On Egyptology

'In every field of study, whether it be science, history or religion, it periodically becomes necessary to pause and take stock of what we think we know... The time for such a reappraisal has now come in the discipline of Egyptology.'
(The Phoenix Solution p. 398)

'the outsider can take an overview, which few qualified Egyptologists can afford to do, since they have been forced to specialise in different aspects of a vast field of study.'
(The Phoenix Solution p. 398)

'Egyptologists have made surprisingly little progress in understanding ancient Egypt. Even though they have translated the hieroglyphic texts, they do not really comprehend them...'
(The Phoenix Solution p. 400)

'a meaningful translation of the Pyramid Texts was impossible in Faulkner's day. Nor has any progress been made since then.'
(The Phoenix Solution p. 400)

'The truth is that Egyptologists have failed to re-create the state of mind which existed in ancient Egypt. If the legends and rituals were built on nothing more than idle superstition, or deliberate manipulation, it is difficult to see how they could have endured for so long, with so little change.'
(The Phoenix Solution p. 138)

'modern scholars have criticised the Egyptians for their stupidity in placing the source of the Nile in two locations, neither of which was the true source of its waters... It can only be said that such criticisms are a fair measure of the depth of understanding of ancient Egypt among modern scholars, i.e. no depth at all.'
(When The Gods Came Down p. 154)

'Whilst Egyptian tour-guides and experts attempt to dazzle us with their expertise on ancient Egypt, the truth is that they know very little.'
(Gods of the New Millennium p. 77)

'despite these fundamental uncertainties, the most eminent scholars in the field of early Egyptology did not hesitate to evoke the Pyramid Texts as evidence for monotheism, with the Sun-god, Re, being the sole God of the ancient Egyptians.'
(When The Gods Came Down p. 59)

'Egyptology today is in the grip of an orthodoxy which explains everything in terms of the Sun - temples, obelisks, pyramids, Sphinx - everything. A new generation of scholars works away busily at their various specialities (doing much good work, it must be said), but taking for granted all things on religious matters and relying unquestioningly on the interpretation imposed prematurely by Breasted and Wallis Budge a century ago.'
(When The Gods Came Down p. 59)

'As I pointed out in my previous book, The Phoenix Solution, Re's name meant 'Rising', and it is thus suited perfectly to the idea of the primeval mound rising in Nun - this being an allusion to the explosion of a planet in the waters of space. I went on to highlight the fact that this crucial motif - the rising mound - was strangely absent from the Pyramid Texts unless Re's name was a personification of it. I also highlighted the fact that the hieroglyph used for Re's name - a circle-within-a-circle - looks nothing like the Sun, but does look suspiciously like the primeval mound emerging in the watery abyss. All things considered, it seems beyond argument that Re was not originally a Sun-god at all, but was rather the god of the rising primeval mound. In other words, Re was a planetary god first and foremost, and only became a solar deity when the Sun was adopted as a symbol for the exploded planet. Over the course of time, Re's solar symbolism overpowered his original identity, and concealed it so effectively that thousands of years later Egyptologists completely missed it.'
(When The Gods Came Down p. 109)

'The single most significant mistake in those early days of Egyptology was the identification of Re as nothing more than a Sun-god... clear descriptions of subterranean journeys were ignored... [Egyptologists] were forced to assume that Re and Osiris were fundamentally different gods, since Osiris was the god of the dead, and had nothing to do with the Sun... instead of recognising the common nature of these deities in a cult of cosmic catastrophism, Egyptologists only found support for their own preconceptions that these weird and wonderful deities had resulted from primitive beliefs in animism, fetishism and magic.'
(The Phoenix Solution p. 401)

'In summary, then, there was a real underworld (beneath the ground) and a symbolic underworld (over the horizon). The real underworld was entered by a symbolic Sun (symbolising the meteorite). The symbolic underworld was entered by the real Sun.

How odd, then, that early Egyptologists such as Sir Ernest Alfred Wallis Budge and James Henry Breasted conveyed exactly the opposite idea. The Sun was not a symbol of the meteorite, they said, but the meteorite was a symbol of the Sun. And because the Sun was all-important, the real underworld, they said, was the one over the western horizon. In other words, Wallis Budge and Breasted succeeded in turning the real into the symbolic, and the symbolic into the real.'
(When The Gods Came Down pp. 24-25)

'... Sir Ernest Alfred Wallis Budge - one of the founding fathers of Egyptology at the beginning of the 20th century - occulted the true meaning of the underworld and the symbolic Sun, and - more to the point - wittingly or unwittingly perpetuated the millennia-old secrets of the ancient mystery schools.'
(When The Gods Came Down p. 26)

'Was Wallis Budge really as ignorant as he might appear from his misreading of the Het-Benben texts, and the Duat texts? Or was he feigning ignorance in order to conceal the true meaning of these vitally important concepts?... All that can be said with certainty is that Wallis Budge, in the error of his ways in 1905, served to protect the millennia-old secret of the underworld throughout the 20th century. He could not have done a better job even if he had been paid to do it.'
(When The Gods Came Down p. 68)

'the fatal weakness of Egyptology has been its failure (with only isolated exceptions) to embrace the subject of astronomy in its study of ancient Egypt... It seems to me that this collective failure of Egyptologists has been caused largely by prejudice against 'the primitives', but also by a fear of getting to grips with astronomy, a subject which seems totally foreign to them.'
(The Phoenix Solution pp. 401-2)

'Nevertheless... a cursory knowledge of astronomy would not have been sufficient for Egyptologists to decode the Pyramid Texts, since these texts only begin to make sense under the exploded planet hypothesis, which was not published in book-form until 1993. How could we possibly expect Egyptologists to have spotted the connection between Egyptian religion and planets which no longer physically exist in the heavens?'
(The Phoenix Solution p. 402)

'If mythology is our guide, then Egyptologists have made some fundamental mistakes in interpreting the role of the pyramid...'
(Introduction to The Phoenix Solution)

'90 per cent of Egyptologists think the true pyramids were connected with the Sun, whilst the other 10 per cent think they might also have been connected with the stars - not the most promising of foundations for this study, in retrospect!'
(The Phoenix Solution p. 285)

'In each field there exist standard texts and theories which are so entrenched that nothing is to be gained (and everything lost) by the maverick who tries to challenge the status quo.'
(Gods of the New Millennium p. 21)

'Why do Egyptologists speak of revolutionary religious changes in the Old Kingdom, and yet fail to consider that such religious changes might extend to the practice of burial itself?'
(The Phoenix Solution pp. 108-9)

'Until Egyptologists find a new solution, they will not let go of the old tombs theory. But until they let go of the old tombs theory, they will never begin to find a new solution. This is a 'catch 22', with human psychology as the barrier to progress.'
(The Phoenix Solution p. 71)

'In order that they might be left alone to pursue more constructive subjects, the scholars drew their wagons into a circle around the consensus that the Pyramid was the tomb of Khufu. In so doing, it became essential to understate the magnitude of the Pyramid's mystery, lest the door be opened to a new breed of pyramidiots who were now appearing like 'Indians' on the horizon.'
(The Phoenix Solution p. 403)

'the Great Pyramid was a scientifically accurate representation of the Earth's northern hemisphere... By blindly ignoring the obvious, it is the Egyptologists, for once, who are behaving like 'cranks'.'
(The Phoenix Solution p. 293)

'great shame has been brought upon Egyptology by the continuing reluctance of Stadelmann, the DAI and the SCA, to investigate beyond the stone portcullis... we have witnessed Stadelmann abusing a position of authority to issue his 'expert' opinion that the metal latches were nothing more than 'decorative hieroglyphs' - a ridiculous claim which is an insult to anyone who has studied ancient Egypt.'
(The Phoenix Solution p. 408)

'If something lies behind the 'door', it is more likely than not to undermine the theory that the Pyramid is 'a tomb and nothing but a tomb', resulting in an 'open season' for the Pyramid-revisionists. The DAI and SCA understand these risks fully, and their failure to investigate speaks volumes about their private concerns with many of the possibilities discussed in this book.'
(The Phoenix Solution p. 409)

'... Egyptologists seem to be trapped in a kind of 'fairy-tale land'. They get upset if we suggest that the Egyptians did not build the Great Pyramid, but they get equally upset if we notionally give the Egyptians the proper tools for the job... This position is completely untenable, and threatens to bring the field of Egyptology into disrepute... any member of the public who visits Egypt can see at a glance that simple copper tools were totally insufficient for building the Great Pyramid, so the opinion of the 'experts' is immediately devalued.'
(The Phoenix Solution p. 407)

'Who can blame these Egyptologists for preferring the option of a well-known third millennium bc culture to an unknown and highly speculative pre-historic culture?'
(The Phoenix Solution p. 3)

'Egyptologists, for their part, are so familiar with the overwhelming presence of the 4th Dynasty at Giza, that an adoption scenario has simply never occurred to them. They have not appreciated the strength of contrary evidence because they have never looked for it.'
(The Phoenix Solution p. 101)

'Did this dizzy world of religious turbulence really exist in the 4th Dynasty of ancient Egypt, or has it been invented by Egyptologists, who are working on fundamentally incorrect assumptions?'
(The Phoenix Solution p. 351)

'Lehner's argument [re elongation of the Sphinx's body], in my humble opinion, is as stretched as the Sphinx to which it relates.'
(The Phoenix Solution p. 6)

'Petrie's decades-long study has never been rivalled before or since, and those modern scholars who challenge his conclusions without the benefit of his experience with the artefacts themselves, are engaged in an amateurish and unscientific tinkering, which is being driven by questionable motives.'
(The Phoenix Solution p. 15)

'Egyptologists must always ignore one or more facts to make their theories work.'
(The Phoenix Solution p. 351)

'the entrenched idea that the Meidum step pyramid somehow evolved from the Step Pyramid at Saqqara is nonsensical and contrary to all of the evidence, and can only be seen as a naive attempt to connect the unconnectable based on a preconceived need to find an evolutionary pattern.'
(The Phoenix Solution p. 47)

'The foregoing discussion on pyramid chronology reveals the remarkable ability of Egyptologists to overlook the obvious in their rush to construct a nice, neat sequence of evolving pyramids. The huge differences between the step pyramids of Saqqara and Meidum are thus ignored, as are the obvious design flaws in the Meidum conversion, whilst on the other hand the perfectly designed Bent Pyramid, ironically, is dismissed as defective! One can only conclude that Egyptologists are rather like certain disreputable authors and journalists in that they will not let the facts get in the way of a good story.'
(The Phoenix Solution p. 49)

'Egyptology has been under siege from cranks since its very beginning, and there is thus a pervasive suspicion of anything that challenges the orthodox interpretation.'
(The Phoenix Solution p. 4)

'It seems to me that, with very few exceptions, Egyptologists are so paralysed by the fear of discovering what they cannot explain, that they are no longer effectively discharging their public duties. They are, in effect, suffering the symptoms of a long-established collective psychosis, spawned by the traumatic experiences of their forebears with pyramidiots in the late-19th and early-20th centuries, and the premature judgements which ensued therefrom.'
(The Phoenix Solution p. 409)

'... Egyptologists have developed such a distrust and scepticism of any ideas coming from outside their own field. And, when viewed from this historical perspective, one can fully understand and sympathise with their attitude.'
(The Phoenix Solution p. 404)

'In short, the controversial hypothesis put forward in this book confronts orthodox academics with nothing less than a paradigm crisis, which few of them are psychologically equipped to deal with.'
(The Phoenix Solution p. 405)

'one of our greatest weaknesses as a species is our tendency to rush into the construction of paradigms which are then defended at all costs.'
(Foreword to Gods of the New Millennium)

'the only choice open to Egyptologists, at least during the imminent future, is to vilify me and ridicule the exploded planet hypothesis. It would be naive of me, in the circumstances, to expect anything else...'
(The Phoenix Solution p. 405)

'Egyptologists are very experienced in the art of ducking the issues, and may well take the view that the optimum strategy is to totally ignore The Phoenix Solution.'
(The Phoenix Solution p. 405)

'In my opinion, a whole generation of Egyptologists will have to pass away before the exploded planet thesis becomes mainstream.'
(www.eridu.co.uk 'An Interview with Alan Alford', 20th July 1998)

'despite my criticisms of certain Egyptologists in this book, I must express my sincere thanks to the hundreds of archaeologists and scholars who have achieved so much in the study of ancient Egypt during the last two centuries. Although I believe that many of their interpretations are fundamentally incorrect, I could not be challenging their views without the basic facts which they established, often at great personal sacrifice and expense.'
(The Phoenix Solution p. 423)

On Sumerology and Assyriology

'just about every archaeologist and historian suffers from the same flawed way of thinking, which assumes that ancient civilisations must have been less knowledgeable than ourselves. The problem is then further compounded by the false assumption that any culture which did not develop writing was 'primitive', thereby leading to the sweeping generalisation that all human beings lived primitive lives up until six thousand years ago.'
(The Phoenix Solution p. 375)

'modern scholars talk of the earth being made fertile by thunder-gods, lightning-gods, rain-gods and hail-gods... it is typical of scholars that they downgrade everything from a planetary scale to a localised mountain or valley. And then, as if this were not enough, they bring the gods down from the Heaven-of-space, and relocate them in the Earth's troposphere, as if to suggest that ancient man was incapable of conceiving anything beyond the visible clouds.

But it is modern scholars who are beclouded. They have missed the whole point that the story of the gods fertilising the Earth was a sacred mystery - the ultimate mystery of the creation.'
(When The Gods Came Down p. 51)

'we have a situation where scholars can pick and choose from a veritable armoury of theories, to explain away the meaning of the gods in any particular myth. This is indeed what scholars do, picking and choosing from the armoury almost whimsically, and arguing back and forth between themselves concerning each and every legend. The result is not only a lack of consensus on any one particular legend, but also a complete lack of any sensible framework concerning the corpus of mythology as a whole.'
(When The Gods Came Down p. 22)

'the inability of scholars to recognise this fundamental relationship between Heaven, Earth and underworld - particularly the fact that the three realms were conceived in each other's image - has constrained severely their ability to understand what the ancients were talking about.'
(When The Gods Came Down p. 95)

'It is therefore puzzling... why scholars have traditionally avoided the translation 'meteorite' in favour of vague translations such as 'host of heaven', 'shooting star', or 'sky-bolt'. Frankly, I am dumbfounded by this. Do scholars not bother to read what the texts actually say? Are they ignorant of what a meteorite is? Or could it be that the fathers of academia have inculcated a culture in which meteorites must not be mentioned? It is an intriguing mystery, but what we can say, at the very least, is that scholars' understanding of The Epic of Gilgamesh - in particular its celestial, religious context - is hopelessly inadequate. Absurdly so.'
(When The Gods Came Down pp. 122-23)

'Why, then, did the flesh-and-blood Sumerian people insist on calling themselves 'the black-headed ones'? The official answer, from scholars, is that the Sumerians had extremely black hair, in contrast to some of the neighbouring peoples. Excuse my mirth.'
(When The Gods Came Down p. 205)

'But personally I am not (at this juncture) concerned with finding the archaeological solution to the mystery of Dilmun's location. Rather, I am interested  in the mythological solution... a celestial location. In my view, scholars have come seriously unstuck as a result of their failure to make this distinction, and this is due to their complete lack of understanding of ancient ankiography (the 'geography' of Heaven and Earth).'
(When The Gods Came Down p. 155)

'Frankly, I am puzzled. I can think of a dozen reasons why modern scholars might have failed to make the proper celestial connections - prejudice, ignorance, complacency, the list goes on. And yet I cannot help wondering whether some of them knew something. There just seem to have been too many wrong turns, too many blind eyes, and too many anomalies swept casually under the carpet. It is almost as if everything that should have been taken literally was taken symbolically, and, vice versa, that everything which should have been taken symbolically was taken literally. It is incredible. One almost suspects that some scholars knew the truth, but regarded it as a truth too potent for outright telling.'
(When The Gods Came Down p. 52)

'The only real surprise... is that scholars of the late 20th century did not take their beclouded predecessors to task... the disciplines of Egyptology, Sumerology and Assyriology must stand accused, at a collective level, of falling asleep at the wheel.'
(When The Gods Came Down p. 367)

'Why is it that scholars have failed for more than a hundred years to recognise that ancient religions were exploded planet cults?... Broadly, the problem seems to have been one of preconceptions, based on a religious education which was the antithesis of the pagan world.'
(When The Gods Came Down p. 362)

'Scholars, for some reason, seem to detest unified explanations. Perhaps they prefer the past to be complicated, so that their expertise might remain an essential and required commodity - to explain everything to us lesser mortals.'
(When The Gods Came Down p. 86)

'I must acknowledge the remarkable work of dozens of men and women whom I have never met, namely those who performed minor miracles in the study of ancient Near Eastern cultures during the last two hundred years. I refer not only to archaeologists, but also to the handful of scholars who deciphered the mysterious writing systems of the ancients. Readers need only look through the Plates section of this book to realise that these scholars performed a most amazing and heroic feat, for which society has paid them far too little credit.'
(When The Gods Came Down p. 414)

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