The Secret Chamber of Osiris: Lost Knowledge of the Sixteen Pyramids (6 page)

THE MYTH OF OSIRIS

I’d been traveling along the desert road for about a half hour and had now almost reached the vista point. About six or seven buses were bunched together in a makeshift bus park while dozens of tourists milled around taking snapshots of the pyramids, which thrust out of the desert sands about a mile in the distance. As I turned the sharp bend into the bus park’s entrance, from the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of an Antiquities Guard near the boundary wall at the far side, mounted on a camel, having his photograph taken with some tourists and more than happy to relieve them of some
baksheesh
for his trouble. Or perhaps it was the somewhat unsettling sight of his Glock handgun that compelled the tourists to part with their cash.

This was awkward and precisely the kind of situation I had hoped to avoid. I didn’t want to continue on my journey with the guard so near and so able to observe my movements. Not that I was doing or even about to do anything illegal, but it would have looked somewhat peculiar, a lone figure heading out onto the desert road on foot, and would surely have piqued the guard’s curiosity and no doubt his attention, which I could well have done without.

Thus, for the next half hour or so I had to stay put and content myself with some sandwiches and my bottle of water—killing time. It was also a convenient opportunity to join the frenzy of pyramid shooting. While this particular aspect of the pyramids—spread out north to south—was truly magnificent, it was not nearly as spectacular a view as the iconic, jaw-dropping, east-west panoramas to be seen from the vantage points to the south of the Giza pyramid field. From the location here the pyramids seemed somehow disjointed, like pieces of a gigantic geometric puzzle that had become scattered and disconnected and that needed to be picked up and reassembled (figure 2.6).

After having taken the third “pyramid-in-my-hand” photo for some grateful American tourists, I overheard the crackling of the guard’s radio. He took the radio from his belt and spoke into it briefly before signaling with a brush of his hand, “No more photos.” Before long, and with a considerable sense of relief, I watched as he exited from the bus park on his camel, heading out across the desert sand in a southeasterly direction—opposite to where I was headed. I didn’t waste any more time. I quickly packed my things and, with one final check that the guard was fully out of sight, made my way once more onto the dusty road.

A few hundred yards later the road took a sharp turn, heading almost exactly due south. In the distance I could see the rise of a small hill, beyond which was my goal. The feeling of excitement and exhilaration was building within me with each passing step. As I looked to the pyramids in the distance behind me, something rather remarkable was occurring—as I reached the point where I was almost perfectly in line with the diagonal of the three pyramids, the wide gaps between them had completely vanished, giving the illusion that the three individual structures had morphed into one giant, unified body. In this I was reminded of Plutarch’s tale of Osiris and Isis whereby Osiris (the ancient Egyptian god of rebirth and regeneration), having had his body cut into sixteen pieces (some versions of the tale say fourteen pieces) by his evil brother Seth, who then scattered them all across the land of Egypt, was made whole again after his wife (and sister) Isis found all the body parts (with the exception of one) and pieced them together again.

Figure 2.6. The Giza pyramids (looking east). Photo by Scott
Creighton.

I began to wonder if there was in fact a kernel of truth in this ancient myth, whether it could be possible that this story was actually an allegorical tale pointing us toward a fundamental truth that the body of Osiris that had been cut into sixteen pieces and scattered across the land was not meant to be understood in terms of a human body but was perhaps a metaphorical reference to the early, giant pyramids acting as the body of Osiris, much in the same way that a Christian church today represents the allegorical “body of Christ.” And further still, could it be that the one piece of the “body” we are told from the myth that Isis could
not
find may be an allegorical reference to a
hidden
part, a subtle clue to a hidden vault somewhere deep underground, awaiting discovery—the legendary hidden chamber of Osiris?

This may not be as radical a thought as it may at first seem. The idea that the scattered “body of pyramids” (i.e., the first sixteen or so pyramids built by the ancient Egyptians at Abu Roash, Saqqara, Meidum, Dahshur, and Giza) may represent (or may have come in later times to represent) the allegorical body of Osiris finds some support in our earliest religious texts, the ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, in which it is written, “This pyramid . . . is Osiris . . . this construction . . . is Osiris.”
²

This notion is given further support in Frank Cole Babbit’s translation of Plutarch’s
Isis and Osiris,
in which we read, “The traditional result of Osiris’s dismemberment is that there are many so-called tombs of Osiris in Egypt; for Isis held a funeral for each part when she had found it . . . all of them called the tomb of Osiris.”
³

While it may have been believed by some later historians such as Plutarch and Herodotus that these early pyramids (along with the hundred or so much later pyramids) had been conceived and built as tombs, there is considerable evidence—presented in the next chapter that raises some serious questions about that assertion. What is absolutely certain, and for which there can be absolutely no doubt, is that clearly
intrusive
burials have been recovered from a number of the earliest pyramids. And, by the same token, what is clear also is that not a single
intact
burial of an ancient Egyptian king has ever been recovered from any of these first pyramids (or indeed from
any
pyramid in any age). Indeed, the
only
fully intact burial of an ancient Egyptian king ever found was that of Tutankhamun, who was buried in a deep, underground tomb (not in a pyramid) in the Valley of the Kings.

The concept of pyramids as arks or recovery vaults for the kingdom (containing all manner of seeds, tools, pottery, etc.) could not be better symbolized than by the ancient Egyptian god Osiris, their god of agriculture and of rebirth. The pyramids contained, after all, the means by which the kingdom hoped to recover should the worst effects of “Thoth’s Flood” come to pass. These “dismembered body parts” (i.e., the individual pyramids scattered along the length of the Nile) represented the agency through which the recovery or rebirth of the kingdom could occur.

In essence these first scattered pyramids along the Nile Valley
were
Osiris (i.e., his body cut into sixteen parts), just as the ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts and Plutarch’s
Myth of Osiris
inform us. As such it should be of little surprise then to find that when plotting the individual locations of the first, giant pyramids onto a map of Egypt, what we find is a crude “matchstick” outline drawing of the classic Osiris figurine (see figures 2.7a–e), complete with the royal regalia of the distinctive three-pronged Atef Crown of Osiris and symbols of power, the crook and flail.

These images demonstrate the locations of the pyramids listed below with the name of the king Egyptologists believe constructed each pyramid (its location in parentheses), and which were constructed on the high plateaus along the lush green Nile Valley (Osiris is often painted with a green body depicting vegetation and rebirth) and are believed by Egyptologists to have been completed in the following order of construction.

1. Djoser (Saqqara)
   
2. Sekhemkhet (Saqqara, unfinished)
   
3. Khaba (Zawiyet al-Aryan, unfinished)
   
4. Sneferu (Meidum, farthest south)
   
5. Sneferu (Dahshur, the Bent Pyramid)
   
6. Sneferu (Dahshur, the Red Pyramid)
   
7. Khufu (Giza, with four satellite pyramids)
   
8. Djedefre (Abu Roash, farthest north)
   
9. Khafre (Giza, with one satellite pyramid)
   
10. Nebka (Zawiyet al-Aryan, unfinished)
    
11. Menkaure (Giza, with three satellite pyramids)
    

Figure 2.7a. The first pyramids outline the god Osiris.

Figure 2.7b. Locations of the first 19 pyramids built by the ancient Egyptians along the Nile Valley (inludes 3 unfinished pyramids).

Figure 2.7c. The most northern pyramids correlate with the Atef Crown of Osiris.

Figure 2.7d. The middle pyramids correlate with the torso and the flail and crook of Osiris.