An Anthology of Text and Pictures, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2011, p. 266. 3 Ibid. 4 Albert M. Hyamson, ‘The Lost Tribes, and the influence of the search for them on the return of the Jews to England’, Jewish Quarterly Review 15, 2003, p. 641. 5 Richard Brothers, A Revealed Knowledge of the Prophecies and Times, West Springfield, MA: Gray, 1797, pp. 56–7. 6 John Wilson, Lectures on Our Israelitish Origin, 5th edn, London: James Nisbet, 1876, p. vii. 7 The British-Israel-World Federation, ‘Our beliefs’, online at http://www.britishisrael.co.uk/ beliefs.php.

CHAPTER 10: DISTANT LINKS: APOSTOLIC TRAVELLERS Eusebius, Church History, Book III, Ch. 1: 1–2, trans. A. C. McGiffert, ed. Philip Schaff, New York: Christian Literature; Oxford: Parker, 1890; reprinted Edinburgh: T&T Clark; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1991.   2 Acts 26.32.   3 Acts 28.30.  4 Clement, Epistle to the Corinthians, 5.  5 Irenaeus, Against Heresies III:3.  6 Eusebius, Church History, Book VI, Ch. 14: 5–7. The reference location is sometimes wrongly cited.   7 Granger Ryan and Helmut Ripperger (trans.), The Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine, New York: Arno Press, 1969, p. 336.  8 Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, vol. II: The Spirit of Eastern Christendom (600–1700), Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1974, p. 157.   9 Henry Care, A Modest Enquiry whether St. Peter were ever at Rome and Bishop of that Church?, London: Randall Taylor, 1687. 10 Pope Paul VI, 26 June 1968, cited online at http://www.catholicpreaching.com/ paul-vis-and-the-churchs-happy-news-the-anchor-may-9-2008. 11 Ryan and Ripperger, Golden Legend, p. 369. 12 Usuard, Martyrologium, ‘huius sacratissima ossa ab ierosoliminis ad Hispanias translata, et in ultimis earum finibus condita, celeberrima illarum gentium veneratione excoluntur’. 13 Bernal Diaz del Castillo, The True History of the Conquest of Mexico, New York: McBride, 1927, pp. 74–5. 14 Jan van Herwaarden, ‘The origins of the cult of St James of Compostela’, Journal of Medieval History 6 (1), 1980, pp. 3, 29. 15 ‘The Acts of Thomas’ 1–2, in M. R. James (ed.), The Apocryphal New Testament, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924, online at http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/actsthomas. html. 16 ‘The Acts of Thomas’, 170. 17 Benedict XVI, General Audience, 27 September 2006, online at http://www.vatican.va/ holy_father/benedict_xvi/audiences/2006/documents/hf_ben-xvi_aud_20060927_en.html.  1

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William Blake, Milton: A Poem in 2 Books, Preface, 1804. William of Malmesbury, De Antiquitate Glastoniensis Ecclesiae, cited in J. Armitage Robinson, Somerset Historical Essays, London: Oxford University Press, 1921, pp. 5–7. 20 Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia Regum Britanniae, Ch. 19. 21 Helinand, Chronicon, online at http://www.maryjones.us/ctexts/helindanus.html. 22 Richard Broughton, The Ecclesiasticall Historie of Great Britaine Deduced by Ages, Doway: Wyon, 1633, cited by W. W. Skeat (ed.), Joseph of Arimathie, London: Trubner 1971 (reprinted New York: Greenwood, 1969), pp. xxvi–xxvii. 23 William Dugdale, Monasticon Anglicanum, or, the History of the Ancient Abbies and other Monasteries […] in England and Wales, Abridged, vol. I, London: Sam. Keble, 1692, pp. 1–2, online at http://archive.org/details/monasticonanglic00dugd. 24 Online at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8380511.stm. 25 Sermo de sancta Maria Magdalenae, translated in Raymond Clemens, ‘The cult of Mary Magdalen in late medieval France’, in Thomas Head (ed.), Medieval Hagiography: An Anthology, New York: Routledge, 2001, p. 656. 26 Ryan and Ripperger, Golden Legend, p. 357. 27 Ryan and Ripperger, Golden Legend, p. 360. 28 Acts of Andrew 8, in M. R. James (ed.), The Apocryphal New Testament, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924. 29 Ryan and Ripperger, Golden Legend, p. 8. 30 Francis Dvornik, The Idea of Apostolicity in Byzantium and the Legend of the Apostle Andrew, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958, pp. 160–1.

18 19

CHAPTER 11: CHANGING IMAGES: HISTORY AND PREHISTORY IN EGYPT AND THE ANCIENT NEAR EAST 1 2 3 4

Walter Heisenberg in 1968, reprinted in Abdus Salam, Unification of Fundamental Forces, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, p. 99. Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 1859. V. Gordon Childe, New Light on the Most Ancient East, rev. edn, London: Routledge, 1952, pp. 1–2. Peter Ucko, ‘Series editor’s foreword’, volumes in series Encounters with Ancient Egypt, London: UCL Press, 2003.

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INTRODUCTION Some good examples of imagined pasts, mainly in more recent times, are in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. For critical discussions of ‘pseudoarchaeology’ see contributions in Garth G. Fagan (ed.), Archaeological Fantasies: How Pseudoarchaeology Misrepresents the Past and Misleads the Public, Abingdon: Routledge, 2006; K. L. Feder, Frauds, Myths and Mysteries: Science and Pseudoscience in Archaeology, Mountain View, CA: Mayfield, 1990. The whole definition of quasi-archaeology and quasi-history is discussed in Robin Derricourt, ‘Pseudoarchaeology: the concept and its limitations’, Antiquity 86 (332), 2012, pp. 524–31. Some of the same issues relating to the African continent are considered in Robin Derricourt, Inventing Africa: History, Archaeology and Ideas, London: Pluto, 2011. Claims which placed the Phoenicians in sub-Saharan Africa are discussed in Chapter 1. The classic work by Edward W. Said is Orientalism (first published London: Routledge and New York: Pantheon, 1978.) The thesis has been the subject of numerous critiques by other writers and responses by Said. A different approach to ‘Orientalist’ writers is taken by Arabist Robert Irwin, For List of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies, London: Penguin, 2006. The creating of history and prehistory of other areas of the eastern Mediterranean and Middle East is discussed by the different contributions in Lynn Meskell (ed.), Archaeology Under Fire: Nationalism, Politics and Heritage in the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East, London: Routledge, 1998. On treatment of ancient Mesopotamia in historical narratives, this includes Zainab Bahrani, ‘Mesopotamia: imaginative geography and a world past’, pp. 159–71. Nineteenth-century constructions of Cleopatra are discussed in Scott Trafton, Egypt Land: Race and Nineteenth-Century American Egyptomania, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004, pp. 165–221.

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CHAPTER 1: MYSTICAL ROLES FOR ANCIENT EGYPT The original documents (from medieval manuscripts to nineteenth-century pamphlets to contemporary websites) provide the best documentation for seeing the changing images of ancient Egypt, but there have been many secondary discussions of individual aspects and movements. Erik Hornung, The Secret Lore of Egypt: Its Impact on the West, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001 (translated from the book first published in German in 1999) is an excellent source linking the theme of what he calls ‘Egyptosophy’ across different periods. Erik Iversen, The Myth of Egypt and its Hieroglyphs, Copenhagen: GEC Gad Publishers, 1961, deals with just one aspect of this, but one extending across different periods: beliefs in the role of Egyptian symbolic writing. There is useful discussion of alternative Egypt by Paul Jordan, ‘Esoteric Egypt’, in G. G. Fagan (ed.), Archaeological Fantasies, London: Routledge, 2006, pp. 109–28; and by Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince, ‘Alternative Egypts’, in Sally MacDonald and Michael Rice (eds), Consuming Ancient Egypt, London: UCL Press, 2003, pp. 175–94. Overview articles on images of Egypt are by Alan B. Lloyd, Andrew Bednarski, Michael Cooperson, Christina Riggs, in the section on ‘The Reception of Egyptian Culture’ in Alan B. Lloyd (ed.), A Companion to Ancient Egypt, vol. II, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. Peter Ucko and Timothy Champion (eds), The Wisdom of Egypt: Changing Visions Through the Ages, London: UCL Press, 2003. This has useful articles on changing images of ancient Egypt. The article ‘Ancient Egypt in Medieval Arabic writings’ by Okasha el-Daly (pp. 39–64) is a useful survey. The same author has expanded on this theme in Egyptology: The Missing Millennium, London: UCL Press, 2005. Among numerous discussions of the classical world’s engagement with Egypt, see essays in Roger Matthews and Cornelia Roemer (eds), Ancient Perspectives on Egypt, London: UCL Press, 2003, including Thomas Harrison, ‘Upside down and back to front: Herodotus and the Greek encounter with Egypt’, pp. 145–56. For Diodorus Siculus, Library of History, I have mainly used the Loeb Classical Library 1933 edition by C. H. Oldfather, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933; for Herodotus, Histories, the Penguin edition translated by Aubrey de Sélincourt, 1954. For documents of early Hermeticism see Brian P. Copenhaver (trans.), Hermetica, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Aspects of the medieval treatment (in both Europe and the Middle East) are discussed by Michael Cook, ‘Pharaonic history in medieval Europe’, Studia Islamica 57, 1983, pp. 67–103. For the early Enlightenment period see John Gascoigne, ‘The wisdom of the Egyptians and the secularisation of history in the age of Newton’, in Stephen Gaukroger (ed.), The Uses of Antiquity: The Scientific Revolution and the Classical Tradition, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991, pp. 171–212; and David Boyd Hancock, ‘Ancient Egypt in 17th and 18th century England’, in Ucko and Champion, The Wisdom of Egypt, pp. 133–60. On the Rosicrucian movement of the period see Frances A. Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, London: Routledge, 1972 and subsequent editions. For Count Cagliostro, see Iain McCalman, The Seven Ordeals of Count Cagliostro, London: Century Hutchinson, 2003. The Golden Dawn movement is discussed in the context of nineteenth-century British fascinations with Egypt in Roger Luckhurst, The Mummy’s Curse: The True History of a Dark Fantasy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012, Ch. 8. Joseph Smith’s Book of Abraham is discussed in Fawn M. Brodie, No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith the Mormon Prophet, 2nd edn, New York: Knopf, 1986, pp. 68–75; and David Persuitte, Joseph Smith and the Origins of the Book of Mormon, 2nd edn, Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2000, pp. 281–96.

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On British Israelites and Egypt, see Gabriel Moshenska, ‘The Bible in stone’, Public Archaeology 7, 2008, pp. 5–16. Alongside the articles quoted by Jordan, and by Picknett and Prince, L. L. Wynn, Pyramids and Nightclubs, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2007, touches on aspects of contemporary constructions in Chapters 2 (Buried Treasure) and 3 (Atlantis and Red Mercury).

CHAPTER 2: PYRAMIDOLOGIES AND PYRAMID MYSTERIES A good survey of current scientific knowledge of the pyramids is Mark Lehner, The Complete Pyramids, London: Thames & Hudson, 1997. This does mention some of the earlier alternative interpretations. John Romer, The Great Pyramid: Ancient Egypt Revisited, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007 is another good survey specifically of Khufu’s pyramid at Giza, but also mentions only the early ideas. A rather traditional survey is Joyce A. Tyldesley, Pyramids: The Real Story Behind Egypt’s Most Ancient Monuments, London: Viking, 2003. There is still value in two classic surveys: I. E. S. Edwards, The Pyramids of Egypt, London: Penguin, 1947; revised editions 1961, 1986; and Ahmed Fakhry, The Pyramids, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1961. These three books give minimal attention to older alternative pyramidologies. None of the books mentioned above tackle the new cult and quasi-archaeologies. Peter Tompkins, Secrets of the Great Pyramid, London: Allen Lane, 1973, is useful as a survey of the development of pyramidology up to publication date, though the writer implies sympathy to or belief in most or all the ideas presented. For detailed classification and further discussion of alternative pyramidologies, see Robin Derricourt, ‘Pyramidologies of Egypt: a typological review’, Cambridge Archaeological Journal 22, 2012, pp. 353–63. The chronology adopted here is that used by Toby Wilkinson in The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt, London: Bloomsbury, 2010. For some further scholarly discussions of aspects of Egyptian pyramids, see D. G. Jeffreys, ‘Regionality, cultural and cultic landscapes’, in W. Wendrich (ed.), Egyptian Archaeology, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011, pp. 102–18. On the symbolism of the benben, Barry Kemp, Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization, London: Routledge 1989, pp. 85–8. There is relevant discussion of early European ideas of pyramids in chapters in Peter Ucko and Timothy Champion (eds), The Wisdom of Egypt: Changing Visions Through the Ages, London: UCL Press, 2003. A valuable survey of early British studies and continental European influences is John David Worthen, British Egyptology 1549-1906, Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1971. The best source, of course, remains the actual writings of the different pyramidologists who are discussed in this chapter. Many of the earlier works have been scanned and digitised and are freely available online. On prophetic interpretations and especially those linked to British Israelites, see Gabriel Moshenska, ‘The Bible in stone: pyramids, lost tribes and alternative archaeologies’, Public Archaeology 7, 2008, pp. 5–16. Egyptian traditions about the meaning of the pyramids are mentioned in Elliot Colla, Conflicted Antiquities: Egyptology, Egyptomania, Egyptian Modernity, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. Surviving Egyptian and some tourist beliefs about the pyramids are discussed by L. L. Wynn in Pyramids and Nightclubs, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007, and ‘Shape shifting lizard people, Israelite slaves, and other theories of pyramid building’, Journal of Social Archaeology 8, 2008, pp. 272–95.

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CHAPTER 3: MUMMIES AND THEIR CHANGING REPUTATION Salima Ikram and Aidan Dodson, The Mummy in Ancient Egypt: Equipping the Dead for Eternity, London: Thames and Hudson, 1998, is an detailed account of the nature and development of mummification as shown by archaeology, history, literature and scientific examination of mummies and their equipment. Christine el Mahdy, Mummies, Myth and Magic in Ancient Egypt, London: Thames & Hudson, 1989, is a general survey of mummification. The book has a short epilogue on ‘the curse’. Arthur C. Aufderheide, The Scientific Study of Mummies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, is a detailed survey of mummies worldwide, not just in Egypt, by a palaeopathology specialist. Françoise Dunand and Roger Lichtenberg, Mummies and Death in Egypt, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006 (translated from French 1998), is a useful summary and survey. On medical uses of mumia, see Karl H. Dannenfeldt, ‘Egyptian mumia: the sixteenth century experience and debate’, The Sixteenth Century Journal 16 (2), 1985, pp. 163–80, for a survey of the sources. Warren R. Dawson, ‘Mummy as a drug’, Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine 21 (1), 1927, pp. 34–9, is a short early article summarising the records. The numerous English literary references on the seventeenth century are discussed in detail in ‘“Mummy is become merchandise”: cannibals and commodities in the seventeenth century’, in Philip Schwyzer, Archaeologies of English Renaissance Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, Ch. 5. Carol Lupton, ‘“Mummymania” for the masses: is Egyptology cursed by the mummy’s curse?’, in Sally MacDonald and Michael Rice (eds), Consuming Ancient Egypt, London: UCL Press, 2003, pp. 23–46, is a good summary of mummies in the media, including recent books and films. Mark R. Nelson, ‘The mummy’s curse: historical cohort study’, British Medical Journal 325 (7378), 2002, pp. 1482–4, demonstrates the non-delivery of Tutankhamen’s curse on his tomb’s discoverers. For a checklist of 500 works of mummy fiction there is Brian J. Frost, The Essential Guide to Mummy Literature, Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2008. An entertaining and thorough survey of the mummy’s curse narrative is a recent book by literary scholar Roger Luckhurst: The Mummy’s Curse: The True History of a Dark Fantasy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. This presents a detailed account of the literary and journalistic sources and popular development of the curse myth, including Tutankhamen and the Unlucky Mummy, and of other Egypt-related supernatural tales, with thoughtful discussion of the historical, literary and cultural context. There is a small industry of other work by literary and cultural studies scholars looking at applications of the mummy in literature, film and popular culture, but these are of variable focus and interest. They include: Nicholas Daly, Modernism, Romance and the Fin de Siècle: Popular Fiction and British Culture 1880-1914, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, Ch. 3: ‘“Mummie is become merchandise”: The mummy story as commodity theory’; Scott Trafton, Egypt Land: Race and Nineteenth-Century American Egyptomania, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004, pp. 121–40; Bradley Deane, ‘Mummy fiction and the occupation of Egypt: imperial striptease’, English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920 51 (4), 2008, pp. 381–410; Karen Macfarlane, ‘Mummy knows best: knowledge and the unknowable in turn of the century mummy fiction’, Horror Studies 1.1, 2010, pp. 5–24; Aviva Briefel, ‘Hands of beauty, hands of horror: fear and Egyptian art at the fin de siècle’, Victorian Studies 50 (2), 2008, pp. 263–71; Richard Pearson, ‘Archaeology and gothic desire: vitality beyond the grave in H. Rider Haggard’s Ancient Egypt’, in R. Robbins and J. Wolfreys (eds), Victorian Gothic: Literary and Cultural Manifestations of the

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Nineteenth Century, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000, pp. 218–44; Lisa Hopkins, ‘Jane C. Loudon’s The Mummy! Mary Shelley meets George Orwell, and they go in a balloon to Egypt’, Romantic Textualities 10, 2003 (online); Richard Freeman, ‘The mummy in context’, European Journal of American Studies 1, 2009 (online); Jasmine Day, The Mummy’s Curse: Mummymania in the English-speaking World, Abingdon: Routledge, 2006. Most can be gained from examining the original literary works and the movies mentioned in the text.

CHAPTER 4: EGYPTOCENTRISM: ILLUSIONS OF GLOBAL INFLUENCE There are good discussions of pre-modern images of the Egyptian past by contributors to Peter Ucko and Timothy Champion (eds), The Wisdom of Egypt: Changing Visions Through the Ages, London: UCL Press, 2003, including John Tait on ‘The wisdom of Egypt: classical views’, pp. 23–38; Timothy Champion on ‘Beyond Egyptology: Egypt in 19th and 20th century archaeology and anthropology’, pp. 161–85; and discussions of Newton, Stukeley, Sandwich and others by David Boyd Hancock, ‘Ancient Egypt in 17th and 18th century England’, pp. 133–60. The classical encounter with Egypt is also discussed in chapters of a companion volume, Roger Matthews and Cornelia Roemer (eds), Ancient Perspectives on Egypt, London: UCL Press, 2003. Dominic Montserrat, Akhenaten: History, Fantasy and Ancient Egypt, London: Routledge, 2000, is a broad-ranging and thoughtful survey of the different uses and misuses that have been imposed upon the image of Egypt’s Aten-worshipping pharaoh. For Grafton Elliot Smith, different sources reflect different perspectives, even within the same collection. Smith’s widow invited his friends to compile a memorial volume which includes a long biographical sketch and a very partial autobiography: Warren R. Dawson (ed.), Sir Grafton Elliot Smith: A Biographical Record by his Colleagues, London: Jonathan Cape, 1938. This includes a list of his publications. To mark the centenary of his birth two conferences were held, and their papers published: one at his alma mater the University of Sydney: A. P. Elkin and N. W. G. Macintosh (eds), Grafton Elliot Smith: The Man and his Work, Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1974, with a biographical sketch by Raymond Dart; the other in London organised by the Royal Zoological Society: Solly Zuckerman (ed.), The Concepts of Human Evolution, London: Academic Press, 1973. A new short book about (and broadly sympathetic to) his diffusionist ideas includes a biographical summary and useful outlines of Elliot Smith’s main diffusionist books: Paul Crook, Grafton Elliot Smith, Egyptology and the Diffusion of Culture, Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2012. See also J. T. Wilson, ‘Sir Grafton Elliot Smith 1871–1937’, Obituary Notices of the Fellows of the Royal Society 2, 1938, pp. 323–3; G. Richards, ‘Smith, Sir Grafton Elliot’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004; M. J. Blunt, ‘Smith, Sir Grafton Elliot (1871–1937)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. XI, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1988; T. W. Todd, ‘The scientific influence of Sir Grafton Elliot Smith’, American Anthropologist 39, 1937, pp. 523–6. Some discussion of Elliot Smith is by Timothy Champion, ‘Egypt and the diffusion of culture’, in David Jeffreys (ed.), Views of Ancient Egypt since Napoleon Bonaparte, London: UCL Press,

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2003, pp. 127–46. A strong denunciation is by Glyn Daniel, The Idea of Prehistory, London: Penguin Books, 1964, pp. 88–107. Grafton Elliot Smith’s major publications on or relating to the theme of Egypt included:   The Ancient Egyptians and Their Influence Upon the Civilization of Europe, London: Harper (1st edn 1911, 2nd edn 1923, retitled The Ancient Egyptians and the Origins of Civilization).    The Migrations of Early Culture, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1915.   The Evolution of the Dragon, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1919.   In the Beginning: The Origins of Culture, 1st edn, London: Howe, 1928; 2nd edn, London: Watts, 1934.   Human History, London: Jonathan Cape, 1930.    The Diffusion of Culture, London: Watts, 1933. See also G. Elliot Smith, Bronislaw Malinowski, Herbert J. Spinden and Alexander Goldenweiser, Culture: The Diffusion Controversy, London: Kegan Paul, 1928. Relevant works by W. J. Perry are:    The Megalithic Culture of Indonesia, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1918.   The Children of the Sun: A Study in the Early History of Civilization, London: Methuen, 1923.    Origin of Magic and Religion, London: Methuen, 1923.   The Growth of Civilization, London: Methuen, 1924, 1926, Harmondsworth UK: Penguin, 1937.

CHAPTER 5: THE BLIGHT OF ‘RACE’ On identity, see Amartya Sen, Identity and Violence, New York: Norton and London: Penguin, 2006. Ivan Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West, Washington: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1996, is a very thorough survey and makes the argument that race is a recent concept. John P. Jackson and Nadine M. Weidman, Race, Racism and Science: Social Impact and Interaction, Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2004, is a useful survey of the history of race especially through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For the history of European racism, see M. S. Staum, ‘Paris ethnology and the perfectibility of “races”’, Canadian Journal of History, 35, 2000, pp. 453–73; and work by Michael D. Biddiss: ‘Gobineau and the origins of European racism’, Race and Class, 7, 1966, pp. 255–70; Father of Racist Ideology: The Social and Political Thought of Count Gobineau, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1970; and Images of Race, Leicester: Leicester University Press and New York: Holmes & Meier, 1979. Primary sources of racial theory are noted in the citations of text quoted in this chapter, as are key contributors in the challenge to the concept of biological race. On the 1930s debate on race, see Elazar Barkan, ‘Mobilizing scientists against Nazi racism, 1933–1939’, in G. W. Stocking (ed.), Bones, Bodies, Behavior: Essays on Biological Anthropology, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988, pp. 180–205. Note also D. Paul, ‘Eugenics and the left’, Journal of the History of Ideas 45, 1984, pp. 567–90. A key paper in the discussion of race is Frank B. Livingstone, ‘On the non-existence of human races’, Current Anthropology 3, 1962, pp. 279–81; see also the comments by Theodore Dobzhansky.

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The biological analysis of Egyptian skeletal material is C. Loring Brace, David P. Tracer, Lucia Allen Yaroch, John Robb, Kari Brandt and A. Russell Nelson, ‘Clines and clusters versus “Race”: a test in ancient Egypt and the case of a death on the Nile’, American Journal of Physical Anthropology 36, Issue Supplement 17, 1993, pp. 1–31. Breasted’s writing is discussed in Lindsay J. Ambridge, ‘Imperialism and racial geography in James Henry Breasted’s Ancient Times, a History of the Early World’, in Thomas Schneider and Peter Raulwing (eds), Egyptology from the First World War to the Third Reich, Leiden: Brill, 2013, pp. 12–33. The support for racial thought and the eugenics movement by the leading Egyptologist of his day, Flinders Petrie, is explored in detail in Debbie Challis, The Archaeology of Race: The Eugenic Ideas of Francis Galton and Flinders Petrie, London: Bloomsbury, 2013. A thoughtful recent survey of ethnic identity and supposed homogeneity in ancient Egypt is Christina Riggs and John Baines, ‘Ethnicity’, UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, online at http:// escholarship.org/uc/item/32r9x0jr.

CHAPTER 6: RACE REVERSED: THE AFROCENTRIC CHALLENGE A valuable study of different strands of Afrocentric views, including those of Diop, is Stephen Howe, Afrocentrism: Mythical Pasts and Imagined Homes, London: Verso, 1998. On early arguments for a black Egypt see also Bruce Dain, ‘Haiti and Egypt in early black racial discourse in the United States’, Slavery & Abolition 14, 1993, pp. 139–61. Different approaches and symbolism of Egypt in black and white America of the nineteenth century are discussed from a literary and cultural perspective in Scott Trafton, Egypt Land: Race and Nineteenth-Century American Egyptomania, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. Trafton outlines a broad range of writings from the period relevant to the era’s conflicting perspectives. A polemical attack on Afrocentrism is Mary R. Lefkowitz, Not Out of Africa: How ‘Afrocentrism’ Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History, New York: Basic Books, 1997. Ann Macy Roth has written brief if useful comments on these issues. See ‘Ancient Egypt in America: reclaiming the riches’, in Lynn Meskell (ed.), Archaeology Under Fire: Nationalism, Politics and Heritages in the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East, London: Routledge, 1998, pp. 217–29; and ‘Afrocentrism’, in Donald B. Redford (ed.), Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt, vol. I, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 29–32. Critiques from within the African American community include Wilson Jeremiah Moses, Afrotopia: The Roots of African American Popular History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998; Clarence E. Walker, We Can’t Go Home Again: An Argument about Afrocentrism, New York: Oxford University Press, 2001; and Algernon Austin, Achieving Blacks: Race, Black Nationalism, and Afrocentrism in the Twentieth Century, New York: New York University Press, 2006. Diop, Bernal and Africanist perspectives on ancient Egypt are discussed by contributors to David O’Connor and Andrew Reid (eds), Ancient Egypt in Africa, London: UCL Press, 2003. Major works of Cheikh Anta Diop in English are The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality, New York: Lawrence Hill, 1974; Precolonial Black Africa, Westport, CN: Lawrence Hill, 1987; The Cultural Unity of Black Africa, London: Karnak House, 1989; and Civilization or Barbarism, Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 1991. Some of these titles have been reissued. Important and relevant works by American Afrocentric writers are detailed in the references to quotations. The major books by Molefi Kete Asante are The Afrocentric Idea, Philadelphia:

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Temple University Press, 1987; Kemet, Afrocentricity, and Knowledge, Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1990; An Afrocentric Manifesto, Cambridge: Polity, 2007; and The History of Africa: The Quest for Eternal Harmony, New York: Routledge, 2007. The sequence of books in the Black Athena debate is complex, because critiques were raised, and answered, before the full three volumes were available. Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, vol. I: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785-1985 was published in 1987 (London: Free Association Press; New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press), and vol. II: The Archaeological and Documentary Evidence in 1991. Multiple authors contributed responses in Mary R. Lefkowitz and Guy MacLean Rogers (eds), Black Athena Revisited, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. Bernal responded in Black Athena Writes Back: Martin Bernal Responds to his Critics, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001. A survey of the issues is in Jacques Berlinerblau, Heresy in the University: The Black Athena Controversy and the Responsibilities of American Intellectuals, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press 1999. Then the detailed evidence on which the hypothesis was based appeared as Black Athena, vol. III: The Linguistic Evidence, New Brunswick, NC: Rutgers University Press, 2006. There is some discussion of related issues in Robin Derricourt, Inventing Africa: History, Archaeology and Ideas, London: Pluto, 2011, Ch. 6 on ‘Ancient Egypt and African sources of civilisation’. The New York genetic study is reported by Yin Leng Lee, Susan Teitelbaum, Mary S. Wolff, James G. Wetmur and Jia Chen, ‘Comparing genetic ancestry and self-reported race/ethnicity in a multiethnic population in New York City’, Journal of Genetics 89, 2010, pp. 417–23. On a different but related theme, there is discussion of the identification of African Americans with Judaism in Edith Bruder, The Black Jews of Africa: History, Religion, Identity, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

CHAPTER 7: CREATING NARRATIVES OF ‘THE HOLY LAND’ James B. Pritchard (ed.), Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament, 3rd edn, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969; and The Ancient Near East: An Anthology of Texts and Pictures, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010, are excellent sources for ancient documents of the region. Of the numerous translations of the Bible in print, the New Revised Standard Version (1989) has the advantage of providing a translation into modern English without imposing a modern theological reinterpretation, and is used for citations here. The Cambridge Annotated Study Bible, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, supplements this translation with useful notes and apparatus. As a general reference work on biblical literature, the informed background articles are useful in Bruce M. Metzger and Michael D. Coogan (eds), The Oxford Companion to the Bible, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. A quick reference list of Mosaic laws is online at http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/613_Mitzvot. Michael D. Coogan, The Old Testament: A Historical and Literary Introduction to the Hebrew Scriptures, 2nd edn, New York: Oxford University Press, 2011, is a widely used textbook survey and summary of current knowledge. A thorough survey volume on the Old Testament prophets is Paul L. Redditt, Introduction to the Prophets, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008.

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Philip R. Davies, In Search of Ancient Israel, Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1992, is a clearly written essay on the distinction of biblical from historical Israel. For the minimalist approach to the chronology and setting of Old Testament books, a detailed argument is in Thomas L. Thompson, Early History of the Israelite People: From the Written and Archaeological Sources, Leiden: Brill, 1992; for a more polemical general presentation, see Thomas L. Thompson, The Bible in History: How Writers Create a Past, London: Jonathan Cape, 1999. A useful critique of minimalism by George Athas is online at http://jmm.aaa.net.au/ articles/9246.htm. More specialist discussions of historical interpretations include Walter Dietrich, The Early Monarchy of Israel: The Tenth Century B.C.E., Leiden: Brill, 2007. A special mention should be made of Irving Finkel, The Ark Before Noah: Decoding the Story of the Flood, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2014. This witty and appealing book places one of the biblical narratives in its wider Near Eastern setting.

CHAPTER 8: CONFLICTED PASTS OF ISRAEL: POLITICS, RELIGION, IDENTITY For the history of archaeological research in Israel, Palestine and Syria, see P. R. S. Moorey, A Century of Biblical Archaeology, London: Lutterworth Press, 1991; M. Díaz-Andreu, A World History of Nineteenth-Century Archaeology: Nationalism, Colonialism and the Past, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, Ch. 6; Neil A. Silberman, Digging for God and Country: Exploration, Archaeology, and the Secret Struggle for the Holy Land 1799–1917, New York: Knopf, 1982; and Thomas W. Davis, Shifting Sands: The Rise and Fall of Biblical Archaeology, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, on the subsequent period. There is also background in P. J. King, American Archaeology in the Mideast: A History of the American Schools of Oriental Research, Philadelphia: American Schools of Oriental Research, 1983. The more recent archaeological picture relating to ancient Israel is described and discussed in Israel Finkelstein and Neil A. Silberman, The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of its Sacred Texts, New York: Free Press, 2001. A detailed review of the archaeological context for understanding ‘David’ and ‘Solomon’ is Israel Finkelstein and Neil A. Silberman, David and Solomon, New York: Free Press, 2006. Katharine Galor and Hanswulf Bloedhorn, The Archaeology of Jerusalem: From the Origins to the Ottomans, New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2013, includes the traditional approach of citing biblical texts for the archaeologically missing Davidic and First Temple period. A brief general survey is John H. C. Laughlin, Archaeology and the Bible, London: Routledge, 2000. See also R. S. Hess, Israelite Religions: An Archaeological and Biblical Survey, Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2007. Israel Finkelstein and Amihai Mazar with Brian B. Schmidt (eds), The Quest for the Historical Israel: Debating Archaeology and the History of Early Israel, Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2007, presents two views of the same material. William G. Dever has contributed a number of discussions on archaeology and the biblical lands, including Who Were the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From?, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003; and Did God Have a Wife?, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005. For a discussion of the relations of Zionist ideology to historical imagery, see Gabriel Piterberg, The Returns of Zionism: Myths, Politics and Scholarship in Israel, London: Verso, 2008,

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especially Chs 6 and 7. The topic is addressed in different ways in David Ohana, The Origin of Israeli Mythology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. The political application of ancient Israel in modern Israel is discussed by Keith W. Whitelam, The Invention of Ancient Israel: The Silencing of Palestinian History, London: Routledge, 1996. He presaged this in a co-authored book: Robert B. Coote and Keith W. Whitelam, The Emergence of Early Israel in Historical Perspective, Sheffield: Almond Press, 1987 (2nd edn, Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2010). An argument around the same issues and a discussion of Christian Zionism are included in Nur Masalha, The Bible and Zionism: Invented Traditions, Archaeology and Post-Colonialism in Palestine-Israel, London: Zed Books, 2007. A useful history of Christian Zionism is Dan Cohn-Sherbok, The Politics of Apocalypse: The History and Influence of Christian Zionism, Oxford: Oneworld, 2006. Tel Aviv historian Shlomo Sand, in The Invention of the Jewish People, London: Verso, 2009, includes the evidence of archaeological work alongside discussion of genetics and of broader national myth-making in a book which proved controversial in Israel in its Hebrew edition. The sequel The Invention of the Land of Israel, London: Verso, 2012, considers the ideological origins of territorial claims. Shorter scholarly discussions of the social and political context of archaeological debates include N. A. el-Haj, ‘Translating truths: nationalism, the practice of archaeology, and the remaking of past and present in contemporary Jerusalem’, American Ethnologist 25 (2), 1998, pp. 166–88; Neil A. Silberman, ‘Whose game is it anyway? The political and social transformations of American biblical archaeology’, in Lynn Meskell (ed.), Archaeology Under Fire: Nationalism, Politics and Heritage in the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East, London: Routledge, 1998, pp. 175–88; Sandra Scham, ‘Diplomacy and desired pasts’, Journal of Social Archaeology 9, 2009, pp. 163–99; R. S. Hallote and A. H. Joffe, ‘The politics of Israeli archaeology: between “nationalism” and “science” in the age of the second republic’, Israeli Studies 7 (3), 2002, pp. 84–116; and at greater length N. A. el-Haj, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2001; and Raphael Greenberg, ‘Towards an inclusive archaeology in Jerusalem: the case of Silwan/The City of David’, Public Archaeology 8, 2009, pp. 35–50. More general narratives on archaeological topics include contributions to the journal Biblical Archaeology Review, such as David Ilan, ‘Archaeology adding to the powder keg’, Biblical Archaeology Review 34 (6), 2008, p. 36; Rachel Hallote, ‘Who pays for excavations? Religious and political agendas in the funding of “biblical” archaeology’, Biblical Archaeology Review 35 (2), 2009, p. 22. Other articles are Sandra Scham, ‘The lost goddess of Israel’, Archaeology, March 2005, pp. 36–40; John W. Betylon, ‘A people transformed: Palestine in the Persian period’, Near Eastern Archaeology 68, 2005, pp. 4–58; Mati Milstein, ‘No saints in Jerusalem’, Archaeology, September 2010, p. 18ff.; Steven Erlanger, ‘King David’s palace is found, archaeologist says’, New York Times, 5 August 2010. The religious influences on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Egyptology are discussed in David Gange, ‘Religion and science in late nineteenth century British Egyptology’, Historical Journal 49, 2006, pp. 1083–103.

CHAPTER 9: LOST TRIBES There is a substantial literature relating to the Ten Tribes, including the narratives of those seeking one or more Lost Tribes in different parts of the world. The classic analysis of the issue and its

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history is the lengthy Allen H. Godbey, The Lost Tribes, A Myth: Suggestions Towards Rewriting Hebrew History, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1930 (reprinted New York: KTAV, 1974). A useful, thorough and readable modern survey is Tudor Parfitt, The Lost Tribes of Israel: The History of a Myth, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2002. The same author has written on individual groups associated with the myth. Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, The Ten Lost Tribes: A World History, New York: Oxford University Press, 2009, is an accessible volume which considers especially the Jewish search for the Lost Tribes. Edith Bruder, The Black Jews of Africa: History, Religion, Identity, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, includes a useful general survey as well as details on expanding African claims to a historical Jewish identity.

CHAPTER 10: DISTANT LINKS: APOSTOLIC TRAVELLERS Geza Vermes, Christian Beginnings: From Nazareth to Nicaea (CE 30–325), London: Penguin, 2012, is a valuable survey by a distinguished scholar, pulling together the conclusions of a lifetime of study of the biblical and contemporary sources and Christianity in the context of Jewish society. The translation of the Bible used here is the New Revised Standard Version (1989). For books of the Apocryphal New Testament, the most detailed English language edition is Wilhelm Schneemelcher and R. McL. Wilson (eds), New Testament Apocrypha, rev. edn, 2 vols, Cambridge: James Clarke and Louisville, KY: Westminster, 1991–2; an older collection is M. R. James (ed.), The Apocryphal New Testament, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924. Useful reference works are David Farmer (ed.), The Oxford Dictionary of Saints, 5th edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011; and F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone, Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 2nd edn, London: Oxford University Press, 1974. Useful scholarly articles on early Christianity are in the early volumes of The Cambridge History of Christianity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006–9. Current Roman Catholic thinking is presented by mainly American scholars in The New Catholic Encyclopedia, 2nd edn, Detroit: Thomson Gale, 2003. It is an ultimate successor to The Catholic Encyclopedia, New York: Robert Appleton, 1907–14, online at http://www.newadvent. org/cathen, which reflects an earlier set of Roman Catholic history and interpretations. Translations of The Golden Legend are Granger Ryan and Helmut Ripperger, The Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine, New York: Arno Press, 1969; and Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, trans. W. Granger Ryan, 2 vols, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. In Michael D. Goulder, ‘Did Peter ever go to Rome?’, Scottish Journal of Theology 57 (4), 2004, pp. 377–96, the British Professor of Biblical Studies disinters the evidence and concludes that Peter ‘probably died in his bed in Jerusalem about A.D. 55’. An alternative view is argued by Markus Bockmuehl, ‘Peter’s death in Rome? Back to front and upside down’, Scottish Journal of Theology 60 (1), 2007, pp. 1–23. Accounts of Peter are discussed in Bart D. Ehrman, Peter, Paul and Mary Magdalene: The Followers of Jesus in History and Legend, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. A short popular account claiming the discovery of Saint Peter’s bones was published by Margherita Guarducci as The Tomb of St. Peter, New York: Hawthorn and London: Harrap, 1960. For a different view, see John Curran, ‘The bones of St. Peter?’, Classics Ireland 3, 1996, pp. 18–46.

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The languages of early first-century Palestine are discussed by Aaron Teshan, ‘The languages spoken by Jesus’, The Master’s Seminary Journal 20 (1), 2009, pp. 71–94; and Stanley E. Porter, ‘Did Jesus ever teach in Greek?’, Tyndale Bulletin 44 (2), 1993, pp. 199–235. The classic work by Sir Thomas Kendrick on Santiago presents a readable survey of the legend and its development in English: T. D. Kendrick, St James in Spain, London: Methuen, 1960. The sources of the narratives around Saint James in Spain are described, analysed and discussed in detail in Jan van Herwaarden, ‘The origins of the cult of St James of Compostela’, Journal of Medieval History 6 (1), 1980, pp. 1–35; with a partly revised version as Ch. 9 of Jan van Herwaarden, Between Saint James and Erasmus, Leiden: Brill, 2003. A good general discussion of the issues is ‘The early history of the cult of St. James’, in Richard A. Fletcher, Saint James’s Catapult, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984, Ch. 3. The pilgrimage attracted by the shrine of Saint James’ burial in Compostela is the subject of ever-growing numbers of publications. A classic, summarising the historical myth, is Walter Starkie, The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St James, London: John Murray, 1957. More detailed discussion includes essays in Maryjane Dunn and Linda Kay Davidson (eds), The Pilgrimage to Compostela in the Middle Ages, New York: Garland, 1996. Both the Thomas legend and the history of the Saint Thomas Christians are discussed in Robert Eric Frykenberg, Christianity in India: From Beginnings to the Present, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008; Leonardo Fernando and G. Gispert-Sauch, Christianity in India: Two Thousand Years of Faith, New Delhi: Penguin, 2004; Stephen Neill, A History of Christianity in India: The Beginnings to 1707, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984; George Mark Moraes, A History of Christianity in India, Bombay: Manaktalas, 1964; and L. W. Brown, The Indian Christians of St Thomas, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956. The Acts of Thomas is discussed in detail by contributors to Jan N. Bremmer (ed.), The Apocryphal Acts of Thomas, Leuven: Peeters, 2001, including Bremmer himself on date and location, and Lourens P. van den Bosch, ‘India and the apostolate of St. Thomas’. A defence of a historical basis for the text is George Nedungatt, ‘The Apocryphal Acts of Thomas and Christian origins in India’, Gregorianum 92 (3), 2011, pp. 533–57, who suggests that an actual journey to India by Thomas underlay the development of the apocryphal book. The legend of Joseph of Arimathea in Britain is presented in a general survey by R. F. Trehearne, The Glastonbury Legends: Joseph of Arimathea, the Holy Grail and King Arthur, London: Cresset Press, 1967. For discussion see Daniel Scavone, ‘Joseph of Arimathea, the Holy Grail, and the Edessa Icon’, Arthuriana 9 (4), 1999, pp. 1–31, which proposes an impressive argument for the origin of the association of Joseph with Britain. For later influence of the story, see Jack Cunningham, ‘“A young man’s brow and an old man’s beard”: the rise and fall of Joseph of Arimathea in English Reformation thought’, Theology, July 2009 (112), 2009, pp. 251–9. The revision of the text by William of Malmesbury was analysed in J. Armitage Robinson, Somerset Historical Essays, London: Oxford University Press, 1921. Robinson also wrote a short general book: Two Glastonbury Legends: King Arthur and St. Joseph of Arimathea, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1926. There is a large literature on the Holy Grail and an even larger library on Arthurian legend. Surveys of the Holy Grail include D. D. R. Owen, The Evolution of the Grail Legend, Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1968; and Malcolm Godwin, The Holy Grail: Its Origins, Secrets and Meaning Revealed, London: Bloomsbury, 1994. Different essays on Glastonbury and its traditions are assembled in James P. Carley (ed.), Glastonbury Abbey and the Arthurian Tradition, Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2001. Particularly useful are contributions by Felicity Riddy, Antonia Gransden, and especially Valerie Lagorio, ‘The evolving legend of St Joseph of Glastonbury’, which first appeared in Speculum 46, 1971, pp. 209–31.

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For Mary Magdalene in France, see the text and translations by Raymond Clemens, ‘The cult of Mary Magdalen in late medieval France’, in Thomas Head (ed.), Medieval Hagiography: An Anthology, New York: Routledge, 2001, pp. 655–74. On Saint Andrew’s role in Byzantium (Constantinople), see Francis Dvornik, The Idea of Apostolicity in Byzantium and the Legend of the Apostle Andrew, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958. This book is also a useful survey of the importance of apostolic links in the politics of the early church.

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INDEX

Abd al-Latif, 76 Abraham (patriarch), 2, 26, 178, 193, 203, 206, 219 Adam, Jean-Pierre, 58 Ado (bishop), 233 Africa, 2, 12, 33, 89, 93, 116, 119–21, 130–1, 134–5, 136, 138–40, 142, 144–6, 149–70, 213, 215, 217; see also Ethiopia African Americans, 10, 32–3, 52, 149–70 Afrocentrism, 149–70 Akhenaten, 11, 28, 44, 110, 156 Akkad, 142 Albright, William F., 197–8, 204 Alcott, Louisa May, 100 Aldhelm of Malmesbury, 230 Alexander the Great, 17, 19, 20, 107, 164, 174, 194 Alexandria, 24, 52, 76–7, 108, 156, 246 Alfonso II (king), 233 Alfonso III (king), 233 Alford, Alan, 53 Allen, Grant, 85–6 Alveydre, Alexandre Saint-Yves d’, 28 Amarna, 110 American Anthropological Association, 141 American Schools of Oriental Research, 196–8 Americas, 26, 45, 104, 109, 111, 116–17, 119, 121, 139, 150, 151, 161–2, 214, 234–5, 236; see also United States of America AMORC, 27–9 Anatolia, see Turkey al-Andalusi, Sa’id, 21

Andrew, Saint, 248–50 Anthony, Saint, 73 Anthroposophical Society, 27 apostles, 4–5, 220–50 Arabia, 1, 2, 5, 12, 46, 116, 138, 205, 210, 238–9 Arabs, 2, 11, 20–1, 23, 39, 47–8, 76–7, 133, 161, 164, 191, 204–5 Ararat, 12, 49 archaeology, xi, 3, 5–7, 10, 12, 16, 40, 62, 64, 69, 100, 110, 111, 113–14, 115, 118, 120, 121, 126–8, 171–3, 176, 179–80, 184, 186, 188, 191–210, 251–7; see also excavation Arthur (king), 241, 243 Asante, Molefi Kete, 163–6 Asherah, 180 Asia Minor, see Turkey Assman, Jan, 166 Association for Research and Enlightenment, 31 Association for the Study of Classical African Civilizations, 167 Assurbanipal, 194 Assyrians, 138, 152, 173, 176, 180–1, 194, 201, 211–12 Atlantis, 28, 30, 36, 38–9, 51–2, 105, 215 Augustine, Saint, 133 Austin, Algernon, 166 Austin, Jane G., 85 Avicenna (Ibn Sina), 76 Babel, Tower of, 50

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Babylon, 45, 174–5, 177–8, 181, 185, 188, 190, 200, 211–14 Babylonians, 57, 152, 173–8, 181 Bacon, Francis, 21, 77 Balfour Declaration, 66, 209–10 Ballard, Robert, 52 Bard, Kathryn, 169 Bartholomew, Saint, 246 Bauval, Robert, 36–7, 63–4 Beaudine, William, 96 Belzoni, Giovanni, 80 Benedict XVI (pope), 239 Benjamin of Tudela, 48, 213 Berlinerblau, Jacques, 169 Bernal, Martin, 107, 150–1, 160, 167–9 Bernard, William Bayle, 83 Bernier, François, 135 Bible, see New Testament; Tanakh Biblical Archaeology Society (USA), 199, 209 Biblical Research Account, 196 Biot, Jean Baptiste, 53 Birch, Samuel, 194 Black Athena, see Bernal, Martin Blake, William, 240–1 Blavatsky, Helena Petrovna, 26–8, 68 Blome, John, 245 Blumenbach, Johann, 80, 135–6 Booth, Michael, 95 Boothby, Guy, 90 Boron, Robert de, 244 Boulter, Carmen, 38, 54 Bourgeois, Gérard, 95 Boyle, Robert, 78 Brace, C. Loring, 146 Bradley, Michael, 164 Breasted, James H., 145 Britain, 60, 79, 105, 111, 113–15, 124–5, 215–17, 220, 225, 240–6 British (people), 60, 66, 124–8, 192, 194, 216–17 British Association for the Advancement of Science, 117–20 British colonialism, 2–3, 5, 27, 66, 85, 96, 103, 104, 120, 125, 127–9, 195–7, 209–10, 216–17 British Israelism, 211, 216–19, 241 British Museum, 73, 89, 92, 102 Broughton, Richard, 245 Browne, Thomas, 78

Brugsch, Heinrich Karl, 18, 255 Brunès, Tons, 68 Bruno, Giordano, 21 Brunton, Paul, 51 Buckland, A.W., 120 Buckland, William, 188 Budge, E.A. Wallis, 19, 145, 255 Byzantium, 248–50 Cagliostro, Alessandro di, 23–4, 50–1 Cairo, 39, 76–7, 110, 113–16, 124, 145 Calvert, Charles, 96 Calvin, John, 187 Canaan, see Palestine Canaanites, 11, 180–1, 197, 199–200, 203–5, 210 Capper, Richard, 85 Care, Henry, 228 Carnarvon, Lord, 100–1 Carter, Howard, 100–1 Casaubon, Isaac, 21 Çatal Höyük, 256 Catholic Church, 5, 21–2, 94, 186–7, 224–35, 238–40 Cayce, Edgar, 30–1, 51 Chamberlain, Houston Stewart, 140 Champion, Timothy, 111 Champollion, Jean-François, 18, 26, 109 Chaney, Lon, 97, 98 Chatelain, Maurice, 52 Cheops, see Khufu Chephren, see Khafre Childe, Vere Gordon, 128, 255–6 China, 109–10, 111, 116–17, 119, 121, 139, 215, 239 Christian Zionism, 5, 208–9 Christianity, see Catholic Church; Copts; Eastern Churches; Protestantism Christie, Al, 96 Church of the Eternal Source, 34 Church of Latter Day Saints, see Smith, Joseph cinema, see film Clement of Alexandria, 227 Clement of Rome (pope), 226 Cleopatra, 11, 14, 106, 107, 164, 166 Coleby, A. E., 95 Compostela, 229, 232–3, 235 Conan Doyle, Arthur, 86–9, 92, 101

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Conring, Hermann, 21 Constantine (emperor), 224, 249 Constantinople, 248–50 Cook, Michael, 20 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 21 Copts, 17, 20, 73, 237, 246 Corelli, Marie, 101 Cortes, Hernando, 234 Cotsworth, Moses B., 53, 62 Courtet de l’Isle, Victor, 143 Crawford, K. W., 162 curse, 26, 72, 85, 93–4, 95–8, 99–103, 147 Cutliffe-Hyne, C.J., 92 Cyprian (bishop), 230 Cyrus the Great, 174–5, 178, 188–9 Daly, Nicholas, 80–1 Daniel, Glyn, 111, 126 Däniken, Erich von, 35, 52 Darius I, 175 Dart, Raymond, 118 Darwin, Charles, 139 Davey, Horace, 96 David (king), 179–80, 188, 197, 200–2, 205–7, 210 Davidson, David, 62, 64 Day, Jasmine, 100 Dayan, Moshe, 202 Dead Sea Scrolls, 174 Deir el-Bahri, 120 Deuteronomist, 177–82 Deutscher Palästina Verein, 194 Deverall, Robert, 105 Dimde, Manfred, 54 Diodorus Siculus, 17, 47, 76, 106 Diop, Cheikh Anta, 150, 153, 157–9, 163, 166, 167 Dioscorides, 76 documentaries, see film Donnelly, Ignatius, 30, 51 Douglass, Frederick, 153–4 Drake, St Clair, 163 Drbal, Karel, 54 Du Bois, W. E. B., 154–6 Dugdale, William, 245 Dunstan, Saint, 242 Eastern Churches, 230, 236–8, 244, 249–50 Easton, Hosea, 153

Edessa, 236–8 Edgar, Morton, 67 Edwards, Amelia, 195 Egypt, 1–7, 11–13, 14–170 passim, 178–82, 194–6, 199, 214, 217, 223, 246, 249, 254–7 Egypt Exploration Fund, 85, 195 Egyptian Museum Cairo, 39, 93, 110 Egyptocentrism, 104–29 Egyptosophy, 16, 31, 40 Einstein, Albert, 251 Elam, 174 Eldad ha-Dani, 213 Eleutherius (pope), 242 Elohim, 178 England, see Britain Enlightenment (period), 9, 16, 31, 108, 134, 187 Ethiopia, 146, 152, 154, 215, 240, 247–8 ethnicity, 131–3, 139, 141–2, 164, 178 Ethnological Society of London, 143 Eusebius, 224–5, 236, 240, 248 Everett, Alexander, 152 Everett, H. D., 89 excavation, 6, 188, 252–3, 256; Egypt, 15, 18, 25, 46, 93, 100, 115, 195; Glastonbury, 245; Israel, 192–3, 198, 201, 202; Jerusalem, 10, 203, 205, 207; Near East, 194, 199–200; Rome, 229 Exodus, 2, 12, 17, 47, 65, 107, 173, 176–8, 182–3, 188, 195, 199, 206 Faber, George Stanley, 49 Fanon, Frantz, 157 Fard, W. D., 156 Farrar, Frederic, 143 Fernandez, Diego, 239 fertile crescent, 3, 255 Feydeau, Ernest, 84 fiction (novels, short stories), 24, 80–94, 96, 100, 101, 111, 160 film: documentaries, 4, 12–3, 14–15, 35–6, 38, 54, 68, 70, 199, 246; entertainment movies, 40, 72, 74, 94, 95–9, 100, 101, 103 Finkelstein, Israel, 204 Flanagan, Pat, 54 Fontaine, Guy de la, 77 France, 2, 24, 77–8, 104, 124, 127, 143, 157, 226, 230, 233, 241–3, 246–7

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Freculf (bishop), 242 Freedom’s Journal, 152 Freeman, R. Austin, 92 Freemasonry, 22–4, 27, 40, 50–1 Freud, Sigmund, 110 Freund, Karl, 96 Funck-Hellet, Ch., 68 Gale, Theophilus, 22 Galton, Francis, 145 Gardiner, Alan, 100, 167, 255–6 Garnier, John, 64, 217 Garvey, Marcus, 156 Gaul, see France Gaunt, Mary, 93 Gautier, Théophile, 83–4 Geoffrey of Monmouth, 243 Gerald of Wales, 243 Gerar, 196 Germany, 23, 24, 93, 104, 127, 140, 156, 194 Gezer, 193 Giza, 8, 17, 28, 31, 35, 42–71, 81, 124 Glastonbury, 241–6 Göbekli Tepe, 45, 256 Gobineau, Arthur de, 136–40, 142 Golden Dawn, 27 Golden Legend, The, 220–1, 227, 232, 246–50 gospels, see New Testament Grant, Asahel, 214–15 Great Pyramid, see Giza Greaves, John, 54–6, 58 Greece, 30, 106, 225, 248–9 Greeks, 1, 8, 16–17, 19, 21–2, 28, 44, 46, 58, 73, 84, 105–8, 133, 138, 143–4, 149–50, 157–8, 160, 164, 167–8, 188 Greenberg, Raphael, 208 Grégoire, Henri, 142–3 Gregory of Tours, 238, 248 Griffith, George, 92 Guarducci, Margherita, 229 Gundaphorus (king), 236–7 Haddon, A. C., 118, 140 Haeckel, Ernst, 132, 139 Haggard, H. Rider, 89, 93 Hamas, 205 Hamites, 130, 138–40, 147–8, 155 Hammurabi, 181 Hancock, Graham, 37, 64

Hannaford, Ivan, 133 Harrison, Ted, 246 Hawass, Zahi, 54 Hawthorne, Julian, 85 Hebrew Bible, see Tanakh Hebrews, 22, 133, 138, 152; see also Israel Helena (empress), 249 Helinand of Froidmont, 244 Heliopolis, 46 Herakles, 106 Hermes Trismegistus, 19–24, 28 Hermeticism, 19–24, 25, 27–8, 32, 34, 39–40, 223 Herodotus, 16, 17, 24, 38, 47, 73, 76, 106–7 Heron, E. & H., 90 Hertog, Roger, 208 hieroglyphic, 18, 19, 109, 194 History Channel, 35 Holy Grail, 243–4 Hornung, Erik, 16 Howard-Vyse, Richard, 58–9 Howe, Stephen, 151 Huet, Pierre, 109 Huxley, Julian, 140, 141 Huxley, Thomas Henry, 139 hyperdiffusionism, 110–29 Ibn Serapion, 76 Icke, David, 52 Idris, 20 Imhotep, 44 imperialism, 104, 107, 110, 127, 211; see also British colonialism India, 2, 4, 27, 75, 109, 116–17, 119–22, 127, 138–9, 146, 215, 235–40, 246 Institute of Pyramidology, 64–5 internet, see websites Ir David Foundation, 207–8 Iranians, see Persians Iraq, see Mesopotamia Irwin, Constance, 161 Isidore of Seville, 230 Islam, 2–3, 10, 12, 17, 20, 40–1, 47, 75–7, 102, 107–8, 119, 124, 172, 179, 186, 205, 209, 220–1; see also Qur’an Islamist movements, 186 Israel (ancient), 11, 12, 47–8, 50, 107, 110, 133, 152, 154, 172–3, 176–90, 195, 197,

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199–201, 204–5, 211–12, 214, 216; see also Lost Tribes Israel (modern state), 3, 5, 10, 12, 171, 183, 191–210, 215 Israel Exploration Society, 202 Italy, 8, 22, 236, 249; see also Rome Iversen, Erik, 21

Keynes, John Maynard, 45 Khafre, 35, 45, 54 Khirbet Qeiyafa, 207 Khufu, 8, 42, 45, 81–3 al-Kindi, 76 Kunkel, Edward, 53 Kyle, Melvin Grove, 198

James, George, 160 James, Saint, 5, 229–35, 242 Jeffreys, David, 45 Jehovah’s Witnesses, 67 Jericho, 181–2 Jerome, Saint, 240, 241 Jerusalem, 2, 5, 7, 10, 26, 55, 173–6, 178–80, 193–4, 197, 199–203, 205–10, 211, 213–14, 220, 222, 224, 227, 229, 232–3, 237, 240, 244 Jesus Christ, 2, 12, 65, 171, 208, 220–5, 228–30, 235, 237, 239–46 Jewish people, 2, 5, 12, 21, 22, 48, 66, 77, 110, 136, 138, 139–40, 171–90, 191–210, 211–19, 222–3, 224–5, 227, 240; see also Judaism Jomard, Edmé François, 58, 62 Jones, William, 138 Joseph (patriarch), 12, 17, 21, 26, 43, 48–9, 71, 90, 171, 177 Joseph of Arimathea, 214, 240–6 Josephus, 47 Joshua, 173, 176, 180, 197, 200 Josiah (king), 179, 181 Judah (pre-exilic), 2, 107, 173–5, 177–81, 188, 197, 199–201, 205, 207, 210, 211–13, 215 Judaism, 2, 10, 11–12, 21, 22, 28, 44, 47, 68, 71, 107–8, 172, 174–5, 179–80, 183–4, 187, 211, 215, 220–1, 223, 225, 236; see also Tanakh Judea (post-exilic), 174–7, 191, 220–1, 223, 225, 227, 232, 241, 245 Julius Honorius, 48

language, 22, 34, 50, 109, 131, 138–9, 140, 142, 144–5, 147–8, 212, 225 Leclerc, George-Louis, 135 Lemesurier, Peter, 67 Lenormant, Charles, 143 Leo XIII (pope), 235 Lewis, H. Spencer, 27–9, 63 Linnaeus, Carl, 135 Livingstone, Frank, 141 Lopez, José Alvarez, 63 Lost Tribes, 12, 176, 211–19 Louvre Museum, 87 Lowie, R.H., 127 Lubicz, René Schwaller de, 28, 35, 68 Lubitch, Ernst, 95 Lucius (king), 242–3

Karenga, Maulana, 166 Keane, Augustus Henry, 12 Kemetism, 32–5, 40 Kemp, Barry J., 256 Kenyon, Kathleen, 207 Kephra Publications, 34 Kerala, 235, 238, 239

Macalister, R.A.S., 193 Madagascar, 12 el-Magar, 76 Maier, Michael, 23 Maimonides, 187 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 128 Mandeville, Sir John, 48–9 al-Maqrizi, 49 Marduk, 174 Mariette, Auguste, 18, 109 Mark, Saint, 246–7 Marsh, Richard, 91 Marx, Karl, 253–4 Mary (mother of Jesus), 232 Mary Magdalene, 247 Mazar, Benjamin, 202–3 Mazar, Eilat, 203, 207 Medes, see Persians medieval (period), 8, 11, 17, 20–1, 45, 47–9, 72, 75, 108, 187, 213, 220, 229, 235, 240–5, 246–50 Megiddo, 194, 198 Meiners, Christoph, 136 Memphis, 45, 47, 162

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Menzies, Robert, 64 Meso-America, see Americas Mesopotamia, 2, 3, 39, 128, 138, 142, 174, 177, 179, 181, 192, 196, 199, 210, 236–7, 255, 257 Mill, John Stuart, 143 Mizpah, 175 Montagu, John Earl of Sandwich, 108–9 Montezinos, Antonio de, 214 Montserrat, Dominic, 110 Moorey, Roger, 198 Mormons, see Smith, Joseph Morton, Samuel, 143, 153 Moses (patriarch), 11–12, 21–2, 28, 48, 110, 173, 177–9, 182–3, 187, 195, 205 Moses, Wilson Jeremiah, 160 Moss, Harold, 33–4 movies, see film Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 24–5, 51 Muhammad, Elijah, 156 mumia, 75–9, 80 mummies, 3, 72–103, 111, 115, 119, 124 Mylapore, 238–40 Napoleon, Emperor, 2, 18, 58 Naville, Edouard, 195 Nazism, 129, 130, 134, 136, 140–1, 185 Needham, John, 109 Nefertari, 155–6 Nefertiti, 93 Neo-Babylonians, see Babylonians New Age movements, 31–5 New Testament, 221–4, 227, 230, 236–7, 241, 246, 250 Newell, Mike, 99 Newton, Sir Isaac, 18, 22, 55, 108–9 Nile Valley, see Egypt Nineveh, 152; see also Assyrians Noah (patriarch), 12, 49, 134, 147, 152, 178, 199, 214 Notker (monk), 233 novels, see fiction Nubia, 106, 115, 146–7, 161, 164 Nuttall, Zelia, 121 Nuwaubian, 33 Obenga, Théophile, 166 opera, 24–5, 90 Orientalism, see Said, Edward

Orion, 63–4 Orthodox churches, see Eastern Churches Ortona, 236 Osburn, William, 50 Osman, Ahmed, 36–7 Ottoman Empire, 2–3, 41, 102, 110, 125, 192, 194 Pacific, 104, 116–17, 121–2, 134, 155, 215 Palestine (modern territories), 172, 193–4, 196–7, 204, 208, 210 Palestine (region), 2, 4, 10, 33, 66, 171, 173–4, 178, 180, 183, 191, 192, 199, 201, 202, 204, 205, 211, 213, 222, 249, see also Judea Palestine Exploration Fund (UK), 192–3 Palestine Exploration Society (USA), 193–4 Paracelsus, 77 Paré, Ambroise, 78 Paris, Matthew, 213–14 Parthia, 236 Paul VI (pope), 229 Paul, Saint, 222–3, 225–6, 230 Pauw, Cornelius de, 53 Pelikan, Jaroslav, 228 Pentateuch, see Tanakh Perez, Marel, 96 Perry, William J., 111, 113, 117–18, 121, 123, 127 Persia, 75–6, 136, 213, 214, 239, 247, 255 Persians, 1, 2, 16, 17, 73, 106, 133, 174–9, 181, 192, 198, 200–2, 211, 223 Peter, Saint, 223, 224–9, 234, 247 Petrie, W. M. Flinders, 18, 44, 60, 62, 98, 118, 145, 156, 195–6 Pettigrew, Thomas, 74, 80 Philip, Saint, 230, 242, 246 Phillips, R. W., 96 Phoenicians, 1, 12, 117, 119–21, 123, 138, 161–2, 194, 210 Pius XII (pope), 229 Plato, 107 plays, 30, 83–5, 95, 110 Pliny the Elder, 76, 107 Pococke, Richard, 108 Poe, Edgar Allan, 83 Poole, Reginald, 195 Postel, Guillaume, 214 postmodernism, 251, 253, 256

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Pratt, Ambrose, 93 Prester John, 214, 238 Proctor, Richard, 63 Protestantism, 5, 22, 94, 124, 184–5, 186–7, 192–3, 197, 208, 214, 218, 245 pseudoarchaeology, see pseudohistory pseudohistory (term), 1, 5, 35, 37, 40, 44, 50, 52–3, 133, 160, 162, 167 pyramidologies, 5, 42–71, 105, 217 pyramids, 16–7, 21, 27, 35–6, 38, 41, 42–71, 105, 161; see also Giza; Sakkara Qur’an, 20, 44, 48, 183, 221 race, 26, 107, 115–16, 122, 130–48, 149–70 Rawlinson, George, 144 Raz-Krakotzkin, Amnon, 203 red mercury, 39 Reed, Ishmael, 160 Reformation, 6, 22, 49, 245 Reisner, G. A., 115 Rhazes, 76 Ripley, William, 140 Rivers, W. H. R., 117, 121, 122–3 Robert of Avesbury, 245 Rockefeller, John D., 198 Rohmer, Sax, 96 Roman Catholic Church, see Catholic Church Romans, 1, 8, 17, 19, 22, 40, 44, 46, 73, 74, 105–7, 121, 133, 144, 156, 178–9, 188, 198, 208, 210, 211, 214, 221–3, 224–5, 246, 248 Rome, 223, 224–9, 230, 245–9 Rosicrucians, 11, 22–8, 32, 63 Royal Anthropological Institute, 141 Royal Society, 60, 113 Royal Zoological Society, 113 Rutherford, Adam, 64–6, 217 Said, Edward, 3, 102 Saïs, 106 Sakkara, 44–6 Samaria, 173, 176, 180, 197, 201, 212–13, 232 Sand, Shlomo, 205 Santiago, see James, Saint Sargon II, 212 Saul (king), 173, 197, 200, 202 Scavone, Daniel, 244 Schiff, Jacob Henry, 197

Schikaneder, Emanuel, 24–5 Schinkel, Karl Friedrich, 25 Schoch, Robert, 36, 51, 166 Schoelcher, Victor, 143 Seiss, Joseph, 64 Seligman, C.G., 147 Semitic (group classification), 136, 138, 140, 143–4, 145, 150, 158, 168, 194 Semitic (language group), 142, 147–8, 151 Sen, Amartya, 131, 136 Sergi, Giuseppe, 145 Simon Zealotes (apostle), 247 Sinai, 12 Siuda, Tamara, 34 Skinner, J. Ralston, 57, 68 Smith, George, 194 Smith, Grafton Elliot, 59, 110–29, 141, 145–6, 161, 255 Smith, Joseph, 26, 214 Smyth, Charles Piazzi, 53, 59–62, 217 Société ethnologique de Paris, 143 Society for Biblical Archaeology, 194 Solomon (king), 24, 55, 108, 173, 179–80, 188, 197, 200–2, 205–6 Southern Baptist Convention, 184–5 Spain, 225, 229–35 Sphinx, 28, 31, 35–7, 46, 51 Spinoza, Baruch, 187 Stachys (bishop), 249–50 Stecchini, Livio, 63 Steiner, Rudolf, 27 Stoker, Bram, 91–2, 94 Strachan, Gordon, 246 Stringer, Christopher, 142 Stukeley, William, 108 Sudan, 45, 96, 147 Suez Canal, 2, 103 Tanakh, 10, 21, 44, 48, 172–4, 176–9, 182–4, 186–8, 190, 192, 214, 217 Tanis, 195 Taylor, John, 59–60, 62 Teichmann, Frank, 53 Tel Dan, 201 television, see film Temple, Robert, 35, 52 Temple Mount, Jerusalem, 205 Terrasson, Jean, 24 Thebes, 85, 106

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Theodemir (bishop), 233 Theodosius (emperor), 73 Theosophy, 26–8, 34, 57, 68 Thevet, André, 77 Thomas, Saint, 235–40 Tiglath-Pileser, 211 Titanic, 102 Torres Strait, 118–19 Turkey, 1, 2, 12, 36, 45, 174, 192, 222, 225, 236, 246, 248, 255, 256 Tutankhamen, 9, 18, 94, 97, 100–1, 122, 126, 195 Tuthmosis III, 27–8 Twain, Mark, 79 Ucko, Peter, 257 Uehli, Ernest, 51 UNESCO, 141, 158–9 United States of America, 4, 15, 25, 31–2, 35, 51, 55, 66, 79, 126–7, 131, 145, 149–70, 184–5, 196–9, 209, 216–17 Ur, 126 Ur-Nammu, 181 Usuard (monk), 232–3 Van Sertima, Ivan, 160–2, 166 Velikovsky, Immanuel, 53, 110 Venice (San Marco Basilica), 43, 49 Verdi, Giuseppe, 90 Vézelay, 247 Vigo, Giovanni de, 77 Volney, Constantin (de), 142–3, 151–2 Voragine, Jacobus de, see Golden Legend, The

Walker, Clarence E., 166 Walker, David, 152 Washington, Booker T., 154 Webb, Jane, 81, 83 websites, 1, 4, 9, 28, 32, 34, 35, 37–9, 53–4, 64, 68, 69–71, 166–7, 209 Wellhausen, Julius, 190 West, John Anthony, 35–7, 68 WGBH Boston, 199 Whitelam, Keith, 204 Wicca, 34 Wilkinson, J. Gardner, 144 Willcock, David, 68 William of Malmesbury, 242–3 Williams, Chancellor, 162 Wilson, John (English writer), 59, 217 Wilson, John A. (Egyptologist), 144 Winlock, Herbert, 102 Wright, George E., 197–8 Wynn, Lisa, 38 Yadin, Yigael, 202 Yahweh, 172–83, 200, 203, 212 Yates, Frances, 21 al-Yaq’ubi, 20 Yehud, see Judea York, Malachi, 33, 52 Young, Thomas, 18, 138 Zaragoza, 232 Zionism, 10, 202, 205, 208–10 Zoroastrianism, 174

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