"Judge Pugsley described it as a "foul crime" because it led to the risk of addiction to other drugs."
So
is he saying we should punish people that grow or use cannabis because
other people that take cannabis later take addictive drugs?
If
that is so, then should we not be punishing those that drink coffee
(itself quite addictive and certainly a drug) because some coffee
drinkers later take more addictive drugs?
Should
we not then argue to punish people with toy guns because some of them
go on to get real guns and commit terrible crimes - or stop the
licensing of guns completely - or punish all drivers because some drive
too fast and have terrible accidents?
Or could we not simplify the law and only prosecute and punish those with victims?
http://www.derbytelegraph.co.uk/Derby-judge-s-jail-threat-arthritic-gardener/story-21144213-detail/story.html
Derby judge's jail threat to arthritic gardener who grew cannabis
Derby Telegraph
Monday 26 May 2014
A
GARDENER who has smoked cannabis for many years to alleviate pain from
arthritis rented a cottage so he could grow the drug. Julian Pinnington
started renting the property about a year ago and set up
cannabis-growing systems in two of the bedrooms.
The 43-year-old admitted producing cannabis but said that it was primarily for his own use.
However,
he accepted that, if there had been a large yield, he would have sold
the drug to offset the £350 monthly rent he paid for the cottage.
Derby
Crown Court was told that a drugs expert estimated that the potential
yield of the operation was 1.5kg to 4kg and could have sold for between
£9,720 and £40,500.
Judge David Pugsley handed Pinnington, of Lyndale Drive, Codnor, a 12-month jail sentence, suspended for a year.
And
the judge said: "I'm sorry, you don't spend £350 a month on rent,
never mind the equipment, if you don't intend to produce a significant
amount of cannabis – unless you are a complete buffoon.
"A suspended sentence in your case is not a light sentence as, if you smoke cannabis, you will be sent to prison. My advice is you give it up."
Judge Pugsley described it as a "foul crime" because it led to the risk of addiction to other drugs.
Sarah
Allen, prosecuting, said that police found three growing tents and 30
cannabis plants in the property in Oakerthorpe, as well as evidence of a
previous crop.
She said that Pinnington's fingerprints were found on the growing equipment.
Miss
Allen said: "He was arrested and he admitted he had been a user of
cannabis for many years and suffered from arthritis and used it to
alleviate the pain from that."
He told police he used about £60 to £70 of cannabis a week.
The
court heard that Pinnington, who was self-employed as a gardener, had
no previous convictions and was a family and community man.
Nicola
Hunter, in mitigation, said Pinnington had started renting the cottage
after he received compensation as a result of a car accident.
She
said: "He decided to use the money to set up a cannabis grow. "His
view at the time was: 'If I grow my own, I can grow a huge supply for
myself.'
"He says he has never previously sold any and the previous grow was a catastrophe and produced nothing."
Pinnington will be supervised by the probation service for a year. This supervision includes a drug rehabilitation requirement.
Tuesday 27 May 2014
Saturday 24 May 2014
If they do no harm to others, why arrest cannabis users?
Supt Mick Stamper just about sums it up "He said: “Cannabis is a
harm to the individual, but a cannabis user will rarely cause harm to
other people.“A class A user will cause harm to other people. On a
societal level this is a big issue.”"
So if the cannabis users rarely do harm to others, why are they arrested?
It is nothing short of tyranny for a Government to interfer with a person's private life or lifestyle without good reason, and those reasons are made clear in Human Rights law - the authorities must be acting to prevent risk to public health, public order or the Rights of others.
If there are no victims but the taxpayers that pay the cost of enforcing bad law, then these arrests must stop.
No Victim No Crime - find it on Facebook
http://www.northamptonchron.co.uk/news/crime/police-chief-cannabis-is-too-easy-to-get-hold-of-in-northampton-1-6078758
Northampton Chronicle 24 May 2014
A Northamptonshire police chief says targeting ‘hard drug’ use will always be the force’s top priority, despite a charity’s fears that cannabis is now as easy to get hold of as tobacco.
Service manager for the CAN Young People’s Team, Ali Smith, said the class B drug was now too easy to acquire in Northampton and it could have devastating side effects on teenagers.
She said: “Years ago this was so much less of a problem. We saw little bits of cannabis, but not on the regular scale we see now. The stats are that young people are now using more.”
Mrs Smith said cannabis was the biggest substance the St Giles Street centre – which provides a range of drug, alcohol and homelessness services for young people – deals with.
She said it could be especially harmful because young people were taking it as their bodies were still developing: “There’s a lot going on with young people,when you throw into that a strong hallucinogenic, it has a massive impact.”
Supt Mick Stamper, head of the Northamptonshire Police’s operational command unit, admitted the ‘culture’ of cannabis was a problem in young people, in particularly a misconception that it will cause little harm.
But he said the force will always have to prioritise targeting class A drugs, such as cocaine and heroin over the class B substance.
He said: “Cannabis is a harm to the individual, but a cannabis user will rarely cause harm to other people.
“A class A user will cause harm to other people. On a societal level this is a big issue.”
https://www.facebook.com/pages/NO-Victim-NO-CRIME/257914584389417
So if the cannabis users rarely do harm to others, why are they arrested?
It is nothing short of tyranny for a Government to interfer with a person's private life or lifestyle without good reason, and those reasons are made clear in Human Rights law - the authorities must be acting to prevent risk to public health, public order or the Rights of others.
If there are no victims but the taxpayers that pay the cost of enforcing bad law, then these arrests must stop.
No Victim No Crime - find it on Facebook
http://www.northamptonchron.co.uk/news/crime/police-chief-cannabis-is-too-easy-to-get-hold-of-in-northampton-1-6078758
Northampton Chronicle 24 May 2014
A Northamptonshire police chief says targeting ‘hard drug’ use will always be the force’s top priority, despite a charity’s fears that cannabis is now as easy to get hold of as tobacco.
Service manager for the CAN Young People’s Team, Ali Smith, said the class B drug was now too easy to acquire in Northampton and it could have devastating side effects on teenagers.
She said: “Years ago this was so much less of a problem. We saw little bits of cannabis, but not on the regular scale we see now. The stats are that young people are now using more.”
Mrs Smith said cannabis was the biggest substance the St Giles Street centre – which provides a range of drug, alcohol and homelessness services for young people – deals with.
She said it could be especially harmful because young people were taking it as their bodies were still developing: “There’s a lot going on with young people,when you throw into that a strong hallucinogenic, it has a massive impact.”
Supt Mick Stamper, head of the Northamptonshire Police’s operational command unit, admitted the ‘culture’ of cannabis was a problem in young people, in particularly a misconception that it will cause little harm.
But he said the force will always have to prioritise targeting class A drugs, such as cocaine and heroin over the class B substance.
He said: “Cannabis is a harm to the individual, but a cannabis user will rarely cause harm to other people.
“A class A user will cause harm to other people. On a societal level this is a big issue.”
https://www.facebook.com/pages/NO-Victim-NO-CRIME/257914584389417
Thursday 22 May 2014
I would like to see candidates and parties mentioning cannabis issues in their manifestos, fliers and broadcasts
What I would like to see is candidates and parties mentioning cannabis
issues in their manifestos, fliers and broadcasts - I have seen nothing.
AS for the Greens, a couple of years ago I wrote to them - the letter was forwarded with an added comment for somebody to reply and the reply along with comment came back to me - "I thought we'd taken care of the dopers' votes" it said.
For almost 20 years I have been involved in pushing the Greens and I must say that they did change their policy after the LCA became a political party and won votes in 2001.
I offered to finance a local candidate flier if it included the words Legalise Cannabis or something similar - the fliers were printed but the Norwich Green Party told the lady she was not allowed to put them out, so I withdrew my offer, the fliers were binned and she had no flier at all.
My Eastern Region Green Party candidate Rupert Reid and his associate Adrian Ramsey say advertising their "pro-cannabis" policy would lose them votes.
All credit to Caroline Lucas for starting a petition, but in my region, Rupsert Reid (says the cannabis issue is a "no-brainer") will not get my vote.
The next years General Election I will consider voting for any candidate that seems able and willing to represent me and that includes the cannabis issue - an issue that concerns health and medicine, law and Rights, fuel and pollution, the environment, agriculture, industry, employment, trade, tax, education and even foreign policy.
The absence of any mention of cannabis in these elections (in the UK) demonstrates to need for a dedicated cannabis political party - one that will allow the users to represent themselves.
AS for the Greens, a couple of years ago I wrote to them - the letter was forwarded with an added comment for somebody to reply and the reply along with comment came back to me - "I thought we'd taken care of the dopers' votes" it said.
For almost 20 years I have been involved in pushing the Greens and I must say that they did change their policy after the LCA became a political party and won votes in 2001.
I offered to finance a local candidate flier if it included the words Legalise Cannabis or something similar - the fliers were printed but the Norwich Green Party told the lady she was not allowed to put them out, so I withdrew my offer, the fliers were binned and she had no flier at all.
My Eastern Region Green Party candidate Rupert Reid and his associate Adrian Ramsey say advertising their "pro-cannabis" policy would lose them votes.
All credit to Caroline Lucas for starting a petition, but in my region, Rupsert Reid (says the cannabis issue is a "no-brainer") will not get my vote.
The next years General Election I will consider voting for any candidate that seems able and willing to represent me and that includes the cannabis issue - an issue that concerns health and medicine, law and Rights, fuel and pollution, the environment, agriculture, industry, employment, trade, tax, education and even foreign policy.
The absence of any mention of cannabis in these elections (in the UK) demonstrates to need for a dedicated cannabis political party - one that will allow the users to represent themselves.
NO VICTIM NO CRIME: Pay £16 Billion but go to jail
The law ought to be about protecting people and society not controlling them for no good reason, not punishing them for their choices even if they threaten or do no harm - and certainly not to prevent people from growing and possessing (using) plants for theor own medicinal benefits.
In the UK it costs the taxpayer about £500 a year each, on average, to finance this failed war on cananbis users, some £16 Bliion a year to "fight drugs" and the policy has failed.
If there is NO VICTIM then there ought be NO CRIME
In the UK it costs the taxpayer about £500 a year each, on average, to finance this failed war on cananbis users, some £16 Bliion a year to "fight drugs" and the policy has failed.
If there is NO VICTIM then there ought be NO CRIME
Monday 19 May 2014
PIGS - The Enemies of Legalisation?
P
is for paranoia and fear of persecution. This prevents cannabis
users and non-users with a huge barrier to overcome before they can
publicly speak out against prohibition. Users fear raids from the
police and arrest, loss of employment and even imprisonment. Many
professional people such as Doctors, Teachers, Lawyers, Probation
Officers, Social Workers etc, although privately supporting
legalisation or some lesser form of change in law, are afraid of
persecution from people in power and the press. MP's of all parties
can be silenced and pressurised to change their statements, by the
Party Whips. Many Doctors quietly advise patients that cannabis is
of possible benefit to them but will not make a public statement on
the issue. If you are one of those professionals please speak out
and help call an end to the suffering caused to hundreds of thousands
of citizens of the UK, every year, under the inefficient and
expensive attempts at suppressing freedom of choice, in general,
cannabis in particular. If you are a user, fear not, for to express
an opinion on the law is not an offense and does not indicate that
you are a user. Many non-users advocate legalisation too.
I
is for indifference and for ignorance. Many non-users and people who
are stigmatised or victimised by society through illness, poverty,
lifestyle, belief or riches and power, remain unconcerned or unaware
of the disastrous social and environmental effects of prohibition.
These people need to be awoken. Many of them are on drugs - heroin
addicts, alcoholics, Valium addicts, alcoholics and at all rungs of
the social ladder; they just don't care. But others do care, they
just either don't know or don't know what they can do. It is up to
activists to educate and guide these people to the postbox and the
ballot boxes. Then, when they do care, we need to reassure them to
avoid them slipping into the description of P.
G
is
for greed. These are the highly profit-motivated suppliers of
illegal cannabis, often of dubious quality, and those directors (and
their minions) of the multinational corporations that profit by
billions from their environmentally damaging synthetic and dangerous
alternatives. These include petroleum companies who risk losses if
hemp seed oil becomes widely available; pharmaceutical companies who
would lose out if people take less of their synthetic drugs and more
home grown cannabis and including those that now make massive;
profits from cannabis products such as “Sativex”; producers of
plastics and synthetic materials - products that could be replaced
locally from locally grown cannabis; nuclear fuel and fossil fuel
companies whose products could also be replaced by locally grown
cannabis, far more efficiently and cheaply than for all modern fuels;
timber companies who fear that cannabis would replace wood as a
material for furnishing as well as paper and packing materials;
breweries and tobacco companies who fear that the use of home grown
cannabis would decrease the sales of their highly dangerous legal
drugs; national and international criminal and terrorist
organisations who profit from illegal cannabis, possibly even the
secret services of certain countries (not yours, of course); police,
solicitors, barristers, judges and prison staff, with all the
associated industry at colossal public expense, who may be out of a
job is 250,000 less people are searched and 100,000 less prosecuted,
annually.
S
is for squabblers and for separation.. Those people who continually
insist upon arguing over matters of minor or academic differences
which distract from the general cause of delay action towards the
consensus aim of legalisation. Such arguments are divisive and
unproductive, often originating from personal grievances. Some times
such arguments are introduced by insincere campaigners, even
infiltrators from corners supporting prohibition, whose aim is to
suppress by division and mistrust. Other times the arguments may be
prolonged by sincere people. When the squabble, due to personal
grievances, interferes with actions of the general movement for
legalisation, or any particular event or group, then the squabblers
become enemies of the movement.
Don't
be any part of PIGS. Wake up, learn, act, cooperate, become involved
in this movement which is all about freedom of choice, lifestyle and
religion. It is about the very rights granted by the United Nations
Charters. Prohibition of cannabis is a prolonged attempt at
mis-education and tyrannical control, and must be resisted by the
masses.
Sunday 18 May 2014
A Strange Justice That Convicts For Victimless Private Activities
It is disturbing to see Court cases where there are no victims and
the only losers are the defendant and the taxpayers and one should be
forgiven for thinking such cases to be politically or religiously
motivated.
Sadly this is happening daily throughout the country in particular the likes of those prosecuted for possession or cultivation of cannabis for their own use in private.
It is even more shocking when these people are sent to prison for growing plants for medicinal use whilst GW Pharmaceuticals are licensed to grow tens if not hundreds of thousands of the same plants that they use to produce their highly profitable and expensive Sativex.
One incredible distinction made by Government is that Sativex is now scheduled in the UK as a drug with medicinal value whereas the plants themselves are still scheduled as a drug with no medical use.
Incredible to think that a pharmaceutical company is capable of creating a product with medicinal value from a plant with no medical value when the only difference is the alcohol used in the extraction process and the peppermint used in the flavouring.
It's little short of a scientific miracle, magic or alchemy, like turning lead into gold.
Can you imagine a time when lead is in fact turned into gold but the process was limited to the rich and powerful and anyone else risks prison for even trying it - even possession of lead is illegal? I would call that tyranny.
That is what is happening in the UK and Neil Morgan’s recent imprisonment is one example.
Neil had been growing cannabis for his own use for many years and been sent to prisons and fined several times before his most recent case.
In all the cases there was nobody else involved, there were no victims, it was done in private, but despite Neil's attempts to stand up for his Right to a Private Life, Neil was repeatedly punished by the courts.
So it does not take much to see that if Neil was doing no harm to anyone or causing no risk to public health the only reason why he was prosecuted at all - was due to laws made by politicians, law that seem to favour the profits of big businesses.
How much longer will the public vote in these tyrannical prohibitionists that put law above Justice and profits above people?
How much longer will we stand for it?
Maybe people would wake up if it was tea and not cannabis - if the only tea they could get was many times the price from the chemist - of course cannabis and tea are very different plants - for a start tea has less medicinal value and uses and cannabis is less toxic.
FREE NEIL MORGAN: https://www.facebook.com/freeneilmorgan?fref=ts
UK: Cannabis user said prosecution was "breach of human rights" (Neil Morgan)
South Wales Evening Post
Sunday 18 May 2014
A MAN convicted of growing cannabis told a court if he was jailed there would be no-one to look after his dogs.
But a judge said, while he was sympathetic towards the animals, he would not be emotionally blackmailed and sentenced 58-year- old Neil Morgan to a year behind bars.
Swansea Crown Court heard Morgan had changed his lifestyle and switched from the growing of cannabis to producing mead and breeding dogs. He was convicted by a jury after standing trial at the court after denying cultivating drugs.
He had previously told the court he believed the prosecution was a breach of his human rights.
Morgan, from Hillrise Park in Clydach, has a long list of previous convictions for growing or possessing the drug.
His barrister Carina Hughes told Judge Paul Thomas that since his arrest for this latest offence, Morgan said he had broken his 40-year addiction to cannabis and instead turned his interests to making mead and breeding Jack Russell dogs.
Miss Hughes said Morgan had known he faced prison and had, in the time since his conviction, tried to re-home the 17 dogs, but not all had been.
Miss Hughes said: "He has had a significant change in attitude. In my submission, if he is given a custodial sentence then there's a potential here for him to take steps backwards. "
If he comes out of prison destitute, with no home, no dogs and having lost his mead interest he's likely to turn back to use cannabis."
But Judge Thomas then said that any attempt by Morgan to use the dogs to "emotionally blackmail" the court would not work because Morgan had known for more than a year he was likely to go to prison.
The judge told him although Miss Hughes had said everything she could on his behalf, because she did not represent him at trial she had not seen his "unrepentant" attitude throughout.
"Had you decided not to contest this matter, it may be that there would be some scope, although unlikely, for a different outcome.
"The time has come that you must learn that cultivating cannabis is an offence, whatever your personal views.
"I had, and still have, huge sympathy for your dogs but you have had over a year to do something about that," he added.
http://www.southwales-eveningpost.co.uk/Cannabis-user-said-prosecution-breach-human/story-21106957-detail/story.html#Tpk0jaelIEiW1tjx.99
Sadly this is happening daily throughout the country in particular the likes of those prosecuted for possession or cultivation of cannabis for their own use in private.
It is even more shocking when these people are sent to prison for growing plants for medicinal use whilst GW Pharmaceuticals are licensed to grow tens if not hundreds of thousands of the same plants that they use to produce their highly profitable and expensive Sativex.
One incredible distinction made by Government is that Sativex is now scheduled in the UK as a drug with medicinal value whereas the plants themselves are still scheduled as a drug with no medical use.
Incredible to think that a pharmaceutical company is capable of creating a product with medicinal value from a plant with no medical value when the only difference is the alcohol used in the extraction process and the peppermint used in the flavouring.
It's little short of a scientific miracle, magic or alchemy, like turning lead into gold.
Can you imagine a time when lead is in fact turned into gold but the process was limited to the rich and powerful and anyone else risks prison for even trying it - even possession of lead is illegal? I would call that tyranny.
That is what is happening in the UK and Neil Morgan’s recent imprisonment is one example.
Neil had been growing cannabis for his own use for many years and been sent to prisons and fined several times before his most recent case.
In all the cases there was nobody else involved, there were no victims, it was done in private, but despite Neil's attempts to stand up for his Right to a Private Life, Neil was repeatedly punished by the courts.
So it does not take much to see that if Neil was doing no harm to anyone or causing no risk to public health the only reason why he was prosecuted at all - was due to laws made by politicians, law that seem to favour the profits of big businesses.
How much longer will the public vote in these tyrannical prohibitionists that put law above Justice and profits above people?
How much longer will we stand for it?
Maybe people would wake up if it was tea and not cannabis - if the only tea they could get was many times the price from the chemist - of course cannabis and tea are very different plants - for a start tea has less medicinal value and uses and cannabis is less toxic.
FREE NEIL MORGAN: https://www.facebook.com/freeneilmorgan?fref=ts
UK: Cannabis user said prosecution was "breach of human rights" (Neil Morgan)
South Wales Evening Post
Sunday 18 May 2014
A MAN convicted of growing cannabis told a court if he was jailed there would be no-one to look after his dogs.
But a judge said, while he was sympathetic towards the animals, he would not be emotionally blackmailed and sentenced 58-year- old Neil Morgan to a year behind bars.
Swansea Crown Court heard Morgan had changed his lifestyle and switched from the growing of cannabis to producing mead and breeding dogs. He was convicted by a jury after standing trial at the court after denying cultivating drugs.
He had previously told the court he believed the prosecution was a breach of his human rights.
Morgan, from Hillrise Park in Clydach, has a long list of previous convictions for growing or possessing the drug.
His barrister Carina Hughes told Judge Paul Thomas that since his arrest for this latest offence, Morgan said he had broken his 40-year addiction to cannabis and instead turned his interests to making mead and breeding Jack Russell dogs.
Miss Hughes said Morgan had known he faced prison and had, in the time since his conviction, tried to re-home the 17 dogs, but not all had been.
Miss Hughes said: "He has had a significant change in attitude. In my submission, if he is given a custodial sentence then there's a potential here for him to take steps backwards. "
If he comes out of prison destitute, with no home, no dogs and having lost his mead interest he's likely to turn back to use cannabis."
But Judge Thomas then said that any attempt by Morgan to use the dogs to "emotionally blackmail" the court would not work because Morgan had known for more than a year he was likely to go to prison.
The judge told him although Miss Hughes had said everything she could on his behalf, because she did not represent him at trial she had not seen his "unrepentant" attitude throughout.
"Had you decided not to contest this matter, it may be that there would be some scope, although unlikely, for a different outcome.
"The time has come that you must learn that cultivating cannabis is an offence, whatever your personal views.
"I had, and still have, huge sympathy for your dogs but you have had over a year to do something about that," he added.
http://www.southwales-eveningpost.co.uk/Cannabis-user-said-prosecution-breach-human/story-21106957-detail/story.html#Tpk0jaelIEiW1tjx.99
Thursday 15 May 2014
Question to Norman Baker, Lib Dem MP
Mr Baker, I heard you on BBC
Radio Sussex this morning talking about medicinal use of cannabis by a
man called Kieron Reeves as it seems to have stopped his epileptic
seizures, and a man Clark French that uses cannabis to ease the
symptoms of his MS.
You said that government advisors have said that cannabis has limited medicinal uses - so why is it still scheduled as a drug with no medicinal uses and what uses do you acknowldge?
There are clearly some as GW Pharmaceuticals simply extract ALL the active ingredients from cannabis plants using alcohol to produce their peppermint-flavoured expensive spray called Sativex.
Obviously to produce Sativex a medicine by extracting compounds from a plant said to have such limited medicinal value is either magic, a miracle or some sort of fraud
- and the punishment of people that grow the plant at home whilst allowing a pharmaceutical company to grow tens of thousands of plants to produce medicine for sale, is unjust and suggests corruption.
Please answer a question put to you on the show - Keiron Reeves says he needs cannabis to cope with his illness and that prescribed medication did not work - should he wait for the law to be changed considering that successive governments have stated they will not change it?
That is a direct question, please answer it - should people in desparate need of cannabis for medical reasons break the law or suffer in silence?
How ought the law deal with such people?
https://www.facebook.com/NormanBakerMP
available for a few days after May 16th http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01ylhhz
You said that government advisors have said that cannabis has limited medicinal uses - so why is it still scheduled as a drug with no medicinal uses and what uses do you acknowldge?
There are clearly some as GW Pharmaceuticals simply extract ALL the active ingredients from cannabis plants using alcohol to produce their peppermint-flavoured expensive spray called Sativex.
Obviously to produce Sativex a medicine by extracting compounds from a plant said to have such limited medicinal value is either magic, a miracle or some sort of fraud
- and the punishment of people that grow the plant at home whilst allowing a pharmaceutical company to grow tens of thousands of plants to produce medicine for sale, is unjust and suggests corruption.
Please answer a question put to you on the show - Keiron Reeves says he needs cannabis to cope with his illness and that prescribed medication did not work - should he wait for the law to be changed considering that successive governments have stated they will not change it?
That is a direct question, please answer it - should people in desparate need of cannabis for medical reasons break the law or suffer in silence?
How ought the law deal with such people?
https://www.facebook.com/NormanBakerMP
available for a few days after May 16th http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01ylhhz
Wednesday 14 May 2014
From Dot to Cleopatra - FACT, THEORY AND FICTION
Bearing in mind the huge range
of years which the title ‘From Dot to Cleopatra’ suggests - billions of
years - it may be surprising that the first chapter consists of only a
few pages yet covers all the time up to about 3000 BC, yet
the remainder of the book covers only the Ancient Egyptians over about
3000 years. Now that you have read Chapter One you may be wondering
“Well, what is true?”, which is really the reason why I have included
it. My intention was not, however, to confuse you or make you feel any
pointlessness in studying history; on the contrary it is designed to
give you a taste of forming your own conclusions, establishing your own
beliefs and starting you off on the fascinating journey of unravelling
the fact from the fiction. There are certainly a lot of gaps in our
knowledge of our past and the past of our planet and the universe, a lot
of ‘dark’ times about which we have little or no knowledge and have to
rely largely on guess work and theory. In addition there are very many
theories and beliefs and different interpretations of the solid
discoveries that have been made.
History and Egyptology are both subjects which, like science, rely on observation, but in these cases the observations are of ‘items’ left either purposefully or accidentally, from the past. What these things mean is a different matter. Like scientists we must look at what we have before us and form a theory; then we must look at whatever else we know for sure and check the theory out for consistency. If the facts don’t fit we have to change the theory. Remember it was not so long ago that mankind believed the Earth was flat and that we could fall off the end. That was a theory based on observation. But there came a time when someone sailed round the world and never did fall off and then we had to get rid of the idea and believe the Earth was round.
There are two types of past which I am talking about, the Prehistoric and the Historic. History is the study of the past based on records kept, of particular interest to us now; records of people, places, events, activities and changes in society, the people and the rulers. In a perfect world, history would be an unbroken record of what actually happened. Unfortunately the world of man is never perfect: there are plenty of gaps in our knowledge. For a start, before we could have records we had to have some sort of writing or drawing in symbols. Then we had to feel the need to record events for posterity. Then those records had to survive until today, or at least until someone else could find and rewrite them, in which case that person’s interpretation would come into play.
Prehistory, then, is the study of the time before records were kept. On a world scale this time finished on different dates in different places. The Ancient Egyptians started writing about 3000 BC, whereas in Britain and Europe it came much later. Prehistory becomes history when we reach the stage in the development of the civilisation where they considered dates important. Before that we have to rely on what we can see now and on what is recorded as having been seen in the past. Scientists such as astronomers, cosmologists, cosmogonists, archaeologists and geologists base their theories on what is seen to happen, what it looks like has happened and what they postulate will happen, making the best guess possible. These guesses may be reasonable inferences or vague ideas. Sometimes there are so many observations which confirm the ideas that the theories become accepted as facts.
Consider, for instance, dinosaurs. We know that they existed, because plenty of bones have been found. We can infer their appearances by imagining how the bones fitted together and how they would be covered by muscle and skin. We can guess at what they ate by looking at fossils found from the same periods and looking at their teeth and comparing them with teeth of other creatures. We can guess that they were not very clever from the size of their brains, supposing that their brains were in their heads! But do we know what colours they were? Do we know what they did each day? Do we know why, after surviving for millions of years before any recognisable form of man came along, they suddenly died out? When dinosaurs roamed the world the ancestors of the creatures which would one day walk and talk, write and sing and cook and use tools and so on, that is us, were little more than clever little rodents living off leftovers. We can only guess at the answers.
History, being based on written records, should produce a more reliable picture of the past, but, you will see, that is not always so. We have a lot of modern day techniques such as radiocarbon dating, which enables us to date organic materials by measuring the percentages of a particular radio isotope of carbon, carbon 14 and we have computers to tabulate and analyse finds. We have stone stele and papyrus scrolls to study, often fragmented and needing rebuilding like a jigsaw puzzle. We have literally thousands of finds to ponder on. We have the tombs with their wall paintings and huge pyramids and temples with hieroglyphic carvings. From all this we can get a fairly good picture of what was happening.
The discovery of a stone tablet which you will read about, now called the Rosetta stone, which was found in Egypt at a place called Rosetta and, after about 20 years hard work deciphering it, we have been able to start to read the thousands of inscriptions and papyri. So we are able to create a picture of what happened all those years ago. But there will always be questions unanswered. For instance, imagine a stone tablet found out in the desert; it may hold script including the name of the writer and information from which we can date it - we cannot use radiocarbon dating on stone. Do we know this was the name of the person who wrote it? Well we do know that certain Pharaohs wrote their names - or rather got workmen to carve them - on their predecessors’ monuments, thus making them appear to be their’s instead. Sometimes even a royal name was chiselled out and a new name put in, or left blank. Another occurrence could have been when someone came along later and carved a name where there had been none, the name he may have thought should have been there. Would we know whether the name was the right one, carved at the time of building, or even a thousand years later? There was a particular Egyptian historian who became interested in the ‘Ancient Monuments’ some 2000 years after they were built and he is known to have visited the Step Pyramid at Saqqara. Upon seeing the absence of the king’s name on one of the other pyramids, he chiselled it out - Unas, or Wenis.
Imagine another situation where a tomb or a hole in the ground is discovered and in this is found a corpse together with some everyday objects such as a comb, a doll, or a piece of jewellery. On one of these items there is a name. Is this the name of the owner? Was this the name of the living person whose body is in the grave? Often there is no way of knowing. Certainly there have been finds in places where such items would not normally be expected to occur. Maybe the item was transported, lost or robbed, and buried or sold on. This type of discovery was made in Giza near Cairo, at the site of the Great Pyramid. The Great Pyramid did not seem to bear the name of the builder, which would seem rather strange if it had been built as a monument to the Pharaoh of the time. Many people have thought that the Great Pyramid was built as the result of an egotistical urge of the Pharaoh to proclaim his greatness. This argument has serious flaws; for a start they say that the Pharaoh’s successor also built a pyramid, but if it also was a result of ego then we may well ask why this Pharaoh built one slightly smaller and why the next Pharaoh built his one smaller. But how do we know who these Pharaohs were? Well, not far from the outside of the Great Pyramid, deep within an underground shaft, was found a very small statuette of the Pharaoh Cheops (now in Cairo Museum). In fact this is the only representation of Cheops so far ever found and it was upside down as if dropped. Based on this find it is generally accepted that Cheops was the builder of the Great Pyramid, although the reasoning is hardly reliable.
What about stories handed down generation after generation before being written down? How reliable are those? If you have ever played ‘Chinese whispers’ with about seven or so people, you will have seen how repeated words can change. Over hundreds or thousands of years the stories would certainly be subjected to colourful embellishments and exaggerations. Even if an event was recorded at the time, was that how it happened or simply how the writer or his superior wanted it to look? Did Adam walk on Earth? What about Osiris? Was there a great flood? If there was, did the people who survived know what caused it, or only guess? Who selected what to record and what to miss out?
In the Bible the name Egypt is mentioned hundreds of times, yet in Egyptian history the name Israel is hardly mentioned at all. In the Bible, Moses is mentioned and the king is simply referred to as Pharaoh, so we do not know for sure which one it was. Whoever it was, the Exodus of the Israelites from Egyptian slavery must have been a momentous event, yet there is no record of it at all in Egypt’s records and no mention of Moses. Maybe the defeated Pharaoh, like most people, preferred to record his winnings to his losses!
So Egyptology is vague. In this book I am trying to show you the difference between what I know, what I am reasonably sure of and what I can only guess at and leave the decision of what to believe up to you. As you go on to read more you can always change your mind and opinions without shame. There is not always a clear cut right and wrong. For a moment think about the fantastic discoveries from the Tomb of Tutankhamun in The Valley of the Kings. There was huge wealth inside. We can reasonably believe that the items were put there due to religious beliefs and stayed there because it was not found earlier! Other Pharonic tombs, when rediscovered in modern times, mostly contained nothing save a damaged mummy. We can surmise that this was because they were robbed and we know that this was a big problem in the time of Ramesses X. Since many of the Pharaohs were a lot richer than Tutankhamun it is reasonable to say that their tombs would have contained a lot more than his. So where did all that stuff go? Who were the robbers? Poor men, workers maybe, corrupt officials, later Pharaohs, foreign invaders? Nobody knows.
If you decide to scratch a little deeper into the mysteries of Ancient Egypt you will find every section an ever deepening intrigue before you; you will realise the contradictions between authors both in opinion and so-called fact. You will see whole dynasties moved about through hundreds of years and anomalies such as tombs apparently built before the owner’s birth. Many are the remaining mysteries. Yet sacred Egyptian writings promise that one day all will be revealed.
Next I want to mention the names of the Pharaohs and how we know them. Firstly consider that we know the hieroglyphs were all consonants; there were no real vowels. So if we get a name like, Rmsss, it could be Ramesses, Romassis, Remosses and so on. So we are not entirely sure we are pronouncing the name as it was pronounced in those days, but that really is not very important since a name is merely a means of reference and providing we keep to the same name for the same person, we should not get too confused. Think of them as nicknames.
A lot of the information we rely on was written by historians of the past; in particular, we rely on them for lists of Pharaohs’ names. The first person who wrote history was a son of the famous Ramesses II, called Khaemwese, who lived about 1250 BC By this time the pyramids were ancient and the Valley of the Kings old. Khaemwese was actually a Magician and a High Priest of Ptah. He visited many tombs at Saqqara and studied books in the Royal Library. He was the one who chiselled the name of Unas on the pyramid at Saqqara and he also carved a message saying that it was he who carved the name, “since it was not found on the face of the pyramid, because the priest Khaemwese loved to restore the monuments of Upper and Lower Egypt”.
In about 450 BC a Greek writer called Herodotus visited Egypt and tried to sort out the fact from the fiction, basing his work on the results of discussions with people, in particular the priests. Herodotus had been born in Halicarnassus and travelled a lot and in his later life wrote a book called ‘The Histories’. He is now considered the ‘Father of History’ and we rely upon his reports, although he was sometimes inaccurate, relying so much on hearsay. Some of his information, such as the time when the Pharaoh Cheops was said to have closed the temples, has since proved inaccurate, but his information on certain other Pharaohs, such as Amasis, is all we have. In fact we know very little about Herodotus himself. The lives of the writers were not recorded in great detail, or at least none have been found. We know that Herodotus was the son of Lyxes called Carian and Dryo. He seems to have been very much influenced by the Inonian culture of Greece and, in fact, Ionic was the language in which he wrote. His large volumes contained information on the geography, history and ethnography of Egypt. His observations in Egypt, at the time after the invasion by Cambyses, are invaluable. Herodotus wrote of Egypt “Such animals as there are in Egypt, both wild and tame, are held to be sacred”.
During the reign of Ptolemy II, there lived a priest called Manetho (305 - 285 BC) and it is to him we owe the division of the Pharonic times into 31 dynasties. Manetho wrote in Greek and took his information from surviving documents, now lost. He gave the ancient Pharaohs Greek names. Some of the dynasties he listed were contemporaneous with each other, there being one ruler in Upper Egypt and another in Lower Egypt. These were competing dynasties.
As well as dividing the large time span into dynasties modern day historians have divided it into periods. These are the approximate dates of the different periods:-
Archaic Period 3100 - 2686 BC
Old Kingdom 2686 - 2181 BC
First Intermediate Period 2181 - 2133 BC
Middle Kingdom 2133 - 1633 BC
Second Intermediate Period 1633 - 1567 BC
New Kingdom 1567 - 1085 BC
Third Intermediate Period 1085 - 750 BC
Late Period 750 - 323 BC
Ptolemaic Period 323 - 30 BC
As with most dates from ancient Egypt these are subjective.
During Roman times tourists were able to move around and visit many of the monuments, including the Pyramids and the Valley of the Kings and they often left graffiti to commemorate their interest. What were in those days simply uncalled-for scribbles on the monuments have become, to us, historic inscriptions in themselves!
In 25 BC a Greek called Strabo wrote 17 books called ‘Geographia’and although mainly about geography, the last book provides some interesting information. Strabo mentions the two huge statues of Amenophis III, on the West Bank at Thebes, known as the ‘Colossi of Memnon’. They once flanked a large mortuary temple. In 27 BC there was an earthquake which cracked the monuments and led to a very strange and eerie sound in the mornings. By the time Strabo arrived there were tales of the singing colossi! However, it is now known that it was caused by the morning temperature rise which made the insides of the statues vibrate as the warm air passed through the cracks. Strabo listed the names of towns, pyramids, tombs, temples and also made notes on the Nilometer at Elephantine, near Aswan. A very useful 2000 years old list.
In the years of the Roman occupation of Egypt there lived another historian, Pleny the Elder (27 -79 AD) who wrote his ‘Historia Naturalis’, drawing from many older sources which have since disappeared. He described the Sphinx and obelisks (one of which was transported to Rome and stands there to this day) and mentions some of the techniques of preparation of mummies.
A few years later Plutarch (50 - 120 AD) wrote an account of the myth of Osiris and Isis. This is very fortunate for us, since no original Egyptian version has survived until today.
At the same time a Roman historian, Flavius Josephus, wrote his own work using extracts from Manetho and making comments on Moses, the Exodus and the Hyksos invasion.
In the following few centuries AD, Egypt became a Christian country for a while. The Christians held no respect whatsoever for the monuments, destroying many of the inscriptions on temples and even scraping the paint off the walls of tombs. The Christians considered the ancient religions of Egypt to be evil. Monks who adapted tombs as their living quarters often defaced or obliterated the wall paintings.
By the time the Arabs arrived in Egypt in the 7th century AD, the population had forgotten all about the early civilisations and lost the ability to read the hieroglyphs. The Arabs, like the Christians, considered the monuments evil, thinking that the huge pyramids and statues had been built by giants or magicians. They ignored them, except when they wanted to destroy one, or take it apart for the materials for their new buildings and mosques.
In more recent times, especially since Napoleon Bonaparte’s visit to Egypt in 1798 AD, interest in the old cultures has regrown. There were several major explorers and discoverers who have contributed a tremendous amount to our knowledge. Belzoni (1778 - 1823 AD) discovered the tomb of Aye, the magnificent tomb of Seti I and four others. He was also responsible for opening the Pyramid of Khephren and the discovery of the colossal statues of Ramesses II at Abu Simbel. His competitors, John Lewis Burckhart (1784 - 1817 AD), Bernardino Drovetti (1775 - 1852 AD) and Henry Salt (1780 - 1827 AD) were also very active in Egypt, often bringing items back to European museums. Drovetti, an Italian, made a major find, the Turin Canon of Kings.
Various people had tried to understand the hieroglyphs over the years. It was one William Warburton (1698 - 1779 AD), who became the Bishop of Gloucester, who recognised that hieroglyphics was in fact a written language and not just symbolic. But none of his contemporaries liked his ideas much, sticking to the notion that it was a symbolic script which would be impossible to understand.
In 1741 William Stukely, a doctor and famous antiquarian who was active at Avebury and Salisbury (in England), founded the Egyptian Society in London. Interest in ancient Egypt became more widespread. Stukely had examined the hieroglyphs on a statue in Turin and concluded that they were completely different from Chinese characters, which ‘experts’ were claiming had been derived from the hieroglyphs. He claimed that it was a symbolic script and that the hieroglyphics were beyond understanding.
Napoleon’s
troops discovered the Rosetta Stone in Egypt. Wax impressions of the
scripts (there were three on the stone - Hieroglyphs, Greek and
Hieratic, which was an easier and quicker everyday form of hieroglyphs
for everyday documents), were circulated amongst historians in Europe.
The Stone itself was brought to Britain after the British troops had
ousted Napoleon’s men from Egypt in 1801, following Nelson’s victory at
the Battle of Aboukir.
Thomas Young (1773 - 1824) became fascinated by hieroglyphics and discovered the other written languages of Ancient Egypt. He realised that hieroglyphs were in fact alphabetical as well as ideogrammatic. He also suggested that the oval shaped Cartouche contained Royal Names, which we now know is true.
A major advance in our knowledge resulted from the decision made by Jean François Champollion to try to decipher the hieroglyphs. He spent his early years learning many languages and scripts, including Hebrew, Sanskrit, Arabic, Parsi, Persian, Zend, Pali, Chaldean and Coptic. He realised that the hieroglyphs were phonetic. When he eventually started to understand the inscriptions they were able to find out more about who owned what. In 1768 another great discoverer, James Bruce, had found a tomb in the Valley of the Kings but was not able to discover which Pharaoh it had belonged to. It turned out to have been Ramesses III’s.
Robert Hay (1799 - 1863) constructed 49 volumes of beautiful and detailed drawings of the monuments. This is now housed in the British Museum. It was about this time that another keen investigator of antiquity founded ‘Egyptology’ in England. This was John Gardner Wilkinson, 1797 - 1875. Wilkinson excavated many tombs at Thebes, adding much to knowledge of the Pharaohs.
Egypt was now becoming a popular tourist attraction for the wealthy. Florence Nightingale visited the monuments of Luxor in 1849. When she saw the Colossus of Memnon on the west bank, she exclaimed that it did not look so big after all, and that it was consistent with its surroundings stating that she thought it is us who were the dwarves. Another who visited to Egypt was Mark Twain in 1869.
A Frenchman called Auguste Mariette (1821 - 1881 AD) became interested in Egyptology after his son, Nestor l’Hôte, had been to Egypt with Champollion. He studied Egyptian writing and started building catalogues of items in the museum in Boulogne. He was then sent to Egypt himself, to collect rare manuscripts. He visited Saqqara and noticed the head of a sphinx sticking out of the sand and, having read Strabo’s descriptions of an avenue of Sphinxes, decided to start digging. This resulted in the discovery of the avenue, several tombs and the Serapeum where the Sacred Bulls had been buried. These were sensational finds at the time, especially the finding of the mummified bulls. Mariette decided he would love to open a museum in Egypt itself and, after some political changes in Egypt, Mariette was offered the post of Director of Ancient Monuments. This was the start of the first Egyptian museum. He then initiated excavations all over Egypt, at thirty-five different locations, including Dier el- Bahari, Karnak, Thebes, Abydos, Esna and Elephantine. His work led to an international exhibition including the precious jewellery of Queen Ahhotep, which was found at Thebes. Unfortunately though, it may be that Mariette’s enthusiasm for artefacts left a trail of damage and debris; seldom did explorers take care with how they worked, often using explosives instead of slower methods, to force entry, destroying untold valuable evidence of the past.
Until 1870 nobody (in the modern world) knew that Royal Mummies had been moved in the time of Ramesses X and XI, in the Valley of the Kings. The mummies were simply assumed to be missing or destroyed. It was Gaston Maspero (1846 - 1916 AD) who rescued them after they had been discovered in a cache in 1871 by a local villager called Ahmed Abd er-Rasul, accidentally, while he was searching for a lost goat!
Since then there have been many Egyptologists working all over the country. People like Sir W. M. Flinders Petrie (1853 - 1942 AD) and Howard Carter (1874 - 1939 AD), a student of Petrie, have made monumental discoveries and filled museums in Egypt and around the world. There are 120,000 objects in the National Museum in Cairo. One could spend weeks roaming the corridors looking at statues, stele, small items, mummies, sarcophagi, papyri and so on. But without a very good guide book and, at least some ideas of who was who, one would probably be becoming more and more confused.
Petrie discovered tombs at Abydos, information on the Pharaoh Akhenaten and royal treasures from near the pyramid at Lahun. He also discovered over two thousand predynastic graves at a very ancient site, Nagada and the old city which had been given for the Greeks to live in, Naucratis. Howard Carter discovered, of course, the incredible tomb of Tutankhamun, amongst others, in the Valley of the Kings.
An American, George Reisner (1867 - 1942) was responsible for finding the tomb of the IVth dynasty Queen Hetepheres at Giza and the Valley temple of Menkaure and mastaba graves of nobles on the same site.
Mummies had become a valuable commodity in Europe and Asia, because people believed they had medicinal properties, which led to the exportation of mummies on a massive scale. One wonders which of the ancient Pharaohs and nobles were eaten in Europe, to cure a wide range of ailments such as coughs, nausea, ulcers, concussion and abscesses! The word mummy, derived from the Persian for bitumen, was often confused with bitumen itself. Even the King Francis I of France carried some ground up mummy, mixed with rhubarb, to cure his aches and pains. In 1809 Queen Victoria was given a gift of a mummy from the King of Persia. By the 18th century trade in mummies was so huge that it had to be made illegal.
As for the names of the Pharaohs, we rely on several sources, which together still do not give us a complete list. These are:-
(a) Manetho, who wrote Greek versions of the names.
(b) The Turin Canon of Kings, also known as the Turin Papyrus, now in the Museum of Turin. This is a Hieratic papyrus from the time of Ramesses II, which, although ruined gave us eighty to ninety Kings’ names.
(c) The Gallery of Lists in the Temple of Seti I at Abydos shows seventy-six ancestors of the Pharaoh Seti.
(d) The Table of Karnak from the time of Tuthmosis III, discovered in 1825, originally held sixty-one names but not all have survived to be read.
(e) The Table at Saqqara originally had fifty-seven names but only fifty are legible now.
(f) The Palermo Stone, badly broken, held the names of the first five dynasties and went back into pre-dynastic times, listing also the lengths of the Pharaoh’s reigns. It was originally compiled in the fifth dynasty. There are only five surviving pieces, now housed in museums in Cairo, the Palermo Museum and in the private collection of Petrie in the University College London.
Having several lists to refer to has both enabled Egyptologists to try to make a complete list and complicated matters further! This is because the Pharaohs each had more than one name and different lists refer to different names. In fact some finds previously attributed to two different Pharaohs are now known to be the work of one with two different names. Added to that is the fact that the ancient historians used other different names, even Greek versions and it is names like these that are often recognised today, like Cheops who was probably called Khufu. The works of the ancient historians such as Manetho have not survived, but were copied by later historians and not always copied well. It is particularly confusing for the first and second dynasties - dates are uncertain, names are changed, lengths of reigns are different in different lists. The first few Pharaohs offer a very small amount of evidence as to who they were exactly. We call the first Pharaoh Menes, but his hieroglyphs reveal the name Narmer. We do not know whether these names belonged to the same man or not. Before Narmer or Menes we believe there was a great pre-dynastic conqueror called Scorpion and after Narmer there was a Pharaoh now known as Hor-Aha. These names may apply to one, two, three or four different Kings, or for that matter even whole tribes. Apart from these names we actually know very little about the individual Pharaohs. We know some were great warriors and conquered other lands, whilst some seemed to have been peacemakers. Yet others were weak and under the thumbs of noblemen. One or two were very different, such as Akhenaten, who changed the religion and was later regarded as a heretic. There are a few stories which have come down to us from ancient times, which tell us that so-and-so was a cruel king or a kind king. It seems that the Pharaohs of dynasty four were quite cruel men, at the time of the building of the massive pyramids of Giza, although there were very few slaves. Mostly it seems that the local peoples worshipped the Pharaohs as gods, at least in the very early periods. As I have said we know very little and have to guess a lot.
Despite the vagueness and fuzziness of Egyptology and the large lists of strange names, it is this uncertainty which can lead to the fascination of unravelling it all. We are talking of a period of time longer than we are since Jesus and, apart from the Bible, there is little evidence of Him either. It can sometimes be far more enjoyable than knowing for sure, just like the fun of the jigsaw puzzle is in putting it all together.
Over the years the tombs and monuments of Ancient Egypt have continually suffered from tourists and explorers alike. From olden times finds have been exported from Egypt, both for museums and private collections. As well as removing and destroying mummies, deliberate damage was done to tombs and monuments by Christians and Moslems. In more modern times damage has been done accidentally by tourists. The fantastic tomb wall paintings of Nefertari, for instance, has suffered terribly form the results of thousands of tourists simply breathing! The salts in their breath have started to crystallise on top of the paint and chemicals in the rocks have crystallised under the paint, due to humidity. So the beautiful images have started falling apart, which, fortunately in this case, led to the closing of the tomb to the public and reparation work by experts. Other problems are solved far less easily, or maybe not at all, being caused by atmospheric pollution from 20th century factories. What little rain falls around Giza today is acid rain. Bits have been falling off the Sphinx, no longer hidden by sands, and have to be stuck back on. Another point of interest here is the face of the Sphinx. In all honesty it’s very ugly! It was actually badly damaged by invading Mameluks who decided to use it to test their canons! It is amazing it still stands at all, this ‘Father of Time’ as the Arabs call it.
If you visit Egypt and pay entrance fees to museums or tombs and pyramids, you can do so with the awareness that your money is going towards saving these precious monuments from the ancient past. Once they have gone they will never be built again!
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History and Egyptology are both subjects which, like science, rely on observation, but in these cases the observations are of ‘items’ left either purposefully or accidentally, from the past. What these things mean is a different matter. Like scientists we must look at what we have before us and form a theory; then we must look at whatever else we know for sure and check the theory out for consistency. If the facts don’t fit we have to change the theory. Remember it was not so long ago that mankind believed the Earth was flat and that we could fall off the end. That was a theory based on observation. But there came a time when someone sailed round the world and never did fall off and then we had to get rid of the idea and believe the Earth was round.
There are two types of past which I am talking about, the Prehistoric and the Historic. History is the study of the past based on records kept, of particular interest to us now; records of people, places, events, activities and changes in society, the people and the rulers. In a perfect world, history would be an unbroken record of what actually happened. Unfortunately the world of man is never perfect: there are plenty of gaps in our knowledge. For a start, before we could have records we had to have some sort of writing or drawing in symbols. Then we had to feel the need to record events for posterity. Then those records had to survive until today, or at least until someone else could find and rewrite them, in which case that person’s interpretation would come into play.
Prehistory, then, is the study of the time before records were kept. On a world scale this time finished on different dates in different places. The Ancient Egyptians started writing about 3000 BC, whereas in Britain and Europe it came much later. Prehistory becomes history when we reach the stage in the development of the civilisation where they considered dates important. Before that we have to rely on what we can see now and on what is recorded as having been seen in the past. Scientists such as astronomers, cosmologists, cosmogonists, archaeologists and geologists base their theories on what is seen to happen, what it looks like has happened and what they postulate will happen, making the best guess possible. These guesses may be reasonable inferences or vague ideas. Sometimes there are so many observations which confirm the ideas that the theories become accepted as facts.
Consider, for instance, dinosaurs. We know that they existed, because plenty of bones have been found. We can infer their appearances by imagining how the bones fitted together and how they would be covered by muscle and skin. We can guess at what they ate by looking at fossils found from the same periods and looking at their teeth and comparing them with teeth of other creatures. We can guess that they were not very clever from the size of their brains, supposing that their brains were in their heads! But do we know what colours they were? Do we know what they did each day? Do we know why, after surviving for millions of years before any recognisable form of man came along, they suddenly died out? When dinosaurs roamed the world the ancestors of the creatures which would one day walk and talk, write and sing and cook and use tools and so on, that is us, were little more than clever little rodents living off leftovers. We can only guess at the answers.
History, being based on written records, should produce a more reliable picture of the past, but, you will see, that is not always so. We have a lot of modern day techniques such as radiocarbon dating, which enables us to date organic materials by measuring the percentages of a particular radio isotope of carbon, carbon 14 and we have computers to tabulate and analyse finds. We have stone stele and papyrus scrolls to study, often fragmented and needing rebuilding like a jigsaw puzzle. We have literally thousands of finds to ponder on. We have the tombs with their wall paintings and huge pyramids and temples with hieroglyphic carvings. From all this we can get a fairly good picture of what was happening.
The discovery of a stone tablet which you will read about, now called the Rosetta stone, which was found in Egypt at a place called Rosetta and, after about 20 years hard work deciphering it, we have been able to start to read the thousands of inscriptions and papyri. So we are able to create a picture of what happened all those years ago. But there will always be questions unanswered. For instance, imagine a stone tablet found out in the desert; it may hold script including the name of the writer and information from which we can date it - we cannot use radiocarbon dating on stone. Do we know this was the name of the person who wrote it? Well we do know that certain Pharaohs wrote their names - or rather got workmen to carve them - on their predecessors’ monuments, thus making them appear to be their’s instead. Sometimes even a royal name was chiselled out and a new name put in, or left blank. Another occurrence could have been when someone came along later and carved a name where there had been none, the name he may have thought should have been there. Would we know whether the name was the right one, carved at the time of building, or even a thousand years later? There was a particular Egyptian historian who became interested in the ‘Ancient Monuments’ some 2000 years after they were built and he is known to have visited the Step Pyramid at Saqqara. Upon seeing the absence of the king’s name on one of the other pyramids, he chiselled it out - Unas, or Wenis.
Imagine another situation where a tomb or a hole in the ground is discovered and in this is found a corpse together with some everyday objects such as a comb, a doll, or a piece of jewellery. On one of these items there is a name. Is this the name of the owner? Was this the name of the living person whose body is in the grave? Often there is no way of knowing. Certainly there have been finds in places where such items would not normally be expected to occur. Maybe the item was transported, lost or robbed, and buried or sold on. This type of discovery was made in Giza near Cairo, at the site of the Great Pyramid. The Great Pyramid did not seem to bear the name of the builder, which would seem rather strange if it had been built as a monument to the Pharaoh of the time. Many people have thought that the Great Pyramid was built as the result of an egotistical urge of the Pharaoh to proclaim his greatness. This argument has serious flaws; for a start they say that the Pharaoh’s successor also built a pyramid, but if it also was a result of ego then we may well ask why this Pharaoh built one slightly smaller and why the next Pharaoh built his one smaller. But how do we know who these Pharaohs were? Well, not far from the outside of the Great Pyramid, deep within an underground shaft, was found a very small statuette of the Pharaoh Cheops (now in Cairo Museum). In fact this is the only representation of Cheops so far ever found and it was upside down as if dropped. Based on this find it is generally accepted that Cheops was the builder of the Great Pyramid, although the reasoning is hardly reliable.
What about stories handed down generation after generation before being written down? How reliable are those? If you have ever played ‘Chinese whispers’ with about seven or so people, you will have seen how repeated words can change. Over hundreds or thousands of years the stories would certainly be subjected to colourful embellishments and exaggerations. Even if an event was recorded at the time, was that how it happened or simply how the writer or his superior wanted it to look? Did Adam walk on Earth? What about Osiris? Was there a great flood? If there was, did the people who survived know what caused it, or only guess? Who selected what to record and what to miss out?
In the Bible the name Egypt is mentioned hundreds of times, yet in Egyptian history the name Israel is hardly mentioned at all. In the Bible, Moses is mentioned and the king is simply referred to as Pharaoh, so we do not know for sure which one it was. Whoever it was, the Exodus of the Israelites from Egyptian slavery must have been a momentous event, yet there is no record of it at all in Egypt’s records and no mention of Moses. Maybe the defeated Pharaoh, like most people, preferred to record his winnings to his losses!
So Egyptology is vague. In this book I am trying to show you the difference between what I know, what I am reasonably sure of and what I can only guess at and leave the decision of what to believe up to you. As you go on to read more you can always change your mind and opinions without shame. There is not always a clear cut right and wrong. For a moment think about the fantastic discoveries from the Tomb of Tutankhamun in The Valley of the Kings. There was huge wealth inside. We can reasonably believe that the items were put there due to religious beliefs and stayed there because it was not found earlier! Other Pharonic tombs, when rediscovered in modern times, mostly contained nothing save a damaged mummy. We can surmise that this was because they were robbed and we know that this was a big problem in the time of Ramesses X. Since many of the Pharaohs were a lot richer than Tutankhamun it is reasonable to say that their tombs would have contained a lot more than his. So where did all that stuff go? Who were the robbers? Poor men, workers maybe, corrupt officials, later Pharaohs, foreign invaders? Nobody knows.
If you decide to scratch a little deeper into the mysteries of Ancient Egypt you will find every section an ever deepening intrigue before you; you will realise the contradictions between authors both in opinion and so-called fact. You will see whole dynasties moved about through hundreds of years and anomalies such as tombs apparently built before the owner’s birth. Many are the remaining mysteries. Yet sacred Egyptian writings promise that one day all will be revealed.
Next I want to mention the names of the Pharaohs and how we know them. Firstly consider that we know the hieroglyphs were all consonants; there were no real vowels. So if we get a name like, Rmsss, it could be Ramesses, Romassis, Remosses and so on. So we are not entirely sure we are pronouncing the name as it was pronounced in those days, but that really is not very important since a name is merely a means of reference and providing we keep to the same name for the same person, we should not get too confused. Think of them as nicknames.
A lot of the information we rely on was written by historians of the past; in particular, we rely on them for lists of Pharaohs’ names. The first person who wrote history was a son of the famous Ramesses II, called Khaemwese, who lived about 1250 BC By this time the pyramids were ancient and the Valley of the Kings old. Khaemwese was actually a Magician and a High Priest of Ptah. He visited many tombs at Saqqara and studied books in the Royal Library. He was the one who chiselled the name of Unas on the pyramid at Saqqara and he also carved a message saying that it was he who carved the name, “since it was not found on the face of the pyramid, because the priest Khaemwese loved to restore the monuments of Upper and Lower Egypt”.
In about 450 BC a Greek writer called Herodotus visited Egypt and tried to sort out the fact from the fiction, basing his work on the results of discussions with people, in particular the priests. Herodotus had been born in Halicarnassus and travelled a lot and in his later life wrote a book called ‘The Histories’. He is now considered the ‘Father of History’ and we rely upon his reports, although he was sometimes inaccurate, relying so much on hearsay. Some of his information, such as the time when the Pharaoh Cheops was said to have closed the temples, has since proved inaccurate, but his information on certain other Pharaohs, such as Amasis, is all we have. In fact we know very little about Herodotus himself. The lives of the writers were not recorded in great detail, or at least none have been found. We know that Herodotus was the son of Lyxes called Carian and Dryo. He seems to have been very much influenced by the Inonian culture of Greece and, in fact, Ionic was the language in which he wrote. His large volumes contained information on the geography, history and ethnography of Egypt. His observations in Egypt, at the time after the invasion by Cambyses, are invaluable. Herodotus wrote of Egypt “Such animals as there are in Egypt, both wild and tame, are held to be sacred”.
During the reign of Ptolemy II, there lived a priest called Manetho (305 - 285 BC) and it is to him we owe the division of the Pharonic times into 31 dynasties. Manetho wrote in Greek and took his information from surviving documents, now lost. He gave the ancient Pharaohs Greek names. Some of the dynasties he listed were contemporaneous with each other, there being one ruler in Upper Egypt and another in Lower Egypt. These were competing dynasties.
As well as dividing the large time span into dynasties modern day historians have divided it into periods. These are the approximate dates of the different periods:-
Archaic Period 3100 - 2686 BC
Old Kingdom 2686 - 2181 BC
First Intermediate Period 2181 - 2133 BC
Middle Kingdom 2133 - 1633 BC
Second Intermediate Period 1633 - 1567 BC
New Kingdom 1567 - 1085 BC
Third Intermediate Period 1085 - 750 BC
Late Period 750 - 323 BC
Ptolemaic Period 323 - 30 BC
As with most dates from ancient Egypt these are subjective.
During Roman times tourists were able to move around and visit many of the monuments, including the Pyramids and the Valley of the Kings and they often left graffiti to commemorate their interest. What were in those days simply uncalled-for scribbles on the monuments have become, to us, historic inscriptions in themselves!
In 25 BC a Greek called Strabo wrote 17 books called ‘Geographia’and although mainly about geography, the last book provides some interesting information. Strabo mentions the two huge statues of Amenophis III, on the West Bank at Thebes, known as the ‘Colossi of Memnon’. They once flanked a large mortuary temple. In 27 BC there was an earthquake which cracked the monuments and led to a very strange and eerie sound in the mornings. By the time Strabo arrived there were tales of the singing colossi! However, it is now known that it was caused by the morning temperature rise which made the insides of the statues vibrate as the warm air passed through the cracks. Strabo listed the names of towns, pyramids, tombs, temples and also made notes on the Nilometer at Elephantine, near Aswan. A very useful 2000 years old list.
In the years of the Roman occupation of Egypt there lived another historian, Pleny the Elder (27 -79 AD) who wrote his ‘Historia Naturalis’, drawing from many older sources which have since disappeared. He described the Sphinx and obelisks (one of which was transported to Rome and stands there to this day) and mentions some of the techniques of preparation of mummies.
A few years later Plutarch (50 - 120 AD) wrote an account of the myth of Osiris and Isis. This is very fortunate for us, since no original Egyptian version has survived until today.
At the same time a Roman historian, Flavius Josephus, wrote his own work using extracts from Manetho and making comments on Moses, the Exodus and the Hyksos invasion.
In the following few centuries AD, Egypt became a Christian country for a while. The Christians held no respect whatsoever for the monuments, destroying many of the inscriptions on temples and even scraping the paint off the walls of tombs. The Christians considered the ancient religions of Egypt to be evil. Monks who adapted tombs as their living quarters often defaced or obliterated the wall paintings.
By the time the Arabs arrived in Egypt in the 7th century AD, the population had forgotten all about the early civilisations and lost the ability to read the hieroglyphs. The Arabs, like the Christians, considered the monuments evil, thinking that the huge pyramids and statues had been built by giants or magicians. They ignored them, except when they wanted to destroy one, or take it apart for the materials for their new buildings and mosques.
In more recent times, especially since Napoleon Bonaparte’s visit to Egypt in 1798 AD, interest in the old cultures has regrown. There were several major explorers and discoverers who have contributed a tremendous amount to our knowledge. Belzoni (1778 - 1823 AD) discovered the tomb of Aye, the magnificent tomb of Seti I and four others. He was also responsible for opening the Pyramid of Khephren and the discovery of the colossal statues of Ramesses II at Abu Simbel. His competitors, John Lewis Burckhart (1784 - 1817 AD), Bernardino Drovetti (1775 - 1852 AD) and Henry Salt (1780 - 1827 AD) were also very active in Egypt, often bringing items back to European museums. Drovetti, an Italian, made a major find, the Turin Canon of Kings.
Various people had tried to understand the hieroglyphs over the years. It was one William Warburton (1698 - 1779 AD), who became the Bishop of Gloucester, who recognised that hieroglyphics was in fact a written language and not just symbolic. But none of his contemporaries liked his ideas much, sticking to the notion that it was a symbolic script which would be impossible to understand.
In 1741 William Stukely, a doctor and famous antiquarian who was active at Avebury and Salisbury (in England), founded the Egyptian Society in London. Interest in ancient Egypt became more widespread. Stukely had examined the hieroglyphs on a statue in Turin and concluded that they were completely different from Chinese characters, which ‘experts’ were claiming had been derived from the hieroglyphs. He claimed that it was a symbolic script and that the hieroglyphics were beyond understanding.
Thomas Young (1773 - 1824) became fascinated by hieroglyphics and discovered the other written languages of Ancient Egypt. He realised that hieroglyphs were in fact alphabetical as well as ideogrammatic. He also suggested that the oval shaped Cartouche contained Royal Names, which we now know is true.
A major advance in our knowledge resulted from the decision made by Jean François Champollion to try to decipher the hieroglyphs. He spent his early years learning many languages and scripts, including Hebrew, Sanskrit, Arabic, Parsi, Persian, Zend, Pali, Chaldean and Coptic. He realised that the hieroglyphs were phonetic. When he eventually started to understand the inscriptions they were able to find out more about who owned what. In 1768 another great discoverer, James Bruce, had found a tomb in the Valley of the Kings but was not able to discover which Pharaoh it had belonged to. It turned out to have been Ramesses III’s.
Robert Hay (1799 - 1863) constructed 49 volumes of beautiful and detailed drawings of the monuments. This is now housed in the British Museum. It was about this time that another keen investigator of antiquity founded ‘Egyptology’ in England. This was John Gardner Wilkinson, 1797 - 1875. Wilkinson excavated many tombs at Thebes, adding much to knowledge of the Pharaohs.
Egypt was now becoming a popular tourist attraction for the wealthy. Florence Nightingale visited the monuments of Luxor in 1849. When she saw the Colossus of Memnon on the west bank, she exclaimed that it did not look so big after all, and that it was consistent with its surroundings stating that she thought it is us who were the dwarves. Another who visited to Egypt was Mark Twain in 1869.
A Frenchman called Auguste Mariette (1821 - 1881 AD) became interested in Egyptology after his son, Nestor l’Hôte, had been to Egypt with Champollion. He studied Egyptian writing and started building catalogues of items in the museum in Boulogne. He was then sent to Egypt himself, to collect rare manuscripts. He visited Saqqara and noticed the head of a sphinx sticking out of the sand and, having read Strabo’s descriptions of an avenue of Sphinxes, decided to start digging. This resulted in the discovery of the avenue, several tombs and the Serapeum where the Sacred Bulls had been buried. These were sensational finds at the time, especially the finding of the mummified bulls. Mariette decided he would love to open a museum in Egypt itself and, after some political changes in Egypt, Mariette was offered the post of Director of Ancient Monuments. This was the start of the first Egyptian museum. He then initiated excavations all over Egypt, at thirty-five different locations, including Dier el- Bahari, Karnak, Thebes, Abydos, Esna and Elephantine. His work led to an international exhibition including the precious jewellery of Queen Ahhotep, which was found at Thebes. Unfortunately though, it may be that Mariette’s enthusiasm for artefacts left a trail of damage and debris; seldom did explorers take care with how they worked, often using explosives instead of slower methods, to force entry, destroying untold valuable evidence of the past.
Until 1870 nobody (in the modern world) knew that Royal Mummies had been moved in the time of Ramesses X and XI, in the Valley of the Kings. The mummies were simply assumed to be missing or destroyed. It was Gaston Maspero (1846 - 1916 AD) who rescued them after they had been discovered in a cache in 1871 by a local villager called Ahmed Abd er-Rasul, accidentally, while he was searching for a lost goat!
Since then there have been many Egyptologists working all over the country. People like Sir W. M. Flinders Petrie (1853 - 1942 AD) and Howard Carter (1874 - 1939 AD), a student of Petrie, have made monumental discoveries and filled museums in Egypt and around the world. There are 120,000 objects in the National Museum in Cairo. One could spend weeks roaming the corridors looking at statues, stele, small items, mummies, sarcophagi, papyri and so on. But without a very good guide book and, at least some ideas of who was who, one would probably be becoming more and more confused.
Petrie discovered tombs at Abydos, information on the Pharaoh Akhenaten and royal treasures from near the pyramid at Lahun. He also discovered over two thousand predynastic graves at a very ancient site, Nagada and the old city which had been given for the Greeks to live in, Naucratis. Howard Carter discovered, of course, the incredible tomb of Tutankhamun, amongst others, in the Valley of the Kings.
An American, George Reisner (1867 - 1942) was responsible for finding the tomb of the IVth dynasty Queen Hetepheres at Giza and the Valley temple of Menkaure and mastaba graves of nobles on the same site.
Mummies had become a valuable commodity in Europe and Asia, because people believed they had medicinal properties, which led to the exportation of mummies on a massive scale. One wonders which of the ancient Pharaohs and nobles were eaten in Europe, to cure a wide range of ailments such as coughs, nausea, ulcers, concussion and abscesses! The word mummy, derived from the Persian for bitumen, was often confused with bitumen itself. Even the King Francis I of France carried some ground up mummy, mixed with rhubarb, to cure his aches and pains. In 1809 Queen Victoria was given a gift of a mummy from the King of Persia. By the 18th century trade in mummies was so huge that it had to be made illegal.
As for the names of the Pharaohs, we rely on several sources, which together still do not give us a complete list. These are:-
(a) Manetho, who wrote Greek versions of the names.
(b) The Turin Canon of Kings, also known as the Turin Papyrus, now in the Museum of Turin. This is a Hieratic papyrus from the time of Ramesses II, which, although ruined gave us eighty to ninety Kings’ names.
(c) The Gallery of Lists in the Temple of Seti I at Abydos shows seventy-six ancestors of the Pharaoh Seti.
(d) The Table of Karnak from the time of Tuthmosis III, discovered in 1825, originally held sixty-one names but not all have survived to be read.
(e) The Table at Saqqara originally had fifty-seven names but only fifty are legible now.
(f) The Palermo Stone, badly broken, held the names of the first five dynasties and went back into pre-dynastic times, listing also the lengths of the Pharaoh’s reigns. It was originally compiled in the fifth dynasty. There are only five surviving pieces, now housed in museums in Cairo, the Palermo Museum and in the private collection of Petrie in the University College London.
Having several lists to refer to has both enabled Egyptologists to try to make a complete list and complicated matters further! This is because the Pharaohs each had more than one name and different lists refer to different names. In fact some finds previously attributed to two different Pharaohs are now known to be the work of one with two different names. Added to that is the fact that the ancient historians used other different names, even Greek versions and it is names like these that are often recognised today, like Cheops who was probably called Khufu. The works of the ancient historians such as Manetho have not survived, but were copied by later historians and not always copied well. It is particularly confusing for the first and second dynasties - dates are uncertain, names are changed, lengths of reigns are different in different lists. The first few Pharaohs offer a very small amount of evidence as to who they were exactly. We call the first Pharaoh Menes, but his hieroglyphs reveal the name Narmer. We do not know whether these names belonged to the same man or not. Before Narmer or Menes we believe there was a great pre-dynastic conqueror called Scorpion and after Narmer there was a Pharaoh now known as Hor-Aha. These names may apply to one, two, three or four different Kings, or for that matter even whole tribes. Apart from these names we actually know very little about the individual Pharaohs. We know some were great warriors and conquered other lands, whilst some seemed to have been peacemakers. Yet others were weak and under the thumbs of noblemen. One or two were very different, such as Akhenaten, who changed the religion and was later regarded as a heretic. There are a few stories which have come down to us from ancient times, which tell us that so-and-so was a cruel king or a kind king. It seems that the Pharaohs of dynasty four were quite cruel men, at the time of the building of the massive pyramids of Giza, although there were very few slaves. Mostly it seems that the local peoples worshipped the Pharaohs as gods, at least in the very early periods. As I have said we know very little and have to guess a lot.
Despite the vagueness and fuzziness of Egyptology and the large lists of strange names, it is this uncertainty which can lead to the fascination of unravelling it all. We are talking of a period of time longer than we are since Jesus and, apart from the Bible, there is little evidence of Him either. It can sometimes be far more enjoyable than knowing for sure, just like the fun of the jigsaw puzzle is in putting it all together.
Over the years the tombs and monuments of Ancient Egypt have continually suffered from tourists and explorers alike. From olden times finds have been exported from Egypt, both for museums and private collections. As well as removing and destroying mummies, deliberate damage was done to tombs and monuments by Christians and Moslems. In more modern times damage has been done accidentally by tourists. The fantastic tomb wall paintings of Nefertari, for instance, has suffered terribly form the results of thousands of tourists simply breathing! The salts in their breath have started to crystallise on top of the paint and chemicals in the rocks have crystallised under the paint, due to humidity. So the beautiful images have started falling apart, which, fortunately in this case, led to the closing of the tomb to the public and reparation work by experts. Other problems are solved far less easily, or maybe not at all, being caused by atmospheric pollution from 20th century factories. What little rain falls around Giza today is acid rain. Bits have been falling off the Sphinx, no longer hidden by sands, and have to be stuck back on. Another point of interest here is the face of the Sphinx. In all honesty it’s very ugly! It was actually badly damaged by invading Mameluks who decided to use it to test their canons! It is amazing it still stands at all, this ‘Father of Time’ as the Arabs call it.
Step Pyramid
If you visit Egypt and pay entrance fees to museums or tombs and pyramids, you can do so with the awareness that your money is going towards saving these precious monuments from the ancient past. Once they have gone they will never be built again!
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