The Black Pharaohs

After capturing city after city along the Nile River in 730 B.C., troops commanded by King Piye of Nubia storm the great walled capital of Memphis with flaming arrows. Piye modeled himself after powerful pharaohs such as Ramses II (statues), claiming to be the rightful ruler of Egypt. His triumph over the northern chiefs would unite all Egypt under Nubian rule for three-quarters of a century.

At the height of his power, King Taharqa leads his queens through the crowds during a festival at the temple complex of Nubia’s Jebel Barkal, its pinnacle gleaming with gold. Accompanied by a sacred ship bearing an image of the god Amun, Taharqa is robed in a priestly leopard skin and crowned with the double uraeus that declares him Lord of the Two Lands—ruler of both Nubia and Egypt.

An ignored chapter of history tells of a time when kings from deep in Africa conquered ancient Egypt. For 75 years Nubian kings ruled over ancient Egypt, reunifying the country and building an empire. Until recently, theirs was a chapter of history lost in the shadows.

By Robert Draper
National Geographic Contributing Writer

In the year 730 B.C., a man by the name of Piye decided the only way to save Egypt from itself was to invade it. Things would get bloody before the salvation came.

“Harness the best steeds of your stable,” he ordered his commanders. The magnificent civilization that had built the great pyramids had lost its way, torn apart by petty warlords. For two decades Piye had ruled over his own kingdom in Nubia, a swath of Africa located mostly in present-day Sudan. But he considered himself the true ruler of Egypt as well, the rightful heir to the spiritual traditions practiced by pharaohs such as Ramses II and Thutmose III. Since Piye had probably never actually visited Lower Egypt, some did not take his boast seriously. Now Piye would witness the subjugation of decadent Egypt firsthand—“I shall let Lower Egypt taste the taste of my fingers,” he would later write.

North on the Nile River his soldiers sailed. At Thebes, the capital of Upper Egypt, they disembarked. Believing there was a proper way to wage holy wars, Piye instructed his soldiers to purify themselves before combat by bathing in the Nile, dressing themselves in fine linen, and sprinkling their bodies with water from the temple at Karnak, a site holy to the ram-headed sun god Amun, whom Piye identified as his own personal deity. Piye himself feasted and offered sacrifices to Amun. Thus sanctified, the commander and his men commenced to do battle with every army in their path.

By the end of a yearlong campaign, every leader in Egypt had capitulated—including the powerful delta warlord Tefnakht, who sent a messenger to tell Piye, “Be gracious! I cannot see your face in the days of shame; I cannot stand before your flame, I dread your grandeur.” In exchange for their lives, the vanquished urged Piye to worship at their temples, pocket their finest jewels, and claim their best horses. He obliged them. And then, with his vassals trembling before him, the newly anointed Lord of the Two Lands did something extraordinary: He loaded up his army and his war booty, and sailed southward to his home in Nubia, never to return to Egypt again.

When Piye died at the end of his 35-year reign in 715 B.C., his subjects honored his wishes by burying him in an Egyptian-style pyramid, with four of his beloved horses nearby. He was the first pharaoh to receive such entombment in more than 500 years. A pity, then, that the great Nubian who accomplished these feats is literally faceless to us. Images of Piye on the elaborate granite slabs, or stelae, memorializing his conquest of Egypt have long since been chiseled away. On a relief in the temple at the Nubian capital of Napata, only Piye’s legs remain. We are left with a single physical detail of the man—namely, that his skin was dark.

Piye was the first of the so-called black pharaohs—a series of Nubian kings who ruled over all of Egypt for three-quarters of a century as that country’s 25th dynasty. Through inscriptions carved on stelae by both the Nubians and their enemies, it is possible to map out these rulers’ vast footprint on the continent. The black pharaohs reunified a tattered Egypt and filled its landscape with glorious monuments, creating an empire that stretched from the southern border at present-day Khartoum all the way north to the Mediterranean Sea. They stood up to the bloodthirsty Assyrians, perhaps saving Jerusalem in the process.

Until recently, theirs was a chapter of history that largely went untold. Only in the past four decades have archaeologists resurrected their story—and come to recognize that the black pharaohs didn’t appear out of nowhere. They sprang from a robust African civilization that had flourished on the southern banks of the Nile for 2,500 years, going back at least as far as the first Egyptian dynasty.

Today Sudan’s pyramids—greater in number than all of Egypt’s—are haunting spectacles in the Nubian Desert. It is possible to wander among them unharassed, even alone, a world away from Sudan’s genocide and refugee crisis in Darfur or the aftermath of civil war in the south. While hundreds of miles north, at Cairo or Luxor, curiosity seekers arrive by the busload to jostle and crane for views of the Egyptian wonders, Sudan’s seldom-visited pyramids at El Kurru, Nuri, and Meroë stand serenely amid an arid landscape that scarcely hints of the thriving culture of ancient Nubia.

Now our understanding of this civilization is once again threatened with obscurity. The Sudanese government is building a hydroelectric dam along the Nile, 600 miles upstream from the Aswan High Dam, which Egypt constructed in the 1960s, consigning much of lower Nubia to the bottom of Lake Nasser (called Lake Nubia in Sudan). By 2009, the massive Merowe Dam should be complete, and a 106-mile-long lake will flood the terrain abutting the Nile’s Fourth Cataract, or rapid, including thousands of unexplored sites. For the past nine years, archaeologists have flocked to the region, furiously digging before another repository of Nubian history goes the way of Atlantis.

The ancient world was devoid of racism. At the time of Piye’s historic conquest, the fact that his skin was dark was irrelevant. Artwork from ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome shows a clear awareness of racial features and skin tone, but there is little evidence that darker skin was seen as a sign of inferiority. Only after the European powers colonized Africa in the 19th century did Western scholars pay attention to the color of the Nubians’ skin, to uncharitable effect.

Explorers who arrived at the central stretch of the Nile River excitedly reported the discovery of elegant temples and pyramids—the ruins of an ancient civilization called Kush. Some, like the Italian doctor Giuseppe Ferlini—who lopped off the top of at least one Nubian pyramid, inspiring others to do the same—hoped to find treasure beneath. The Prussian archaeologist Richard Lepsius had more studious intentions, but he ended up doing damage of his own by concluding that the Kushites surely “belonged to the Caucasian race.”

Even famed Harvard Egyptologist George Reisner—whose discoveries between 1916 and 1919 offered the first archaeological evidence of Nubian kings who ruled over Egypt—besmirched his own findings by insisting that black Africans could not possibly have constructed the monuments he was excavating. He believed that Nubia’s leaders, including Piye, were light-skinned Egypto-Libyans who ruled over the primitive Africans. That their moment of greatness was so fleeting, he suggested, must be a consequence of the same leaders intermarrying with the “negroid elements.”

For decades, many historians flip-flopped: Either the Kushite pharaohs were actually “white,” or they were bumblers, their civilization a derivative offshoot of true Egyptian culture. In their 1942 history, When Egypt Ruled the East, highly regarded Egyptologists Keith Seele and George Steindorff summarized the Nubian pharaonic dynasty and Piye’s triumphs in all of three sentences—the last one reading: “But his dominion was not for long.”

The neglect of Nubian history reflected not only the bigoted worldview of the times, but also a cult-like fascination with Egypt’s achievements—and a complete ignorance of Africa’s past. “The first time I came to Sudan,” recalls Swiss archaeologist Charles Bonnet, “people said: ‘You’re mad! There’s no history there! It’s all in
Egypt!’ ”

That was a mere 44 years ago. Artifacts uncovered during the archaeological salvage campaigns as the waters rose at Aswan in the 1960s began changing that view. In 2003, Charles Bonnet’s decades of digging near the Nile’s Third Cataract at the abandoned settlement of Kerma gained international recognition with the discovery of seven large stone statues of Nubian pharaohs. Well before then, however, Bonnet’s labors had revealed an older, densely occupied urban center that commanded rich fields and extensive herds, and had long profited from trade in gold, ebony, and ivory. “It was a kingdom completely free of Egypt and original, with its own construction and burial customs,” Bonnet says. This powerful dynasty rose just as Egypt’s Middle Kingdom declined around 1785 B.C. By 1500 B.C. the Nubian empire stretched between the Second and Fifth Cataracts.

Revisiting that golden age in the African desert does little to advance the case of Afrocentric Egyptologists, who argue that all ancient Egyptians, from King Tut to Cleopatra, were black Africans. Nonetheless, the saga of the Nubians proves that a civilization from deep in Africa not only thrived but briefly dominated in ancient times, intermingling and sometimes intermarrying with their Egyptian neighbors to the north. (King Tut’s own grandmother, the 18th-dynasty Queen Tiye, is claimed by some to be of Nubian heritage.)

The Egyptians didn’t like having such a powerful neighbor to the south, especially since they depended on Nubia’s gold mines to bankroll their dominance of western Asia. So the pharaohs of the 18th dynasty (1539-1292 B.C.) sent armies to conquer Nubia and built garrisons along the Nile. They installed Nubian chiefs as administrators and schooled the children of favored Nubians at Thebes. Subjugated, the elite Nubians began to embrace the cultural and spiritual customs of Egypt—venerating Egyptian gods, particularly Amun, using the Egyptian language, adopting Egyptian burial styles and, later, pyramid building. The Nubians were arguably the first people to be struck by “Egyptomania.”

Egyptologists of the latter 19th and early 20th centuries would interpret this as a sign of weakness. But they had it wrong: The Nubians had a gift for reading the geopolitical tea leaves. By the eighth century B.C., Egypt was riven by factions, the north ruled by Libyan chiefs who put on the trappings of pharaonic traditions to gain legitimacy. Once firmly in power, they toned down the theocratic devotion to Amun, and the priests at Karnak feared a godless outcome. Who was in a position to return Egypt to its former state of might and sanctity?

The Egyptian priests looked south and found their answer—a people who, without setting foot inside Egypt, had preserved Egypt’s spiritual traditions. As archaeologist Timothy Kendall of Northeastern University puts it, the Nubians “had become more Catholic than the pope.”

Under Nubian rule, Egypt became Egypt again. When Piye died in 715 B.C., his brother Shabaka solidified the 25th dynasty by taking up residence in the Egyptian capital of Memphis. Like his brother, Shabaka wed himself to the old pharaonic ways, adopting the throne name of the 6th-dynasty ruler Pepi II, just as Piye had claimed the old throne name of Thutmose III. Rather than execute his foes, Shabaka put them to work building dikes to seal off Egyptian villages from Nile floods.

Shabaka lavished Thebes and the Temple of Luxor with building projects. At Karnak he erected a pink granite statue depicting himself wearing the Kushite crown of the double uraeus—the two cobras signifying his legitimacy as Lord of the Two Lands. Through architecture as well as military might, Shabaka signaled to Egypt that the Nubians were here to stay.

To the east, the Assyrians were fast building their own empire. In 701 B.C., when they marched into Judah in present-day Israel, the Nubians decided to act. At the city of Eltekeh, the two armies met. And although the Assyrian emperor, Sennacherib, would brag lustily that he “inflicted defeat upon them,” a young Nubian prince, perhaps 20, son of the great pharaoh Piye, managed to survive. That the Assyrians, whose tastes ran to wholesale slaughter, failed to kill the prince suggests their victory was anything but total.

In any event, when the Assyrians left town and massed against the gates of Jerusalem, that city’s embattled leader, Hezekiah, hoped his Egyptian allies would come to the rescue. The Assyrians issued a taunting reply, immortalized in the Old Testament’s Book of II Kings: “Thou trustest upon the staff of this bruised reed [of] Egypt, on which if a man lean, it will go into his hand, and pierce it: So is Pharaoh king of Egypt unto all that trust on him.”

Then, according to the Scriptures and other accounts, a miracle occurred: The Assyrian army retreated. Were they struck by a plague? Or, as Henry Aubin’s provocative book, The Rescue of Jerusalem, suggests, was it actually the alarming news that the aforementioned Nubian prince was advancing on Jerusalem? All we know for sure is that Sennacherib abandoned the siege and galloped back in disgrace to his kingdom, where he was murdered 18 years later, apparently by his own sons.

The deliverance of Jerusalem is not just another of ancient history’s sidelights, Aubin asserts, but one of its pivotal events. It allowed Hebrew society and Judaism to strengthen for another crucial century—by which time the Babylonian king Nebuchadrezzar could banish the Hebrew people but not obliterate them or their faith. From Judaism, of course, would spring Christianity and Islam. Jerusalem would come to be recast, in all three major monotheistic religions, as a city of a godly significance.

It has been easy to overlook, amid these towering historical events, the dark-skinned figure at the edge of the landscape—the survivor of Eltekeh, the hard-charging prince later referred to by the Assyrians as “the one accursed by all the great gods”: Piye’s son Taharqa.

So sweeping was Taharqa’s influence on Egypt that even his enemies could not eradicate his imprint. During his rule, to travel down the Nile from Napata to Thebes was to navigate a panorama of architectural wonderment. All over Egypt, he built monuments with busts, statues, and cartouches bearing his image or name, many of which now sit in museums around the world. He is depicted as a supplicant to gods, or in the protective presence of the ram deity Amun, or as a sphinx himself, or in a warrior’s posture. Most statues were defaced by his rivals. His nose is often broken off, to foreclose him returning from the dead. Shattered as well is the uraeus on his forehead, to repudiate his claim as Lord of the Two Lands. But in each remaining image, the serene self-certainty in his eyes remains for all to see.

His father, Piye, had returned the true pharaonic customs to Egypt. His uncle Shabaka had established a Nubian presence in Memphis and Thebes. But their ambitions paled before those of the 31-year-old military commander who received the crown in Memphis in 690 B.C. and presided over the combined empires of Egypt and Nubia for the next 26 years.

Taharqa had ascended at a favorable moment for the 25th dynasty. The delta warlords had been laid low. The Assyrians, after failing to best him at Jerusalem, wanted no part of the Nubian ruler. Egypt was his and his alone. The gods granted him prosperity to go with the peace. During his sixth year on the throne, the Nile swelled from rains, inundating the valleys and yielding a spectacular harvest of grain without sweeping away any villages. As Taharqa would record in four separate stelae, the high waters even exterminated all rats and snakes. Clearly the revered Amun was smiling on his chosen one.

Taharqa did not intend to sit on his profits. He believed in spending his political capital. Thus he launched the most audacious building campaign of any pharaoh since the New Kingdom (around 1500 B.C.), when Egypt had been in a period of expansion. Inevitably the two holy capitals of Thebes and Napata received the bulk of Taharqa’s attention. Standing today amid the hallowed clutter of the Karnak temple complex near Thebes is a lone 62-foot-high column. That pillar had been one of ten, forming a gigantic kiosk that the Nubian pharaoh added to the Temple of Amun. He also constructed a number of chapels around the temple and erected massive statues of himself and of his beloved mother, Abar. Without defacing a single preexisting monument, Taharqa made Thebes his.

He did the same hundreds of miles upriver, in the Nubian city of Napata. Its holy mountain Jebel Barkal—known for its striking rock-face pinnacle that calls to mind a phallic symbol of fertility—had captivated even the Egyptian pharaohs of the New Kingdom, who believed the site to be the birthplace of Amun. Seeking to present himself as heir to the New Kingdom pharaohs, Taharqa erected two temples, set into the base of the mountain, honoring the goddess consorts of Amun. On Jebel Barkal’s pinnacle—partially covered in gold leaf to bedazzle wayfarers—the black pharaoh ordered his name inscribed.

Around the 15th year of his rule, amid the grandiosity of his empire-building, a touch of hubris was perhaps overtaking the Nubian ruler. “Taharqa had a very strong army and was one of the main international powers of this period,” says Charles Bonnet. “I think he thought he was the king of the world. He became a bit of a megalomaniac.”

The timber merchants along the coast of Lebanon had been feeding Taharqa’s architectural appetite with a steady supply of juniper and cedar. When the Assyrian king Esarhaddon sought to clamp down on this trade artery, Taharqa sent troops to the southern Levant to support a revolt against the Assyrian. Esarhaddon quashed the move and retaliated by crossing into Egypt in 674 B.C. But Taharqa’s army beat back its foes.

The victory clearly went to the Nubian’s head. Rebel states along the Mediterranean shared his giddiness and entered into an alliance against Esarhaddon. In 671 B.C. the Assyrians marched with their camels into the Sinai desert to quell the rebellion. Success was instant; now it was Esarhaddon who brimmed with bloodlust. He directed his troops toward the Nile Delta.

Taharqa and his army squared off against the Assyrians. For 15 days they fought pitched battles—“very bloody,” by Esarhaddon’s grudging admission. But the Nubians were pushed back all the way to Memphis. Wounded five times, Taharqa escaped with his life and abandoned Memphis. In typical Assyrian fashion, Esarhaddon slaughtered the villagers and “erected piles of their heads.” Then, as the Assyrian would later write, “His queen, his harem, Ushankhuru his heir, and the rest of his sons and daughters, his property and his goods, his horses, his cattle, his sheep, in countless numbers, I carried off to Assyria. The root of Kush I tore up out of Egypt.” To commemorate Taharqa’s humiliation, Esarhaddon commissioned a stela showing Taharqa’s son, Ushankhuru, kneeling before the Assyrian with a rope tied around his neck.

As it happened, Taharqa outlasted the victor. In 669 B.C. Esarhaddon died en route to Egypt, after learning that the Nubian had managed to retake Memphis. Under a new king, the Assyrians once again assaulted the city, this time with an army swollen with captured rebel troops. Taharqa stood no chance. He fled south to Napata and never saw Egypt again.

A measure of Taharqa’s status in Nubia is that he remained in power after being routed twice from Memphis. How he spent his final years is a mystery—with the exception of one final innovative act. Like his father, Piye, Taharqa chose to be buried in a pyramid. But he eschewed the royal cemetery at El Kurru, where all previous Kushite pharaohs had been laid to rest. Instead, he chose a site at Nuri, on the opposite bank of the Nile. Perhaps, as archaeologist Timothy Kendall has theorized, Taharqa selected the location because, from the vista of Jebel Barkal, his pyramid precisely aligns with the sunrise on ancient Egypt’s New Year’s Day, linking him in perpetuity with the Egyptian concept of rebirth.

Just as likely, the Nubian’s motive will remain obscure, like his people’s history.

AP ENTERPRISE: Grisly theory for Holy Land mystery

A reconstruction

This undated aerial photo shows Rujm al-Hiri

By MATTI FRIEDMAN - Associated Press

RUJM AL-HIRI, Golan Heights (AP) — A newly proposed solution to an ancient enigma is reviving debate about the nature of a mysterious prehistoric site that some call the Holy Land's answer to Stonehenge.

Some scholars believe the structure of concentric stone circles known as Rujm al-Hiri was an astrological temple or observatory, others a burial complex. The new theory proposed by archaeologist Rami Arav of the University of Nebraska links the structure to an ancient method of disposing of the dead.

The site's name means "stone heap of the wild cats" in Arabic. In Hebrew it is known as Galgal Refaim, or the "wheel of ghosts." It was first noticed by scholars in 1968, a year after Israel captured the Golan Heights from Syria, and despite its intriguing nature it has attracted few visitors. Unmarked, it lies an hour's hike from the nearest road, near old minefields, an abandoned military bunker and a few grazing cattle.

Rujm al-Hiri's unremarkable appearance from the ground belies its striking form when seen from the air: It consists of four circles — the outermost more than 500 feet across — made up of an estimated 42,000 tons of basalt stone, the remains of massive walls that experts believe once rose as much as high as 30 feet. It is an enormous feat of construction carried out 6000 years ago by a society about which little is known.

It seems likely that Rujm al-Hiri served residents of excavated villages nearby that were part of the same agrarian civilization that existed in the Holy Land in the Chalcolithic period, between 4500 and 3500 B.C. This predates the arrival of the Israelites as described in the Bible by as much as three millennia.

But nothing is known about why they went to such great lengths to construct something that was not a village or fortress, whose location was not strategic and whose practical purpose is entirely unclear.

Most scholars have identified Rujm al-Hiri as some kind of ritual center, with some believing it connected to astronomical calculations. Archaeologist Yonathan Mizrahi, one of the first to excavate there, found that to someone standing in the very center of the circles on the morning of the summer solstice in 3000 B.C., "the first gleam of sunrise would appear at the center of the northeast entryway in the outer wall."

Just like England's Stonehenge — thought to date to around 3000 B.C. at the earliest — Rujm al-Hiri has also provided fodder for ideas of a less scientific sort. One posits the site is the tomb of the Biblical giant known as Og, king of the Bashan. There is indeed a tomb in the center of the site, but scholars tend to agree it was added a millennia or two after the circles were erected.

A self-proclaimed expert in supernatural energy fields visited the site in 2007 and claimed it had high levels of energy and vibration, which he suggested was the reason the ancients chose the location. A psychic consulted afterward by the same expert declared that Rujm al-Hiri had been a healing center built with knowledge that came from "ancient Babel" and was "managed by a priestess named Nogia Nogia."

The theory proposed by Arav, who has led the excavation of another ancient site nearby since the late 1980s, is based on a broader look at the local Chalcolithic civilization and on similarities he noticed with more distant cultures. Arav published his idea in the current issue of Biblical Archaeology Review, a U.S. periodical.

"I tried to look at the whole culture of that time," said Arav.

The Chalcolithic people of the Holy Land buried their dead in ossuaries, small boxes used to house bones. Use of ossuaries requires that the flesh first be removed, which can be achieved by burying bodies for an initial period in temporary tombs until only the bones remain. But archaeologists have not found evidence of such preliminary graves from Chalcolithic times, Arav said, suggesting a different method for disposing of the flesh.

Arav found a clue in a trove of Chalcolithic artifacts discovered to the south, near the Dead Sea: a small copper cylinder with a square opening like a miniature gate and, crucially, figures of birds perched on the edge.

He also noticed a similarity to round, high-walled structures used by Zoroastrians in Iran and India, known as dokhmas or towers of silence. These are buildings used for a process known as excarnation or sky burial — the removal of flesh from corpses by vultures and other birds. The winged scavengers perch on the high circular walls, swoop in when the pallbearers depart and can pick a skeleton clean in a matter of hours.

Rujm al-Hiri, Arav believes, was an excarnation facility.

The cylindrical object found near the Dead Sea, he believes, is a ceremonial miniature of such excarnation sites. He cites evidence — including a mural showing vultures and headless human corpses — that excarnation was practiced several millennia earlier in southern Turkey, where the local Chalcolithic residents are thought to have originated.

Arav's theory is the first such claim that excarnation was practiced in the Holy Land in that era.

Archaeologist Mike Freikman of Hebrew University in Jerusalem, who has led digs at the site for the past five years, said Arav's theory was based only on "very distant parallels" rather than on hard evidence, but that it could not be ruled out.

"We know so little about this site that the answer could be yes or no," he said.

Freikman's excavations have yielded almost no material remains of the kind that are common at most archaeological sites, he said. That is significant, however, as it confirms that the site was never lived in and was thus not a defensive position or a residential quarter but most likely a ritual center of some kind — possibly, he said, one indeed linked to a cult of the dead.

If Arav's theory is correct, the biblical narrative written millennia later might offer hints that sky burial remained in the memory of the local population. No longer practiced, it was instead considered an appalling fate wished on one's worst enemies.

In one example, from the Book of Samuel, the shepherd David tells the Philistine warrior Goliath that he would soon cut off his head. Then David says: "I will give the carcasses of the Philistine camp to the birds of the sky and the beasts of the earth."

The Art of W. M. Hyperborea

The Prophet

Artist Statement:
For more than twelve years now, the Dutch couple, Willem and Madeleine, have been working together in different fields of the arts.

They chose Hyperborea, (“New Found Land”), as their professional name. Being sculptors by trade, they’ve created a substantial collection of stone sculptures in addition to translating these into bronze works.

Several years ago they discovered the realm of computer graphics. This resulted in a large number of 3D renderings, featuring their unique style: Alien landscapes inhabited by graceful life forms.

Most recently they have been working together on various projects in which they combine their sculptures, 3D artworks and original electronic music into multi-media presentations.

The Art of W M Hyperborea

They also compose electronic ambient music to provide the sculptures and 3D artwork with audio soundscapes. Compilations of these audio/video projects are available on their website and on the Hyperborea's YouTube Channel. You'll find total 23 clips, such as Alien Architecture, Another Utopia, Ancient Dreams ...

The Museum Of Lost Wonder

Jeff Hoke, curator of the Museum of Lost Wonder and author of the book bearing the same title (also senior exhibition designer at California's Monterey Bay Aquarium), had a mission: To illuminate life's mysteries.

He writes that the eclectic museums and curiosity cabinets of the 1600s inspired him, and that he wants to return us to a time before "science became a belief system unto itself," a time when artist-alchemist-scientists were able to search for inner truth via mystical experiences and experiments without being ridiculed.

The museum is arranged with 7 halls (representing the seven stages of alchemical process) in which the questions of the universe unfold. It begins with The Calcinatio Hall where the featured exhibit is The Beginning of Everything and leads us into halls like The Sublimatio Hall, with the exhibit How To Have Visions. In The Separatio Hall the exhibit Where Are You Going challenges us in our own journey. Through each hall we are led into an exhibit that questions our own understanding of life and urges us into new ways of thinking.

There is more information about the book on his website. Once there, you can also take an interactive tour of the Museum of Lost Wonder. Just click on the 'Tour' tab.

Step inside and discover your lost wonder!
The Museum Of Lost Wonder by Jeff Hoke.

Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts

Astrology and theology
The religious feasts are the main contents of the Calendars of Psalters or Books of Hours. Its illustration shows the typical activities of the seasons of the year in the Labours of the Month and the passing of astronomical time in the Signs of the Zodiac.


Ever since man recognized some kind of regularity in the movement of stars and planets, he has believed that the celestial bodies influenced earthly events. Ideas, ultimately dating back to Babylonian times, persisted in the Middle Ages, and even today horoscopes continue to be drawn. In some regions of the world hardly a marriage is concluded without a serious look at the constellations.

Christian theologians were of course most familiar with the astrological ideas of the Graeco-Roman world.

These presented a challenge to their own ideas about the omnipotence of God, and they wrote many pages to reject what was unacceptable in their eyes.

Natural history and bestiaries
Bestiaries and other texts on natural history are populated with animals both actual and fabulous. It is as if they illustrate the story of the fifth and sixth day of the Creation: living creatures each after its kind. The properties ascribed to certain animals made them suitable as metaphors of vices or Christian virtues. As modern books and movies demonstrate, both real and phantasy animals continue to challenge our imagination.

Griffin: Part eagle, part lion, the griffin fuses the two mightiest animals into one. Ruling heaven and earth, immortal and of a double nature, it can symbolize Christ. When a griffin mates with a mare, they produce a Hippogriff: the eagle part of a griffin, hind legs and tail of a horse. The Hippogriff still lives: it is the pet of Hagrid, one of the main characters of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter saga.

Griffin

St. Petronilla holding the devil by a leading-string
Forms of evil
As is shown here, the devil may take on different guises in the illuminations we find in these manuscripts, but there are three basic ingredients: man, animal, and pure phantasy. When he tries to tempt Christ in the desert, or when he fools a nobleman, he looks almost human. But the miniaturist makes sure he does not fool us: his feet are that of an animal, or his eyes are burning coals.

The pictures tell us, that he may turn himself into a cat. He may also be a pale, threatening creature taking souls to hell. The colourful monsters pestering saint Pachomius could have been designed by Bosch. Finally, the devil that seduces Theophilus to sell his soul, looks like one of the more malicious Muppets designed by Jim Henson.

Holy helpers: male saints and female saints
The veneration of saints is as old as the Christian church itself. Christians believed that saints could intercede for them with God. Of couse many still do. Where saints were buried, people gathered to celebrate the anniversary of their death. On this foundation an elaborate system developed during the Middle Ages. For specific complaints or dangers people would ask help from a specific saint.
Apollonia: A deaconess in Alexandria. She refused to renounce Christ and her teeth were broken during torture. They threatened to burn her if she persisted. She didn't wait, but jumped into the fire herself. She protects against toothaches and is patroness of dentists.

Apollonia

Creation of Sun, Moon and Stars
The Creation of the World
The beginning of Genesis, the first book of the bible, has always given rise to reflection and debate. In the Middle Ages this debate remained of course within the boundaries of the Christian faith. The created universe was an accepted fact, not an opinion to be discussed. Since Darwin and the rise of evolutionary theory, the debate has received an added dimension, and it certainly has not lost its topicality. One only has to search the internet with the combined keywords 'evolution' and 'creation' to get an impression of the occasional intensity of the discussion. This gallery, obviously, is not a contribution to the debate. It merely serves to show how the creation was visualized in the Middle Ages.

Prehistoric Antiquity Pyramids

The great pyramid of the Atlanteans.

The age when the pyramids were built had its origins deep in prehistoric antiquity. We need therefore to return to the past as far as our imagination and minds armed with the study of history will permit us. If we set ourselves the goal of discovering the causes of the pyramid phenomenon, our only chance of success lies in the possibility of seeing it all with our own eyes.

Key signposts on our journey will definitely be the ancient works of architecture and writing that will help us get closer to our goal without losing our orientation in time and space. The difference between what is known and what you will find out will come to you as an insight, as the result of your own researches. There is but one truth, we just need to see its course with our own eyes. Be prepared – sometimes you will have to make jumps in space and time to compare what you have seen in the past with what is known according to modern science. This will help you to better grasp the symbolism and ideas of the ancients.

Now, mentally viewing our beautiful blue planet from space, let us draw closer and turn our mind’s eye to Egypt. This is a natural choice as more monuments preserving traces of ancient knowledge have survived there relatively intact than anywhere else. The forms and language in which the Ancient Egyptian texts are expressed allow us to see things that can barely be made out in the writings of other peoples. Such an advantage is important when considering fundamental ideological doctrines that determined not only the imagery of presentation, but also the fate of this or that civilization. We lose nothing in giving preference to Egypt, as the “Source” of knowledge for the Egyptian, Sumerian and Mayan civilizations was one and the same. We too shall touch upon that “Source”. The texts of ancient civilizations lead us almost unerringly to it.

At the base of the entire Ancient Egyptian state and religious system lay ideas and knowledge obtained from some even more ancient, highly developed civilization. Tracks leading back to it run through all stages of Ancient Egyptian history to the place where we find the first historical mention of a pyramid – to the times of the legendary Atlantis that was later swallowed by a terrible flood. Before that, however, Atlantis was an archipelago of islands located 600 kilometers west of the Strait of Gibraltar, as well as a number of islands and part of the coast of the Mediterranean, which the Atlanteans called “The Internal Lake”.

The coastline of the islands, seas and oceans of that period differed from what we see today.

Let us go back 15,000 years, to the historical period that the Ancient Egyptian texts call “the First Time” (Zep Tepi) or the era of the Neferu, “when the Neferu lived on the Earth and talked with people”. The word Neferu (Netheru), translated as “gods”, has a complex internal structure2. The descriptions of the Neferu in the texts indicate that they were human beings with god-like abilities. It was these beings who gave people knowledge of mathematics, architecture, astronomy and medicine, of the structure of the Solar System, of cyclical processes and the principles lying at the foundation of the universe. All that made Egypt great was received in its time from the Neferu. The significance of the knowledge, affecting all spheres of life, which had been received from the Neferu was so great that all subsequent civilizations and generations acknowledged the continuity of power and the legitimate existence of something only if it was justified or explained by or connected with the “First Time” – the era of the Neferu.

On one of the southern islands of Atlantis stood a gigantic pyramid topped by a quartz pyramidion. From it straight canals radiated out in different directions, joining into a single system other canals that encircled the pyramid in a series of rings. All this complex irrigation system flowed directly into the waters of the ocean.

Before we start to examine the purpose of the pyramid, let us move across to the Mesopotamian region, to the land of the Sumerians (the territory of present-day Iraq and Syria). This is not a random move – there too people built pyramidal edifices: the stepped ziggurats. The surviving written texts and legends of the ancient Sumerians also contain many mentions of some highly developed civilization that “descended to Earth from the heavens” and collaborated closely with the elite of Sumer. The interaction between “gods” and humans became so close that a number of ancient texts speak openly of the “gods” having sexual relations with “earthly maidens”. The result was the birth of children with unusual genetic abilities described in legends as “half-gods” that went on to become rulers of the land of Sumer.

There is no counting the scientific achievements and technical innovations of the Sumerians who devoted particular attention to the study of the sky and heavenly bodies – and of the Nephilim – the gods that “descended to Earth from the heavens”. Zecharia Sitchin, a leading specialist in the translation of the Sumerian language, pointing out inexactitudes in the rendering of ancient texts, wrote:
“We shall immediately state that neither the Akkadians nor the Sumerians called these beings from the sky ‘god’. Only much later, in the era of paganism, did the concept of divine beings or gods penetrate into the thinking, and also into the language of the ancient peoples.
“The Akkadians called those from the sky ‘Ilu’ – ‘the High Ones’. The Canaanites and Phoenicians called them ‘Baal’ – ‘Lords’ or ‘Wanderers beyond the Clouds’.”
You probably have a strange feeling – this conjecture does not accord with common sense. If that is what is worrying you, you are on the brink of an important revelation. It would seem that the Neferu of the Ancient Egyptians and the Nephilim of the Sumerians are travelers from another planet…

Is such a thing possible? It’s hard to believe; harder still to draw the logical consequences. After all, in school and in higher education our teachers gave and are still giving a completely different version of history. But if it is so, where exactly did these Neferu or Baal come from? Do the Egyptian writings contain at least some mention, some hint that would throw light on this? – Yes, there is something!

In the heyday of Atlantis and later when the Atlanteans who survived the catastrophe arrived in northern Africa, the pyramids were used as a means of communication and a tool for gaining understanding. With the aid of the pyramids it became possible to do more than just improve the energy, and consequently psychic, capacities of the human being. The pyramids provided a unique opportunity to make “contact” with energy-based forms of life and to interact with representatives of extra-terrestrial civilizations. The knowledge obtained in this way raised the capabilities of the Atlanteans who, in the eyes of the primitive peoples around them were like gods.

In the process of degradation evoked by the breach of fundamental moral and ethical standards, partially preserved teachings passed down a somewhat distorted picture of how the ancient gods had lived and what they did.

The Egyptian Nobleman

A noble's estate, like this one at Tell el Amarna, far more than a family dwelling. It was built around workshops, stables, shrines and banquet rooms. Servants were constantly busy—baking bread in the kitchens, bottling beer in the household brewery, storing grain in silos. There were scribes, vintners, was carpenters and herdsmen. The whole establishment was managed with the Egyptian passion for order, Although the household was run by the noble's steward, there is evidence that his wife also had a free hand—-"You should not supervise . . . your wife in her house," one father admonished his son.

The nobleman who controlled the land that the peasant worked often lived in considerable luxury. If he was a high-ranking official, his town or country house—made of the sun-baked brick the Egyptians used for all domestic architecture, from hovels to palaces—was usually set in a landscaped garden enclosed by a high wall. Its whitewashed elegance and columned veranda were reflected in a large pool stocked with fish and scattered with lotus blossoms. Visitors were greeted in a central reception hall about which were clustered smaller public rooms, guest rooms and the family's private chambers. Comfortable furnishings—couches, tables, chairs, beds, chests and colourful wall-hangings —attested to the competence of Egypt's craftsmen.

Those who dwelt within the royal palace itself enjoyed a life of splendour. Through broad courts, frescoed halls and corridors with friezes of faience tiles flowed a constant stream of imperial business. Shaven-headed priests, high dignitaries and army officers came and went on matters of domestic, foreign and religious concern. Subject princes from Syria and Palestine arrived, often accompanied by dazzling retinues. Upon a dais in a lofty, colonnaded audience hall the god-king sat enthroned, flanked by a bodyguard and attended by ranks of courtiers. Here he received ambassadors from the courts of Babylonia, Crete, the Hittites and other nations; here he accepted rich tribute brought by newly conquered chieftains in exotic dress.

Set apart from the pageantry of state were the pharaoh's private apartments—his robing chamber, bedroom and bath, and the adjoining quarters of the royal harem. Opening off the apartments was the Balcony of Appearances. From this vantage point, on festive or solemn occasions, the monarch displayed himself to crowds in a court below, and from it he bestowed gifts and decorations upon deserving retainers.

Though extremely remote in time, the civilization of ancient Egypt is in some respects more intimately known today than that of any other nation of antiquity. The Old Testament is rich in references to Egypt. In addition, history and literature written by the Egyptians themselves have endured in the stone of temples, monuments and tombs, and on papyrus scrolls.

The fundamental conservatism of the ancient Egyptians also helped to preserve the evidences of their civilization. Although they were subjected to alien rulers in their latter days and assaulted on every hand by foreign influences, they clung tenaciously to the customs and beliefs of their past. Thus many remains of their culture lasted virtually intact almost until modern times, to be observed first-hand and recorded by writers of the rising Western world.

The Egyptians themselves were responsible for the preservation of many artifacts of their civilization because of their distinctive attitude towards death. Since they viewed death as an extension of life, they prepared for it elaborately. Any man who could afford a proper tomb spared neither energy nor expense to furnish it with the many things thought indispensable for living in the hereafter. Geography and climate assisted in the preservation process. Most of the land bordering the Nile is desert, receiving little or no rainfall. The remains of the past, blanketed by dry sand, rested undisturbed through the millennia. Even the most perishable materials—delicate fabrics, articles of fragile wood, papyrus—survived relatively unscathed.

As a result of these two factors—religion and climate— Egypt remained a huge and unique storehouse of antiquity. Its artifacts span all the periods from primitive prehistory to the sophisticated and magnificent age of the pharaohs. Scenes painted on the walls of tombs from dynastic days onwards faithfully depict many details of Egyptian life. Their subjects range from the lowly tasks of farmers and servants and the happy games of children to the pomp and ceremony that attended gods and kings. Small wooden models reproduce dwellings, ships, soldiers in battle gear; butchers, bakers and brewers in their shops. Although the tomb furnishings— clothing, musical instruments, furniture, cosmetics, tools and weapons—were for the use of the dead, all shed light on the ways of the living.