THE AUDIENCE in the Washington
auditorium saw these words flashed up on a screen behind him.
THE DESTINY STELA
They also saw a stone relief of
the Egyptian god Thoth. Part avian, part man, the shoulders bulked in stone,
while above it reared the thin snake-like neck and head of an ibis with a
crescent beak. Thoth held a reed pen in his fingers, reflecting his role as the
god of writing, wisdom and magical words of power.
“How old is the Destiny Stela?”
he began. “The Palermo Stone - a recorded Canon of Kings - and other testaments
of the ancient Egyptians speak of divine beings and demigods who ruled Egypt
for thousands of years before the first human kings, beginning with Menes, also
known as Narmer.
Let’s begin by trying to grasp a
sense of the dizzying abyss of time we must span in order to reach the age of
Menes and beyond.
Try picturing a line-up of
Egypt’s rulers stretching into the distance.
Imagine we are moving past this assembly on a river of time, like a water ride
in a theme park, journeying back to the first historical dynasties and earlier.
We’ll ignore more recent history
-a string of one hundred and forty seven Ottoman rulers, fifty seven assorted
Mamelukes, over one hundred Fatimid, Abbasid and non-Abbasid rulers, scores of
Byzantine Period Christian rulers and a line of forty three Roman Emperors.
We’ll start with Cleopatra, for,
although Greek, she actually went native, spoke the language and adopted the
religion.
Ready? We’re off.
We build up momentum and
Cleopatra glides by in her Love Boat, arm in arm with Marc Anthony, her sails
making the wind drunk with their perfume, but wait, there’s a cavalcade of six
earlier Cleopatras and a fleet of fourteen Ptolemies stretching into the
distance before we pass the monolith of Alexander the Great and the Macedonian
kings.
Now the Persian hordes engulf us
in the Second Persian period before we reach the last Egyptian born pharaoh,
the magician-king Nectanebo II, working his magic on model wax ships floating
in a bowl of water.
We’ve still got around two
thousand, two hundred and seventy years to go before we get back to the pyramid
age.
We travel through ten more
dynasties and over fifty kings, including a detour of a hundred years as we see
a line of Nubian, or Kushite, pharaohs mount the Horus throne, before we tumble
into the darkness and chaos of the Third Intermediate Period.
Then we enter the New Kingdom
and a new golden age in a line of three dynasties and thirty-three kings.
We rush by eleven Rameses kings
alone, including Rameses the Great and his colossal seated statues at the
Temple of Abu Simbel.
We see the boy king Tutankhamun
posing for his golden mask.
It’s still almost two thousand
years before the pyramid age.
Now we pass the sun-drunk
pharaoh Akhenaten and Queen Nefertiti in their brand new city of Akhetaten
mushrooming magically in the desert wilderness of Amarna, then a parade of
other pharaohs, including multiple Amenhoteps.
And then it’s on to the
Thutmosids and Pharaoh Thutmosis the Third in his chariot and blue war crown,
leading his armies out of Thebes to conquer the Levant.
Moving back in time before
Thutmosis, we find the female pharaoh Hatshepsut applying her strap-on symbol
of kingship, a false beard.
Dynasties seventeen, sixteen,
fifteen, fourteen, thirteen and a parade of over ninety kings passes by -
compare this with the mere sixty six monarchs of Britain.
We find ourselves in darkness
and turmoil as we hit the Second Intermediate Period and the Hyksos conquest of
Egypt. Foreign rulers take over for two centuries.
We rise on to meet classical
times, an austerely refined age called the Middle Kingdom. Eleven pharaohs
slide past in all their gravitas, including Amenemhat III, builder of the Great
Labyrinth.
Astoundingly, there’s still
around eight hundred years to go before we get back to the Old Kingdom pyramid
age.
Then a veritable chaos of kings
tumble by, not quite ‘seventy kings in seventy days’ as in the first
intermediate Period, but something very like it.
We plummet into an age of chaos
called the First Intermediate Period and we hear screams. It’s a horror section
of three hundred years, where emaciated figures of death and famine leap out to
terrify us like ghoulish animatrons.
As we regain speed, we come upon a line of
thirty-six more kings. Dynasties six, five, four... flash past like numbers in
a rapidly descending lift.
We have finally arrived at the
age of the pyramid builders and the Early Dynastic period.
Worker hordes pitch stone
pyramids like immense limestone tents on the plateau of Saqqara, including the
Great Pyramid of Khufu and the Step Pyramid of Zoser.
We’re over five thousand years
from our present day.
But have we hit ground zero yet?
Not quite. Other shadowy kings,
as many as thirteen, with names like ‘Crocodile’, ‘Catfish’ and ‘Scorpion’, are
beginning to emerge from the darkness of prehistory. There seems to be an
unknown number of basements beneath.
We have just reached the borders
of myth and history.
Conventional Egyptology places
this period before the invention of writing.
Yet we keep pushing back the
date of Egypt’s invention of hieroglyphs with new discoveries. Writing goes
back further than Egyptologists previously once believed. This is the age of
the Destiny Stela…
He paused. “I hope you aren’t
feeling giddy after that ride," he said to the audience. "What is the
Destiny Stela? Before I unleash the spectre of an apocalypse, let’s warm up
with a quiz. What do the following individuals have in common: the ancient
Egyptian Prince Khaemwaset, Pharaoh Rameses the Great, Adolf Hitler - and a
mysterious individual we'll call ‘X’?”
He clicked through a series of
images on the screen.
The audience saw:
A
red standing statue of the ancient Egyptian Prince Khaemwaset.
A
fallen colossus of the prince’s father, the Pharaoh Rameses the Great.
An
image of Adolf Hitler bristling with moustache and Nazi iconography.
Finally, a shadowy
silhouette of a person that contained within it the letter ‘X’.
“Anyone? There’s no prize for guessing
correctly, but there could be a nasty surprise for humankind if we get it
wrong.”
At the next click, the images coalesced
into a montage.
“The answer: all of these people, Prince
Khaemwaset, Rameses the Great and Hitler had one thing in common, I believe.
They all got their hands on an apocalyptic tome known as the Stela or Stone
Book of Thoth, the most powerful composition ever written, apart from the Bible
but a far more volatile book than the Bible, as I’ll come to later...”
Excerpt from the novel "The Ibis Apocalypse"
