Inside the Tombs of Saqqara

Smithsonian Magazine ^ | August 2021 | Jo Marchant

[Stravinsky]

Twenty miles south of Cairo, on the Nile's west bank, where riverfed crop fields give way to desert, the ancient site of Saqqara is marked by crumbling pyramids that emerge from the sand like dragon's teeth. Most striking is the famous Step Pyramid, built in the 27th century B.C. by Djoser, the Old Kingdom pharaoh who launched the tradition of constructing pyramids as monumental royal tombs. More than a dozen other pyramids are scattered along the five-mile strip of land, which is also dotted with the remains of temples, tombs and walkways that, together, span the entire history of ancient Egypt. But beneath the ground is far more-a vast and extraordinary netherworld of treasures.

One scorching day last fall, Mohammad Youssef, an archaeologist, clung to a rope inside a shaft that had been closed for more than 2,000 years. At the bottom, he shined his flashlight through a gap in the limestone wall and was greeted by a god’s gleaming eyes: a small, painted statue of the composite funerary deity Ptah-Sokar-Osiris, with a golden face and plumed crown.It was Youssef’s first glimpse of a large chamber that was guarded by a heap of figurines, carved wooden chests and piles of blackened linen. Inside, Youssef and his colleagues found signs that the people buried here had wealth and privilege: gilded masks, a finely carved falcon and a painted scarab beetle rolling the sun across the sky. Yet this was no luxurious family tomb, as might have been expected. Instead, the archaeologists were astonished to discover dozens of expensive coffins jammed together, piled to the ceiling as if in a warehouse. Beautifully painted, human-shaped boxes were stacked roughly on top of heavy limestone sarcophagi. Gilded coffins were packed into niches around the walls. The floor itself was covered in rags and bones.

[PIF]

... discovery that metric units of measure were used as well as geometry that was thought to be discovered many centuries later by the Greeks.
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Not only metric measurement and geometry, but many other things which were later “discovered” by western civilization. To include : eyeglasses, telescopes other lenses, shipbuilding and so on. We are rediscovering what we once knew, but have long forgotten ; especially the history of the human species.

Why? Because of the 20,000 years of bombardment by asteroids, and comet fragments, culminating in 10800 BC with the 100 year long bombardment of comet fragments burning off 10% of the Earth’s vegetation, as well as a goodly portion of the Earth’s oxygen, and the near total destruction of the surface of the North American continent. People were simply so terrified that the only thing which mattered was personal survival. All else was unneeded and forgotten.

We only relearned some of the rudiments because a small number of people from the previous civilization returned to teach us ; where did they go? Who knows? But there are hints in the megalith monuments pointing to the Pleiades, Sirius, and Orion.

They left what was to become an unstable planet for 10s of thousands of years. Were are their remains? Everywhere, we just do not recognize them as such, but attribute those remains to various other groups : Inca, Egyptian, etc. We still see them today, but call them ‘aliens’.

Religious dogma, consensus thinking, and the tendency of the various disciplines to examine only the data of their discipline while dismissing, destroying, or ignoring data outside of their disciplines, these keep us from understanding what is before our eyes. But that is slowly changing.