Temple's tome

Egyptian Dawn: Exposing the Real Truth Behind Ancient Egypt by Robert Temple (2010). Century, Random House, London
Professor Robert Temple has written a persuasive scientific paean to the antiquity of pyramids in ancient Egypt for the uninitiated amateurish Egyptologist. This book, however, will horrify professional Egyptologists. Like Thucydides or Tacitus, Temple combines perspicacity and an eye for telling detail with an ear for ringing.
Re-dating key monuments is a topic that tires Egyptologists, though. They have heard it all before and are not in the least convinced of its relevance to their labours. Yet these aspects are precisely part of Temple's saga's compelling readability for the gullible and ingenious unprofessional Egyptologist. The monarchs given most attention are the confusing kings Khasekhem (alias Hedjefa) and Khasekhemui (alias Bebti) as well as the equally confounding Khufus -- Khufu conventionally known as Cheops of the Great Pyramid, and the lesser known and rather mysterious Khnumu-Khufu, also associated with the Great Pyramid of Giza.
Such mystification is a vital part of Temple's narrative. His prose is throughout disconcerting, though excellently paced and inlaid with gems that take us to the heart of ancient Egyptian civilisation. Temple intriguingly presents the baffling torsions of the tale of the ancient Egyptian state -- the Two Lands -- as the Delta and Upper Egypt draw together and strain apart. There is no doubt that Temple himself is partial to Lower Egypt, or rather to the races presumably whiter and more sophisticated that established themselves in the Delta. He is equally dismissive of the "southern kings" supposedly blacker whom he routinely designates as uncivilised chimpanzees. This is when I began to suspect that Egyptian Dawn was something of a pot-boiler.
The passion that drove Temple to produce his legendary The Sirius Mystery, perhaps his greatest work, prompted him to froth at the mouth in Egyptian Dawn. Temple writes his case studies as though they were short stories necessarily fuelled by an insatiable curiosity.
If the numerous royal personages with confusingly similar names -- the Khasekhems and Khasekhemuis, the Khufus and the Khnum-Kufus -- and the mass of psuedo-scientific detail sometimes overwhelm Temple's tome, nonetheless his vivid narrative makes a curiously engaging read. These often overlooked figures of the past hint at how ancient Egypt has become such a global addiction.
Egypt is ingrained in the international psyche. An enthusiastic tale about how it all began is beguiling and always sells. Temple's Egyptian Dawn can be summarily dismissed by professional Egyptologists as trash. But Temple urges us to consider carefully the provision of proper latitude for the exercise of individual judgement of the exotic Egyptian past. There are two ways to do this. First, and contrary to the zeitgeist we should not take the word of professional Egyptologists as gospel truth.
Second, we can employ scientific methods to delve into the depths of ancient Egyptian mysteries. Optical thermolunescence "perfected by my Greek colleague" Professor Ioannis Liritzis, "previously a nuclear scientist", Temple postulates, is the cornerstone upon which he constructs his theory of the founders of ancient Egyptian civilisation and the wonders they created. Temple has been on this trail for some time. Once Temple's tale gathers momentum it is difficult not to put the book down.
Still, Temple's tome is definitely not designed to be read from beginning to end. I personally couldn't. Partly, it is because the author's thread of explanations of the origins of ancient Egyptian civilisation becomes tangled amid the sheer weight of his accumulated documentary evidence.
Huge in scope and energetically argued, Temple's latest bombshell is incapable of permanently altering Egyptology as we know it. The answers to the pressing questions posed by the author in Egyptian Dawn are not adequately answered.
To cite one example, who was the monarch who actually united Egypt -- the Two Lands? "In the fragments that survive of the history of Egypt written by the Egyptian priest with the Greek name of Manetho, the first pharaoh is stated to have had the name Menes. But the names, given by Manetho are Grecianised, and are often difficult to match with Egyptian names, especially since the pharaohs all had more than one name anyway. So one of the great questions that has haunted Egyptology is: Who was Menes?"
We may dismiss Temple's tome as tiresome, trifling and trumped-up. But Temple conjures up deeply paradoxical questions. "It has been suggested that Hor-Aha was Menes, it has been suggested that his father, Narmer, was Menes, and it has been suggested that neither was Menes. For decades, no one knew for certain. There were bits of evidence, tantalising, tempting but not conclusive." Temple goes on to suggest that James Allen's article published in 1992, entitled Menes the Memphite, is in his opinion the most convincing explanation. "Allen points out that it is most probable that Menes was never a name. He believes that it comes from the Egyptian word for the ancient city of Memphis near Giza, which was supposed to have been founded by the first pharaoh of the First Dynasty. This was the tradition believed in by the time of the New Kingdom, when no one clearly remembered the actual fellow who did it." Temple asks the contemporary reader to articulate the mental assumptions that led the ancients to act as they did. Temple rants and rages about the "chronological chaos" of Egyptologists, but I am afraid that his own hypothesis is not quite convincing either.
"I think we were all lucky to miss predynastic Egypt, as many of us would have ended up with our heads bashed in." So what does Temple's bestseller have to do with contemporary Egyptian culture? Does it really matter who constructed the pyramids and what race they belong to? The author appears to think so.
"We return to the problem: Who really built the pyramids? If we find it difficult to believe that Smasher, Subjugator, and Mace Man were quite what we had in mind, we can take comfort in one thing: the demonstrable fact that a whole dynasty of 13 kings can vanish without a trace."
These kings were caught in a squeeze. A new political bargain was forged between the kings of the south and the potentates of the north. The northern aristocracy initially might have been great masons, but they failed to conquer the south. Such a conquest required a level of statecraft that they lacked. Or so Temple seems to imply. The southern monarchs, on the other hand, ruled by brutish force. The southern aristocracy was obliged to strike a grand bargain.
In exchange for technological innovation and sophisticated masonry, they literally ruled with an iron fist.
The mace-brandishing monarchs were the menacing emblem of southern military might. They personified black power. They abhorred the pyramid structures that were a constant reminder of the foreign roots, the mountainous terrain, from which the northern kings emanated.
The southern potentates preferred the mastaba, type of flat-roofed, rectangular ancient Egyptian tomb, a typical Egyptian artefact to this very day. The word mastaba means stone bench in Arabic and it is a common feature of contemporary rural Egyptian architecture.
The author makes much of the rivalry and symbolic value of foreign pyramid and indigenous mastaba. In fact the prevailing theory among Egyptologists, which Temple does not subscribe to, that pyramid is merely a collection of mastabas piled on top of one another.
While the ascendancy of the south lasted, the rules of funerary structures initiated by the northerners could be broken with impunity. Even after the northern-influenced pharaohs preferred to be entombed in pyramids, the Egyptian nobility continued to be buried in mastaba tombs, much to the consternation of the kings.
Temple notes that King Enezib, the fifth king of the First Dynasty, was perhaps the first ancient Egyptian monarch to build a pyramid, albeit a primitive one. Enezib's pyramid was not made of stone, but rather of mud bricks. Enezib appears to be associated with the norther elite. His successor, Semerkhet, clearly a southerner, made every effort to efface Enezib's memory. He had Enezib's pyramid decapitated. "This was certainly a pretty drastic thing to do, and suggests a violent hatred of pyramids by the southern kings, who had established the First Dynasty."
Thermoluminescence dates pottery and Temple has plenty of evidence to support his curious theory. Binding former enemies together in a common kingdom was Egypt's historic political achievement. Today these ties are being tested as never before since the days of the pharaohs. The north of the country, the Delta, is relatively more prosperous and the south is the least developed part of the country. Distinct cultural cleavages remain. The north is more open to foreign influences, the south is authentic, the true harbinger of autochthonous Egyptian culture.
Though Temple's unorthodox theories may be disparaged as hogwash, his Egyptian Dawn reads like a thundering thriller skewered by his crisp prose. Temple explicates on Egypt's peculiarly propitious geology.
The myth of Menes, ostensibly the unifier of Egypt, I find particularly gripping. Indeed, as Temple rightly point out, one of the great questions that has haunted Egyptologists is: Who was Menes? Here Temple refers to the mesmerising theory of James Allen entitled Menes the Memphite published in 1992. Menes, according to Allen was never a personal name.
"For the first 1500 years of its existence, Memphis was called White Walls. Memphis, in its Egyptian form of course, only came into use in later times, during the New Kingdom." According to Allen, Menes began to be referred to as the Memphite, much like Jesus the Nazarene, and Temple subscribes to this theory.
"This clever resolution of the problem of Menes by James Allen is one of the great clarifying and cathartic acts of Egyptological thought of our time, in my opinion," the author argues. "And by the time the Greeks came to Egypt, when they expressed this name as Menus, everybody believed that this was the genuine name of the first king of Egypt. In other words, all the evidence of any royal name remotely resembling Menus in the First Dynasty or before has been discredited."
Temple goes on to extrapolate further. "Memphis has ceased to be the capital during the New Kingdom. And Thebes had taken its place; all the more reason, therefore, to invoke 'the Memphite' as an ancestor, to prove the legitimacy of succession and justify the new location of the capital by honouring the founder of the 'original capital' of a united Egypt," Temple stresses.
An engaging study, Temple's Egyptian Dawn touches on the very foundations of the Egyptian state. The irony is that the political entity created by the pharaohs survives to this day.
Temple takes a peremptory look at some of the current archeological research trends, but he draws attention to his groundbreaking study. Temple's tome is a happy parade of the inexplicable exploits of an eccentric inventor.
But it is an uneven read. Certain parts are more convincing than others, but all are absolutely riveting. The pleasure lies in the steady unfurling of breathtaking scientific discoveries. "Until now, it has not been possible for archaeologists to date stone structures directly. All the dates for buildings and structures that one reads about are based on indirect methods. Pieces of pottery scattered around a site, or a bit of wood or other organic matter, can be dated." Wood and organic matter are dated by the well-known Carbon 14 method.
Temple's tome elaborates on sophisticated new techniques of dating. "The conclusion is drawn that perhaps a building is of the same date as the bits and pieces found around or within it. At least the archaeologist hopes so! For what else can he do? He can't date the building itself. But now it can be done." Temple delves into the intricacies of the new techniques. "Suddenly he realised that the flooding of the limestone crystal with sunlight (which he calls 'bleaching'), and the emptying of its electron traps, could be considered as setting a 'stone clock' to zero. Then when the crystal was covered in darkness again and could begin swallowing its medicine once more, with the electrons creeping in as normal from the ambient radiation, the crystal's clock would be set ticking afresh. And if one removed the crystal again (not exposing it to the light) and counted the electrons which were in it, one could know how many years had elapsed since it had been 'bleached' by the sun." Mind-boggling revelations?
"In fact, there are no hieroglyphics in the Giza pyramids, no inscriptions, and not one shred of evidence was ever found inside any of the three pyramids to associate them with the Fourth Dynasty pharaohs, apart from some daubings in red paint inside some chambers above the King's Chamber of the Great Pyramid," Temple postulates. "If this sounds sensational, it is. Nor should we be afraid of change. If we have to change our ideas, that's good. I start from the premise that no one is ever correct. We are often mistaken about many matters. But what we should all aim to do is continually try to reduce our errors, try to get nearer and nearer to the truth. If we see that we are wrong, we must abandon the false path and try and find the true one. This book explores many paths."
Cheops, Chephren and Mycerinus are Greek names of Egyptian kings who reigned long before the arrival of the Greco-Roman world. The Old Kingdom chronology is suspect because the political intrigue involved is not taken into account.
Temple, best known for his masterpiece The Sirius Mystery, teaches history and the philosophy of science at Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. A prolific writer in Nature and New Scientist, Temple has struck a raw nerve.
Some of his views smack of racism. Others appeal to common sense. Egyptian Dawn is prey to some of the vices of both. Reading Egyptian Dawn from cover to cover can seem at times like perusing a strident polemicists' rant.
So back to the question: "Who could these people be? If they were from a date earlier than the Third Dynasty (conventionally dated 2686-2575 BC), then they could clearly in any case not be the kings of the south, who were not able to hack a limestone block any better than a chimp," speculates Temple. To put Temple in his place, chimpanzees are indeed quite capable of hacking at limestone, which is a soft stone.
Temple speaks of a mysterious race, presumably white, of megalith builders who not only constructed the largest megalithic ring in the world "in the deepest wilds of Morocco" but fostered an "Atlantic Coastal civilisation" which "was later inherited from about 1550 BC by the Phoenicians. It thrived on trade."
Preposterous, I hear you say. However, we sometimes underestimate the great length our ancestors traveled to barter and trade.
Temple's most provocative theory revolves around the supposedly superior race of masons and megalithic builders whose closest descendants are curiously the Basques. He maintains that these supermen constructed megalithic structures throughout the eastern Atlantic shores and the Mediterranean basin.
"In other words, the builders of the earliest version of Stonehenge and Avebury in Britain are directly connected with the builders of the pyramids of Giza." "The story presented in this book therefore embraces and unifies traditions of the origins of Egyptian civilisation, the construction of the pyramids of Giza, the builders of Stonehenge, and event gives a possible full explanation of the myth of 'Atlantis'."
After a great deal of time spent tracing the civilization of the megalithic-builders, Temple comes to the conclusion that they are Basques, Libyans, Phoenicians or some other disparate peoples that contributed constructively to Egyptian civilization. These are all sea-faring people.
"This leaves open the possibility raised originally in my Sirius Mystery that the connection with the Star Sirius was not just an accident."
But what about the stone structures that they left behind? "So let us begin. Everything starts not with substance but with shadow, which is my little joke as you will soon understand." Temple obviously takes pleasure in prising up the sidewalk slabs of "Golden Giza Plateau" to find what lies beneath.
"I cannot describe the details of this ingenious physical shadow procedure here, as the very short equinoctial shadow is of no concern to us in considering the Giza Plan, which was based on the longest shadow of the winter solstice."
The case Temple makes is powerful and is illustrated with telling examples. "It is important to realise, therefore, that the ancient Egyptians did not themselves necessarily distinguish between the First and Second Dynasties, or between the Fifth and the Sixth. This was all invented by someone writing in Greek in the third century BC, whose works are not properly preserved anyway."
It therefore makes far greater sense, Temple assures us, to seek the true identity of ancient Egypt in its earliest beginnings. "It was Manetho who first 'created' the division of dynasties One to Six. There was no early tradition of this numbering. Egyptologists have taken over these dynastic creations of Manetho lock, stock and barrel." Egypt's antiquity is sometimes a distinct drawback. The ancient system of bureaucracy is still pretty stifling. The author's encounter with the "dreaded Hawass" corroborates the difficulties of dealing with Egypt's red tape. "With the intention of showing politeness and respect to Zahi Hawass in his role at that time as director of the Giza Plateau, I made an appointment for Olivia [the author's wife and research assistant] and myself to see him at his little office near the Great Pyramid on the Plateau," Temple muses. Hawass's strong personality, the author asserts, has been crucial in getting him this far as an internationally- acclaimed superstar. "After some time his female secretary led us into his office, and she sat beside him throughout our meeting. I said we had come to have a few preliminary words with him about the sampling we would be doing at Giza in the future. He looked enraged rather than pleased, and would not look at me."
Hawass, according to Temple, symbolizes power and the triumph of bureaucratic red tape over propriety. "I was deeply puzzled, as I had gone to see him with the intention of establishing friendly and cooperative relations. Thinking that perhaps he did not understand, or doubted what we were saying, I handed him the archaelogical permission form signed by the authorities of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, including the then director Gaballah Gaballah, with whom I had very amicable relations, and who is a most congenial, cultured and polite person. Gaballah is precisely the person who gives Egypt a good image abroad." The clash of civilization comes into play. "Hawass looked at this form for a moment, screwed it up into a ball and threw it across his desk at my face, saying impatiently: 'This means nothing!'". We need say no more about this rather unfortunate altercation.
One of the great merits of this work is that it firmly puts the emphasis on the latest scientific discoveries. "For the full series of colour photographs of the adventure described in the next chapter [The Osiris Shaft at Giza and its Mysteries], please consult this book's website www.egyptiandawn.info,www.egyptiandawn.info,as the economics of book publishing make it possible to have only a limited number of photographic plates in the book itself. The book's website, maintained by the author, should always be treated as an extension of the book, and consulted by the reader when he wants to see more illustrations of anything discussed in the book."
Egyptian Dawn reveals many secrets of the distant past. But perhaps the most curious revelation is the so-called "Osiris Shaft". Temple makes it clear that he sees it as key to understanding ancient Egypt. "The Osiris Shaft is the name now generally used to designate a deep burial shaft directly beneath the Chephren Causeway at Giza," the author extrapolates.
"Like Jesus, according to the Egyptian myth, Osiris died, was buried in a tomb and rose from the dead. And also like the Christian story, the open and empty tomb itself symbolised the resurrection that had taken place." The parallels are intriguing.
"Hawass also claims that the two sarcophagi in Level Two are made of red granite, but that is not true, for they are not even red." And yet the current imagination continues to run to control, towards ancient stones -- dacite for one, and new discoveries and endless horizons.
"Egyptologists are seldom very clear about stones and minerals, and many Egyptian artefacts in museums throughout the world are wrongly described in terms of the materials of which they are supposedly composed." Be that as it may, the bookshelves offer bright assistance to amateur Egyptologists.
Reviewed by Gamal Nkrumah