The message of the Sphinx: a quest for the hidden legacy of mankind (19 page)

Let us note in passing that Ayan is not a mythical place but was an actual, physical location in ancient Egypt immediately to the north of Memphis, the Early Dynastic capital city.
[313]
The judgement that was made here was later changed, as the Shabaka Texts go on to tell us:

Then it seemed wrong to Geb that the portion of Horus was like the portion of Seth. So Geb gave to Horus his [Seth’s] inheritance, for he [Horus] is the son of his first born [Osiris] ...

Then Horus stood over the two lands. He is the uniter of the Two Lands, proclaimed in the great name:
Ta-tenen,
‘South-of-his-Wall’, ‘Lord of Eternity’... He is Horus, who arose as King of Upper and Lower Egypt, who united the Two Lands in the [District] of the Wall [Memphis], the place where the Two Lands were united ...
[314]

Treasure trail

What we have in this amazing story is a sort of treasure trail of clues as to how the ancient Egyptians themselves saw the mythical-historical transfer of the ‘deeds’ or keys of the ‘Kingdom of Osiris’ to Horus by the Great Ennead and Geb.

It seems clear, for example, that this momentous event was thought to have taken place at Ayan, immediately to the north of Memphis, i.e. about 10 miles or so south of modern Cairo.
[315]

And as for the dead Osiris, the Shabaka Texts tell us how the god was taken and buried ‘in the land of Sokar’:

This is the land ... the burial [place] of Osiris in the House of Sokar ... Horus speaks to Isis and [her sister] Nepthys: ‘Hurry, grasp him ...’ Isis and Nepthys speak to Osiris: ‘We come, we take you ...’ They heeded in time and brought him to land. He entered the hidden portals in the glory of the Lords of Eternity. Thus Osiris came into the Earth, at the Royal Fortress, to the north of the land to which he had come. And his son Horus as king of Upper Egypt, arose as king of Lower Egypt in the embrace of his father Osiris ...
[316]

Where, what, and whose was the ‘land of Sokar’?

It turns out to have been an epithet used by the ancient Egyptians to describe the extensive ‘Memphite necropolis’ incorporating the Pyramid-field of Giza. According to Sir E. A. Wallis Budge, for example: ‘The dominions of Sokar were situated in the deserts round about Memphis and were supposed to cover a large extent of territory.’
[317]
I. E. S. Edwards tells us that the name ‘Sokar’ was that of ‘the god of the Memphite necropolis’—a predynastic deity of the dead—and that ‘by Pyramid times Osiris had become identified with Sokar’.
[318]
R. T. Rundle Clark then further complicates the picture by speaking of ‘Rostau, the modern Giza, the burial place of Memphis and the home of a form of Osiris known as Sokar’.
[319]

What confronts us, therefore, appears to be a linked sequence of ideas involving Osiris, Sokar, the ‘land of Sokar’ (identified with the Memphite necropolis), and now ‘Rostau’, the ancient Egyptian name for the Pyramid-field at Giza—a name that is in fact carved in hieroglyphs on the granite stela, which we encountered in Part I, that stands to this day between the paws of the Great Sphinx.
[320]
That same stela also describes Giza in more general terms as ‘the Splendid Place of the “First Time” ’ and speaks of the Sphinx as standing beside ‘the House of Sokar’.
[321]

So the clues on the treasure trail, as well as Osiris, Sokar, the land of Sokar and Rostau-Giza, now also include the ‘House of Sokar’ and lead us back towards
Zep Tepi,
the ‘First Time’.

Bearing all this in mind, let us return for a final look at the Memphite theology as it is expressed in the Shabaka Texts.

We find Horus firmly in possession of the earthly ‘Kingdom of Osiris’ (which had of course been founded in the ‘First Time’) and we find the body of Osiris himself safely installed in ‘the House of Sokar’.
[322]
Under these ideal conditions, according to the texts, the spiritualized form of Osiris was freed to depart to the sky—and to a specific location in the sky that we have already identified: ‘the place where Orion is’.
[323]
There it was held that he had established the
Duat—
the cosmic ‘Otherworld’ on the right bank of the Milky Way—as a sort of celestial ‘Kingdom of Osiris’ for the Dead.
[324]

Sphinx god

Selim Hassan actually calls the
Duat
‘the Kingdom of Osiris’ and shows how ‘Osiris is styled “Lord of the
Duat”
and the Osiris-King [i.e. the deceased Pharaoh] “a companion of Orion” ...’
[325]
He then provides a piece of incidental information which adds to our trail of clues when he points out, on the basis of careful textual analysis, that the
Duat
appears in some way to be linked to Rostau.
[326]

38. The passageways, chambers and corridors of the ‘land of Sokar’ in the Fifth Division of the
Duat
as depicted on tomb walls bear a close resemblance to the passageways, chambers and corridors of the Great Pyramid. Could one of the functions of the Pyramid have been to serve as a kind of ‘model’ or simulation of the afterworld in which initiates underwent trials and ordeals?

Like other commentators, Hassan acknowledges that ‘the name of Rostau is applied to the Giza necropolis’.
[327]
But he also, at various points, defines Rostau as ‘the Kingdom of Osiris in the tomb’,
[328]
and as ‘the Memphite Underworld’—i.e. the Memphite
Duat
.
[329]
In this context he examines the so-called twelve ‘Divisions’ (or ‘Hours’) of the
Book of What is in the Duat
and shows that references to the ‘land of Sokar’ appear in this text. Indeed, to be a little more specific, he draws our attention to a most intriguing fact. The land of Sokar occupies the Fifth Division of the
Duat
[330]
and: ‘The centre of the Fifth Division [is] called Rostau.’
[331]

So Egyptologists do not dispute that we have a Rostau on the ground in the form of the Pyramid-field at Giza and a Rostau in the sky in the form of the Fifth Division of the
Duat—
a place, as the reader will recall, that was not seen as an ‘Underworld’ by the ancient Egyptians but rather as a specific celestial location in Orion.

Furthermore, as we noted in passing in Part I, the passageways, chambers and corridors of the land of Sokar—amply portrayed on tomb walls in surviving depictions of the Fifth Division of the
Duat—
uncannily resemble the passageways, chambers and corridors of the Great Pyramid of Giza. Indeed the resemblance is so close that it is permissible to wonder whether one of the functions of the Pyramid may have been to serve as a kind of model or ‘simulation’ of the afterworld in which initiates underwent trials and ordeals intended to prepare them intellectually and spiritually for the terrifying experiences and judgements that the soul was believed to confront after death.

Here, perhaps, was the testing ground for the ancient Egyptian ‘science of immortality’ elaborated in every utterance and vignette of the principal funerary and rebirth texts—the purpose of which was to facilitate the journey of the soul through the daunting traps and pitfalls of the
Duat.

Additional food for thought in this regard is provided by Selim Hassan who does not neglect to mention that one of the distinguishing features of the Fifth Division of the
Duat
is the presence there of a giant ‘double-lion’ Sphinx-god named Aker, who seemingly protects the ‘Kingdom of Sokar’.
[332]
Hassan also points out that ‘above Aker in this scene is a large Pyramid’.
[333]
He says that this symbolism, when put in ‘conjunction with Aker in Sphinx form and the name of Rostau’, suggests that ‘the Fifth Division was originally a [complete] version of the
Duat
and had its geographical counterpart in the Giza necropolis’.
[334]

39. The Fifth Division of the
Duat
features a gigantic ‘double-lion’ Sphinx-god and a large Pyramid. Compare this symbolic imagery with the Great Sphinx and Great Pyramid seen in profile from the south-east.

In support of this idea, Hassan then refers us to another of the ancient Egyptian funerary texts, the so-called
Book of Two Ways,
where mention is made of ‘the Highland of Aker, which is the Dwelling Place of Osiris’ and also of ‘Osiris who is in the Highland of Aker’.
[335]
Hassan suggests that ‘highland of Aker’ may be a reference to the Giza plateau, ‘where is the earthly Rostau’.
[336]
Exactly the same idea occurred to the American Egyptologist Mark Lehner in his 1974 pamphlet,
The Egyptian Heritage
.
[337]
Here, after completing a study of Rostau, he wrote: ‘it is tempting to see the lion figures of Aker as a representation of the Sphinx at Giza.’
[338]

Roads of Rostau

The
Book of Two Ways
is a text that was copied onto the floors and sides of coffins over a 250-year span (2050-1800 BC) during the Middle Kingdom. According to the archaeo-astronomer Jane B. Sellers it was designed ‘to aid the soul of the deceased to pass along the roads to Rostau, the Gate in the necropolis which gives access to the “Passages of the Netherworld” ...’
[339]

The related Coffin Texts (2134-1783 BC) shed further light on the matter when they state:

I have passed over the paths of Rostau, whether on water or on land, and these are the paths of Osiris, they are [also] in the limit of the sky ...
[340]

I am Osiris; I have come to Rostau to know the secrets of the
Duat
...
[341]

I shall not be turned back at the gates of the
Duat;
I ascend to the sky with Orion ... I am one who collects his efflux in front of Rostau ...
[342]

As Sellers points out, many ancient Egyptian texts insist ‘that the topography of Rostau, though in the sky, is on water and on land.’
[343]
She also proposes that ‘the paths by way of water’ could have been in that area of the sky that ‘we know as the Milky Way’.
[344]
This idea seems highly plausible when we remember that the ‘cosmic address’ of the
Duat
is the ‘Kingdom of Osiris in Orion’ on the right bank of the Milky Way. The logic of ancient Egyptian duality therefore suggests that ‘the paths by way of land’ should be found at the earthly Rostau.

The earthly Rostau is the Giza necropolis,
[345]
site of the three Pyramids and the Sphinx—so with all this talk of sky-ground dualities it would be almost perverse to ignore the four narrow ‘star-shafts’ which emanate skywards from the King’s and Queen’s Chambers inside the Great Pyramid.

The reader will recall that the southern shaft of the King’s Chamber was directed at around 2500 BC to the centre of the constellation of Orion—i.e. to Orion’s belt at its ‘culmination’ or ‘meridian transit’ 45 degrees above the horizon. Strangely, at the crucial observational moment in the predawn on the summer solstice—crucial, at any rate, to the ancient Egyptians of the Pyramid Age—computer simulations indicate that Orion was seen
not
at the meridian but in the south-east, i.e. far to the left of the point in the sky targeted by the southern shaft of the King’s Chamber.