Mute Maspero
| Pyramid of Unas | 29 52 05348N 31 12 53.78E | The pyramid can be clearly seen, as can a boat-pit and the causeway which led down into the valley. |
For a time France was in the forefront of European - or even world - scientific progress. French scientists were responsible for the decimal sytem of mensuration and French savants carried out the complicated and difficult task of measuring an arc of longitude from the Channel coast directly north of Paris to the Balearic Islands, directly south of Paris. Others performed the same feat in far away Chile thereby, inadvertently, proving Newton right.
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| Gaston Maspero, the Frenchman who was head of the Egyptian archaeological service. |
Unfortunately European science has featured an undue proportion of bitter personal controversies between scholars over matters that could - and should - have been settled by a couple laboratory experiments. As a result the great triumphs of modern science have taken place in the Anglo-Saxon world, to such an extent that Europeans of ability and little ego have, like Einstein himself, found it more congenial to work in Britian or America rather than in France.
A typical example of this is the Frenchman Maspero, director of the Egyptian Antiquities Service and an archaeologist of distinction. Maspero had explored and excavated in all the pyramids of Egypt, all of which were plain and undecorated on the inside.
Now, you and I might note the fact and pass on, but Maspero built this somewhat insignificant observation into a grand theory about the pyramids and their regal and theological significance. His watchword was, "The pyramids are mute!" and the very nature of Egyptian kingship, to say nothing of Egyptian religion and even Egyptian society, appeared to depend upon this fact.
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| The badly damaged pyramid of Unas stands just outside the enclosure of the Step Pyramid. |
Things had reached this stage when archaeologists working at Saqqara discovered the pyramid of Unas, a much ruined Fifth Dynasty pyramid that had been buried under the desert sands. It took them several days to work their way past the blocking stones in the entrance corridor and meanwhile the grand old man of Egyptology had fallen ill.
The poor man was actually on his deathbed when a messenger came hurrying in with the news that the interior of the new pyramid was completely covered, not just with blue stars in a yellow night sky, not just with painted panelling that mimicked the walls of the royal palace, but with thousands of hieroglyphs - the so-called Pyramid Texts.
I've always felt sorry for Maspero, having a lifetime of theorising and pontificating shattered by a single discovery just when it was too late for him to do anything about it! I do think they could have held off the announcement for another couple of days until the poor man was safely underground before demolishing his grand theory.
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| The interior of the pyramid of Unas is covered with the "Pyramid Texts". |
The Pyramid Texts, however, proved to be a great disappointment. The initial hope was that they they would be like so many other tomb inscriptions and reveal hitherto unknown information about the life and achievements of the tomb's occupant. Alas, they were merely magical spells and incantations designed to facilitate Unas' progress through the underworld.
Transcribing and translating endless repetitions on the theme of "You have gone up. You are become one with Ra," must have sent some poor scholar nearly cross-eyed, so it was doubly frustrating to come across some spells that were pure gibberish.
For over a century these bits of nonsense have puzzled scholars, but it seems that the mystery has now been solved. Acting on a sugestion made by Dr Robert Ritner of the University of Chicago, Propfessor Richard Steiner of the Yeshiva University in New York has identified the language of the spells as an early form of Hebrew or some other Semitic language, transcribed using hieroglyphic characters.
That, at least, is the claim. The actual results do not appear all that promising. One of the "spells" allegedly reads, "Mother snake, mother snake says mucus mucus."
I don't claim to be an expert in either ancient Egyptian language or theology, but I really cannot see how that bit of nonsense would get anybody past the three-headed, four-legged snake that guarded the entrance to the Underworld. Quite the reverse, I should have thought!
