Mark and I decided that the best way to search for prehistoric drawings and artifacts was to actually walk and investigate every likely place such as caves, ledges and wadis. Each day we’d trek about 15 to 20 kilometres, checking every promising location. To our reckoning we found more than 50 new prehistoric drawings in the region, which we fixed with GPS coordinates. The most startling of these finds was on the north side of Gebel Uwaynat, in a cave that was not marked or reported on the detailed maps or previous surveys. The cave - more a deep ledge - contained dozens of prehistoric drawings of men and women with cattle. Some of these were so vivid that they could have been drawn only weeks before! We estimated their age to be late Neolithic, around 4000 to 6000 BC. But further studies by experts are needed to establish a more accurate dating and also the significance of this find. Little did we expect at this stage that even this exciting discovery would be completely overshadowed by what we would eventually find on the southern side of Uwaynat, some 50 kilometres within the Sudanese border. This happened on the morning of 27 November 2007, the ninth day of our expedition. We were inspecting some large boulders near the remains of a strange encampment made of several circles of stones, clearly the remains of huts or perhaps even more elaborate dwellings. It was Mark who, with his binoculars, spotted inscriptions on a boulder that hung precariously halfway up a tall mound. Suddenly Mark cried as he looked with excitement through his binoculars: “Pharaonic inscriptions, a cartouche of a king!!” We stood in silent awe next to each other. We knew then, as we know now, that this was history in the making. And we were actually making it with this amazing discovery.
Until now it was believed that the pharaohs did not travel deep into the desert. Evidence of their presence could be found in the many oases that string from Siwa in the north to Kharga in the south. Only a few years ago my friend Carlo Bergmann, the famous German explorer and traveler, found hieroglyphic inscriptions on a mound some 80 kilometres from Dakhla Oasis. Our own find on that fateful day in November 2007 now proved that the pharaohs traveled as far west as Gebel Uwaynat, that is nearly 700 kilometres from the Nile Valley! The whole geography of ancient Egypt suddenly changed before our very eyes. The pharaohs, far from being daunted by the ‘untraversable desert’ of the Eastern Sahara, as Egyptologists had hitherto believed, had in fact boldly crossed vast areas with donkeys (the camel, although attested sporadically in the early dynastic times, was not used as a animal of burden in ancient Egypt till the 5
th
century BC or even perhaps much later in 332 BC with the advent of Alexander the Great). But there was far more in those inscriptions at Uwaynat than we had imagined. Mark was to take the photographs of the inscriptions to London within days, and a preliminary translation made by British Egyptologists revealed the name of ‘Yam’, a lost kingdom with whom it was known that the pharaohs of the Pyramid Age had had contact with and traded goods. Indeed, several narratives of elaborate expeditions conducted during the reign of the pharaohs Merenre and Pepi II confirm that expeditions were sent to trade with the ‘Kingdom of Yam’, a journey involving hundreds of men with donkeys and which is said to have taken more than 40 days. The inscriptions we found at Uwaynat not only confirm that the pharaohs traveled deep into the Sahara but, more importantly, that the fabled lost Kingdom of Yam was either Uwaynat itself or somewhere beyond it (Darfur?), and not south of Abu Simbel on the Nile as previously thought by scholars.
In January 2008 I was introduced to Robert Bauval by Mark Borda. The two men had met in 1998 when Robert had organized a special educational tour of Egypt which Mark had attended. They had kept contact over the years and now, by a curious twist of fate, Robert and I met in Cairo to discuss the implications of our find. Robert was in the process of researching his next book (
Sahara Dawn
, to be published in 2009) where he was presenting a case arguing that the origins of the pharaonic civilization were to be found in the prehistory of the Egyptian Sahara. The discovery of inscriptions at Uwaynat implied that the pharaohs not only had contact with the remnants of this prehistoric culture but may indeed have been aware of their own ancestry and origins in the Uwaynat highlands. Robert suggested that we also present our find to the Institut Francais D’Archeologie Orientale, the IFAO, based in Cairo. To this end we met Dr. Laure Pantalacci, the director, who made copies of the photographs and informed us that she would arrange for a professional translator to look into them. A few weeks later Dr. Pantalacci asked me if I could obtain better quality photographs of the Uwaynat inscriptions, and so Robert and I decided to organize an expedition to this end.
In early April 2008 Robert and I, along with five other members, took off from Dakhla Oasis and headed southwest towards Uwaynat. After five days of traveling with three fully equipped Toyota Landcruisers, we reached Gebel Uwaynat on 12 April. In the early morning of 13 April I took Robert and the rest of the party to see the ‘Yam Inscriptions’ as I now called them. Various photographs were taken, as well as video footage with a high-resolution camera.
We are still in early days to know the full implications of our find. The most intriguing of the questions arising from this discovery is this: how did the pharaohs know of the location of Uwaynat and, more pertinently, how did they manage to get there with only donkey-power and no water spots for 700 kilometres? A brief calculation of the huge amount of water needed for this journey into the most arid region of the globe reveals that the cargo would have been far too voluminous and massive to be undertaken with donkeys only. Were chariots or carts used? This, according to the evidence, cannot be the case as the ‘wheel’ had not been yet introduced in Egypt, let alone chariots and carts. Were there water spots on the way that today have disappeared? Not likely say the climatologists, for the desert was then as arid as it is now. Did the pharaohs set up water-stations along the route, as we today would set up fuel-stations? Perhaps, but none have been found leading to Uwaynat, at least not yet. The mystery must remain unresolved until more research is done.
Robert and I are planning a second expedition in October 2008, and this time we hope to be able to stay at Uwaynat much longer to answer some of the many questions that the Yam Inscriptions have raised. The Egyptian Sahara still holds many secrets. But the evidence so far points very strongly that the origins of the pharaonic civilization, and perhaps civilization as a whole, were seeded in the Egyptian Sahara and, thousands of years later around 3200 BC, sprouted and bloomed in the Nile Valley to finally give us the giant pyramids of the Old Kingdom in the north and eventually the wonderful temples of the New Kingdom in Upper Egypt in the south.
*Mahmoud Marai is the discoverer, along with Mark Borda, of the ‘Yam Inscriptions’ in southern Uwaynat and the now-named Marai Cave in Northern Uwaynat. He is 34 years old, married, has two children, and lives in the suburb of Maadi in Cairo. Although a qualified chemistry teacher, Marai has chosen to devote his life to the exploration of the Egyptian Sahara and, especially, the Gebel Uwaynat which, to this day, remain largely unexplored. He has travelled to the heart of the Central Sahara, to Tassili N Ajjer, Tenere Desert, the Akakus Mountains and the Arabian Desert. Marai also conducts expeditions and educational tours in the Egyptian Sahara. He can be contacted at: [email protected]
Notes
Introduction
1
Produced by Pioneer Production Ltd. in UK.
2
Produced by the Dutch filmmaker Roel Oostra of Crescom Ltd.
3
Discussions in Egyptology,
Vol. 30, books review section.
4
Anthony Aveni,
Starways to the Stars: Skywatching in Three Great Ancient Cultures
, Cassell, 1997, pp. 11-12.
Chapter One: The Star at the Head of the Sky
1
Robert Bauval and Adrian Gilbert,
The Orion Mystery
, Heinemann, 1994.
2
Stephen Quirke,
The Cult of Ra
, Thames & Hudson, 2001, p. 116.
3
Was the original seated statue inclined? The levelled floor of the
serdab
suggests that it was not. But did it have to be inclined? The head is positioned behind the two peepholes, which are themselves inclined towards the lower northern sky, much like a seated astronomer would be positioned behind a set of binoculars that was inclined towards the lower northern sky. At any rate, the inclination is only about 15 to 17° to the horizontal, which requires a very small tilt of the head backwards to gaze at the same spot in the sky.
4
Mark Lehner,
The Complete Pyramids
, Thames & Hudson, 1997, p. 84.
5
Ian Shaw and Paul Nicholson,
The British Museum Dictionary of Ancient Egypt
, The British Museum Press, 2003, p. 87.
9
The Ancient Gods Speak
, ed. Donald B. Redford, Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 165.
11
See ‘Osiris’, in Shaw and Nicholson, op. cit., p. 213-14.
Khentiamentiu
was the ancient god of Abydos, a site sacred to Osiris and location of the Osireon at Abydos built by Seti I.
12
The Ancient Gods Speak
, op. cit., p. 359.
13
The glyph
kh
, which is a sort of animal’s belly (maybe a cow). This glyph is part of the Horus name of
Ntjr-y-(kh)-t
which may give it the full meaning of ‘Most Divine of the Corporation’ or ‘the Corporation is Divine’.
14
A.M. Blackman, ‘The Ka-House and the Serdab’,
Journal of Egyptian Archaeology
, Vol. 3, 1916, pp. 250-4.
15
J.E. Manchip White,
Ancient Egypt, its Culture and History
, George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1979, 2nd Ed., pp. 40-1.
17
The Orion Mystery
, op. cit.
18
Pyramid Texts, 1,277-9.
19
Alexander Badawy, ‘The Periodic System of Building a Pyramid’,
Journal of Egyptian Archaeology
, Vol. 63, 1977, p. 58.
20
Edwards,
The Pyramids of Egypt
, Penguin, 1982, p. 295.
21
Quirke, op. cit., p. 117.
22
The term ‘Indestructibles’ was used by I.E.S. Edwards in the BBC 2 documentary
The Great Pyramids: Gateway to the Stars
, first shown in February 1994.
23
James H. Breasted,
Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt
, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972, p. 101.
24
R.T. Rundle Clark,
Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt
, Thames and Hudson, 1978, p. 58.
25
E.C. Krupp,
Echoes of the Ancient Skies
, Oxford University Press, 1994, p. 212. Also, according to Mark Lehner ‘The “Imperishable Ones” are the circumpolar stars . . . Since these stars revolve around the celestial North Pole and neither rise or set, the long, narrow passages sloping up from the burial chamber in the northern sides of many pyramids were aimed like telescopes in their direction.’
The Complete Pyramids
, op. cit., p. 28.
26
Shaw and Nicholson, op. cit. p. 166.
28
R. H. Wilkinson,
The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt
, The American University in Cairo Press, 2003, p. 129.
29
Walter Scott (ed.),
Hermetica
, Shambhala, Boston, 1993, p. 485.
30
Blackman, op. cit., p. 254. This description and names given by Blackman would perfectly fit the Djoser Pyramid, with its so-called ‘King’s Apartments’ under the Pyramid which are aligned (i.e. lead upwards and towards) with the
serdab
outside.
31
The Orion Mystery
, op. cit.
32
Wilkinson, op. cit., p. 161.
33
Edwards, op. cit., pp. 267-8. Interestingly, the inscription also mentions the constellation of Orion, an indication of the connection between these stars and the soul of pharaoh.
34
Lehner, op. cit., p. 34.
35
A. Piankoff,
The Pyramid of Unas
, Bollingen Series 5, Princeton, 1968.