Thursday, November 5, 2009

An Actual Example of Egyptian "Threat Formulae"... metaphysical warfare

Threat formula used in the novel 'The Smiting Texts'

There are many examples of chilling inscriptional violence used by the ancient Egyptians as a state weapon of warfare against enemies. Here is a flavour of threat formulae - you can view the video on You Tube - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDYRJ9rCtGs

The eerie, menacing music track was created on synth.


Saturday, October 10, 2009

THE ROSETTA STONE IS A "WORLD MILESTONE"

The British Museum - for all the world

Now Egypt (or Zahi Hawass) has returned to making a grab for the Rosetta Stone!! Without Western decipherment (thank you, France) there’s be no Zahi Hawass (not to mention his American degree) or the ancient Egyptian “industry” as we know it. There’d probably no famous Cairo museum either. (And even if there were one, and they possessed the stone in question, it would be gathering dust in the basement somewhere!) My alternative Egyptologist character Ansor Hunter expresses his feelings on 'who owns the past'...

I was haunting the British Museum again and fell to wondering, as I looked around the Egyptian hall of sculptures: if extremists had their way, would they obliterate these remains from the so-called age of ignorance before Islam? Modern Muslim Egyptians live in fearful tension with their ancient past, it occurred to me, looking up at a colossal head of Rameses. Not long ago, Egypt's Grand Mufti issued a fatwa against sculpture. Egypt's ancient sculptures are forbidden by Islam, he said. Sculptors are doomed to receive the harshest treatment on Judgement Day. Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities distanced itself from the fatwa, saying that the sculptures they preserve and showcase are not for the purpose of idolatry but to provide a window on history. "We display statues so they can be studied and so people can get to know their heritage. This is Egypt's national heritage. We don't display them for worship." A number of influential sheikhs supported the mufti, however, while intellectuals and artists in Egypt were said to have called the fatwa laughable. And yet... Could firebrands one day use this as an excuse to harm treasures of history that belong to all of humankind? The Taliban in central Afghanistan demonstrated the peril of antiquities in the hands of idealogues. They used explosives to destroy the sixth century Buddhas of Bamyan, a pair of colossal standing Buddhas carved into the side of a sandstone cliff, irreplaceable examples of Indo-Greek art. Antiquities authorities in the Arab Republic of Egypt wonder why Western museums are less than eager to repatriate their Egyptian collections to Egypt, yet who can see what lies ahead for this Islamic nation? In spite of recent hectoring by Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities to return artefacts to Egypt from the museums of the world, modern Egypt's exclusive claim on the civilization of the pharaohs is shaky. Where is the link of this 21st century Arabic society with ancient Egypt? Not religion, not language, not politics, probably not even temperament, certainly not philosophy or social structure - let alone shared basic assumptions about equality between the sexes - not artistic tradition, not even the rhythm of life regulated by the ebb and flow of the Nile... the construction of the Aswan High Dam severed that link forever. Today's new antiquities grab is as questionable as the first rape of the Nile by colonial powers. It's a form of rampant nationalism and, in more enlightened times, disagreeable in my view. It's also counter-productive for today's Egypt. The very presence of ancient Egyptian antiquities in the museums of the world spurs thousands to visit Egypt every year. Why kill the goose that laid the golden sarcophagus? Feeling a surge of protectiveness for the civilisation I love, I suddenly - unreasonably, perhaps - wish that the British Museum's ancient Egyptian galleries were ten times their present size, along with those of the New York Metropolititan Museum of Art, The Louvre, Berlin Neues Museum and Turin Museum. And yet I like a great many Egyptians very much and I love the land of Egypt itself and its sites of antiquity and I value the feeling of place that connects me with the past. The Nile Valley is still the biggest and best museum of earth. The issue of who owns the past is a complicated one...

Monday, August 3, 2009

MORE OF MY ANCIENT EGYPTSNIPPETS From Twitter




Snippets of the ancient past

Hatshepsut sent her statue to Punt. Imagine a milky stone queen in African bush sparking legends like She! http://bit.ly/NnrrK

Ancient Egypt coded sex 1: scented delta of lotus blossom under nose, ducks and geese, monkey playing under a chair


Ancient Egypt sex code 2 Girl: 'I'll go into water & come up with red fish who will quiver with happiness in my fingers' http://bit.ly/Xhlbz


Ancient Egypt coded sex 3: wife's possessive arm around husband, intent eyes of a goddess taking pharaoh’s hand http://bit.ly/I45ep


Ancient Egypt subtle sex code 4: King Tut sits in a swamp shooting birds. Queen hands him an arrow in a languid hand http://bit.ly/gjNeP


Ancient Egypt subtle coded sex 5: queen receives liquid from a flask poured into her cupped hand by king Tutankhamun http://bit.ly/1vu8Qr


Pharaoh’s sandals bore images of wretched enemies to trample, walking stick handles had bound captives http://bit.ly/3mVU2g

Hathor-Sekhmet, Mankind's Destroyer. In THE SMITING TEXTS she flips between love goddess & marauding lioness http://bit.ly/QTX2i

Did Egypt invent heaven? Before Egypt's vivid afterlife images, Israel’s Sheol a realm of gloomy nothingness http://bit.ly/oQPtW

Ancient Egypt love affair starts young. Take children to a museum & 2 things they want to see - dinosaur and mummy http://bit.ly/mlk4X

For many Egyptology greats ancient Egypt love began as child. Mine perhaps ignited by Nefernefernefer in The Egyptian http://bit.ly/OEcCB


Was Ancient Egypt afterworld a virtual reality created by a civilisation's collective unconscious sustained by religion? http://bit.ly/YqJbK
http://twitpic.com/cc4bi -

Ancient Egypt est av pop over 3500 yrs 5.25 b people lived & died on Nile. Many secrets hidden under sands


Love the wondrous horizon where ruins emerge from ancient Egypt's empire of sand to send us text messages from eternity http://bit.ly/1e6BZk


Childrens’ art is eerily ancient Egyptian. Objects float, people stand side-on. Timeless, eternal, perspective-free - how they see the world


Potiphar's wife, Cleopatra, Nefernefernefer, & Sesheshet in The Smiting Texts novel - a tradition of fatal females


Tutankhamun discoverer Howard Carter told King Farouk he knew Alexander's tomb location, but would take secret to his grave

Scurrilous legend says last pharaoh magician Nectanebo ended up in Greece and in bed of Olympias, fathering Alexander

SCA's Zahi Hawass guards pharaohs DNA details: ‘National security’. Conspiracy crazies wonder Nubian, Hebrew, alien lineage?


Physicians applied mold from bread and the underside of lily to wounds. Pencillin thousands of years before Fleming?


After The Smiting Texts, I've made my Author's Corrections to The Armageddon Glyphs my next Egypt adventure thriller

Remote-killing execrations or curses were state instruments of warfare dramatised in the thriller The Smiting Texts

Pierre Montet, great French discover of Tanis tombs, died believing the Fayoum Great Labyrinth is still to be found


Should mummies in movies lurch? Or limp? Early sources say embalmers dislocated one ankle to slow the pursuing dead!

Friday, July 24, 2009

ANCIENT "EGYPT SNIPPETS FOR THE TWITTER AGE"



NOT ONE, BUT TWO GREAT SPHINXES?

One of a pair?

Were there once two great sphinxes spanning the Nile?
A curious statement appears in older books on Egypt, without reference, that the Giza Sphinx was originally faced by another on the east bank of the Nile, forming a guardian leonine pair to the entry of Egypt. Never verified, it would certainly add to our understanding of the Sphinx, if correct.


EGYPT "THE MOST IMPORTANT"

Napoleon smitten by Egypt

Napoleon said it all about Egypt: In exile, Napoleon said emphatically in his first interview with the Governor of St. Helena: "Egypt is the most important country in the world."

It certainly is to me, and to the alternative archaeologist, Anson Hunter, in 'The Smiting Texts'.


Wednesday, June 10, 2009

DID ‘APOCALYPSE SCROLL’ TRIGGER RAMESES PLAGUES?




Legend tells that a son of Rameses the Great found the scroll


Does the amazingly powerful Scroll of Thoth keep turning up in history at times of disaster for humankind?

This is the latest controversial theory of alternative archaeologist Anson Hunter in ‘THE ARMAGEDDON GLYPHS’ (a new ancient Egypt based adventure novel out in the UK later this year)


As Anson tells it…


“The re-emergence of the scroll from its ancient past all started with a son of Rameses, a young magician-prince and priest called Khaemwaset, the 'First Egyptologist'. He liked to dig around the Memphis area in search of forbidden knowledge. One day, after entering a tomb in the great necropolis and engaging in a mighty tussle with the ghost of a long-dead magician, he gained the lost scroll.
“The story goes that Khaemwaset opened a series of boxes, rather like the nest of coffins and shrines found inside the tomb of the boy king Tutankhamun. He opened an iron box and found a bronze box inside. He opened the bronze box and found a keté-wood box. He opened the keté-wood box and found an ivory-and-ebony box. He opened the ivory-and-ebony box and found a silver box. He opened the silver box and found a gold box. He opened the gold box and found the Book of Thoth, a scroll of papyrus covered with ancient hieroglyphs.
“As an aside, you may notice how the sequence of metals - iron, copper, gold - echoes the alchemical process of transmutation and of higher illumination. The very word ‘alchemy’ has an Egyptian root, of course, coming from khem, the ancient word for Egypt, meaning black earth or the silt deposits left by the inundation of the Nile. It also stands for the base, black first matter out of which all things came and applied to a spiritual development of a very special order.

“What exactly were these boxes that Khaemwaset found? And were they in fact boxes at all? Why do I raise this question? There’s a pointer in another scroll called the Westcar Papyrus, about an early pharaoh, Khufu, builder of the great pyramid. In it we discover that Khufu is anxiously seeking to discover ‘the number of the secret chambers of the sanctuary of Thoth’ so that he can incorporate the number inside his own tomb. Was this statement a garbled version of what he actually sought? Was his quest to find ‘the number of the secret chambers of the Sanctuary of Thoth’ or simply to find ‘a number of secret chambers of the Sanctuary of Thoth?’


“Just a difference of a definite article, but a definite difference in substance. My question is this. Are we talking about boxes, or about precious chambers - a number of them, one within the other, or after the other, of iron, bronze, kete-wood, ebony-and-ivory, silver and, ultimately gold?


“Whatever the containers were, Khaemwaset’s discovery brings him great power. He becomes ancient Egypt’s most famous magician, while his assertive father Rameses, who doubtless commandeers the scroll, elevates himself to the status of a living god and to an exalted position among the kings of Egypt.

“Rameses embarks on superhuman projects to proclaim his apotheosis and the evidence of it dominates Egypt to this day. His power and vanity know no limit. He fathers a small nation on his own, some estimates putting his progeny as high as one hundred sons, and sixty daughters, and if that doesn’t tire him out he marries at least three of his own daughters too. The most casual glance at the number and scale of the temples and colossi of this king confirms his megalomania. His ambition includes the construction of a whole new city, which in typical bombastic style he names after himself, afflicting the Hebrews in the process.


“How could the appearance of this source of power invoke holy wrath? You’ll recall that the god of Moses abhorred Egypt’s ‘false’ gods, and the source of their power, heka. ‘Against all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgment - I am the Lord,’ he says in Exodus. When the serpent-staff of Moses swallowed the serpents of pharaoh’s magicians, Jehovah was symbolically smiting the magical serpent goddess that adorned pharaoh’s brow. The royal uraeus or cobra on the pharaoh’s brow embodied the most potent symbol of the pharaoh’s magical power and bore the name ‘Great of Magic.’


“When Moses turned the river to blood, God was striking against Hapi, magical god of the Nile. When he plunged Egypt into darkness, he struck against the magical power of Ra, the sun god… and so on.


“I have chosen the title The Armageddon Glyphs for the Scroll of Thoth, conscious of its biblical associations. I am not alone in making religious associations with the scroll. There are groups who see the re-emergence of this forbidden knowledge as the precursor to a messianic event - the Second Coming.


“Could it be that these glyphs were a red rag and that their re-emergence in history acted as some kind of Pandora’s box, or worse, an Armageddon trigger? Khaemwaset’s discovery brought disaster upon the land of Egypt, the royal family, and great affliction on the Hebrews.


“Will disaster again be unleashed as it was on Rameses the Great, on Nectanebo and on Hitler’s Third Reich, but this time on today’s people in the Middle East, and ultimately the whole world?


'THE ARMAGEDDON GLYPHS' is the follow up to the esoteric thriller ‘THE SMITING TEXTS’.

Friday, April 17, 2009