A Fourteenth Century Mystery Still Lost in the Egyptian Desert
Product ID: LK18
Report Topics:
- What strange remains in a lost Egyptian tomb could prove forgotten advanced civilizations once traveled to all the major planets in our solar system?
Full Report:
In March, 1984, after serving as the main speaker and guide on a two-week tour of Egypt, I spent a few extra days in Cairo with my tour director and good friend, an Egyptian-born businessman who lived in America, Abbas Nadim. During our self-declared vacation time we both had a chance to relax and do as we pleased before our flight home. I now look back on our experience as having been most fortuitous, for it set in motion events and opened the way to a discovery that otherwise would never have happened.
On our third day, Abbas made a few phone calls, and he was able to make contact with a mutual friend of ours, a local guide whom we had employed on several of our tours, Abdel Hakim Awyan. Everyone who worked with him simply knew him as Hakim.
When Hakim learned we were still in Egypt, he told us to meet him in one hour in front of the Cairo Museum, because there was something special he wanted to show us, but had not had the opportunity while we were busy on the tour. He also suggested that I specifically bring a notepad and a pen.
Rather than going into the main entrance hall, Hakim directed us back out the front gate and around to the side of the building. There he took us through a not easily found side door where he showed staff officials his government license, allowing us to visit private areas not open to the general public. After passing down a series of long corridors and through several high-ceiling rooms, we finally found ourselves in one of the more obscure locations in the Museum, one that houses a collection of rare books and well-aged treatises. With the help of a staff member, we located several dusty glass-covered display cases that exhibited a number of original medieval Arabic manuscripts.
We eventually found one case in particular Hakim was looking for, containing an obscure fourteenth century work penned by the famed Arab traveler and chronicler, Ibn Batuta. Though many of Batuta’s writings over the years have been translated and published in English and in other languages, the pages we were now viewing, Hakim assured me, only existed in this original Arabic form. In fact, he had yet to find a single reference to this document anywhere during his personal research studies. However, the story it told, Hakim felt, was important enough that it needed to be shared with someone who could discover and understand its deeper implications.
For the next three hours both Hakim and Abbas helped in translating the manuscript for me, and I took as many notes as I could. At times the six hundred year-old archaic language caused some difficulties in interpretation, but between my two companions deliberating over questions of syntax and possible multiple connotations, they managed to wade through the entire wording line-by-line from beginning to end.
The story Batuta told was of his being present at a tomb opening by a family of tomb robbers who lived and operated in the area of Abu Ghurob, located south of Giza. The tomb itself is somewhere in the vicinity of the Sun Temple constructed by the Fifth Dynasty Pharaoh Niuswerre. The exact placement of the tomb has since been lost, and stories persist of more recent failed attempts at rediscovering it. Of special interest to modern researchers are the details of what Batuta described was inside the main tomb chamber.
According to the chronicler’s narrative, the sarcophagus and mummy appear to have been of a minor royal official, which like so many of the other burials found in the area, most probably dated to the Fifth Dynasty, over two and a half millennia ago. Curiously, the sarcophagus did not take a central position inside the chamber but was placed off to one side, as if the body was not the focus of the chamber’s purpose.
On the eastern wall was engraved “a large disk of the Sun,” the god Ra in his physical form, and on the opposite wall, “a woman stretched from earth to heaven,” most likely an image of the sky goddess Nut. Between the two walls, positioned in a straight line down the center of the chamber floor, were eight stone boxes with no lids.
What fascinated Batuta is that the stone boxes did not contain gold or treasure, as the local tomb robbers had hoped, but instead held various kinds of rock and soil. The Arab writer was mystified why such common materials had been so meticulously gathered in one place and so carefully buried in this specific configuration. He reasoned that some unknown great value must have been placed on these boxes’ contents, and guessed that they were “samples of the ground taken from far off lands,” though the chronicler, so well traveled himself, could not recognize their places of origin.
Nevertheless, Batuta felt compelled to describe each box of stones and soil in detail, perhaps so that he might solve the puzzle later on. It is good that he did so, for the tomb robbers he accompanied, angered at expending so much effort to break into the chamber only to find it filled with such “useless rubble,” subsequently smashed the sarcophagus and mummy to pieces and scattered the contents of the eight boxes all over the chamber floor before leaving in disgust.
Batuta portrayed the first stone box having, “small boulders blackened by great heat.” The second box held “stones brittle to the touch, as if once subjected to much pressure.” The third box contained desert sand and pebbles not unlike what could be found in the local desert. In fact, the Arab observer took the time to examine a sample from the box and compared it with the sands just outside the tomb’s entrance, and declared there was no difference between the two.
The materials in the fourth box were stones gray-white to light brown in color, covered with grayish silver dust. The rocks and soil in the fifth box were decidedly “red to orange in hue, something of the nature of iron rust.” The sixth container possessed “heavy, misshapen stones” that he likened to “meteoric iron.”
The seventh box had, ”contents very different yet again, this time of sulfur powder and lava stones.” Finally the eighth box had its own unique materials, these being, “boulders bearing the marks of scratches and striations.”
As I sat at a table near the display case and wrote down as much as possible as these various descriptions were being read to me, I had no time to make any quick assessments about what all this meant. I only felt that here was something important, a mystery whose solution I would have to seek the answer for when I returned home.
Abbas admitted afterwards that he had no idea about what he was translating. But I did sense that Hakim suspected what the enigmatic stones really were, but would not tell me. It was up to me to contemplate the full nature of Batuta’s story on my own.
When I finally did get home, other more pressing projects distracted me, and I filed my notes away for future reference. It was not until almost a year later when I eventually took the notepad pages out of their folder and started to carefully examine them in detail. And it was then that the answer to the story’s riddle hit me full force.
What are we to make of these curious samples from unknown terrains found in a lost tomb? The layout of the tomb itself may be the clue. The boxes were positioned in a straight line between an image of the Sun on one wall and the figure of the celestial sky on the opposite wall. Could these stones and soils be from the inner planetary orbs of our Solar system, placed in their order from the solar body to the outer cosmos?
The first planet from the Sun is Mercury, represented by materials burnt black from tremendous heat.
The second box contained samples subjected to great atmospheric pressure. These match the conditions on the surface of Venus, reminding us of the appearance of the boulders seen In the pictures sent back from the planet’s surface by the Russian Venera landers.
The third box would represent the next planet from the Sun, the Earth, and its contents Batuta readily identified as being from the local area.
The gray-white and brown stones with grayish silver dust in the fourth box is identical to what modern astronauts found and brought back from the Moon.
The orange and reddish stones and soil that appeared rust-like in the fifth box matches what we have seen from today’s remote cameras roving the surface of Mars.
The sixth box possessed heavy meteoric iron. Yet the sample Batuta saw was not burnt from entering the Earth’s atmosphere. Was this a piece taken directly off an asteroid orbiting between Mars and Jupiter?
The sulfur and melted rock in the seventh box the Arab traveler guessed had been of volcanic origin, and the only known active volcano in our Solar system outside the Earth is on one of Jupiter’s moons, Io.
The heavily scratched and striated boulder in the eighth box is indicative of the glacial action of ice, which means it most likely originated from either one of Jupiter’s or Saturn’s ice-buried moons.
The concluding significance of these finds is inescapable. The line-up of these unique materials within the tomb chamber corresponds perfectly with the sequence of surface conditions and what we would expect to find of materials existing on each of the planets and other solar orbs in exactly the same order.
The question remains, however, what were these extraterrestrial samples doing in an Old Kingdom Egyptian tomb? Are we to assume that for some unknown reason an alien visitor bestowed these gifts to a minor royal personage in the Fifth Dynasty? Or is it possible that the entombed official during his lifetime somehow acquired and then sought to preserve these samples taken from another hidden source, from an older chamber buried by an earlier advanced civilization that had achieved space flight and interplanetary exploration in the forgotten distant past. Could that hidden source have been the fabled Hall of Records, located only a short distance away to the north from Abu Ghurob, at Giza?
When I returned to Egypt in 1986 on yet another tour to the land of the Nile, I shared my conclusions with Hakim, who only smiled and nodded his head in agreement. One afternoon, after taking a private tour to nearby Saqqara, Hakim and I journeyed farther south to Abu Ghurob, and we walked around the ruins of the Sun Temple located there, at that time not yet open to tourists. As we strolled around the area, we speculated on possible locations where the lost tomb may yet be found. Unfortunately, six centuries of blowing sands have done their work all too well of covering up the entranceway, and we could find no trace of it anywhere.
I also spoke at length with Abbas about the hidden meaning of what he had translated for me at the Museum years before. He agreed there was no question the historical account was genuine, but being more pragmatic he pointed out that without any tangible physical proof to back up what it described, the story would remain only that, a story. He also informed me that he had talked with a number of local archaeologists about the lost tomb, but they had never heard of it.
My interpretation and that of Hakim regarding the tomb’s contents may also be highly questionable. But the enigma remains, why would ordinary rocks have been placed in such a place of honor if they had been only from earthbound sources?
Adding mystery to mystery, during the years that followed in the 1990’s, when I helped facilitate more trips to Egypt, I repeatedly made inquiries to the Cairo Museum about the Batuta manuscript in order to obtain copies of it for my further study. The first official responses I received were that the manuscript in question was too fragile to be photocopied. There then followed another series of correspondences that claimed the manuscript could not be located in their collection, and finally that it simply did not exist.
What has happened to the original manuscript? Did it come to the attention of someone in authority who thought its content was too controversial and has since permanently buried it somewhere inside the Museum where it no longer is accessible?
In 2002, my good friend Abbas Nadim died of a heart attack while leading a tour to Machu Picchu in Peru. On August 28 of last year, my old friend Hakim quietly passed away at his home in Giza within sight of the Sphinx. Since I am the last surviving member of the trio who examined the Batuta manuscript firsthand twenty-five years ago, and recorded something of what it describes, I feel compelled to share the few facts I know about its contents. It is my hope that what I have offered will help generate some further interest, not only in relocating the misplaced document, but that it may in turn someday supply us with necessary clues to find the whereabouts of the lost tomb itself.
All that can be concluded at this point is that there are secrets yet to be unearthed in the vicinity of Abu Ghurob, very controversial remains that still await their discovery beneath the shifting desert sands of ancient Egypt.
Copyright 2009. Joseph Robert Jochmans. All Rights Reserved.
