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Know_files/FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS.pdf - D Ank Unlimited

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Chapter 46<br />

The Eleventh Millennium BC<br />

Graham Hancock – <strong>FINGERPRINTS</strong> <strong>OF</strong> <strong>THE</strong> <strong>GODS</strong><br />

If it were not for the powerful mythology of Osiris, and if this civilizing,<br />

scientific, law-making deity was not remembered in particular for having<br />

introduced domesticated crops into the Nile Valley in the remote and<br />

fabled epoch known as the First Time, it would probably not be a matter<br />

of any great interest that at some point between 13,000 BC and 10,000 BC<br />

Egypt enjoyed a period of what has been described as ‘precocious<br />

agricultural development’—possibly the earliest agricultural revolution<br />

anywhere in the world identified with certainty by historians. 1<br />

As we saw in recent chapters, sources such as the Palermo Stone,<br />

Manetho and the Turin Papyrus contain several different and at times<br />

contradictory chronologies. All these chronologies nevertheless agree on<br />

a very ancient date for the First Time of Osiris: the golden age when the<br />

gods were believed to have ruled in Egypt. In addition, the sources<br />

demonstrate a striking convergence over the importance they accord to<br />

the eleventh millennium BC in particular, 2 the precessional Age of Leo<br />

when the great ice sheets of the northern hemisphere were undergoing<br />

their final, ferocious meltdown.<br />

Perhaps coincidentally, evidence unearthed since the 1970s by<br />

geologists, archaeologists and prehistorians like Michael Hoffman, Fekri<br />

Hassan and Professor Fred Wendorff has confirmed that the eleventh<br />

millennium BC was indeed an important period in Egyptian prehistory,<br />

during which immense and devastating floods swept repeatedly down the<br />

Nile Valley. 3 Fekri Hassan has speculated that this prolonged series of<br />

natural disasters, which reached a crescendo around or just after 10,500<br />

BC (and continued to recur periodically until about 9000 BC) might have<br />

been responsible for snuffing out the early agricultural experiment. 4<br />

At any rate, that experiment did come to an end (for whatever reason),<br />

and appears not to have been attempted again for at least another 5000<br />

years. 5<br />

1 Egypt before the Pharaohs., pp. 29, 88.<br />

2 To give yet another example, here is Diodorus Siculus (first century BC) passing on<br />

what he was told by Egyptian priests: ‘The number of years from Osiris and Isis, they<br />

say, to the reign of Alexander, who founded the city which bears his name in Egypt<br />

[fourth century BC], is over ten thousand ...’ Diodorus Siculus, volume I, p. 73.<br />

3 Egypt before The Pharaohs, p. 85.<br />

4 Ibid., p. 90.<br />

5 A History of Ancient Egypt, p. 21.<br />

397

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