The stone of the Phoenix

 

In 1994 Robert Bauval and Adrian Gilbert wrote a book entitled The Mystery of Orion. The work, which has since been published in twenty languages and is still available, was based on the theory developed by Bauval, then new, according to which the pyramids of Giza intended to represent the “belt” of the Orion constellation. The evidence in support of this theory is beyond the scope of this book, but as a secondary theme of the book had also discussed the Egyptian legend of the Phoenix, or a bird Bennu said. According to this legend, which in its later form and probably flawed was reported by the greek historian Herodotus, the phoenix is a bird rarely seen, looking like an eagle:

“There is also another sacred bird, which has the name of Phoenix. I [Herodotus] I have not seen if not painted; and in fact rarely in Egypt: only every five hundred years (so they say at Heliopolis); and they say that is when her father died. If resembles her image painted its size and its appearance are like tell you: has the plumage in part Gold, partly turned red. And in size and shape resembles more an eagle. And he tells her this enterprise, which for my part I do not believe; but they say that it starts from his homeland in Arabia and, carrying her father wrapped in myrrh, the transport in the sanctuary of the sun, and bury it there. Here I would like to carry it. At first foggerebbe a myrrh egg, so big you can take it, and I would try the flight transport. It made the attempt, would drain the egg for storing the father, and would cover with the other myrrh to the point where he would, after emptying the egg, introduced his father. Which, placed inside, ristabili- would the original weight; and, re-sealed the egg, would deliver in Egypt to the sun sanctuary. So they tell me to do this bird. “

ben-ben-stone-of-creation

In 1997, several years after the publication of The Mystery of Orion, I had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Victor Clube, then senior lecturer in the Department of Astrophysics at Oxford University. As an expert on comets and asteroids, he was one of the few to speak of the possibility that in the near future, the earth would be affected by one or more asteroids of medium size. During our meeting, Dr. Clube left me nodding stucco to the probability that the Egyptians had actually witnessed meteorite impacts. He explained that such events do not occur isolated and are usually associated with the appearance of a comet parent body (or fragments of a comet) or from which the meteorites came off. Comets, said Clube, begin life in the form of bodies that revolve around the sun along orbits that go far beyond the solar planetary system. However, through the interaction with the gravitational tion of other stars or simple collisions with comets may affect their trajectories. These random events can even cause changes so radical orbit of a comet to cause it starts to periodically visit the inner solar system. Although they have the appearance of dark objects difficult to detect even with a powerful telescope when they are very far away, these are the comets we see. This is because as they approach the sun becomes bright. The solar energy melts a part of the ice that composes and other more volatile chemicals that hold them together, and due to evaporation of these materials the comet develops one or more long “tails”.

Stripped of its most volatile components, the rest of the comet mass is then divided to form a so-called “swarm” of rocks. The size of the latter can vary from pebbles as large as a pea or smaller, up to huge boulders of more than one kilometer in diameter. If the Earth were to be affected knows a specimen of the latter, this is likely to cause a mass extinction event similar to that which it attributes the demise of the dinosaurs. Fortunately for us, such events do not seem to happen more than once every fifty or a hundred million years. Nevertheless, minor events occur much more frequently; Earth, on average, is hit by a boulder the size of a hundred meters once every hundred years or so.

Dr. Clube then explained to me that a number of years his team was following a particular cluster of comets. He told me that represented the remains of a super comet that according to their calculations had entered for the first time in the solar system around 30,000 BC All volatile components of this co meta were washed away by time due to the solar wind. What remains today it is made up of a mass of rocks rather scattered. From an in- depth analysis of the recorded by ancient Chinese astronomers chiaramen- data shows you that this cluster crosses the Earth’s orbit every five hundred years. Every time it does there is a strong probability that some rocks collide with the Earth in the form of meteorites. This phenomenon, says Clube, is what seems to have determined the meteorite cults of the Egyptians and other peoples. In addition to the fairly large meteorites to survive passage through the atmosphere, perhaps many more like meteors burned, illuminating the sky with a real show of fireworks. Anyone assistesse to such events could have supposed that they were stars falling from the sky. A subsequent discovery of the rocky remnant of a similar “star” would be interpreted as a sign that the gods had laid an egg: the egg of the phoenix.

There are several observations to make about this story, which seems to be another reference to the sacred meteorites. First of all, the “sanctuary of the sun” mentioned by Herodotus is a Heliopolis building (today a suburb of Cairo) known as the Temple of the Phoenix. In it was an underground well or sanctuary, which had a central obelisk sacred to the Egyptian phoenix or Bennu. Contrary to the description of Herodotus, it is described in ancient Egyptian literature and also in the form of hieroglyphics on the walls of temples, with the appearance of a gray heron rather than that of an eagle. Beyond any legend concerning its role in burying his father in Heliopolis, usually his appearances were seen as heralding the start of a new era or creation and intermediate periods between appearances could be much longer than five hundred years. The Egyptologist R. T. Rundle-Clark has linked the appearance of the phoenix with the dawn sun shines on a pyramid, standing stone, called the benben. The unfolding of a new era matched the beginning of a new day, a new year, a new Sirius or any other cyclical period cycle:

“For eliopoliti the morning was marked by the light that illuminated a vertical pillar or pyramidion on a support capable of reflecting the rays of the rising sun. Top [Evo] a bird of light, the Phoenix, had settled on the sacred stone, known as the Benben, to begin the great era of the visible God. The rise of the Hill [primitive] 3 and the appearance of the Phoenix are not consecutive events but two parallel assertion tions, two aspects of the supreme creative moment. “

In graphic arts the Phoenix was portrayed as a gray heron perched on the cusp of a kind of stelae topped by a pyramidion Rundle- described by Clark. During the ancient Egyptian kingdom it had actually existed a vertical column in the Temple of Heliopolis, known as “Pillar of Atum,” referring to Atum, the local name given to the sun-god. On top of it he stood a stone spire called Benben, and the combination of the two represented the prototype of all subsequent obelisks. The word Benben is interesting in itself, as in the ancient Egyptian language the root ‘well’ was linked to sexual reproduction (seed, copulation, fertilization, etc.). At the same time, in the Hebrew language well still it has the meaning of ‘son of’. The Egyptian phoenix is called Bennu, ie well-nu, which is very similar to well-nut. Since Nut was the name of the goddess of the sky, mother of Osiris and his brothers, well-nu probably it means ‘son of the goddess of the sky’. If this is correct, the Bennu was probably connected to Osiris, the most important son of Nut, the sky goddess. Meanwhile references to celestial goddess and her children naturally brings us to the meteorites and the probability that the original benben stone was actu- ally similar object of worship. But we may assume that this is not one of the many meteorites found in the desert, and it was found shortly after he saw him fall to the earth. Being on fire as it passed through the atmosphere, it would have the appearance of a “Firebird”. However, when people came to look for him on the point of impact, there would be no trace of any “bird”. The only thing you would find, and only if they had been lucky ones, was the bird’s egg: a meteorite that was cooling. But what might have thought is that these rocks originated from comets.

rgrret
Although it seems likely, we do not know for sure if the benben was a meteorite from this cluster. However, whatever it was, at the beginning of the Egyptian Middle Kingdom (circa 1991 BC) and the benben that the pillar on which Atum was once nestled seem to be lost. It is likely that this happened during the Old Kingdom, and before the start of the Fifth Dynasty (about 2494-2345). In The Mystery of Orion we have stressed the fact that the kings of this dynasty built their pyramids at Abusir. It is a site somewhere a little ‘further south of Giza that, if we accept the thesis that the pyramids of Giza are the Belt of Orion, corresponds more or less to its “head”. The head of Orion actually consists of three stars rather obscure but close: Lambda, Phi 1 and Phi 2 Orionis, and curiously the first three pharaohs who built the pyramids at Abusir were twins among them. In addition to building the pyramids, each of them also erected a temple in honor of the sun god, Ra. These temples, formed by a fence surrounding a hill topped by an obelisk-shaped stump, were clearly modeled on the old Temple of the Phoenix. The reason why they built them is one of the gran- mysteries of Egyptology, but at least part of the answer (and some clues about the actual origins of the Stone of Destiny) is contained in Westcar Papyrus.

papiro Westcar

The Westcar named Henry Westcar, who purchased it in 1824 and in 1839 entrusted him to Karl Richard Lepsius, an Egyptologist in vogue in those days. Now it preserved in the Egyptian Museum of Berlin, and is undoubtedly one of the most important documents Egyptians survived until today. It is believed to date back to the Second Intermediate Period (about 1786-1567 BC), who coincidentally is also the era in which it is believed they lived Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and the other patriarchs of Israel. However it is almost certainly a copy of a more ancient papyrus that would be written several centuries earlier, during the Middle Kingdom. The stories they told, however, take place in even more ancient times, during the IVa and Va Dynasty of the Old Kingdom, or the age of the pyramids. Robert Bauval and I visited Heliopolis in 1993, examining our own the famous Temple of the Phoenix. Although the obelisk that once occupied the place of honor had disappeared, we were able to see the base on which rested a time. What interested us in that temple was a story in Westcar Papyrus concerning Khufu, the builder of the Great Pyramid of Giza. In this story, his son Djedefr? It leads to a courtyard named Djedi magician.

This man is endowed with rare powers: he has one hundred and ten years, can reattach the severed head of a goose animal and can force a cam- undermine tamed lion behind him. Asking him questions, he also discovers he has some important information: he knows the ipwt (numbers) of the wnt (backroom) of Thoth at Heliopolis. Khufu asks him to tell him what are those numbers for later use in the construction of his pyramid. Djedi says he does not know them personally, but where to find the information: in a flint box in a room called “Repeat” in the sanctuary of Thoth at Heliopolis. Djedi goes on to say to the king that he will not bring you the information you want, but the eldest of the sons of the uterus content Reddjedet, the wife of a wab, a priest of Ra. According Djedi, these children were conceived by the sun god Ra in person and one day ricopriran- not the most important position of that country, that will be the pharaohs.

This story begins to bring us back clearly to triplets who built the temples of the sun at Abusir, since it is they that prophecy was referring. A Khufu succeeded several other pharaohs of the Fourth Dynasty but eventually Userkaf, the eldest of the twins, actually ascended to the throne, thus inaugurating the Fifth Dynasty. History does not tell us whether he has really brought before Khufu in the required information, but the account of Djedi is still fascinating and I think the statement that “the Ipwt of Wnt Thoth are in a” flint box “” deserves certainly a consideration. Judging by appearances, the suggestion that a box was made of flint seems very strange. There of flint mines in the Eastern Desert of Egypt and up to the Iron Age flint stones continued to be used as various tools and how surgical instruments. However, from a stabbing to a practical standpoint, the idea that the flint had been used at any time to manufacture a box where to keep secret information seems very unlikely. First of all, it does not lend itself to the purpose. By its nature is brittle and, although it can be used instead of brick as a building material, its use is mainly referring to the manufacture of weapons such as spears and arrowheads. My feeling, therefore, is that in this sense the accepted translation of the papyrus Westcar is wrong; the word, “ds” which is here translated as ‘flint’ and which is assigned as the definite sharpening of knives, it means some other type of material. Which could be?

thoth

Well, it might seem strange and a bit ‘pulled by the ears, but it would be a more plausible explanation that the “flint box” was not a box, nor were made of flint. In fact I think that probably it was a block of sandstone tough enough to be used to sharpen knives, but still malleable enough to be able to change its shape. This sounds remarkably similar to the Stone of Destiny, or at least, if not to the stone we know today by that name, at least to a very similar stone. The reasons that lead me to make this statement are based on the geometry, because the “numbers of Thoth” constituted the system of proportions that oversaw the construction of the Great Pyramid; surprising as it may seem, the Stone of Destiny gives us a geometric way to generate a similar pyramid.

Source: Mysteries of the Stone of Destiny Adrian Glibert – Harmakis Editions[:]

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