In Search of the Golden Books of Imhotep
Report Topics:
- Could the lost medical books of Imhotep be discovered in the ruins of ancient Saqqara in Egypt?
- Report Update—Continued Search for Imhotep's Tomb
Full Report:
The largest excavated and reconstructed portion of the ancient site of Saqqara, located to the south of Giza in Egypt, is composed of the Zoser complex with its famed Step Pyramid, built in the Third Dynasty circa 2600 B.C.E. The mastermind behind the design of this sanctuary had been Pharaoh Zoser’s chief architect and physician, an enigmatic genius named Imhotep.
Since I first began visiting Saqqara in 1981, I have been fully aware that many portions of the Zoser complex possess peculiar architectural designs and energy properties, which I thoroughly believe was the result of Imhotep‘s hidden handiwork.
In March of that year, I was one of thirty featured speakers on a large metaphysical tour of over fifteen hundred participants. On our day-long trip to Saqqara, I spent my time walking through the entire site with a group of a dozen psychics, mediums, channelers, automatic writers and sensitives. As I gave the historical and archaeological background to what we were seeing around us, different members of the group would speak up and add a few words, each from their particular extrasensory perspective, complementing what everyone else was attuned to concerning our ancient surroundings. In this manner, over the next few hours, we successfully gathered together a number of puzzle pieces and collectively built up a comprehensive and cohesive picture of very important aspects of the lost history of this sacred place.
It did not take long before our focus of attention began to center on the life and accomplishments of Imhotep himself. One of the significant archaeological mysteries of Saqqara centers around where this great man’s tomb is located. Despite extensive excavation work, no one has ever been able to discover its whereabouts. Other questions that remain unanswered are, did Imhotep leave behind any written works concerning his medical discoveries, and did he once use architecture as a means for healing? He seems to have known that certain shapes can generate or hold different types of energy, and that the human body can respond to these energies by being healed and regenerated.
As our tour continued, the psychic collage of impressions that eventually emerged and was harmoniously blended together gave a fascinating overview offering some alternative possible solutions to these mysteries. As we slowly moved together from place to place among the monuments, I made it a point to write down everything that was discussed in a small notebook I had brought along with me.
Where is Imhotep buried? The surprising answer is, portions of his body are to be found throughout the complex. From the revelatory perspective, Imhotep was the ultimate healer, having perfected his physique to its ultimate level of health. Just before his soul spirit voluntarily vacated his body, he ordered his medical students to divide his physical frame into its individual organs and component parts. These they buried in specific locations that all together mirrored his body configuration reflected onto the Saqqara architectural landscape. In later times, supplicants who came to the complex and who sought a healing for a specific organ or body part, could go to the place where that same part of Imhotep was interred. Because the location now vibrated with the energies of the corresponding healthy body part of the physician, by spending time in the aura of that energy the supplicants received a specific healing.
What about the hidden medical writings of the great physician? The readings from the different extrasensory sources remarkably paralleled each other in describing a large cache of scroll books made from gold leaf hidden somewhere in the Zoser complex. The various messages received were deliberately vague about revealing the exact location of these, because the time was not yet right for their being brought to light. All that would be revealed is that definite clues had been left by Imhotep himself as to where they will one day be uncovered.
Concerning the enigma of using architectural design for healing purposes, the only clear collective statement that came forth was, look around you. Learn from the master architect, from what he once designed. Study, experiment and discover for yourselves the secrets of energy as shape, and shape as energy.
As the group strolled together through the sand-covered courtyards strewn with broken stonework, we were able to intuitively pinpoint some of the locations of Imhotep’s body parts in the Saqqara complex. The legs of the physician were placed in the main courtyard to the south of the Step Pyramid, and his feet are just beyond the southern wall parallel to the Pyramid of Unas. The Step Pyramid itself is where the phallus had been buried. In another main courtyard just to the north of the Pyramid is a deep red colored stone platform that is Imhotep’s heart center. And beyond the complex’s north wall is a sandy depression where one can find large pieces of Aswan granite, a stone type not indigenous to this region. Here, deep beneath the desert wasteland, we were informed, is a secret chamber wherein the head of Imhotep will one day be found.
I did not meet a very special friend of mine until a year after these experiences. His name was Abdel Hakim Awyan, and he worked for a number of years as a native guide for several different Egyptian tour companies. On my many trips I did with him, no one could ever lose Hakim in a crowd. His tall, quiet form stood head and shoulders above his fellow countrymen as well as most foreign tourists. Unlike so many other Egyptian guides who wore modern European style clothing, Hakim proudly appeared dressed in a long-flowing blue-gray galabaya and sported a small traditional Arabic turban. Though his towering build enhanced the power of his presence, he nevertheless spoke and moved gently through the ancient temples, patiently answering the never-ending series of questions typical of tourist groups.
When I initially told Hakim of my experiences the year before at Saqqara and what had been revealed at that time, he was able to confirm much of the information given in the readings from his own knowledge about these same topics. Several legends and stories from ancient Egypt and preserved among the later Greeks, Romans, Copts, medieval Arabs and even among the modern Bedouin tribes, all described Saqqara as the secret repository of golden books of lost wisdom, a hidden Hall of Records that rivals the one still buried beneath the Sphinx and locked away inside the Pyramids at Giza.
A few years later, during a private excursion out to Saqqara, Hakim first took me to an area just to the north of the Zoser complex, a location not yet open to the public, but which he had access with his government license as a tour guide. The place was once known during the Ptolemaic era in late Egyptian history as the Asclepeion, named after the Greek god of healing, Asclepius. We know from Greek sources that they regarded Asclepius as having been a foreigner, and several works of both Greek and Egyptian literature clearly identified him as having been derived from the historical figure of Imhotep, who was also later deified as a god of healing.
At the Asclepeion, the Ptolemaic Greeks had built a magnificent healing center that was renowned throughout the ancient world for several centuries. Pilgrims with chronic diseases or permanent disabilities who came from far and wide took the long journey to the ancient center seeking a cure or miraculous regeneration. Today, all that remains are a few crumbling walls and ruins that for the most part still await the spade of the archaeologist to uncover.
After walking for a only few minutes into this site, Hakim suddenly stopped and looked down. With one foot he scraped the covering sand away, then reached below and picked up something half-buried. It was an ancient piece of clay that had been fashioned into the shape of a human foot. Below this, with a little more scraping, a dozen more clay objects soon emerged. As Hakim gave them to me one by one to examine more closely, I could clearly identify the pieces as crude representations of not only limbs, but major organs and bones. Gazing around, I soon realized that under the wind-scattered debris there must be thousands of other such clay figurines buried in the immediate vicinity.
Hakim solved the riddle by telling me that, during the heyday when the healing clinic of the Asclepeion had been in operation, the pilgrims who came here each had brought with them as an offering a clay representation of the limb or organ that had afflicted them. These they then buried in the ground in certain prescribed locations within the Asclepieon complex. Each clay gift had been given and subsequently implanted in the earth as a hope that their physical problems would be cured.
Hakim then asked me, were these very real ancient offerings a distant memory of the sacrifice that Imhotep had made in a far earlier age, when he deliberately died in order that his own body parts be buried throughout the Zoser complex—located just within sight of the Asclepeion—so that others could be healed? It certainly placed the psychic information I had recorded on my earlier trip within a definite historical context.
Hakim and I then departed the Asclepeion area and hiked from north to south through the Zoser complex, retracing the same steps I had taken years earlier with the psychic group. Just before scrambling up the steep sand embankment straddling the north wall, we paused to view the anomalous blocks of red, black and crystalline granite still sitting in their sand-filled depression. My guide confirmed that here is where the head of Imhotep will one day be found, that the surface blocks were cuttings left over from the construction of a chamber placed much deeper, made entirely from this type of stone that only comes from almost five hundred miles to the far south. Like the King’s Chamber inside the Great Pyramid, the chamber below is also made entirely of Aswan granite, and is specifically energy-shaped in order to keep the head well-preserved.
Crossing over the wall, we next headed for one of my favorite spots at Saqqara, the deep orange-red colored stone platform at the northern end of the north main courtyard. Here, Hakim pointed out, is where the heart of the great physician is still buried deep below.
We passed around the eastern side of the Step Pyramid, where Hakim confirmed once again that this is where the phallus of Imhotep was kept. Its regenerative powers, he told me, were being constantly amplified by the Pyramid’s shape, even after five millennia of time. These energies were also being broadcast out across the desert sands toward the nearby irrigation canals and Nile river, which aided in the continued fertility of the agricultural production in these areas.
As we walked across the southern main courtyard and climbed the steps up to the top of the southern wall of the complex, Hakim remained strangely quiet. Once at the summit, from a very particular vantage point, he directed my gaze back toward the north. From here, we witnessed a rare sight that cannot be seen from any other location. On the distant horizon, we could clearly observe six pyramids in a row, perfectly spaced apart - the three pyramids at Giza, including the Great Pyramid, and the three main pyramids found at Abu Sir, closer by. Hakim noted that this unique configuration, seen only from where we stood, was a sign that something important was to be found very near this spot. But he never said what it might be.
As we continued our hike a little farther southward toward the Fifth Dynasty Pyramid of Unas, and then turned eastward to walk down the stone processional ramp of Unas that led to the main road where our taxi driver had been instructed to meet us, Hakim gestured to where the feet of Imhotep were buried. Here, he revealed, is where some of the ancient physician’s written works will one day be uncovered.
I asked him the one question that had been uppermost in my mind all the time we had been taking our odyssey through Saqqara. I now wondered aloud if this was the location where the golden books of the old master were preserved.
No, he smiled, the writings to be found at Imhotep’s feet were more of a personal spiritual nature. The golden books themselves, treatises on forgotten secrets of healing, were kept safe elsewhere. When I pushed the point and queried further where that might be, he only answered cryptically that I should look at the images of the ancient physician himself. He quietly repeated this over and over. Look at Imhotep himself.
And that is all Hakim would say.
At the time I did not understand what he meant. Wall engravings of the famed physician appear at Philae temple near Aswan, in Queen Hatshepsut’s temple across the river from modern-day Luxor, as well as in many other places. The Cairo Museum has an excellent collection of the many statues of Imhotep crafted from the Third Dynasty, and also from later periods when he was deified as a god of medicine. And in the Museum’s exhibit rooms full of ancient Egyptian papyri made through the ages, are many excellent examples of inscribed portraits of Imhotep, many painted with brilliant colors.
It was not until I was conducting a much later tour to Egypt and once again stood inside the Cairo Museum viewing the statues of the great physician, that I suddenly had a flash of insight as to what Hakim had been referring to a few years before. The greater majority of Imhotep’s figurines, as well as depictions of him in various papyrus manuscripts, show him in a sitting position. On his lap he holds an unrolled scroll that he is either reading from or writing on with a scribe’s pen. Looking more closely at the painted papyrus images, I discovered that in a few rare instances the scroll in question is pictured as either orange or yellow in color, which the ancient artists used to represent gold.
In other words, Imhotep is either reading or writing in his own book of gold. And where on his statue is the golden scroll located? Across his lap. Going back to the configuration of where the body parts of Imhotep are buried throughout the Zoser complex, the revelation came to me to look at where his upper legs—where his lap would be—is to be found. This corresponds to an area immediately south of the Step Pyramid, in the main southern courtyard, between the Pyramid and the southern wall.
Today, this is nothing more than an open flat expanse of sand and broken stones, where curiously no extensive archaeological excavation work has yet been initiated. I remembered distinctly that when Hakim and I had crossed this terrain, he had remained strangely quiet. Did he know but would not tell me, in our walking excursion across Saqqara, that here is the place where the golden books of Imhotep will one day be found? This was the mystery he wanted me to solve on my own.
And did the unique configuration of pyramids seen from one single vantage, only a few dozen yards away, further pinpoint the books’ hidden location?
It was not until a little while after this revelation that I had a chance to meet Hakim again, this time while he was lecturing in the United States. He was dressed in a business suit and was bare-headed, which seemed so out of context for him, most unlike my memories of him wearing instead his traditional galabaya and small turban. He was in a large auditorium getting ready to speak, and as always he was patiently answering a myriad of questions from a sea of onlookers who regarded him with great curiosity and awe.
I was eventually able to get his attention for only a few seconds, but as our eyes finally met and he recognized me, I managed to mouth one word - lap. He grinned and vigorously nodded, acknowledging that I had indeed solved the riddle. Then he became surrounded again and I lost him in the crowd as he moved toward the podium to deliver his lecture.
That was the last time I saw Hakim before he died. He peacefully passed on from advanced years on August 28, 2008, in the company of his family, at his home within sight of the Sphinx.
In the meantime, I have heard of no new excavations undertaken at Saqqara to explore the main southern courtyard. Until that happens, the tantalizing possibility concerning the location of where the golden books of Imhotep are still to be found remains an unsolved mystery.
Report Update—Continued Search for Imhotep’s Tomb
Besides the baked clay replicas of body parts found in the Asclepeion, we know by looking at the overall archaeological record of Saqqara that the memory of Imhotep was honored by pilgrims seeking a healing from his continued spiritual presence with many other types of gifts. Over the millennia and the passage of all the various Pharaonic Dynasties, one of the most favorite token offerings made by supplicants was to purchase from local vendors specially prepared sealed clay pots containing the mummified remains of an ibis bird. This bird was regarded as sacred to the deity of healing, Thoth or Djehutis, who was also the patron god of Imhotep.
Beginning in 1966, the eminent British archaeologist, Walter B. Emery, became convinced that, if he followed the trail of where these ibis offerings had been deposited within the Saqqara sanctuary precincts, he might discover the pilgrims’ route to the central focus of their devotion, which he assumed would have been the tomb of the great physician himself.
For six digging seasons Emery pursued his quest with large-scale excavation work. He managed to unearth a number of prominent Third Dynasty tombs, as well as miles of buried galleries containing over a million mummified ibises and other animals. Unfortunately, Emery’s efforts were cut short when he suffered a fatal stroke in March, 1971, and his ultimate goal remained unfulfilled. Since then, no one else has resumed his digging efforts in the area of the underground galleries, because—contrary to Emery’s assumption—there does not appear to be any distinguishable central focal point to the ibis or other mummified animal burials after all. In contrast, the offerings were distributed evenly far and wide. Is this another indication that Imhotep’s body was not really buried all in one place, but instead was scattered throughout the complex?
Despite this setback, several more recent archaeological attempts have been launched in the continued search for Imhotep’s tomb. A Polish expedition that began work in 1987 has found blue-green faience ceramic tiles similar to those used in Zoser’s cenotaph burial chamber inside the Step Pyramid, only these were located in an unexplored area west of the monument. The team is pursuing the idea that Imhotep may have used similar decorations for his own burial place. Meanwhile, in 2008, a Scottish investigating group headed by Egyptologist Ian Mathieson has announced their discovery—utilizing ground penetrating radar equipment—of two large unopened underground chambers that are bigger than most tombs found in the region to date. As of this writing, the team is still awaiting permission to excavate these unknown rooms buried beneath the Saqqara sands.
If and when any such chamber dedicated to Imhotep is ever located and brought to light, based on the precedence of past discoveries made throughout the Saqqara area, most likely it will take the form of a cenotaph—a symbolic representation of a tomb, containing only a sarcophagus box sealed but empty, sitting in an otherwise empty room. Such burials were used by the ancient Egyptians exclusively for ceremonial purposes, as locations for popular veneration, while the actual body was secretly interred elsewhere. In the case of Imhotep, if the legends and visions are correct, then none of his physical remains will ever be found in any one place.
Copyright 2009. Joseph Robert Jochmans. All Rights Reserved.
