Out of the ancient Egyptian past, more survived than just hieroglyphs and monuments. A mythology also survived, as recorded by Manetho and attested by countless inscriptions that, while unreadable for more than a thousand years, would eventually be accessible again, thanks to the Rosetta Stone. But in the Hellenistic period, Greco-Egyptian storytelling took the figures of Egypt’s past and created a new mythology. One such story, from the 4th century BCE, survives in a manuscript likely copied during the Ptolemaic period and tells the story of a prince named Setna, son of Pharaoh Ramesses II, who sought secret knowledge within ancient Egyptian tombs, kind of like the first Indiana Jones. Indeed, there does appear to have been some historical basis for the tale, as Khaemweset, son of Ramesses the Great, was known for restoring monuments and temples, and for entering tombs to learn what he could of the inscriptions therein. He has even been called the “first Egyptologist” because of it. In the legend, Setna, the prince seemingly based on Khaemweset, hears that in a certain tomb in Memphis can be found the Magic Book of Thoth, written in the very hand of the Egyptian god of wisdom, who would later be Hellenized as Hermes Trismegistus and Judaicized as Enoch. This book granted the magics to enchant the world and to see the gods, and even to speak with animals, much like the sort of magic that would later be attributed to King Solomon and his magic ring. We see here an early parallel to stories of the Pillars of Wisdom, inscribed with their ancient antediluvian knowledge of magic, and the Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus, which has been referred to as a book and was often described as hidden within a tomb. In the story of Setna, he encounters ghosts who guard the Book of Thoth and warn him of its curse. Setna nevertheless takes the book and its magic for himself, becoming cursed until he brings the book back to the tomb. We see in this ancient legend a model for later legends about a mummy’s curse, but we also see in it a motif about a hidden book of magic that would return in association with other legends inextricably linked to myths surrounding the pyramids. When not adapting the Pillars of Wisdom legend, such as the 4th century CE Greek magico-medical treatise, the Kyranides, which was said to have been inscribed by Hermes Trismegistus on iron pillars, then such legends, especially those originating from medieval Islamic sources, frequently claimed to have originated in lost or hidden books like the Magic Book of Thoth. The legend of the Emerald Tablet, for example, seems to have originated in a 9th-century Arabic legend about Neopythagorean sage Apollonius of Tyana venturing into a subterranean chamber beneath a statue of Hermes Trismegistus and finding the mythical Emerald Tablet there in the grip of another statue of Hermes. In the 10th century, the alchemical treatise Silvery Water and Starry Earth by Muslim author, Muḥammad ibn Umayl al-Tamīmī, describes his having discovered a lost book in hieroglyphs, full of what he assumed were magical secrets, hidden with a statue of Hermes beneath what he claimed was the prison in which Joseph had long ago been held captive. The trope of legends having their origin in lost or hidden books of magic or secret knowledge is so convenient from a storytelling perspective. Think, for example, of the Tablets of the Law, which were the very commandments of God and which were hidden away in the Ark, such that no one could actually view them. Or take a more modern example, the Golden Plates of Nephi, another hidden/lost book legend promoted by Joseph Smith, who also insisted that people could not just be allowed to look at the plates for themselves. The examples are numerous, and this element would also be present in the most pervasive of pyramid myths, which developed in the Middle Ages among Muslim Egyptians and Hermeticists.

While it is clear that, after the Arab conquest of Egypt, many Muslims embraced and built upon the Hellenistic myths and Hermetic legends of the pyramids, it would be untrue to claim that there was uniformity or unanimity of belief in such tales. As evidenced by Caliph al-Ma'mun’s decree that the Great Pyramid be opened and its treasures and magical texts be seized, and in the ensuing claims about their having found a mummy within clutching a book of magic, these myths were clearly extant and spreading among the land’s Muslim conquerors. However, while some credited the tales that the pyramids had been built before the flood, that they were the repositories of ancient knowledge, and that the Great Pyramid was the tomb of Hermes or Enoch, even going so far as to claim certain lines they thought they could perceive on the Great Pyramid’s sides represented the high water mark of the flood, the Prophet Muhammad himself rejected the antediluvian history of Egypt. As a result, most Muslims held that Egypt was founded after the flood, by Ham’s son Mizraim. And medieval Islamic writers developed a number of alternative, postdiluvian myths of the pyramids. They had been built by Nimrod, the great-grandson of Noah responsible for that other, wholly fictional monstrous construction, the Tower of Babel. Or perhaps they had been designed by Aristotle, who oversaw their construction to serve as tombs for Alexander the Great and himself. Then again, perhaps they were built by Daluka, a queen said to have ascended to power after the Pharaoh of Exodus was drowned in the Red Sea. Daluka was also sometimes credited with building the Lighthouse of Alexandria, now ruined but once a Wonder of the Ancient World. But the historical existence of Daluka is inconsistent. The Lighthouse of Alexandria was built during the Ptolemaic Kingdom, so she could not have built it. Before she was claimed to be the successor of the Pharaoh of Exodus, Daluka was also thought to have been an antediluvian queen of Egypt. In fact, like other figures in Exodus and other figures associated with the building of pyramids, she may have never even existed. Another popular contender in medieval Muslim stories about the pyramid was Shaddād bin ʽĀd, said to have been king of the world, ruling from a lost Arabian city called Iram of the Pillars, a place that has been associated with Atlantis because it was said in the Qur’an to have been destroyed by God because of its corruption. This legend proved especially desirable, as it attributed the pyramids’ construction to an Arab. In the end, the legend that would win out was one that synthesized almost every pyramid myth that had come before it: the legend of Sūrīd ibn Salhouk.

A depiction of Setna emerging from the tomb carrying the magical Book of Thoth.

The story of Sūrīd would be told and retold in so many variations that it is difficult to tell without endless digressions to acknowledge alternative versions. For the sake of brevity and engaging storytelling, I will endeavor to blend elements from numerous versions and tell a more cohesive tale. Across the many medieval Islamic and Coptic versions of the story, which can be imagined to trace back to a lost original version, we see the familiar framing device of a lost book of secrets. Two Copts are said to have entered a tomb and discovered a mummy clutching an ancient, moldering book. Unable to read the book, these Copts took it to a faraway monastery, where a monk, who was said to be the last man able to read hieroglyphs, translated it for them. The book told of an antediluvian king named Sūrīd who was a Nephilim, a descendant of the union of Sethite men and Cainite women, and thus a giant, as were all the kings of his dynasty. Sūrīd had a prophetic dream of the Earth being overturned and the stars crashing out of the heavens. His trusted advisor, Philemon, interpreted the dream as a prophecy of the end of the world, and using astrology, he calculated the exact date of the forthcoming flood. Sūrīd then commanded Philemon to oversee the building of the pyramids of Giza, which would serve as tombs for himself and his family and house all their earthly treasures. These grand monuments would also preserve the wisdom and knowledge of the world, though, for Sūrīd directed all the secret sciences of the ancient world to be inscribed on its interior and exterior walls, and all its ceilings and columns. These secret sciences were used by Philemon to build the pyramids, according to the tale. He had only to touch a magical scroll, and the stone blocks were cut and flown into position by magic! And though Sūrīd sought to preserve the knowledge of the past for posterity, he also sought to protect his treasures, setting up magical statue guardians, idols who could kill any man that looked in their eyes, kind of like the Forbidden Eye of the idol Mara in the Indiana Jones ride at Disneyland. The legend ends with accounts of Caliph al-Ma'mun men entering the pyramid in the 9th century, finding the treasures untold that Sūrīd had sealed within its labyrinthine passages and chambers, as well as ghosts, monsters, and booby traps galore. However, the book said to have been found on the chest of the mummy within was not a part of this legend. Rather, the lost book containing the story of Sūrīd that would later be found by the two Coptic brothers actually survived the flood with Philemon, who after building the pyramids happened to befriend Noah and hitch a ride on the Ark so that he would survive to serve the future kings of Egypt, starting with Mizraim.

In this legend can be seen a syncretism of nearly every pyramid myth that came before it. There is its origin in a lost book of secret knowledge. There is the involvement of the biblical giants of Genesis, and the prophetic dream of the flood, as was had by Adam, followed by the efforts to preserve knowledge through inscriptions, traceable back to the myth of the Enochian Pillars. The interpretation of the king’s prophetic dream by his vizier, Philemon, who is then tasked with preparing for the catastrophe by building pyramids even echoes the story of Joseph and the idea that he built the pyramids to store grain. The pyramids are presented as both tombs and repositories for ancient knowledge, and the conclusion, with tomb raiders braving booby traps and facing ghosts and monsters in a vast subterranean warren of passages presages even the most modern myths about ancient Egyptian monuments. But lest anyone hear this and actually credit the story, the facts demonstrating its clearly mythological character should be emphasized. Some have tried to paint the story of Sūrīd with the brush of historicity, but it simply cannot be convincingly done. While it is true that the same Sūrīd may be a corruption of Suphis, the Egyptian priest Manetho’s name for Khufu, the reign of Khufu precedes nearly all the dates for the flood by hundreds of years, and more than that, calculations made according to details in Sūrīd narratives alone place the construction of the Pyramids a thousand years earlier than we now know them to have been built. Moreover, there are no labyrinthine subterranean passages beneath the pyramids, only a few cramped sepulcher chambers. There certainly was not room in there for so much treasure let alone room for giants to have entered it. Indeed, the interior dimensions of the granite coffer within the King’s Chamber, built to hold Khufu’s sarcophagus, was only six and a half feet in length, which proves he could not even have been more than six feet tall and was likely shorter. Then there are the claims that Philemon and the other priests serving Sūrīd used astrological calculations to determine the exact date of the coming catastrophe. It has been accepted since the late 19th century work of French Egyptologist Gaston Maspero that no system of astrology was in use in Egypt until around 500 BCE. Not only does this prove that the story of Sūrīd was not of ancient Egyptian origin, it also disproves so many pyramid myths that claimed the pyramids and obelisks of ancient Egypt were inscribed with the secrets of magic, and specifically astrology. Of course, with the decipherment of hieroglyphs, this eventually became easily provable when it came to inscriptions on other pyramids and obelisks. But not so the inscriptions on the Great Pyramid at Giza, which were so central to many myths and could not actually be found.

Caliph al-Maʾmūn, who first opened the Great Pyramid in the Middle Ages.

Going all the way back to the account of Herodotus, it was said that the Great Pyramid at Giza was absolutely covered with inscriptions. According to his account, Herodotus was told by interpreters that the inscriptions were essentially a record of the costs incurred in the building of the pyramid, but this seems unlikely and may have been misinformation fed to the Greek visitor, if he was actually told this. It was these inscriptions that were said to have preserved ancient antediluvian knowledge and magic formulae. Through the centuries, as myth upon myth propagated and legends developed about inscribed pillars and tablets within the tomb, of secret books clutched by mummies, the myths of pyramid inscriptions at Giza were embellished, such that the entire interior of the Great Pyramid, which was often imagined to contain a far more vast complex of rooms and passages than would actually be found within, was covered, every inch, floor to ceiling, with mysterious hieroglyphs. In reality, when Colonel Richard William Howard Vyse launched an expedition to Egypt during the wave of Egyptomania in the early 19th century and blasted his way into the interior using gunpowder, no inscriptions whatsoever were found, just one some painted graffiti left by the laborers who built it, which included a cartouche depicting Khufu’s name, which cartouche has become a subject of conspiracy theory, with some claiming Vyse forged it for some nefarious reason. Nor is there any inscription on the exterior of the Great Pyramid to be found, except for graffiti carved into its stones by later visitors. Most is easily recognized as graffiti, but above the lintel of the entrance into Khufu’s pyramid, one square hieroglyphic text can be found, but it was actually left there by German Egyptologist Karl Lepsius in the 1840s, using the new hieroglyphic grammar published by Champollion using the Rosetta Stone. It names the members of his expedition and pays respect to Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm IV. In 1934, another inscription was discovered under the lintel by French Egyptologist Andre Pochan—four symbols that aren’t recognizable as hieroglyphs and remain undeciphered. Considering that Karl Lepsius a hundred years earlier was carving his graffiti on that lintel and made no mention of this inscription, we can safely presume it to be a later graffiti as well, though it too has fueled conspiracy theory, with some brilliant online sleuths claiming it connects the pyramids to Roswell and aliens.

While both the Great Pyramid and the slightly smaller pyramid of Khafre, his son, contain no inscriptions on their exteriors or interiors, there is still the possibility that they once did have some sort of inscriptions on their exteriors. As Herodotus described the pyramids at Giza, other stones were used “to fill up the angles of the steps, and make the side of the pyramid a smooth inclined plane.” What Herodotus was describing were the limestone casing stones that once covered these pyramids, making their exterior smooth and gleaming white in the sun, an image of the Giza Pyramids that we can only imagine today. In the Middle Ages, most of the casing was stripped away, said to have been used by Muslim conquerors to build the city of Cairo. Considering the number of ancient testimonia claiming that inscriptions had been carved into the pyramid’s exterior, it is feasible that some of the casing stones were inscribed. However, some casing stones have survived, and none show any signs of inscription. Therefore, it is also possible that the inscriptions were entirely legendary. For example, the story of Sūrīd famously states that an inscription appeared on the pyramid in which Sūrīd took credit for their construction and challenged any who would come after him to prove their greatness by destroying them, with the scathing final remark that “it is easier to destroy than to build.” This element of the story appears to be an adaptation of Diodorus Siculus’s claim that on the Colossus of Ramesses the Great, whose throne name he approximated as Ozymandias, there was an inscription that challenged any who “would know how great I am” to “excel me in any of my works,” a likely fictional inscription that Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley immortalized in his sonnet Ozymandias as “Look on my works ye Mighty, and despair!” If the inscriptions on the Great Pyramid were entirely legendary, then the idea of them may have derived from temples and obelisks elsewhere in Egypt, which were inscribed with hieroglyphs, or the pyramids of later dynasties, which did contain interior inscriptions—the Pyramid Texts I spoke of in the last episode, whose contents were not magical formulae or secret lost wisdom. We can see this development even at Giza, as the other major pyramid at Giza, that of Menkaure, son of Khafre, does have some few inscriptions. At its entrance, there is an inscription giving the date of Menkaure’s death, though this inscription is thought to have been carved later, and within the pyramid is another inscription, made by Menkaure’s son, dedicating the monument to his father. Judging by these inscriptions, even if there are lost inscriptions on undiscovered casing stones, there is no reason to believe their content would be much different than an epitaph on a tombstone.

Plate from Charles Piazzi Smyth’s *Our Inheritance in the Great Pyramid* showing some of the casing stones still in situ at the base. This book blended fact, like this, with pyramidological nonsense.

These many myths about the pyramids had in large part part remained limited to Egypt and Greece, but the Renaissance brought renewed interest in ancient history and “lost knowledge,” especially Hermetic, alchemical lore in Europe. Thus interest in the pyramids and Egypt grew. Italian humanist Peirio Bolzani put in effort to decipher hieroglyphs and compile a dictionary of symbols, though his work relied on the 5th century Greek work of Horapollo, which largely misread hieroglyphs as magical and symbolic characters. He viewed them as ideographs, thinking of them more like ideas in drawing than as a script representing language with grammar and syntax. His work would influence Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher, who became unduly confident that he had finally deciphered hieroglyphs. In reality, he got most of his translations entirely wrong, and his view of ancient Egypt was almost entirely predicated on the religious and Hermetic myths that he discovered in Arabic texts that he acquired. He claimed that ancient Egyptian was the language of Adam and Eve, he believed that Adam had received some secret wisdom from the heavens that his descendants preserved from destruction by the flood, and he perpetuated the legend of Hermes Trismegistus as Enoch—in short, he was a major vector for the transmission of ancient pyramid legends to spread among Europeans during the Renaissance. He is the first to have shared the story of Sūrīd with a European audience. But as much as Kircher was a propagator of misinformation and myth, he was also an early figure in the development of a scientific worldview. Though he defended the story of Noah’s Ark as literally true, claimed large bones were the remains of biblical giants, and promoted notions about Atlantis being a real place in the mid-Atlantic, he also studied volcanism, recognized fossils as animal remains, acknowledged the evolutionary possibility of speciation, was one of the first to observe microbes with a microscope, and even concluded that the plague was caused by a microorganism, which he called an “animalcule.” Even his work on hieroglyphs was not without merit, as he was the first to recognize that the Coptic language retained elements of ancient Egyptian. Because of these accomplishments, he has been recognized as “the first scholar with a global reputation” and as the first Egyptologist. It is due to his influence that much Arabic literature was tracked down and translated for European audiences during the Renaissance. And he also influenced much scholarly study of Egypt, interest in which would remain high into the Enlightenment, as interest in cultural traditions and wisdom outside of Christian traditions was sought.

Kircher both perpetuated myths and encouraged a more rational and scientific approach to the study of Egyptian history, and thus the field of Egyptology was born as a kind of pseudoscience. And one of the first false steps it took was in its relation of ancient Egyptian monuments to the stars. Long before John Herschel imagined that the interior shafts of the Great Pyramid were aligned to view the star Draco, his notions were anticipated by an acquaintance of Athanasius Kircher’s, the English astronomer John Greaves. In his 1646 work, Pyramidographia, which otherwise disregarded ancient myths and provided the most detailed and accurate mathematical survey of the pyramids ever published, he allowed himself to be swayed by the Arabic works that claimed, without support, that the pyramids were built for the purpose of worshipping stars. Kircher promoted this notion as well, suggesting without evidence that Manetho’s name for Khufu, Suphis, was actually a reference to the star Sirius. According to Greaves, the flat top of the Great Pyramid was really a platform on which ancient Egyptians had observed the stars, making the pyramids a sort of observatory. This was his own speculation about the purpose of the pyramids, though as Jason Colavito observes in my principal source, The Legends of the Pyramids, Greaves makes it sound like this was the conclusion of Greek Neoplatonist Proclus Lycius, giving this false notion a false history and pedigree. We know this is untrue just as we know the pyramids were not built by and for giants. If they had been, the entrances would have been made far larger, and if they had been designed as observatories, some sort of passage would have been designed for ancient astronomers to climb to the tip, since remember, the smooth casing stones originally made the pyramids impossible to climb. Today we recognize that there never was a platform on the finished pyramid, as atop its casing stones likely was placed a pyramidion or pointed capstone, as was the case on obelisks. These wrongheaded claims, made by well-meaning and in many ways scholarly individuals, nevertheless forever associated the pyramids, in the imaginations of Europeans, with astronomy, leading eventually to the claims of purposeful alignments made by Herschel and the absolutely bonkers claims of pyramidologists like Charles Piazzi Smyth, as described in the beginning of this series. And this claim that the pyramid builders were preoccupied with the cosmos would also contribute, in the 19th century, to some of the wilder claims of occultists.

So we find that, while Egyptology began with misguided and false notions, it still was taking its first steps toward becoming the legitimate science and academic discipline that is respected today. And as is often the case, simultaneous to that development, and diverging from its efforts to rely on observation and evidence, there were occultists and poets working to perpetuate false notions and myths about the pyramids. Major contributors to this were the Freemasons. As indicated in the last episode, the legend of the Enochian Pillars was long used as part of the ritual initiations of this fraternity. Documents like the Cooke Manuscript demonstrate that the old myth was being incorporated into the fraternity’s lore as early as the 15th century, and in later versions, it's claimed that Enoch inscribed ancient sciences into golden tablets that he hid in deep underground vaults where King Solomon would later find them—thus we see it transformed through the years into the hidden or lost book legend, like that of Hermes Trismegistus’s Emerald Tablet and the Magical Book of Thoth. Into the 18th-century, as the rites and rituals of Speculative Freemasonry became more and more normalized, more and more Hermetic and Egyptian iconography would be incorporated into Masonic symbolism. Surprisingly, the Egyptian image most famously ascribed to Masons, the pyramid with the triangular eye at the top, as seen in the Great Seal of the United States and in this podcast’s cover art, is not actually a Masonic symbol, though the Eye of Providence or All-Seeing Eye in the seal has been used by the fraternity. None of this means that Freemasons really trace their origins back to great antiquity, as their myths claim, or that they are privy to some ancient preserved sciences. The simple fact is that the premise of their fraternity being the preservers of the ancient art of geometry and architecture, which arose from its origins among journeyman bricklayers, means that these legends about preserved knowledge just fit their purposes well. And just as Freemasons’ interest in Hermeticism would lead them to incorporate more of these myths into their mythology, so too would other occultists latch onto them and use them to lend their own practices a veneer of ancient legitimacy. Case in point: the Tarot, which originated simply as playing cards in 15th-century Europe. In the late 18th century, as Freemasonry was growing and appropriating Hermetic myths, these cards were transformed by occultists into a means of divination with a fake history. Early practitioners of Tarot called it “the science of Hermes,” and in 1783, Jean-Baptiste Alliette wrote that the Tarot were, in fact, the ancient Book of Thoth, preserving antediluvian secrets, inscribed by Hermes Trismegistus onto 78 gold tablets hidden within an Egyptian temple. It was the conclusion of the 18th century, two parallel movements had taken especial interest in the Egyptian pyramids at Giza, one scientific and one occult, and an Egyptomania was about to seize the world.

A Tarocchini deck, the game from which Tarot cards are derived.

Until next time, remember, when someone wants to give you a tarot reading, those cards were originally used in 16th-century Italy for a game called Tarocchini. So ask them what the rules are and how you win.

Pyramidiocy - Part Three: The Book of Thoth

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