When Plato invented the story of Atlantis—and he most certainly invented it as an allegory meant to illustrate how hubris can bring about the downfall of civilizations—he chose to place the origin of the tale in Egypt, saying that Solon, who was actually Plato’s ancestor, had received the story from priests in Egypt, and that the priests knew the story because it had been inscribed on pillars in a temple there. As indicated in the first part of this series, the story recalls Herodotus’s tale of receiving the history of Egypt from priests, and indeed, by some interpretations, the entire allegory was meant to counter the growing Greek view that their civilization was inferior to that of Egypt or that Plato had taken his ideas about the ideal state from Egypt. By this interpretation, then, even though the story has it that Egyptians simply transmitted the story, Atlantis was actually meant to represent Egypt, to show that it was inferior to the “perfect society” of Athens, and that it had caused its own downfall. In inventing this story, he may have been inspired by the attempted Athenian conquest of Sicily, or perhaps by the very real destruction of Helike by tsunami, which saw an actual city-state sunk, or rather submerged, much like Atlantis is in his story. However, he had plenty of other models to inspire his story. Since in Critias, it is clear that Zeus is responsible for the sinking of Atlantis, that he chose to punish Atlanteans for their corruption and godlessness, it is further apparent that Plato was reworking a flood myth, a widespread mythological motif in which a supernatural flood is sent by a god or gods to destroy a people or nation because of their corruption or hubris. Of course, when we think of a Great Flood today, because of the influence of the Bible on Western culture, we think of Noah’s flood, but there were other precursor myths to the one that appears in Genesis. I spoke about this at length in my episode The Deluge and the Ark Seekers, in which I refuted the claim that a global flood occurred and that Noah’s Ark was real. Plato was not the first Greek to imagine Zeus punishing hubris with a flood, for Greek myth held that Zeus had destroyed Arcadia with a deluge in his anger over a human sacrifice. And this myth appears to have migrated from the Babylonian flood myth seen in the Epic of Gilgamesh, which itself was derived from a Mesopotamian antecedent myth that likely only described the flooding of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. But the Genesis flood myth was different. The corruption that warranted the flood of Noah was not hubris, but rather something very strange: the mingling of peoples, intercourse between fallen angels and human women, and the issue of unnatural offspring who were giants. Later apocrypha would expand on the myth, with the first man, Adam, having foretold the flood, and with these angels, or Watchers, having revealed ancient knowledge and the secrets of the universe to mankind, and these ancient secrets having been preserved, just as in Plato’s tale of Atlantis, upon pillars that some would say were in Egypt. Just one problem, though: as both Plato and Herodotus asserted, and as the pyramids themselves demonstrated, civilization in Egypt was older than the flood, older even than Eden and the date of Creation, by any calculation at the time. Does the very existence of the pyramids then destroy Biblical literalist views of history? The answer, unfortunately, is no, since Egyptian pyramids are now dated to between 4,000 and 5,000 years ago, well within the 6,000 year range of Biblical literalists, but Jewish writers in antiquity and Christian and Gnostic writers in late antiquity, and Muslim writers in the Middle Ages, were working from an exaggerated timeline and would go to extreme lengths to reconcile the pyramids with their religious doctrines. And this would prove to be a major vector in the development of falsehoods about Egypt and the pyramids.

To think that Jewish theologians did not know how to account for Egypt in their theology is rather surprising. After all, Egypt plays a very large part in the Bible. Abraham lives there for a long time and interacts with a pharaoh. Abraham’s great-grandson Joseph is carried into captivity there but rises to become a vizier. The Israelites are said to have been enslaved there, and Moses is raised in the family of a pharaoh. Plagues are brought down on Egypt before the Israelites are liberated. King Solomon later marries a pharaoh’s daughter, and his son, Rehoboam is said to have lost the Ark of the Covenant to Egyptian Pharaoh Shishak. Even the New Testament has Joseph and Mary taking the baby Jesus into Egypt to escape the wrath of Herod. Even in these canonical scriptures, Egypt is portrayed as a place of evil magics, with the pharaoh surrounded by sorcerers capable wielding magic that rivals Moses’s demonstrations of God’s power. And yet, no mention is made of pyramids whatsoever. With the Israelites said to have been enslaved, one notion was that the Israelites had been forced to build the pyramids, after all, Exodus mentions them “at their hard labor,” and even describes an Egyptian beating a Hebrew slave, for which Moses kills him. Along with some of Herodotus’s phrasing, this proves to be the origin of the myth about pyramids being built by slaves. In fact, there is no archaeological evidence to support the claim that Israelites were enslaved in Egypt. But granting this premise, the Bible does not say what the Israelites did in their labors, and it makes no explicit mention of pyramids or structures that could be interpreted as pyramids. This has not stopped believers from seeing pyramids in the text; for example, it is argued that the word migdol, or tower, the same word used to refer to that other great monolith, the Tower of Babel, would have been used to refer to the pyramids, and furthermore since certain verses refer to a place called Migdol, this must be a reference to Giza. To make this argument one has to entirely disregard the context of every mention of these separate places called Migdol, which were in each case placed in relation to other locations that show it was not Giza. So where were the pyramids? If they weren’t in Exodus, perhaps they could be found in Genesis.

François de Nomé's *The Fall of Atlantis*, 1650

Of course, if Egypt and the pyramids did not conform to biblical views of chronology, a believer could always assert that God had created them already assembled on the Earth in order to test the faith of believers, as He had those pesky dinosaur bones, but for all their ignorance of science and magico-religious beliefs, even the ancients did not stoop to that sort of stupidity. That is a very modern sort of nonsense. Instead, they failed to question their own preconceptions about history when faced with evidence of a civilization of far greater antiquity than they had imagined possible, and sought to demonstrate that it must not have been so very old as was claimed. According to their own ancient traditions, the very first king in Egypt had been named Mizraim, and this name served also as the Hebrew name for the country. In truth, there is strong reason to believe this was a kind of personification, as the root of the name, misr, meant land, and in the dual form, misraim meant “two lands,” which you may recall from the previous episode was actually what the Egyptians themselves called their land. Mizraim was in the Bible, in Genesis 10, as a grandson of Noah, the second son of Ham, and this made for a great way to shoehorn Egypt into Genesis, such that Egypt became the land to which Ham, the wicked son of Noah, went after being cursed. Thus Ham was said to be the founder of Egypt, and his son Mizraim its first king. This notion would also eventually feed into the insidious myth that--because Ham had not averted his gaze from his father’s drunken nudity and his son Canaan was therefore cursed to be a slave to Ham’s brothers—Ham was the progenitor of all Black people, and that Black people had therefore all been cursed to endure slavery. This terrible falsehood would be bolstered in the 17th century by those who tried to prove Ham’s connection with Africa, or specifically Egypt, through inaccurate etymology, claiming Ham was derived from a Hebrew word for “black,” or from an Egyptian word for “servant,” or even from that other name for Egypt, Kemet, “The Black Land,” which of course, as I stated before, is a reference to the rich soil of Egypt, not to skin color. The name Egypt came from a Greek word that referenced the inhabitants’ skin color and, like all those other words, was not clearly connected to the name Ham in any way. Additionally, it’s just contradictory that the myth about Ham’s sons being cursed to be slaves derives from another myth about Ham’s sons being the first kings of the greatest kingdom in human history.

A further problem with identifying Ham’s Mizraim with Mizraim the first king of Egypt was that there were no records in king lists of a Mizraim being a pharaoh. According to Manetho’s king lists, the first king in Egypt was named Menes, but he was just the first human king, as Manetho traces god kings back untold thousands of years further. Other Greek writers claimed an even longer history for Egypt, stretching back some fifty millennia. Some later chronologists sought to resolve this discrepancy by recalculating the history of Egypt. According to Jewish and Christian traditions, Egypt’s history could not possible have stretched back so very many thousands of years because only a couple thousand years were thought to have passed between Creation and the Flood. With Manetho’s account of gods reigning on Earth for nearly 25,000 years, Christian historians of late antiquity, like Sextus Julius Africanus and Eusebius of Caesaria would try to resolve this by claiming that, after all, Manetho and the composers of Egyptian king lists had relied on lunar months which were mistaken for solar years, and that is why their numbers were so inflated. I’m not sure how you’d mistake the two, since they’re night and day (ba-dum-tss), but such a rationalization was good enough for many a believer to just forget about the inconsistency. Others, however, sought some further reconciliation, reasoning that perhaps, after all, the pyramids and Egyptian civilization predated the Great Flood, leading inexorably back to the weird story of the “sons of God” impregnating the “daughters of men” with giants, or Nephilim. In Hellenistic Egypt and the Egypt of late antiquity, as syncretism had birthed many divergent religious myths and belief in magic was giving birth to strange legends, the story of these giants exploded in popularity. With the appearance of certain apocryphal works, the Book of Jubilees, the Book of Enoch, and the Book of Giants, the myth of antediluvian giants grew exponentially. No longer called the “sons of God,” they became known as Egregori or Watchers. Long had there been doctrinal disputes over who the “sons of God” had been, whether truly angels or just men, and you can hear all about that in my series on giants, No Bones About It. What the apocryphal legend did was confirm that the Watchers were fallen angels, list their names, and detail their activities, which would conclude in their destruction in the Flood. Not only did they consort with human women and produce giant offspring, or nephilim—which may not even be correctly translated as giants—but these offspring were evil, and their ghosts still haunt the Earth, such that the story became a kind of demonology. It was claimed the Watchers taught humanity astrology and other ancient secrets, and with the loss of hieroglyphic literacy already underway and Egyptian inscriptions already being thought of as secret and inaccessible knowledge that had been preserved since antiquity, it was not a far leap to the notion that the Watchers had built the pyramids, or considering its size, perhaps their giant children had done so. There was, for example, a myth about these giants having survived the Flood to build the Tower of Babel, so why not the Great Pyramid too? And after all, looking at hieroglyphs, it’s clear that some figures are carved extremely large while others are very small, so… GIANTS, right? Well, no. Without an understanding of hieroglyphs, they did not recognize that the larger figures were just being emphasized as more important, a technique called hieratic scale.

Gustave Doré’s *The Fall of the Rebel Angels*, 1865, courtesy The Harvard Art Museums

Legends about fallen angels and giants would never stop being attached to the pyramids, and neither would the myth that they had been built to preserve ancient and evil knowledge, like…duh duh duuuh…astrology. That may not seem so sinister today, but the sorcery of divining the future by examining the heavens was certainly considered an evil science or magic by some back then. It is from this notion about hieroglyphs having been inscribed in pyramids to preserve these sinister secrets that we derive the modern numerological pyramidology claims about pyramids revealing advanced ancient wisdom and intelligence. This myth originates in the old legend of the Pillars of Wisdom. Hearkening back to Plato’s story about the history of Atlantis being inscribed on ancient pillars in Egypt, and corresponding to the notion that hieroglyphs represented the ancient secrets of the Watchers, the prevalent belief that hieroglyphs contained secret wisdom or magical formulae cropped up in the work of 1st century CE Roman-Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, who in his Antiquities of the Jews shares an apparent longstanding tradition that the descendants of Adam and Eve had taken steps to preserve an ancient and sacred wisdom that had been imparted to them. In this version of the Genesis story which would be further developed in apocryphal traditions such as appear in works like The Testament of Adam, The Apocalypse of Adam, The Conflict of Adam and Eve with Satan and The Cave of Treasure, Adam is not just a simple fool who is easily led astray by the corruptive influences of Eve and the Serpent. No, Adam was the wisest of sages because he had been in the presence of God. The secrets of the universe had been shared with him, and he in turn shared them with his son, who sealed them in a cave. This good son was not Abel, who had been killed by the wicked son Cain, but rather his youngest son, Seth, and Seth’s sons, or descendants, the Sethites, who kept the faith, unlike the sinful descendants of Cain, kept also the celestial knowledge passed down from their forefathers and took heed of a very specific prophecy of Adam’s that the world would be destroyed in a flood. According to Josephus, in order to preserve their knowledge, they inscribed them onto two columns or pillars, called stelae, one of brick and the other of stone. Josephus would state that these pillars were located in the “land of Siriad,” yet another term that was taken to mean Egypt, since it appeared to refer to the star Sirius, which was sacred among Egyptians. Then, the fact that Eusebius would later use the same term, stelae, to refer to pyramidal monuments, cemented the notion that the Sethites built the pyramids to survive a flood they knew was coming and inscribed them with all the secret knowledge of the universe.

Of course, none of this is history. It’s mythology, made up thousands of years after the construction of the pyramids in an effort to fabricate a biblical history of the tombs that so thwarted theologians’ efforts to explain them away. With the eventual decipherment of hieroglyphs, it became impossible to claim that the purpose of the pyramids was to serve as some kind of sacred book that held within it the secrets of ancient knowledge. Actual inscriptions in pyramids, like those preserved at Saqqara, or the Pyramid Texts, as they are called, simply recorded the accomplishments of the pharaohs interred therein, with the only magical spells being merely sacerdotal rituals meant to ensure that the deceased would transition properly into their afterlife. But Josephus’s purpose was not only to explain away those pesky pyramids. His version also revised the received story of Genesis, asserting the “sons of God” who impregnated the “daughters of men” with Nephilim, or giants, were actually the Sethites, those who had kept the faith and the wisdom of Adam, who had been seduced by the wanton women of the Cainites. In one fell swoop, he rewrote the whole affair, such that the ancient and secret knowledge was not some evil sorcery, but rather the Wisdom of God, preserved from the flood on pillars—or perhaps pyramids—by a godly antediluvian people. What we see Josephus doing, modifying ancient traditions to better suit a modern world and his own sensibilities, and even changing the identities of the central characters, is a process that would result in the myths about the pyramids changing and evolving, embraced by one people and then another, always taking the figures credited and identifying them as actually having been someone from their own traditions. In the apocryphal works that so popularized the story of the Watchers, it was one particular Sethite, Enoch, whom one tradition claimed was the inventor of astrology. You can hear me talk a great deal about the figure of Enoch and the unbelievable lore that surrounds him in my previous episode The Secrets of Enoch. What’s relevant here is that in the apocryphal Book of Jubilees, Enoch interacts with the Watchers and tries to reform them, and in the Book of Giants, it is Enoch who inscribes secret prophecies onto tablets. This would eventually translate into Enoch having been the engraver of the Pillars of Wisdom, and the legend of the Enochian Pillars is still widely repeated today as part of the highly metaphorical rituals of Freemasonry. And starting in the third century CE, as Christianity spread in Egypt, and especially that hotbed of syncretism, Alexandria, we would find that Enoch came to be identified with none other than the Father of Alchemy, Hermes Trismegistus. Again, you can hear me talk in great detail about Hermes Trismegistus in my episode on him, but what’s important here is to recognize that his eventual identification with Enoch was only the next step in a long history of syncretistic combination. The figure of Hermes Trismegistus had long been a composite. For hundreds of years, through the process of interpretatio graeca, he had emerged as an amalgamation of the Egyptian god of wisdom, Thoth, and the Greek god Hermes, giving birth to a new religion and school of philosophy, Hermeticism, from which the practices of alchemy sprang.

A depiction of the legendary Hermes Trismegistus

Through the centuries, Hermes Trismegistus went from being a Hellenized deity to being thought of more as a human sage who had really existed and taught secret wisdom. And then, with the spread of Christianity in the region, we see him become Christianized and identified with Enoch, who like both Hermes and Thoth before him had already been credited with secret knowledge and the preservation of wisdom. Additionally, apocryphal traditions claimed that, after being “taken” by God, he was actually spirited away to a faraway place, which was interpreted as Egypt, where Enoch was said to have become the sage Hermes Trismegistus. According to an early medieval Egyptian Jewish legend, Hermes Trismegistus had erected and inscribed the many obelisks of Egypt, called the “needles of the Pharaoh,” with the “secrets of the sciences which he had discovered,” clearly echoing the legend of Enoch’s pillars. And the legend of Hermes Trismegistus, as well as his identification with Enoch, would only be further developed after the Arab conquest of Egypt in the 7th century CE. Unsurprisingly, Muslims were interested in the majestic pyramids at Giza and elsewhere, as well as temples and other monuments, and their mystery was deepened by the fact that it seemed no Copts—those descended from the native peoples of the land—seemed to know anything with certainty about them and their inscriptions. As Hermeticism became popular among Arab-Egyptians, they further developed the myth of Hermes. Statues of the step pyramid architect Imhotep, depicted with a tablet inscribed with hieroglyphs, were mistaken for statues of Hermes, and the myth of Hermes Trismegistus’ Emerald Tablet, inscribed with the secrets of his sciences, was born. This of course corresponded nicely to the legend of the Pillars of Wisdom, so rumors abounded that the Great Pyramid was actually the tomb of Hermes Trismegistus/Enoch, and within could be found the secret of secrets, his occult knowledge, written in a book or inscribed on tablets, as well as the mythical MacGuffins of alchemy, the Philosopher’s Stone and the Elixir of Life. In the 9th century, a caliph ordered the Great Pyramid opened, but it was sealed so tightly—hermetically, you might say, because, again, it was a tomb—that the Caliph’s men had to break stones and tunnel in. Inside, according to competing traditions, they perhaps found Khufu’s treasures, or nothing, and discovered a mummy clutching a book or tablet. Surely Hermes Trismegistus himself! Or more likely Khufu, whom Manetho had more than a thousand years earlier credited with writing a sacred book. But we see this image echoing through the legends of Hermes Trismegistus, who was said to have been entombed with his tablet of secrets.

While Arab Hermeticists had taken the lore about Enoch/Hermes and run with it, Christians and Jews, from Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages, moved away from their apocryphal stories about antediluvian demons and giants and Bible patriarchs as astrologers and alchemists and developed a new explanation of the pyramids that might just be the most ridiculous one ever. They looked to one of the canonical stories of the Bible that center around Egypt, that of Joseph. Genesis tells us of Joseph’s enslavement in Egypt, and during his captivity, he was falsely accused of rape by his master’s wife, whose attempts to seduce him he had rebuffed. Thereafter, in prison, he demonstrated his talent at interpreting dreams to the Pharaoh’s cupbearer, and when the Pharaoh himself had a strange dream, about seven emaciated cows whom he observes swallowing seven fat cows, and of seven withered ears of corn devouring seven healthy ears of corn, Joseph is called on to interpret the dream. Joseph tells the Pharaoh that his dream foretells the coming of seven years’ prosperity and abundance, followed by seven years of deprivation. In order to prepare for the coming famines, Joseph advised the Pharaoh to stockpile grains. The Pharaoh puts such stock in Joseph’s prediction that he makes Joseph his chief official, or vizier, and places Joseph in charge of storing the grains. For six years, then Joseph oversaw the putting by of surplus grains, and when the famine began, just as he’d foretold, even people from surrounding lands came to Egypt for food and were directed to Joseph and his stockpiles. Long had Jews and Christians searched the Bible for any mention of the pyramids. Tortuous had been their rationalizations to explain not only their great antiquity but even their very existence. The very notion that they were great monuments to antediluvian demons and their abominable giant offspring flew in the face of their beliefs, and just as distasteful was the notion that they marked the resting places of pagan kings. Eventually, someone hit on the story of Joseph and came to the surprising conclusion that he had built the pyramids. According to their logic, in order to store grains, Joseph must have built great storehouses or granaries; therefore, Joseph had built the pyramids to store grains ahead of the famine he had predicted.

A 13th-century depiction of Joseph gathering grains in a pyramidal structure.

Just as it had been more desirable to Jews, Christians, and Muslims that they had been built by the patriarch Enoch, so too it was very pleasing to think that the pyramids were not the tombs of pagans but rather the great accomplishment of this celebrated Hebrew figure. There may also have been some syncretism involved with the development of this legend, as Eusebius reported that Jews and Christians in Egypt identified Joseph with the Hellenized Egyptian deity Serapis, who was associated with the provision of grain. Serapis was also associated with death, though, which meant he was associated with pyramids, as they were known to be tombs. Regardless of how this legend appeared, though, it waned in the Middle Ages, as it was simply impossible to credit. While some might say that pyramids could not be tombs because they were all empty, evidence that all pyramids were tombs is too abundant, as is evidence that they are empty because they were long ago looted. Moreover, though empty, pyramids are not hollow. They are almost entirely solid, each with only a warren of narrow passages and rooms. Therefore, they would not have held much grain. Lastly, if the myth were to be credited, it would mean that the pyramids were constructed within only 6 years, which even Herodotus would have found hard to believe. By the 17th century, the idea that pyramids were Joseph’s granaries was mostly considered laughable. And yet, we must never underestimate the potential for laughably false ideas to persist even into modern day. As an example, in 2016, then Republican presidential frontrunner Ben Carson came under fire in the media after video of a commencement speech he’d given in 1998 at a private Seventh Day Adventist university came to light. In the speech, he promoted the idea that the pyramids were Joseph’s granaries, and when asked about it, he doubled down. This just goes to show that there may be no idea too disproven or outdated to be promoted by religious conservatives, and as we’ve seen, many of the biggest myths and misconceptions about pyramids originate in misguided religious beliefs.

Pyramidiocy - Part Two: The Pillars of Wisdom

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