Atlantis and the Ten Plagues of Egypt: The Secret History Hidden in the Valley of the Kings Read Online Free PDF

discovered. Rather than to keep intruders out, it was designed to keep someone or something trapped inside.
    • The mummy was still in its gilded coffin, but all evidence of its identity had been removed.
    • In ancient Egyptian belief, if someone was buried without their name they could not enter the next world. It would seem that Tomb 55 was not so much a final resting place as a prison. In the eyes of his contemporaries, the occupant must have committed a crime so heinous that oblivion was not considered sufficient punishment.
    • Forensic tests carried out in 1963 finally identified the mummy as the Egyptian pharaoh Smenkhkare, the brother and predecessor of the famous Tutankhamun.
    • Sometime in the middle of the fourteenth century BC , Tutankhamun had apparently robbed his brother of his funerary goods, subjected him to an odious ritual curse, laid him out in the parody of a woman, and reinterred him in a woman's funerary equipment which had already been adapted for another man. The enigma of Tomb 55 is so perplexing that it has remained a mystery for almost a century.

CHAPTER TWO
    Prelude to Heresy
    When Tomb 55 was so mysteriously sealed sometime in the late fourteenth century BC , the Egyptian kingdom had already been in existence for almost 2,000 years. The great pyramids of Giza had been standing silently for over a millennium, but there was still another thirteen centuries before Egypt's last pharaoh, Ptolemy XV, the son of Cleopatra, was murdered on the orders of Caesar Augustus and Egypt became the personal estate of the Roman Emperors. Ancient Egypt was by far the longest-lived civilization the world has known; yet for nearly all its three-thousand-year history, its religious beliefs remained fundamentally unchanged. The one occasion the nation did experience a religious revolution, however, just so happens to have occurred during the lifetime of Tutankhamun and Smenkhkare. Before we can ascertain if there is any correlation between this and the enigma of Tomb 55, we must first appreciate the extraordinary nature of Egyptian culture.
    During the European Renaissance, when interest in the ancient world was rekindled, Egypt's wondrous ruins refused to surrender their secrets. Unlike the language of the Greeks and Romans, ancient Egyptian had not been a living language since Egypt came under the sway of the Arab world in the second half of the first millennium AD and Arabic became the national tongue. The land of the Nile was filled with the imposing monuments of a once-mighty people: temples, pyramids, tombs and palaces, covered with tantalizing inscriptions that no one could understand.

    Egyptian writing, in the form of simple pictograms, first appeared around 3000 BC and was soon developed into a system of decorative hieroglyphics, used to inscribe monuments, together with hieratic script, a simplification of hieroglyphics used for speed of writing on papyrus. For years the translation of these exotic symbols defied all attempts, and it was not until the end of the eighteenth century that it was at last made possible by the discovery of the Rosetta Stone. This slab of black basalt, found near the town of Rosetta at the mouth of the Nile in 1799, bore a lengthy inscription dating from 197 BC . As the stone carried the same text in Egyptian hieroglyphics and in a known language, Greek, it enabled the French scholar Jean François Champollion to work towards a complete decipherment of hieroglyphics by 1822.
    Even though the myriad inscriptions that still survived could now be read, it soon became clear that day-to-day records of ancient Egyptian life were few and far between. Only from 332 BC , when Alexander the Great annexed the country and made it a satellite nation of the Greeks, is there a clearly documented history of ancient Egypt. The Greeks brought a new concept to the culture, recording contemporary events for historical posterity; something which the Egyptians themselves appeared to have