Forgotten Ages Research

The Global Maritime Civilization of Ancient Egypt

Report Topics:

• Lost Ships in the Desert
• Revelations from Old Geographies and Traditions
• Out-of-Place Egyptian Remains
• Ancient Egyptians Down Under
• Pharaonic Exchanges With the New World
• Not First or Last But an Important Link
• Report Update—Does American Sweet Corn Appear Among the Ancient Offerings Depicted in Queen Hatshepsut’s Temple in Upper Egypt?

Full Report:

In May, 1954 Egyptologist Kamal-el-Mallakh discovered a curious hole in the ground on the south side of the Great Pyramid of Giza near the monument’s base. The hole was expanded and excavated into a large trench over 100 feet wide and almost 80 feet deep. At its bottom was a series of large limestone blocks, some of them weighing up to 15 tons each. These blocks proved to be the covering over a valuable find farther below—a disassembled ship of cedar wood from the Fourth Dynasty, which took fourteen years to reconstruct. Today the ship, which measures 142 feet in length, has been raised to ground level and is housed in a special structure that helps to carefully preserve the craft in a temperature and humidy controlled environment.

What has amazed archaeologists is that this ship, even though it is over four thousand years old, is of a size and design sophistication equivalent to what the Vikings possessed three millennia later. It was by no means a simple commercial craft for floating down the Nile. Instead, like its distant Norse cousins, the Pharaonic boat was built for long sea voyages. Rather than hugging shallow coastal waters, it had the capacity of sailing into deep waters over extended periods of time, and withstanding the rigors of harsh oceanic weather.

The ancient ship found at the base of the Pyramid was not an innovation, but was very likely the end-product of a long period of development. In 1991, antiquity authorities in Cairo announced the discovery of several more buried royal boats dating to the earliest Dynasties, at least five hundred years older than the Pyramid craft. Though smaller in size, measuring 50 to 60 feet long, they nevertheless exhibited the same design sophistication and inherent capacity to withstand the worst possible weather at sea. The immediate offspring of these royal boats were unearthed at Saqqara and Abusir, measuring up to 100 feet in length.

Far older than them all are Predynastic pottery and wall murals predating the First Dynasty by well over a thousand years which depict even bigger seafaring craft, indicating that early Egyptian contact with farflung shores must have extended all the way back into remote prehistory. While modern archaeologists have only focused on land-based Egyptian civilization along the Nile, the Pharaohs and their predecessors no doubt held sway over an even larger and older maritime culture that has been lost to us.

We know that Viking long boats once made transatlantic journeys to the New World. Did the Egyptian ships once perform the same feat? How far did they travel? During the New Kingdom, inscriptions at Queen Hatshepsut’s Temple at Deir el Bahrei tell of an ocean-going expedition to a mysterious land called Punt. A detailed analysis of the types of animals and goods brought back, as they are artistically depicted on the walls of the Temple, suggest that this expedition may have reached landfalls as far away as Indonesia.

In 2005 a joint team of archaeologists from Boston University and the University of Naples began excavating a two-chambered hand-hewn cave located at Wadi Gawasis, near an ancient Egyptian Red Sea port that dates back four millennia. The cave contains well-preserved pieces of ship beams, oars, anchors and lengths of rope of various thicknesses. Present also are limestone tablets which record voyages to the land of Punt and to another location beyond called Bia-Punt that has not yet been fully identified, but is now thought to be a landfall somewhere in the Indian Ocean region. Both the American and Italian experts involved in the project have been most impressed with the sophistication of the discovered maritime artifacts, for their sum total of knowledge exhibited points to the reality of prolonged deep-sea Pharaonic voyages occurring as early as the Middle Kingdom.

In the shrine of Thutmosis III in Karnak Temple is a virtual library of bird and plant portraits gathered from many distant lands—and some of these have been identified by modern aviary experts and botanists as belonging to species that only inhabit the Americas.

Later period Greek accounts give credit to the Egyptians as being the first to circumnavigate the continent of Africa, and to travel “to the far ends of the known world.” Such accounts appear to have been only a small part of the Egyptians’ larger accomplishments of reaching still other landfalls farther afield. In fact, there have been numerous finds made which bear testimony to the people of the Nile from their earliest existence possessing a world-wide maritime empire.

According to the cartographical research of Captain Arlington H. Mallery of the U. S. Navy and Professor Charles H. Hapgood of Keene State College in New Hampshire, there are a number of early Renaissance maps which show evidence of having been copied from far older maps that depict a knowledge of the world’s geography far in advance of what was known in the sixteenth century. Two of these Renaissance charts—the Turkish Piri Reis map of 1513 and the Portugese Reinal chart of 1510—appear to have had their origins from Egyptian sources, because both were drawn on a sophisticated circular projection that used the Great Pyramid as its central geodetic point. In the margin notes of the Piri Reis chart are references to other source maps going back to the time of Alexander the Great, which links its advanced inherent knowledge with the multitude of scrolls on geography once contained in the lost Library of Alexandria.

What is fascinating is that the Piri Reis portolan accurately depicts both longitude and latitude measurements to within half a degree for landfalls throughout the Atlantic and the Caribbean, something beyond the capabilities of sixteenth century navigators. It also portrays the Andes mountains in South America and part of the Queen Maud Land coastline of Antarctica—geographical features completely unknown to European and Middle Eastern cartographers for several more centuries.

The Portugese Reinal map likewise shows accurate placements for the Maldive and Laccadive Islands in the Indian Ocean, the Caroline Islands in the western Pacific, and a portion of the northern shores of Australia—again, centuries ahead of when any Renaissance explorers reached these regions of the world.

What these “out-of-place” maps indicate is that long before our modern age was born, a far earlier civilization sailed the oceans of the globe, and over a period of perhaps several millennia successfully visited and mapped practically every corner of the planet. Based on the internal evidence of the Renaissance maps, coupled with the long history and sophistication of early Pharaonic seamanship, the civilization that very likely accomplished this feat was ancient Egypt. Being as they were strategically located with ship-building ports on both the Mediterranean and Red Seas, the Egyptians would have had access to all the oceans of the globe, and consequently the geography of the entire world.

Even before the Renaissance charts came into existence, the early Arabs possessed age-old maps as well as traditions which spoke of forgotten voyages into the Pacific Ocean, accurately describing what would be found there. Among the first Islamic portolans, made in A.D. 820 and A.D. 934, are depictions of Western Australia, the Northern Territory, the Gulf of Carpentaria and Cape York Peninsula.

Twelfth century chronicler Al-Idrisi recounted from writings passed down to him from the eighth century, which in turn had been copied from still older sources, that far to the southeast in the South Seas were two large islands with very high smoking mountains, deep valleys, subterranean rivers running through large caverns, and inhabited by gigantic birds. This is a good description of New Zealand with its unique geography and ancient wildlife, which included the now extinct giant moa.

Other traditions told of visiting the coast of another large landmass where there were “blue (black) people as tall as a palm tree who hunt game by throwing sticks through the air.” Were these the Aborigines of the Australian Kakadu country?

Farther beyond was yet another land, this one cold and forbidding, found “at the bottom of the world,” where the “sun only shone for four days.” This can only be Antarctica, located in southern latitudes where the day lengths reach their extremes, described more than a millennium before that continent’s “official” discovery.

In later times, Arab storytellers used these traditons about exotic faraway places to color such well-known fantasy works as A Thousand and One Nights, and The Seven Voyages of Sinbad. But where did these traditions originally come from?

It is noteworthy that they first appeared in Arabic literature just after the Islamic invasion of Egypt and the disappearance of the final vestiges of the Library of Alexandria. While later Christian Church propaganda accused the followers of Mohammed of destroying the Library, we now know instead that, under General Amru, Moslem scholars were brought in to aid in translating and copying as much of the few dilapidated scrolls that had somehow survived the ravages of time.

These copies were later distributed throughout the Baghdad Caliphate under the patronage of its rulers. Copies of ancient Egyptian, Ptolemaic and Greek treatises on geography were considered the most highly prized—particularly those describing distant lands the Arabs were just beginning to take a keen interest in for their own exploration.

The accuracy of these early geographies gleaned from the Alexandrian Library assured the first Arab navigators of many a successful voyage, because they were simply following the directions of those who had gone before them thousand of years earlier.

Later on, much of the Arab geographic lore made its way to the West from Moslem sailors who were captured at sea and held in servitude aboard early Portugese and Italian ships. From such sources the original Toscanelli map of 1474, now kept in the public library of Florence, was drawn showing details of the coastlines of western, northern and eastern Australia, more than a century before any European voyagers reached these waters.

Significantly, long before the Islamic invasion of Egypt in 640 B.C.E., the ancient Greeks preserved their own advanced knowledge of the planet’s landmasses. The Stoic Crates of Malles, on his spherical world map, depicted the “island” of Australia and named it “Antoeci,” or the “Land at Antipodes,” located directly opposite on the Earth’s surface to the known Classical region of the Mediterranean. His contemporary, the famed geographer Eratosthenes, who made a fairly accurate attempt to measure the size of the planet, gave the same name and global positioning to Australia on his map of 239 B.C.E. Most importantly, we know that Eratosthenes spent a good portion of his life in Egypt, and was both a student and teacher in the Library of Alexandria.

Scattered throughout the Pacific and the Americas are controversial artifacts which point to the presence of ancient Egyptian explorers in these regions over a long period of time. One location that has offered tantalizing evidence of numerous contacts is New Zealand.

In 1871, at Crawfords Gully in the Tamahere area of the Waikoto valley on North Island, a Maori boy discovered a beautiful stone-carved bird among the exposed roots of a manuka tree that had been blown over in a storm. The figurine was made from dark green serpentine which is not native to New Zealand—the nearest sources are Indonesia and the Sinai Peninsula. The bird carving, today known as the “Crying Dove,” is of an artistic expression totally foreign to the Maori or any other Polynesian tradition. Yet it bears an uncanny resemblance to ancient Egyptian aviary sculptures from the Ptolemaic period, having a Greek or Anatolian influence. The fact that the figurine was found beneath several feet of old tree growth indicates it had been buried for a considerable number of centuries.

On a rocky outcrop at Mount Tauhara near Lake Taupo in central North Island, archaeologist Perry Fletcher found the carved image of a sailing craft with rigging that reminds us of the reconstruction of the Pharaonic ship unearthed at the base of the Great Pyramid. As Fletcher described it, “This etching looks like a sailing ship viewed from an elevation, and as if the observer were watching the ship sailing away—seen from the mountain, from that very spot were it was found.” There is further evidence the carving was made with metal tools, once known to the Egyptians but not to the native Maori.

During the 1990’s, Auckland University archaeologist Doug Sutton discovered a partially exposed stone wall protruding out of a forested hillside in New Zealand’s Kaimanawa Range. Four of the visible wall blocks uniformally measure 5.3 by 6.3 by 3.3 feet, while others farther down the slope appear to be much larger and weigh several tons. All the stone surfaces are so smooth they show no tool marks, and the joints between the blocks are so tightly fitted that a modern steel knife blade can bearly be inserted. The amount of tree growth and subsoil accumulation over the wall suggests a great age, yet the ancient Maori did not have the architectural skills to construct anything like it.

Instead, what the blocks remind us of, in their size, configuration and precision, is the same building techniques that went into raising the Egyptian Pyramids at Giza. Both American and New Zealand investigators are of the opinion that the exposed hillside stones are part of a much larger structure, and that it must date back thousands of years. More recently, conservative geologists have tried to explain away the wall as being part of a “natural formation of rock strata.” But what is not answered is the puzzle of how natural stones could “split apart” in such measurably regular patterns that perfectly mimic a man-made construction.

In 1950 an early metal-detector enthusiast named Leonard Schmidt found a Ptolemaic bronze coin on the beach at Okiato Point in the Bay of Islands. The coin depicts the likeness of Pharaoh Ptolemy VI and dates to the second century B.C.E. More recently another Ptolemaic coin, this one a century older, was discovered along the Harbor Bay shoreline near Auckland.

In terms of cultural traits, more than one ethnologist has noted the striking similarities between the religious beliefs of the Egyptians and the Maori. Proof of their contact can be found in the fact that, among both, “Ra” is given as the common name for their solar deities.

Maori folklore speaks of a mysterious people called the turehu who were said to have visited and lived in New Zealand long before the first Maori migrations arrived. They were described as being slightly taller but fair-headed, with kiri-puwhero or light-complexioned skin, and with uru-kehu or reddish to gold tinged hair—a trait still shared today by Alexandrian Egyptians. Legends also say they were well-learned in seamanship, construction, agriculture, music and language. This is the same spectrum of talents once possessed by the ancient peoples of the Nile.

Other Maori tribes call these earlier people the patu-paiarehe, and were portrayed as looking more like Europeans. They were also known as the “childen of poutini,” and from them the Native New Zealanders learned how to carve paunamu or greenstone jade. In the ancient Mediterranean world, the Egyptians distinguished themselves above all other cultures in the art of stone-carving.

Complementing these enigmas, there are a number of human skeletal remains—such as those found in the Awamoko limestone rock shelter of North Otago—which have been classified as “non-Polynesian.” Also discovered were eleven mummified heads having light complexions, reddish hair and almost Middle Eastern facial features. The Maori, who usually have a high regard for their own ancestors, thought so little of these strange heads that they freely gave them away to European whalers in the nineteenth century.

Today, even among living representations of the Maori people, are unexplained traces of larger build, lighter complexions and hair tinged with reddish streaks. Are these the distant descendants of Egyptian sailors who settled and intermarried in New Zealand ages ago?

Like New Zealand, the continent of Australia also has its share of “anomalous” Egyptian artifacts. Here are a few examples.

In 1974, at a factory construction site on North Street in Toowomba, Queensland, a large rock carving was unearthed with the figure of the sun, a stylized face and hieroglyphs of serpents. This was accompanied by sixteen other granite stones covered with Phoenician inscriptions. Some of these have been translated to read, “This is the place of the worship of Ra,” and “Assemble here to worship the Sun.” During the late New Kingdom, Phoenician sailors often accompanied Egyptian sea-going fleets. We know from the writings of the Greek historian Herodotus that Phoenicians were commissioned by Pharaoh Necho as part of his expedition to circumnavigate Africa as early as the seventh century B.C.E. So the presence of Phoenician script along with Egyptian symbols would have typified the mixture of sailing crews during this time.

In 1910, Australian ranchers digging for a well at Gordonvale, near Cairns, brought up from nearly seven feet below the surface an Egyptian carved scarab made from sandstone 3.5 inches in length with clearly defined hieroglyphs etched into its flat side.

During the same year, a second stone scarab of similar design was unearthed near Lapstone Gorge on the Neapean river just south of Richmond.

In 1969, also near the Lapstone Gorge, a small metal blade was discovered by railway workers digging a six-foot trench. It was identified as an Egyptian axe more than 2,500 years old that had been specifically used for ship-building.

At the turn of the last century, Andrew Henderson from Barron Falls in Queensland found a bronze coin 1.5 inches in diameter while sinking a fence post to a depth of two feet. The coin had been minted during the reign of Pharaoh Ptolemy IV who ruled between 221 and 204 B.C.E. Though somewhat corroded, it shows a portrait of Ptolemy on one side and the figure of an eagle with a thunderbolt—a Ptolemaic insignia—on the other.

In 1931, a farmer living fifty mles west of Adelaide discovered on his property a stone with carvings identified by French archaeologists as Phoenician script. One phrase of the writing refers to, “Men of the Pharaoh of the City of Sais.” It is thought the ruler in question was Pharaoh Psammetichus who moved Egypt’s capital and royal court to the Delta city of Sais in 663 B.C.E. and thereby established the Twenty-sixth Dynasty.

On the Hawkesbury river near Sydney is an Aboriginal rock carving that greatly resembles a form of ship called a tirane, once used by the Egyptians for sailing the Red Sea and beyond. Similar Indigenous rock art figures of ancient vessels can be seen in the Kimberley Islands, Arnhem Land and Cape York. Along the shores of Cape York botanists have reported finding papyrus and lotus plants growing which are native only to the Nile valley.

Also in the Hawkesbury river area have been located two carved heads identified as representing the Phoenician sun god and earth mother. Such stone figures wee once carried aboard Egyptian sailing craft as religious icons, part of a portable shrine for their Phoenician crews.

At Gosford, between Sydney and Newcastle—situated in the National Park forest of Hunter Valley in New South Wales—are two rock walls facing each other forming a narrow passage between them. The walls are covered with over 250 recognizeable Egyptian pictographs and hieroglyph inscriptions. One large prominent image clearly shows the jackal-headed god Anubis wearing the priestly garb of the Pharaohs and holding an ankh sceptor. These figures are totally unlike any of the local Koori tribal animal carvings, and are considered alien by them.

The first European settlers to arrive in the area in the early 1900’s were aware of the glyphs’ existence. They found the site thickly overgrown with vegetation and filled with rocky debris, all mixed within a higher soil line, indicating a great age for such accumulation. The glyphs and images themselves show wear and tear from the elements of nearby coastal weather, so they were already old before being slowly buried by natural detritus. This can only point to their dating back at least several thousand years.

Australian Egyptologist Ray Johnson has identified the writing as an archaic form of Middle Egyptian that he believes dates to the Third or Fourth Dynasty. What he has been able to translate tells the story of a shipwrecked expedition led by “Lord Djer-es” who was of the royal household. Three cartouches link the expedition leader with RA-JEDEF or Ra-Djedef/ Djedafre, who we know from Egyptian Dynastic history was a son of Pharaoh Khufu and ruled between the reigns of Khufu and Khafre nearly five thousand years ago. A few excavations have been attempted in and around the site, but so far only the glyphs and their story bear mute testimony to the forgotten voyage from the land of the Nile.

Not far from the town of Gympie, situated at Tin Can Bay north of Brisbane, are the remains of a 100-foot earthen pyramid with four-foot high and eight-foot wide terraces lined in large granite blocks. It was once part of a much larger complex of pyramid structures dotting this area, but over the last century and a half the descendants of the first European settlers of Gympie have torn down the monuments and used their stonework for the foundations of their homes, businesses and the local church. Destroyed also was an underground tunnel system of unknown origins beneath Gympie, as well as a long passageway that once descended into the last remaining pyramid’s base—in much the same manner as the entrance passages into the early Dynastic Pyramids in Egypt.

Rex Gilroy, an historian and museum curator from Tamworth, New South Wales, has attempted to gather photographs, drawings and records of the original site made by the early settlers, as well as has tried to preserve some of its still existing artifacts. Gilroy believes that the Gympie complex had been part of an ancient Egyptian mining expedition that extended as far south as the Blue Mountains in New South Wales.

Conservative archaeologists have tried to dismiss the Gympie pyramid as the work of an Italian vineyard owner built in the 1950’s, its terraces used for growing grapes. The problem with this explanation is that it does not say how exactly the owner managed to pile up a hundred feet of earth and then capped its sides with large granite slabs hauled up its slopes—a feat that would have needed the employment of every citizen of Gympie several times over. There is no record of any such work ever having been done.

Gilroy gives evidence that all the pyramids were already present when the first Europeans arrived in the 1830’s, long before there were any vineyards in the area. The settlers were told by the now extinct Kabi-speaking Dhamuri tribe that the structures had been raised by a people who came from the Dreamtine or ages past, who were brown-skinned, had bright eyes and lighter and straighter hair than the Aborigines.

In 1966, what became known as the “Gympie Ape” was unearthed near the main pyramid. It is composed of conglomerate ironstone, and though badly weathered with age, it is still recognizeable as a baboon sitting upright on its haunches and holding an ankh key in its hands. Baboons, it should be noted, are not indigenous to Australia. In shape and attitude it is identical to similar statues of the Egyptian god Thoth in ape form that can still be seen today among the ruins of Hermopolis in the central Nile valley.

Not far from Gympie a second smaller squatting baboon figure was discovered by workmen building a bridge in Widgee Shire near Traveston Crossing.

At Perinth in New South Wales a stepped pyramid, this one fifty feet in size with large granite blocks, was located that has design features similar to the one at Gympie. Still another pyramid is said to exist west of the Blue Mountains.

Unearthed at Noosaville on the Sunshine Coast was an Egyptian ankh figure made of jade, which is a stone type not found anywhere in Australia.

In 2001, a 75-inch long cast iron staff was washed ashore at Sarian, Queensland. Though heavily corroded, one end of the staff has a recognizeable head and face topped with the royal double crown of an Egyptian Pharaoh. The staff was accompanied with pieces of an axle and wheel mounting from a chariot. The indigenous Australians were never known to have ever worked in metal or to have used the wheel.

In 1969, eight miles from Sydney in the Gladeville Bridge area, excavations revealed several fragments of hand-forged iron pottery incised with figures of various Egyptian deities. Again, metal-working was unknown to any of the Australian tribes.

In 1931, while exploring in the Kimberley Range of the Northwest, A. P. Elkin—a Professor of Anthropology at Sydney University—happened upon a tribe of Aborigines who had never encountered white men before. What astonished Elkin, a member of the Freemasons, was that the tribal leaders greeted him with secret Masonic hand signs. The Professor, in making a thorough study of the tribe, discovered they worshipped the sun, possessed several ancient Hamitic and Egyptian words in their vocabulary, and they claimed they were descendants of people called by them the wanjinna, who came across the Indian Ocean in large vessels. The Freemasons have age-old traditions that they are from the same lineage as the builders of the Great Pyramid, and claim that many of their rituals date back to ancient Egypt.

Other Aboriginal legends among the Tweed River tribes of Queensland, recount how strange men wearing stone garments (metal armor?) attempted to mine the region around Mount Warning many generations before the advent of the first Europeans.

According to author-researcher Eric Norman, still other Native Australians, living in the remote hinterlands of Australia’s Northern Territory, have stories which tell of the existence of a lost city they call Burrungu. Three white men who survived the arduous journey through the outback country more than a century ago, reported the presence of “ruined walls, stone houses, wide courtyards and stately arches that look down upon statues set along tree-shaded avenues.” The design of many of the ruins reminded the explorers of the architectural layout of ancient Egyptian temple complexes found along the Nile. According to the tribesmen who guard the approaches to the lost city, the site was once inhabited by lighter complexioned people who built tall buildings because they themselves were tall. The city was once “a place full of much activity,” but now the Aborigines consider it taboo, and will not enter it.

Among the sacred churinga stones of the Kimberley region Aboriginal tribes, is one stele depicting a sun symbol with solar rays extending out from the central disk, and at the end of each ray is a small hand offering life energy. This is the exact same portrayal as the Aten sun disk seen in the wall engravings of Pharaoh Akhnaten and Queen Nefertiti during the Amarna Age almost three and a half millennia ago. The solar images of Aten were distinguished by the rays of the sun having hands giving life to its worshippers.

The Aborigines of Arnhem Land and Torres Strait were known for mummifying their dead in a distinctive manner. They removed internal organs, extracted the brain through the nostrils, embalmed the bodies and then rowed them westward to an island of the dead located two miles out to sea, in boats carved with solar symbols. This process mirrored point for point the ancient Egyptian customs of preparing the dead and ferrying them across the Nile in the direction of the setting sun, toward their tombs on the the west bank, in boats dedicated to the sun god Ra. In 1875, an anthropological expedition to Darnby Island where the Aborigine bodies had been buried, retrieved one of the corpses for a detailed examination. Based on the results, medical scientist Sir Raphael Cilento stated that in his opinion the incisions and embalming techniques employed were the same as those used in Egypt during the Twenty-first and Twenty-second Dynasties, almost three thousand years ago.

When we look at the evidence for ancient Egyptian contacts with the Americas, we find that the substantitve nature of these contacts was very different than elsewhere. In locations such as New Zealand and Australia, the Pharaonic fleets had to deal with communicating with far more primitive peoples, and like the European explorers millennia later, they came as colonizers and exploiters of local resources.

But on reaching the New World the Egyptians would have found themselves inter-relating with full-blown cultures such as the Tiawanakans and Pre-Incans in Peru, the Olmecs, proto-Mayas and Toltecs in Mexico, and the earliest Mound Builders in the Mississippi valley. Here were peoples who already possessed agriculture, mathematics, writing, art, advanced construction and architecture, mining, metallurgy, astronomical observation and calendar systems, and complex belief structures that were as advanced, in some cases even more sophisticated, than that of the Egyptians themselves. Contacts between the two would have instead taken the form of equal trade and the exchange of ideas and concepts.

One cultural element that stands out as having been the result of inter-communications was the presence of pyramids in both Egypt and the New World, particularly in Mexico. Did Egypt, as the elder civilization, have an influential impact on the raising of Mesoamerican pyramidal structures?

The conservative historical consensus argues that there was too much of a gap time-wise fo direct influence to have taken place. The age of pyramid-building along the Nile lasted from circa 2800 to 1600 B.C.E., while the Olmec-Maya-Toltec era of pyramid construction stretched from approximately 500 B.C.E. to the fifteenth century A.D. Obviously, there was no overlap between the two.

Yet we are also aware that in Egypt, though the last of the truly monumental pyramids were completed by the Pharaohs of the Middle Kingdom, the idea of pyramids and the construction of pyramidal forms persisted along the Nile for over a thousand years more. At Deir el Medina in the Valley of the Nobles, one can still see pyramid-shaped tombs built during the New Kingdom. Beginning in the eighth century B.C.E. the Nubian Pharaohs erected dozens of impressive pyramidal tombs at Meroe in what is now modern Sudan. Later still, many of the Old Kingdom pyramids at Giza and Saqqara were cleared out and became the tombs for Saitic nobility during the sixth century B.C.E.

What Egyptian seafarers most likely imparted to their New World contacts was the concept of pyramid-building, which for them had become an age-old tradition. The Mexican cultures in particular simply adopted the idea and then selectively adapted it for their own purposes.

Elsewhere, especially in Peru and among the early Mississippian Mound Builders, the persistence of pyramid-shaped mountain complexes and pyramidal mounds also hints at a possible Egyptian influence. In some cases, such as with the Akapana pyramid at Tiawanaku in modern Bolivia, the Poverty Point mounds in Louisiana, and Cuicuilco Pyramid outside Mexico City, we are in the presence of structures that were indeed built well within the time-frame of Egypt’s classical Pyramid Age. In these instances, the influence of Egypt’s pyramid builders may have been more direct.

In addition, we may note the curious fact that the Great Pyramid at Giza, the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan near Mexico City, and Monks Mound of the Cahokia mouund complex in Illinois all have the same base size within a few feet of each other. This is certainly something more than coincidental, and points instead to a common design feature shared by several diverse cultures over a very wide area. Since the Great Pyramid came first, it suggests that the descendants of its builders were the main source of influence for the other two structures.

As a further point, we also find that the recently proposed “Orion belt” configuration of the Three Pyramids at Giza is precisely mirrored by the same outlay of the Pyramid of the Sun, the Pyramid of the Moon and the Temple of Quetzalcoatl at Teotihuacan. It is also seen inherent in the positions of the three main mounds surrounding Monks Mound at Cahokia. Again, because the Giza designers had seniority, their Pyramid configuration became the blueprint for the other two complexes in the New World.

Because of the more subjective nature of the exchanges that occurred, and the fact that unlike elsewhere the Egyptians did not establish large permanent colonies in the Americas in deference to the Mesoamerican cultures already predominating there, we do not encounter quite the same abundance of Pharaonic artifacts in the New World. More of what we do find is that every one of the South, Central and North American Precolumbian centers shared many certain selective cultural traits with those of ancient Egypt. Besides the concept of pyramids, these included very specific art motifs, sculpturing techniques, religious symbols, stone-working, architectural designs, writing forms, mathematical skills and calendar systems. The list of parallels noted by modern researchers has filled volumes, and bears testimony that the maritime civilization of the Egyptians had ongoing relations with all the New World civilizations over a considerable time.

Besides the exchange of ideas, we do also have concrete evidence of actual trade between the land of the Nile and the cultures of the Americas. A few examples will suffice.

The earliest known variety of cotton in the New World contained thirteen small chromosomes, while its Old World counterpart—first cultivated in Egypt—has thirteen large chromosomes. Remains of cotton excavated from the earliest levels of Huaca Prieta in Peru, however, dating to about 2500 B.C.E., were found to possess thirteen small and thirteen large chromosomes. In other words, the Peruvian cotton was a hybrid between the cottons from both Hemispheres.

Orthodox historians have sought to explain this hybridization in natural, “accidental” terms, but without much success. The cotton plant is too delicate, either in the blossom or seed state, to have been simply carried by sea currents, bird migration or wind from one Hemisphere to the other. And explaining the transportation of the Old World cotton to Peru is only half the problem. The other half involves the propagation of the two forms into a common strain, which would have meant a prolonged period of cultural inter-communication and cooperation to achieve.

In 1976, the Cairo Museum sent one of their major exhibits, the royal mummy of Pharaoh Ramses II, to the Musee de l’Homme in Paris, to undergo restoration work. During a microscopic examination of the remains, Dr. Michelle Lescot, leader of the team of restoration experts, was astonished to discover a tiny fragment of tobacco leaf embedded in the mummy’s bandage fibers. Lescot ran several tests that reconfirmed her analysis—remnants of a plant that only grows in the New World was present in a New Kingdom mummy dating from the thirteenth century B.C.E.

When informed of this finding, the Chief Curator of the Cairo Museum, Professor Nasri Iskander, tried to explain the tobacco as having dropped from the pipe of some unidentified Egyptologist who had been smoking when the mummy was either first discovered or was being transported to the Museum during the nineteenth century. But in a second round of examinations by Dr. Lescot, she found further tobacco fragments deep in Ramses’ abdomen which showed evidence of having been partially digested when the Pharaoh was alive.

The enigma continued to be unresolved until 1992, when Dr. Svetla Balabanova, a toxicologist with the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Ulm, Germany, was asked to examine the mummified remains of Lady Hemut-Tawy, an Egyptian noblewoman from the late New Kingdom period, to determine her cause of death. Utilizing the same sophisticated forensic techniques employed in today’s police testing for drug use, Dr. Balabanova was greatly surprised to find not only the presence of nicotine but also a heavy residue of cocaine. She sent samples to three other labs and all the results came back the same—both nicotine and cocaine were mixed in with the mummy’s hair protein, indicating they had been consumed when the noblewoman was living.

The mystery is, cocaine is processed from the coca plant that is indigenous only in the Americas and nowhere else. What was cocaine, along with nicotine from tobacco—another exclusively New World plant—doing in the body of a woman who had spent her life along the Nile river two thousand years ago?

A number of Egyptologists were called in who not only verified what the German toxicologist had discovered, but also successfully authenticated that the noblewoman’s mummy was as old as it was claimed to be.

Dr. Balabanova next tested samples taken from 134 other mummies housed in museums and universities all across Europe, and found that a third of the bodies likewise contained both nicotine and cocaine. Since then, she has expanded her research to include 3,000 samples, with close to the same ratio showing positive results, from mummies which date not only from the New Kingdom but also from the later Dynasties, covering a period of almost a thousand years.

In attempting to find an alternative explanation, conservative experts have theorized that an unknown and now extinct form of tobacco must have once grown long ago in Africa or Asia, and that this was the real source of the Egyptians’ supply. However, no such botanical specimen has yet been found, nor have remains surfaced from any archaeological site.

There are obscure cousins to the modern tobacco plant which thrive in certain places in Australasia and the Pacific—but even if these were to be considered a viable source, it would be admitting that the ancient Egyptians had the capability of sailing and trading just as far away on one side of the world as the Americas are on the other.

What is more, even if an Old World source for tobacco could somehow be proven, the same theory cannot be applied to the presence of cocaine. Cocaine comes from the coca plant which is so botanically specific and so geographically limited to the Americas, that any suggestion of alternative source possibilities would be considered very untenable.

The picture that emerges is that for a considerable period of time members of ancient Egyptian royalty—from the Pharaohs all the way down to the nobility class—once had access to drugs that were imported exclusively from the Americas. Very likely the original use of nicotine and cocaine had been for either religious or for medicinal purposes, to induce altered states of ecstasy during temple rituals, or as disinfectant cleansers and painkillers. But the heavy usage seen in the residue remains in several of the mummies suggests a general drug dependency had developed, especially for certain of the Pharaohs, pointing to constant daily consumption. This dependency no doubt fueled a New World drug trafficking trade over three thousand years ago that was just as lucrative then as it is today. Eventually, continued drug usage by the Pharaonic ruling class may have been one of the major contributing factors to the decline and fall of the Egyptian civilization.

Placing ancient Egypt’s global maritime enterprise within a larger historic context, we find that it served as the keystone in a series of maritime empires that spanned perhaps as much as fifteen thousand years.

The Egyptians were one of the few peoples with any memories or records of the very first seagoing empire, that of Atlantis, whose existence was twice as old to Dynastic Egypt as Dynastic Egypt is to us today. According to Plato and other Classical writers, before the Planetary Cataclysms triggered by the sudden end of the Ice Age in 10,000 B.C.E., a pre-Pharaonic culture had existed for many millennia along the Nile. This forgotten culture had at first traded with the Atlantean colonies that extended to both sides of the Atlantic Ocean and into Paleolithic Europe. But later they fought against Atlantis’ mighty fleet in its final attempt to conquer what is now the eastern Mediterranean region. Both Greek accounts and Egyptian mythic history testify that the prehistoric inhabitants of Egypt inherited the fundamentals of their civilization from Atlantis before its tragic destruction and disappearance twelve millennia ago.

We know from literary records in India and elsewhere that the Atlantean maritime empire also had been rivals with what some researchers have termed the Rama, Agharta and Uighur civilizations of Ice Age Asia, as well as similar lost Antediluvian cultures in Soouth America and western North America.

After the Planetary Cataclysms subsided, for the next several thousands of years the survivors witnessed the global expansion by sea of a Megalith-building civilization that reached practically every corner of the world. It left its mark in the form of menhirs, standing stones, henges, stone circles, cairns, dolmens, giant mounds, earthen pyramidal structures and other earthworks, all astronomically laid out in vast systems of ley-lines and grids that tapped into the Earth’s energy systems. The Megalith builders predominated everywhere, even in Egypt, where in the southwest desert at Nabta Playa one can still see their handiwork of precisely aligned stones.

When the global Megalith civilization finally began breaking up circa the sixth millennium B.C.E., it was superceded by several post-Atlantean cultures who were slowly regaining their cultural footholds. One of these was Predynastic Egypt, who utilized their long-held inheritence from Atlantis to finally initiate their own advanced ship-building and expansion by sea.

At first the Egyptian sailors had competition from early Sumer, Harappan and Dravidian India, and pre-Shang China, all of which launched their own ocean-going fleets and established important trade routes and centers. But by the time Dynastic Egypt started to emerge in the fourth millennium B.C.E., the Pharaonic Egyptians became the predominant global maritime power and maintained that status for at least two thousand years.

Later, during Pharaonic decline, other seafaring nations such as the Mycenaean Greeks, Babylonians, Hittites, Hebrews, Phoenicians and Carthaginians competed for trade with the New World via the Atlantic, while in the East the Dynastic Chinese and early Japanese took over commercial routes with the Americas via the Pacific.

In the centuries following the final fall of the land of the Nile to the Roman Empire two millennia ago, the Romans briefly engaged in contacts with the New World, but were soon replaced by a succeeding multitude of other explorers and traders, including the Byzantines, Norse, Welsh, Irish, West Africans and early Arabs.

From the East waves of ships originating from Parthian Persia, India, Indonesia, Southeast Asia, Buddhist China, Mongolia and Polynesia followed one the after other in voyaging to the Americas.

Collections of sculptured portraits found among the Mesoamerican cultures during this period surprisingly depict few indigenous peoples, but rather show the distinctive facial features of Mediterranean Semites, bearded Phoenicians, Black Africans, Caucasian Europeans and Orientals.

Even as late as the fifteen century, Imperial China launched several fleets on a combined mission to explore and map the entire globe, as well as open commerce with the farthest distant nations of the world. Only a few decades later, when Columbus finally made it to the New World, he carried charts with him that already gave him foreknowledge of what he would find.

The tidal surges of Spanish, Portugese, Italian, English, Dutch and French ships that came after Columbus were merely fulfilling a long legacy of sailing tradition that had once encompassed the entire planet many times before. This was part of their forgotten inheritance they received which had extended all the way back to ancient Egypt and beyond.

Report Update—Does American Sweet Corn Appear Among the Ancient Offerings Depicted in Queen Hatshepsut’s Temple in Upper Egypt?

In 2006, veteran archaeologist-anthropologist Gunnar Thompson was reviewing century-old photographs and color reproductions by Howard Carter of the many beautiful Eighteenth Dynasty murals carved and painted in Queen Hatshepsut’s Temple at Deir el-Bahri in central Egypt, dating to circa 1470 B.C.E.

Suddenly, in one of the scenes, he was surprised to see depicted a Nubian servant carrying a platter piled high with fruits, vegetables and breads—and at the very summit of this offering is a clearly distinguishable corncob.

Continuing his search, Thompson found eight more examples, many of these portrayed in a row, among the offerings pictured in the Shrine of Anubis located to the right side of the second level of the Queen’s mortuary sanctuary. As the archaeologist noted:

“These corncobs have the distinguishing characteristics of New World maize of the golden sweet corn variety including yellow-orange fruit, tapered cylindrical shape, parallel rows of large kernels, and green husk leaves that have been pulled back to reveal the fruit.”

Thompson likewise found other wall carving examples of corn n the fifteenth centry B.C.E. tombs of Rekhmire and Benia-Pahekamen located near Thebes, now the modern city of Luxor. Altogether, 21 examples of corncobs have been identified. He also found rare depictions of other “out-of-place” fruit, such as the pineapple, which during that ancient period was found only in the Western Hemisphere.

After doing a two-year intensive study for the New World Discovery Institute in Port Townsend, Washington—which included a comprehensive survey of Egyptian temple, tomb and papyrus artwork, some dating ack over four millennia—Thompson concluded:

“The Egyptian corncobs are actually derived from a New World crop plant. They are not spposed to be in Egypt. This is conclusive evidence that the Egyptians were farming New World corn thousands of years before Columbus was born. All the modern Eurpean historians have claimed that Columbus brought the first Indian corn, or maize, to the Old World. That is a total mistake that needs to be corrected.

“The Egyptians had to sail across the Atlantic Ocean in order to obtain corn and all other New World plants.”

It should be noted that American sweet corn, also sometimes known as Indian corn (thought this name is now given to the multi-colored kernel variety) was exclusive to North and Central America before Columbus arrived. Elsewhere in the New World, it is one of four varieties known as maize, scientifically classified as Zea mays, first hybridized and cultivated in Oaxacan Mexico about 10,000 yeas ago.

It should be understood that Western Hemisphere corn and maize have nothing to do with what Europeans, Africans and Turks have called “corn” four thousands of years, which is really wheat, oats, millet and rye. As a semantic example, in old Norse the word “corn” is derived from the root “korn” which means “grain” in general, and refers to any regional grain crop that happens to grow in a local area.

So while “corn” by such a generalized definition has been found in Europe and the Middle East since Neolithic times, it is a separate and distinct entity from what is recognized to be “corn” or sweet corn and maize as it was found in Precolumbian Mesoamerica.

What archaeologist Thompson discovered portrayed in Egyptian temples and tombs is clearly the “out-of-place” New World variety, directly pointing to Transatlantic voyages made by Queen Hatshepsut’s navies, and even earlier.

[Copyright 2009, 2010. Joseph Robert Jochmans. All Rights Reserved.]