Free The Egypt Code by Robert Bauval Page B

is this jubilee of Nature confined to the higher orders of creation. The moment the sand becomes moistened by the approach of fertilising waters, it is literally alive with insects innumerable. It is impossible to stand by the side of one of these noble streams, to see it every moment sweeping away some obstruction to its majestic course, and widening as it flows, without feeling in the heart to expand with love and joy and confidence in the great Author of this annual miracle of mercy . . . a scene of fertility and beauty such as will be scarcely found in another country at any season of the year. The vivid green of the springing corn, the groves of pomegranate-trees ablaze with the rich scarlet of their blossom, the fresh breeze laden with the perfume of gardens of roses and orange thickets, every tree and every shrub covered with sweet scented flowers . . . from Alexandria to Assouan . . . it is the same everywhere, only because it would be impossible to make any addition to the sweetness of the colours, the brilliance of the colours, or the exquisite beauty of the many forms of vegetable life . . . It is monotonous, but it is the monotony of Paradise. 6
     
     
     
    This luxurious outburst of new life and abundance of nature was, in the eyes of the ancient Egyptians, a gift from the gods and, more especially, from the goddess Isis, who applied her great magic (as she had done for the dead Osiris) to bring back to life the Nile and induce the flood to rise from the underworld Duat (at Elephantine). And so, for a people who saw their land as ‘an image of heaven’ and their king as ‘the son of Isis’, it should not surprise us that they wanted to provide him with a sacred landscape that resembled the Duat in order for him to undergo the same miracle of rebirth with the flood and with Osiris. The apotheosis of the rebirth ritual (prosaically called the ‘funeral’ by Egyptologists) took place, according to my own thesis, at the temple of Ra-Horakhti in Heliopolis. In my mind I see the cortege bearing the king’s embalmed corpse placed on a boat or ferry (a splendid example of such a ‘solar’ boat is displayed at Giza) and made to travel from the sun temples of Abu Ghorab along the prescribed ‘solar’ path, then across the Nile and towards the sanctuary of the phoenix at Heliopolis. There the king’s mummy would await the ‘(re)birth of Ra-Horakhti’, which took place at dawn on the day of the heliacal rising of Sirius. On that day the starry Duat would be fully visible in the dawn sky, revealing the interrelationship between Orion and the Pleiades, as well as the path of the sun from the latter to Leo on the west and east sides of the Milky Way - as was defined on the land by the Giza and Abusir pyramids, as well as the solar path from the sun temples of Abu Ghorab to Heliopolis. For it is one of those intriguing facts that if you were positioned on a high point at Letopolis-Ausim, where once stood the so-called tower of Eudoxus, looking east at this celestial region containing the Duat, and then imagined that it could be rotated a full 90° clockwise so that it was now in the south, something strange and wonderful would happen: the Milky Way would now ‘flow’ along the meridian like the Nile on the ground, and the three stars of Orion’s belt to its right (i.e., west) would look like the three pyramids of Giza to the west of the Nile. Bringing the sky map and the ground map to an equal scale using the 1° = 333 metres scale ratio (see Chapter Three) we can see that the position of Leo falls right above Heliopolis, and that the small cluster of the Pleiades falls (not quite, but almost) above the small cluster of the Abusir pyramids. Now if we draw an imaginary line mirroring the path of the sun from the Pleiades to Leo, we see that it traces a path from the sun temples at Abu Ghorab to the sun temple at Heliopolis. In this scheme there is an almost perfect sky-ground correlation, or, in the parlance of