Black Genesis: The Prehistoric Origins of Ancient Egypt

Djedefre Water Mountain, as Bergamann now called it, is 80 kilometers (about 50 miles) southwest of Dakhla oasis
and is now under the supervision of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA). Until recently, however, it was
investigated by the German Archaeological Institute in Cairo and the Heinrich Barth Institute of the University of
Cologne. The German team reported that the hieroglyphic inscriptions found on the east side of the mound mention
several expeditions during the twenty-fifth and twenty-seventh years of the reign of the pharaoh Khufu, builder of the
Great Pyramid at Giza (ca. 2450 BCE). They noted, too, that the name of Khufu’s son and successor, Djedefre, is more
prominent and appears alongside (and also within) the so-called water mountain sign, which Bergmann describes as “a
pack of horizontal zigzag lines framed by a sharply incised and slightly rounded rectangle, the upper corner of which
ending in two small humps.” 30
Figure 2.4. Aerial view of Giza pyramids. Note the eastern offset of the third/smaller pyramid.
Djedefre Water Mountain also has engraved on its walls rock art, which is clearly prehistoric, for it depicts giraffes,
elephants, and other creatures that since at least 4000 BCE could be found only thousands of kilometers farther south in
Africa but must have been here near Dakhla before that date when the Sahara was fertile. Most of the prehistoric rock art
and the pharaonic inscriptions are high up on the east face and about 8 to 10 meters (about 26 to 33 feet) above ground
level. They can be reached by an ancient man-made escarpment that leads to a platform cut into the mound. The platform
itself faces due east, the direction of sunrise, and it is very evident that at dawn on this platform there is astronomical
meaning to this orientation, as we will discuss in chapter 4. The most prominent inscription is found dead center of the
east face and, inside a rectangle that has two protrusions or peaks at the top, bears the name of King Djedefre (see plate
2). This stylized hieroglyph denotes a mountain ( )The ancient Egyptians used a very similar sign but with a sun disk
between the two peaks. This ( ) denoted the idea of a horizon and a sunrise.
It is thus perhaps relevant to note in passing that Djedefre was the first royal devotee of a new solar cult devised by
the priests of Heliopolis, and he was also the first pharaoh to incorporate into his name the word Re (the sun god) and to
add Son of Re to his royal titles. 31 His (now) truncated pyramid at Abu Ruwash, which stands some 7 kilometers (about
4 miles) north of the Giza plateau, is thought by some to have been the first sun temple and, like his mountain temple in
the Sahara, was also made to face the rising sun due east. Clearly, the new symbolism brought into the royal cult by
Djedefre is intensely solar and may have been the stimulus for his successors in the fourth dynasty, such as the pharaohs
Khafre and Menkaure, builders of the second and third pyramids at Giza, also to add Re to their names. This new solar
cult was even more prominent with the kings of the fifth and sixth dynasties, who built sun temples at Abu Ghorab, a few
kilometers south of Giza. Oddly, it was the kings of the sixth dynasty whom Harkhuf and his father, Iry, had so diligently
served by finding the way to the kingdom of Yam. At any rate, we will take a closer look at all this in chapter 6.
Meanwhile barely a few years after Carlo Bergmann’s discovery of Djedefre Water Mountain, another chance
discovery of a similar water mountain was made by a German team of anthropologists, but this time the site was a
staggering 700 kilometers (more than 400 miles) south of Dakhla and deep inside Sudan, adjacent to the town of
Dongola. To everyone’s surprise this other water mountain contained prehistoric rock art perfectly matching that of the
mysterious Djedefre Water Mountain. This rock art was studied by the German anthropologist Rudoph Kuper.
[T]he isolated but identical presentation of the water ideograms [near Dongola] more than 700 kilometers south of