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Throughout recorded
history, human beings and unsolved mysteries have enjoyed a close - and
often financially-rewarding - relationship. Of special relevance to
bibliomaniacs is an enigma which has not only outpaced the rediscovery
of Noah’s Ark, but also kept statues on Mars and divinely-encoded bibles
firmly on the back-burner. The Hall of Records, as it is called, is an
elusive archive which can hardly be left out of our bookish tour of
Ancient Egypt. It was first glimpsed on 29th October 1933
during a deep trance by the great Kentucky clairvoyant Edgar Cayce
(1877-1945). Over the following dozen years the Sleeping Prophet
continued to receive additional data regarding its fabulous age and
provenance. In recent years his findings have attracted a worldwide
following, thanks to the considerable literary talents of John Anthony
West (see Part Seventeen) and Graham Hancock, author of five
alternative-prehistory bestsellers, including Keeper of Genesis
(1996). For these and a growing band of bibliozealots, the Hall lies a
tantalizing fifty feet beneath the Giza Sphinx. It contains, besides a
potted history of Atlantis, a sort of global survival-kit which the
sages of yore thoughtfully put aside to allow mankind to weather the
self-inflicted catastrophes of modern times:
This Hall of Records - when
discovered - will have a profound effect upon the world! It will change
our perception of many of our ideas and will, at one stroke, rewrite our
history books and upgrade and revolutionise our scientific know-how.
Many people believe that this Hall of Records will be discovered in the
fairly near future. When the Hall of Records is eventually opened we
shall, at long last, have all the evidence we need to prove the
existence of Atlantis. At that time we shall then discover that
Atlantean technology and knowledge was far more advanced than we had
hitherto thought possible!
[Website]
Nuclear weapons, landmines, ozone-holes and genetically-engineered food
- all swept firmly into the cupboard like the wayward toys of Mary Poppins.
It would certainly be none too soon. On a more serious note, could the
Hall of Records have a real-life alias? We have been looking at rediscovered
scrolls in Herculaneum and the lost libraries of Alexandria, Carthage
and Rome. What are the chances that Egypt’s dry atmosphere might not have
preserved something special for us booklovers? In fact the entire country
is an archival repository - hieroglyphs, papyri and ostraka (inscribed
stone and pottery fragments) surviving by the million, easily outstripping
any other location on the planet. Conventional Egyptology once focused
on the accessible dynastic inscriptions, but in recent years the fascinating
details of everyday life have been emerging thanks to the Herculean labours
of backroom translators. One of the principal sources was located in a
New Kingdom village of exceptionally literate craftsmen who built the
tombs in the Valley of the Kings outside Thebes (several hundred miles
upriver from Old Kingdom Giza). It was here in 1950 that French archaeologist
Bernard Bruyère stumbled not upon a Hall but a well of records. The village
in question is now known as Deir el-Medina or ‘Monastery of the City’,
but its original name was Set Maa, ‘the
Place of Truth’ - a euphemistic reference to the nearby Necropolis.
The dryness of the surrounding terrain made it a fitting locale not only
for royal mummies but also the world’s oldest book, The Teaching of
Ptah-Hotep, commonly known as the Prisse Papyrus after its discoverer,
Émile Prisse d’Avennes (1807-79). It also ensured that the shaft of a
projected village well was a particularly deep one: soon after the founding
of Set Maa in 1550 BC an attempt was made |
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Temple of Het-Hert At Deir el-Medina |
to reach the water table. After descending 150 feet
the villagers gave up, and over the following five hundred years used the
bottomless pit as a rubbish dump instead. It thus became the final resting-place
for about thirty thousand rock-shard ‘notepads’ - laundry lists, love songs,
employee absences, receipts, legal settlements and ruminations about gods
and dreams. ‘They were incredibly bureaucratic,’ as one investigator has
observed. Could they possibly be related to the Spanish? |
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Unique mural of Bes
from the tomb of
Senneferi, Thebes,
1420 BC
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As the most talented craftsmen
in the civilized world, the villagers of Deir el-Medina could hardly resist
decorating their dwellings inside and out with furnishings and frescoes.
The commonest motif was the god Bes, a versatile deity associated not
only with childbirth, dancing, music, dreams and fertility but later on
with Ibiza (‘the Island of Bes’) because of its miraculous lack of snakes
and scorpions. Such creatures were known to shun the presence of the ferocious
talismanic dwarf - just as malevolent spirits fled before his astonishing
ugliness: a grotesque face, a curly beard or mane, lion-like ears, a lion’s
tail, a prominent belly and bandy legs. The overwhelming majority of
Carthaginian coins minted on our island bear his
bizarre anthropoid features. His name, incidentally, may be related to
besa, the panther whose skin is often draped over his shoulders
and whose head appears as a pendant. The charismatic deity is the protagonist
of Shelli Wright Johnson’s recent children’s book, The Story of Bes
(2000 - to be reviewed in a fortnight), which includes a foreword by John
Anthony West, the subject of our last article (Weekly Edition 083). Bes
also takes centre stage in Jean-Charles Pichon’s Le Jeu de Bes
(2001), a novel set in present-day France which combines an ingenious
plot with generous doses of mythology and ancient history. It so happens
that our dwarf god also shares some interesting characteristics with the
Giza sphinx: both have a mixture of leonine and human features and both
enjoyed protective roles vis-à-vis the royal house of Egypt… and just
possibly their treasured books. Hmmmn.
To conclude, let us take a closer look at ancient
plural cases. The Phoenician name for Ibiza - Ybshm - means either
the ‘Islands
of Bes’ with a Semitic plural ‘m’ (as in ‘cherubim and seraphim’)
or just possibly the ‘Island of the Beses’ (we will ignore
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Bes and Beset,
Ptolemaic period,
Saqqara Necropolis
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| for the present a rival etymology - ‘The
Islands of Aromatic Pines’). The latter would be a reference to the original
nuclear family, Bes plus female consort (Beset) and two little scamps (Boy
Bes and Girl Bes). Could those last-named rascals have something to do with
the impish barruguets unique to Ibiza which we came across in Weekly
Editions 056 & 058? Bes and the Pityusan archipelago are not the only
ancient entities whose plural cases are often swept under the carpet: according
to our Sleeping Prophet, the Hall of Records also existed at the same time
as two companion archives - one in Yucatan, and a third which disappeared
beneath the waves at the same time as Atlantis. Hancock is convinced he
has just found the latter off Japan and his forthcoming blockbuster, Underworld,
will provide more details. Let us wish the maverick investigator economically-rewarding
diving. By the way, Bes’s temple-sanctuary remains to be found on Ibiza.
Wannabe Harrison Fords should drop by in a fortnight’s time for a few tips.
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Scarab from Carthage
showing Bes holding
a (scape) goat with
flanking papyri stems
(rattles for scaring
away demons). |
http://www.beazley.ox.ac.uk/Gems/Scarabs/Script/Scarab3.11.htm
http://www.beazley.ox.ac.uk/Gems/Scarabs/Script/Scarab3.12.htm
form the first two
sections of an impressive online catalogue of Phoenician scarabs set up
by Oxford University’s Beazley Archive: eighty-three Beses from
collections around the world spearhead this project, one of the largest
collections of images yet published of ancient Ibiza’s protective deity
(see illustration above). Statues of Bes and his lesser-known consort
from a variety of different website are shown below.
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Lamp with Bes and Beset, terracotta. Favum |
Bes |
Egyptian faience Bes amulet |
Ceramic statue of Bes found at Kawa (Nubia) in 2000 |
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| Bronze figure
of Pantheistic Bes, 644-525 BC Fantastical, four-armed figures,
its body engraved with a network of human eyes, spread wings, an
erect phallus and four animal heads emerging from behind each
ear (jackel, lion, falcon, baboon, bull, ram, cat and
crocodile). |
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Egyptian faience amulet, 664-525 BC.
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664-525 BC.
A turquoise amulet of
the god Bes, naked, with hands at his side and wearing a plumed
headdress. |
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Wooden tablet of Bes holding papyrus-stem rattles, New Kingdom
(Brussels, Musées Royaux) |
Bes |
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