Before the Pyramids: Cracking Archaeology's Greatest Mystery Read Online Free PDF Page B

special as the Giza pyramids it is essential to understand the theological and mythological heritage of a civilization. As they say, ‘there is little new under the Sun.’ New religions are hardly ever invented – rather they are improvements on older cults or an amalgam of the best bits of the rituals and beliefs from various sources.
    It is from the ancient Egyptians and the Sumerians that the later gods of the Greeks, Romans and the Jews ultimately sprang. Later, Christianity and Islam arrived as reworked versions of older ideas. Abraham, the pivotal figure from the earliest annals of the Old Testament, was from the Sumerian city of Ur and went into Egypt talking about his ‘God of our Fathers’ – meaning that the deity was the god of that specific city. Meanwhile Judaism claims to date back to Abraham and his son Isaac, and the Old Testament carries other Sumerian legends such as Noah’s Flood and the story of Enoch.
    When the story of Jesus Christ was found to be valuable to the Roman state it was changed to include the key aspects of Mithraism, a cult of Persian origin, which was already very popular in Rome and the wider empire. St Paul had been brought up as a follower of Mithra and the idea of the death and resurrection of a man-deity made immediate sense to him, whereas the Jews of the Jerusalem Church must have been horrified by this alien concept being grafted onto their heritage. For them the long-anticipated Messiah was a king to lead them into battle against oppressors – not some physical aspect of their God, Yahweh, who would take responsibility for their individual wrongdoings. 6 The powerful icon of the dying and rising god stems back to ancient Egypt and, no doubt, long before that. And the main festivals of Christianity, including Christmas and Easter, were thousands of years old when Jesus Christ was born. Ancient astronomy lies behind these modern religious celebrations – Christmas being the winter solstice, when the rising Sun reaches its most southerly point on the horizon and Easter, the springtime of rebirth, is calculated by the Western Church as being the first Sunday after the first full moon following the vernal equinox.
    So what influences did the ancient Egyptians have to form their early beliefs? This is difficult because writing was only invented around the time that the Egypt we call ancient Egypt was created by the unification of Upper (southern) and Lower (northern) Egypt, which is thought to have taken place around 3100 BC during dynasty ‘Zero’. One of the earliest hieroglyphic inscriptions is the Narmer Palette, which dates from about that time. It is thought by some to depict the unification of the two lands by King Narmer. On one side of the palette the king is depicted with the white crown of Upper Egypt and the other side depicts him wearing the red crown of Lower Egypt.
    The indications are that the time before history began in Egypt, agriculture had developed around the Nile by the so-called ‘Badarian’ people. They were essentially semi-nomads who appear to have had a belief in the afterlife as they buried their dead in small cemeteries on the outskirts of their temporary settlements. Bodies were interred in the foetal position and they were always laid facing west, towards the setting Sun.
    Archaeologists have been able to track subtle changes in the habits and lifestyles of the Badarian people which started to take place around 4500 BC . The culture in Upper Egypt from this period is referred to as Naqada 1, after the town of Naqada on the west bank of the Nile in the region of Qena. The Naqada people would prove to be the most significant culture to emerge in Upper Egypt. Instead of simply accepting the bounty of the annual Nile flood the Naqada embraced it, building irrigation ditches and canals and creating a form of agriculture that was far more sophisticated that that practised during the Badarian period. The nomadic lifestyle ceased and true towns began