Vyse and the 'Khufu/Khnem-khuf' inscriptions
Doug Bailey
There seems to be a rather heated debate going on regarding Vyse and his
'discovery' of the Khufu inscriptions in the Great Pyramid. I've heard
the arguments as to why they may be frauds, I would like to hear the
evidence from those who believe that these markings are, without a
doubt, genuine. I would ask that we stick to the evidence however and
not get into character attribution of people like Sitchin, Daniken, or
Hancock. I am not concerned with them, I am concerned with the facts.
Here is an excerpt from 'From Atlantis to the Sphinx' by Colin Wilson
which seems to shed some light on this controversy. Comments welcome.
(My thanks to Martin Stower for posting this excerpt, it can be found at
http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~martins/Pyramid/atlantistosphinx.html).
One of these established ideas is the `certainty' that the Great Pyramid
was built by a pharaoh called Cheops or Khufu. As a cautionary tale, it
is worth telling how this particular `certainty' came about.
In 1835, a British officer, Colonel Richard Howard-Vyse - according
to one writer, `a trial to his family', who were anxious to get rid of
him [reference:
`1 Peter Tompkins, Secrets of the Great Pyramids [sic], 1971 (p.
59).'] - came to Egypt and was bitten by the `discovery' bug. He
approached Caviglia,
who was still exploring the Pyramid, and offered to fund his
researches if Caviglia would give him credit as the co-discoverer of any
major find; Caviglia
rejected this.
In 1836 Howard-Vyse returned to Egypt and managed to obtain a
firman - permission to excavate - from the Egyptian government. But, to
Howard-Vyse's disgust, this named the British Consul, Colonel
Campbell, as a co-excavator, and Caviglia as supervisor. Howard-Vyse
paid over a sum of
money to finance the investigation, and went off on a sightseeing
tour. When he returned he was infuriated to find that Caviglia was
looking for
mummies in tombs instead of investigating the Great Pyramid for
secret chambers, which is what Howard-Vyse wanted. Caviglia had told him
that he
suspected that there might be more hidden rooms above Davison's
Chamber.
On the night of 12 February 1837, Howard-Vyse entered the Pyramid
at night, accompanied by an engineer named John Perring, and went to
examine
a crack that had developed in a granite block above and to one side
of Davison's Chamber; a three-foot reed could be pushed straight through
it, which
suggested there might be another chamber above. The very next
morning, Howard-Vyse dismissed Caviglia, and appointed Perring to his
team.
Howard-Vyse's workmen now began to try to cut their way through the
granite at the side of Davison's Chamber. It proved more difficult than
he had
expected, and a month later he had still made little headway. Royal
visitors came, and Howard-Vyse had little to show them except
`Campbell's Tomb',
which Caviglia had discovered near one of the other Giza pyramids.
(He also tried boring into the shoulder of the Sphinx, looking for
masons' markings,
but was unsuccessful.) Finally, in desperation, he employed small
charges of gunpowder - which made granite fly around like shrapnel - and
managed to
open a small passage up from out of Davison's Chamber.
Oddly enough, Howard-Vyse then dismissed the foreman of the
workmen. The next day, a candle on the end of a stick revealed that
Caviglia had been
right; there was another hidden chamber above.
The hole was further enlarged with gunpowder. The first to enter it
was Howard-Vyse, accompanied by a local copper mill employee and
well-known
`fixer' named J. R. Hill. What they found was another low chamber -
only three feet high - whose irregular floor was covered with thick
black dust,
made of the cast-off shells of insects. To Howard-Vyse's
disappointment, it was completely empty. Howard-Vyse decided to call it
Wellington's Chamber.
The hole was enlarged yet again, and the next time Howard-Vyse
entered it, with John Perring, and another engineer named Mash, they
discovered a
number of marks painted in a kind of red pigment, daubed on the
walls. These were `quarry marks', marks painted on the stones when they
were still
in the quarry, to show where they had to go in the Pyramid.
Conveniently enough, none of these marks appeared on the end wall,
through which
Howard-Vyse had smashed his way. But there was something more
exciting than mere quarry marks - a series of hieroglyphs in an
oblong-shaped box
(or cartouche) - which meant the name of a pharaoh. Oddly enough,
Howard-Vyse had failed to notice these when he first entered the
chamber.
From the fact that Wellington's Chamber was almost identical with
Davison's underneath it, Howard-Vyse reasoned that there must be more
above. It
took four and a half months of blasting to discover these- three
more chambers on top of one another. The topmost chamber, which
Howard-Vyse called
`Campbell's Chamber', had a roof that sloped to a point, like the
roof of a house. All the chambers had more quarry markings, and two of
them -
including Campbell's Chamber - had more names in cartouches. As in
Wellington's Chamber, these marks were never on the wall through which
Howard-Vyse had broken . . .
The purpose of these chambers was now apparent: to relieve the
pressure of masonry on the King's Chamber below. If there was an
earthquake that
shook the Pyramid, the vibration would not be transmitted through
solid masonry to the King's Chamber. In fact, there had been an
earthquake, as the
cracks in the granite revealed, and the secret chambers had served
their purpose and prevented the King's Chamber from collapsing.
When copies of the quarry marks and inscriptions were sent to the
British Museum, the hieroglyphics expert Samuel Birch testified that one
of the
names written in a cartouche, and found in Campbell's Chamber, was
that of the Pharaoh Khufu. So, at last, someone had proved that Cheops
built the
Great Pyramid, and Howard-Vyse had earned himself immortality among
Egyptologists.
But Samuel Birch admitted that there were certain things about the
inscriptions that puzzled him. To begin with, many were upside-down.
Moreover,
although the script was - obviously - supposed to be from the time
of Cheops, around 2500 BC, it looked as if many of the symbols came from
a much
later period, when hieroglyphics had ceased to be `pictures', and
become something more like cursive writing. Many of the hieroglyphs were
unknown -
or written by someone so illiterate that they could hardly be
deciphered. This in itself was baffling. Early hieroglyphic writing was
a fine art, and only
highly trained scribes had mastered it. These hieroglyphs looked as
if they had been scrawled by the ancient Egyptian equivalent of Just
William.
Most puzzling of all, two pharaohs seemed to be named in the
cartouches - Khufu and someone called Khnem-khuf. Who was this
Khnem-khuf? Later
Egyptologists were agreed that he was supposed to be another
pharaoh - and not just some variant on Khufu - yet the puzzling thing
was that his name
appeared in chambers lower than Campbell's Chamber, implying that
Khnem-Khuf had started the Pyramid and Khufu had completed it (since a
pyramid is built from the bottom up). It was an embarrassing puzzle
for archaeologists. The answer to this puzzle has been suggested by the
writer
Zechariah [sic] Sitchin. Unfortunately, his solution will never be
taken seriously by scholars or archaeologists, because Mr Sitchin, like
Erich von
Daniken, belongs to the fraternity who believe that the pyramids
were built by visitors from outer space, `ancient astronauts'. Sitchin's
own highly
individual version of this theory is expounded in a series of books
called The Earth Chronicles. These have failed to achieve the same
widespread impact
as Daniken's because Sitchin is almost obsessively scholarly; he
can read Egyptian hieroglyphics, and he overloads his chapters with
archaeological
details that sometimes make them hard going. But no matter how one
feels about his theory that `gods' came to earth from a `12th planet'
nearly half a
million years ago, there can be no doubt that he has an extremely
acute mind, and that his erudition is enormous. And what he has to say
about
Howard-Vyse goes straight to the point.
Sitchin points out that no marks of any kind were found in
Davison's Chamber, discovered in 1765 - only in those discovered by
Howard-Vyse. And,
noting that Howard-Vyse dismissed Caviglia the day after his secret
visit to Davison's Chamber, and his foreman on the day the workmen broke
through into Wellington's Chamber, he concludes reasonably that
Howard-Vyse preferred not to be observed by anyone who had his wits
about him. He
notes that Hill was allowed to wander in and out of the newly
discovered chambers freely, and that it was he who first copied the
quarry marks and
other inscriptions.
`The atmosphere that surrounded Vyse's operations in those
hectic days is well described by the Colonel himself. Major discoveries
were
being made all around the pyramids, but not within them.
Campbell's Tomb, discovered by the detested Caviglia, was yielding not
only
artefacts but also masons' markings and hieroglyphics in red
paint. Vyse was becoming desperate to achieve his own discovery. Finally
he
broke through to hitherto unknown chambers; but they only
duplicated one after the other a previously discovered chamber
(Davison's)
and were bare and empty. What could he show for all the effort
and expenditure? For what would he be honoured, by what would he be
remembered? We know from Vyse's chronicles that, by day, he
had sent in Mr Hill to inscribe the chambers with the names of the Duke
of
Wellington and Admiral Nelson, heroes of the victories over
Napoleon. By night, we suspect, Mr Hill also entered the chambers, to
`christen' the pyramid with the cartouches of its presumed
ancient builder.' [reference: `2 Zechariah Sitchin, The Stairway to
Heaven,
1980 (p. 271).']
The problem was that in the 1830s, knowledge of hieroglyphics was
still minimal (the Rosetta Stone, with its parallel inscriptions in
Greek and ancient
Egyptian, had only been discovered in 1799). One of the few books
that Hill might have consulted would be Sir John Wilkinson's Materia
Hieroglyphica,
and even Wilkinson was uncertain about the reading of royal names.
Sitchin suggests that what happened is that Hill inscribed the name
that Wilkinson thought was Khufu, and then Howard-Vyse heard that a new
work
by Wilkinson, the three-volume Manners and Customs of the Ancient
Egyptians, published earlier that year, had just reached Cairo.
Howard-Vyse and
Hill did some frantic - and unexplained commuting between Giza and
Cairo soon after the discovery of the chamber named after Lady
Arbuthnot. They
must have been dismayed to find that Wilkinson had changed his mind
about how Khufu was spelt, and that Hill had inscribed the wrong name in
the
lower chambers. They hastened to put right this appalling blunder
in the newly discovered Campbell's Chamber, and at last the correct
spelling of
Khufu appeared.
But what they did not know was that Wilkinson was still incorrect.
The `Kh' of Khufu should be rendered by a symbol like a small circle
with lines
hatched across it - a sieve. Wilkinson, and a Frenchman named
Laborde (who had also written about hieroglyphs in a travel book) made
the mistake of
rendering this as a sun-disc - a circle with a dot in the middle.
In fact, this was the name for the sun god Ra. So instead of writing
`Khufu', the forger
wrote `Raufu'. No ancient Egyptian would have made such an
appalling and blasphemous error.
But what about the red paint? Would it not be obvious that the
inscriptions were modern, and not more than four thousand years old? No.
The same red
ochre paint was still used by the Arabs, and Perring noted that it
was hard to distinguish ancient quarry marks from new ones. (In the same
way,
many Cro-Magnon cave paintings look as fresh as if they were made
yesterday.) Sitchin notes that Mr Hill, who had been a mere copper mill
employee
when Howard-Vyse met him, became the owner of the Cairo Hotel when
Howard-Vyse left Egypt, and that Howard-Vyse thanks him effusively in
his
book. Howard-Vyse himself had spent ten thousand pounds - an
incredible sum - on his excavations. But the black sheep was able to
return to his family
as a famous scholar and discoverer.
It is Sitchin's intention to try to prove that the Great Pyramid
was built in some remote age, at the time of the Sphinx. This would seem
to be a
reasonable assumption - except that carbon-dating tests on organic
material found in the mortar of the Great Pyramid seem to indicate that
its date was
- give or take a century or so - the middle of the third millennium
BC. (We shall see later that there is another reason - the astronomical
alignment of
the `air vents' in the King's Chamber - for accepting the
conventional dating.) It is nevertheless worth bearing in mind the
curious tale of how
Egyptologists came to accept that the Great Pyramid was built by
Khufu, and to draw from it the moral that, where ancient civilisations
are concerned,
nothing should be taken for granted unless it is based on hard
scientific evidence.
Alan Alford
In article <33872A7C...@ix.netcom.com>, Doug Bailey
<aess...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>
> But Samuel Birch admitted that there were certain things about the
> inscriptions that puzzled him. To begin with, many were upside-down.
> Moreover,
> although the script was - obviously - supposed to be from the time
> of Cheops, around 2500 BC, it looked as if many of the symbols came from
> a much
> later period, when hieroglyphics had ceased to be `pictures', and
> become something more like cursive writing. Many of the hieroglyphs were
> unknown -
> or written by someone so illiterate that they could hardly be
> deciphered. This in itself was baffling. Early hieroglyphic writing was
> a fine art, and only
> highly trained scribes had mastered it. These hieroglyphs looked as
> if they had been scrawled by the ancient Egyptian equivalent of Just
> William.
>
group, the hieroglyphs were painted by the work gang. Presumably no-one
let them have time off for hieroglyphic classes?!
Did Birch really say these things about the writing? Again, according to
Martin Stower, there is nothing inherently wrong about the way the
hieroglyphs are written.
> `The atmosphere that surrounded Vyse's operations in those
> hectic days is well described by the Colonel himself. Major discoveries
> were
> being made all around the pyramids, but not within them.
> Campbell's Tomb, discovered by the detested Caviglia, was yielding not
> only
> artefacts but also masons' markings and hieroglyphics in red
> paint. Vyse was becoming desperate to achieve his own discovery.
Those who deny Vyse was capable of a fraud would do well to consider this
atmosphere that you refer to. I quote from the 1956 publication "The
Mountains of Pharaoh" by Leonard Cottrell, which includes numerous quotes
from Vyse's diaries:
"Caviglia it seems, had been digging for mummies in the mastabas near the
Great Pyramid. However Vyse persuaded him to assist him in measuring the
interior of the Great Pyramid and in "copying hieroglyphs inscribed on the
rocks northward of the Second" and in the evening - [here comes a diary
quote]
"... had a long conversation.. with Mr Caviglia, in which he observed that
I hurt his feelings by continually urging him to turn his attention
towards the pyramids, instead of employing the people at the mummy's pits
(i.e the mastaba tombs). I had assured him that I had no such intentions,
but that as I had undertaken the operations solely with the view to these
magnificent structures, particularly the great one, I naturally wished to
make some discoveries before I returned to England." (p.125-6).
And again I quote from his journal from February 1837:
"In returning to the tents in the afternoon, I asked Mr Caviglia when he
would probably have finished at the mummy pits, and be able to take the
bulk of the people to the pyramids. He said in about a fortnight, but that
he intended to begin upon another. I remarked, that in that case it was
useless for me to remain any longer, as no discovery could be made before
I should be obliged to return to England...". (same source p.127.)
I trust that this sheds some light on the situation. There is no doubt
that Vyse was in a position to commit a fraud and was capable of it. At
the end of the day, each must make up his own mind whether he actually
did.
Alan F. Alford
Author "Gods of the New Millennium"
http://www.eridu.co.uk
Graham
: > But Samuel Birch admitted that there were certain things about the
: > inscriptions that puzzled him. To begin with, many were upside-down.
: > Moreover,
: > although the script was - obviously - supposed to be from the time
: > of Cheops, around 2500 BC, it looked as if many of the symbols came from
: > a much
: > later period, when hieroglyphics had ceased to be `pictures', and
: > become something more like cursive writing. Many of the hieroglyphs were
: > unknown -
: > or written by someone so illiterate that they could hardly be
: > deciphered. This in itself was baffling. Early hieroglyphic writing was
: > a fine art, and only
: > highly trained scribes had mastered it. These hieroglyphs looked as
: > if they had been scrawled by the ancient Egyptian equivalent of Just
: > William.
: >
Cursive forms of hieroglyphs actually go all the way back to Dynasty Zero
on vases mantioning the names of king jrj-Hrw at least. We have every
reson to believe that cursive writing existed along side hieroglyphic
writing from the beginning. Moreover, one would expect mason marks to be
cursive rather than inscriptional, so there is no reason to doubt their
authenticity on this basis alone.
Geoffrey Graham
Yale University
Graduate Student in Egyptology
so...@minerva.cis.yale.edu
Martin Stower
Doug Bailey wrote:
>
> There seems to be a rather heated debate going on regarding Vyse and his
> 'discovery' of the Khufu inscriptions in the Great Pyramid. I've heard
> the arguments as to why they may be frauds, I would like to hear the
> evidence from those who believe that these markings are, without a
> doubt, genuine. I would ask that we stick to the evidence however and
> not get into character attribution of people like Sitchin, Daniken, or
> Hancock. I am not concerned with them, I am concerned with the facts.
> Here is an excerpt from 'From Atlantis to the Sphinx' by Colin Wilson
> which seems to shed some light on this controversy. Comments welcome.
> (My thanks to Martin Stower for posting this excerpt, it can be found at
> http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~martins/Pyramid/atlantistosphinx.html).
Clearly I need to work on this. The rest of the site - the home page
being http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~martins/Pyramid/ - is a _refutation_
of the forgery claim.
Martin
Martin Stower
Alan Alford wrote:
>
> In article <33872A7C...@ix.netcom.com>, Doug Bailey
> <aess...@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
[. . . quoting Colin Wilson . . .]
> How can this be so? According to Martin Stower elsewhere on this news
> group, the hieroglyphs were painted by the work gang. Presumably no-one
> let them have time off for hieroglyphic classes?!
That's not quite what I said. The inscriptions would have been written
by a scribe - of course. Scribes were the bureaucracy of ancient Egypt;
wherever something needed organising, there you would find a scribe - so
it's no surprise to find them attached to work crews. Hence we find in
the minor cemetery at Giza one Nefer, who lived during Khufu's reign and
who includes among his titles `Chief Scribe of the Crews' (or something
like that - I'm relying on memory here). The hieroglyph for `crew' here
is the same one found in the crew names in the pyramid.
See Goedicke's `Old Hieratic Paleography' for comparison.
To get an idea of the system, see `Egyptian Phyles in the Old Kingdom'
by Ann Macy Roth (University of Chicago Press). (Sadly, there's no
uniformity in mapping from Egyptian to English terms; I'm translating
the Egyptian `aper' as `crew'.)
We know from a later series of letters that scribes were expected to
know things such as how many men it would take to move an obelisk, or
build a ramp of a given specification.
> Did Birch really say these things about the writing? Again, according to
> Martin Stower, there is nothing inherently wrong about the way the
> hieroglyphs are written.
There isn't.
[. . .]
> Those who deny Vyse was capable of a fraud would do well to consider this
> atmosphere that you refer to. I quote from the 1956 publication "The
> Mountains of Pharaoh" by Leonard Cottrell, which includes numerous quotes
> from Vyse's diaries:
Cottrell quotes from Vyse's book, which was _based_ on his journal, but
was reworked for publication. What became of Vyse's manuscript journal
is unknown. (The family don't know.)
If you have a hardback edition of Cottrell's book, you'll find in it
Cottrell's own photo of the interior of the Khufu boat pit, with the
boat still in pieces within it, and most of the roofing blocks still
in place. On one of these blocks part of an inscription can be seen
- very similar in style to the inscriptions within the pyramid. Also
visible is a levelling line, a uniform distance (one cubit?) below the
roof level - again, similar to what we find within the pyramid.
[. . .]
> I trust that this sheds some light on the situation. There is no doubt
> that Vyse was in a position to commit a fraud and was capable of it. At
> the end of the day, each must make up his own mind whether he actually
> did.
Was he capable of writing immaculate old hieratic? I doubt it.
Martin
Martin Stower
frank murray wrote:
>
> On Mon, 02 Jun 1997 14:45:37 +0100, Martin Stower
> <mar...@dcs.shef.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> >Clearly I need to work on this. The rest of the site - the home page
> >being http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~martins/Pyramid/ - is a _refutation_
> >of the forgery claim.
>
> painted stones are overlapped by other stones (though i've no idea of
> how accurately the artist intended to map them)...
Yes. For example, the `Khufu' cartouche is followed by several
hieroglyphs (forming altogether the crew name, of which `Khufu's
Friends' seems to be the best translation). The same set of
hieroglyphs appears on an adjacent roofing block, but the
cartouche itself is concealed beyond the joint where the block
meets the side wall. Whether or not any trace of it survives
there is another question: several of the inscriptions seem to
have been partly obliterated during handling (a nice touch of
authenticity on the part of our forger) - but the jointing up
there isn't perfect, so there's some chance of such concealed
parts surviving.
I take it you're talking about Perring's drawings. Yes, I
think he set out to be accurate (but he had some trouble
with some of the signs - surprising, if they were all in
the capacity of the hypothetical forger, J. R. Hill, who ex
hypothesi knew nothing about hieroglyphs).
> if parts of any of
> the hieroglyphics disappear behind these overlapping stones, then
> forgery by vyse would, in the absence of proof that vyse had devised
> some method of painting within the tiny gap, sufficiently refute
> claims that he forged all the hieroglyphics...
>
> but i've not seen where you mention this possible evidence, or lack of
> it, on your website...might you address that here, along with the
> ancillary question of why the the hieroglyphics are entirely in sight,
> if they so are??...
>
> frank
Zahi Hawass has made the following statement, in an interview
reproduced at the NOVA site (to which I've included a link):
. . . there are some inscriptions there that cannot be
written by anyone except the workmen who put them there.
You cannot go and reach there. It has to be the man who
put the block above the other one to do that. . . .
I've been told also that this is confirmed by a guide who
took a couple of forgery theorists (unnamed) up to the
chambers - but I'd prefer to confirm this in detail before
using it myself as an argument. Obviously it would be a
powerful argument (and consistent with what I've otherwise
found, that the potential falsifiers fail to falsify).
It would be more accurate to say that my site is a sketch
toward a refutation. I haven't tried to be exhaustive -
for one thing, in terms of effectiveness, diminishing
returns set in - but I have considered a lot more than
I've written up so far.
frank murray
>Zahi Hawass has made the following statement, in an interview
>reproduced at the NOVA site (to which I've included a link):
>
> . . . there are some inscriptions there that cannot be
> written by anyone except the workmen who put them there.
> You cannot go and reach there. It has to be the man who
> put the block above the other one to do that. . . .
>
>I've been told also that this is confirmed by a guide who
>took a couple of forgery theorists (unnamed) up to the
>chambers - but I'd prefer to confirm this in detail before
>using it myself as an argument. Obviously it would be a
>powerful argument (and consistent with what I've otherwise
>found, that the potential falsifiers fail to falsify).
let us know when you receive confirmation, if that happen...are you
aware of any complete set of photographs covering all surfaces in
those upper chambers??...
frank
Martin Stower
If only. Had such photographs been readily available, this
nonsense would never have got started. (One area in which
the professionals could have done better, IMO.)
A correspondent was looking into the question of getting a new
set of photos done, but at the time getting permission looked
problematic - this was when the head of the Council of
Antiquities had just been dismissed and the situation was (lets
say) fluid.
Now, given the above, the prospect looks more promising; I'll
look into it again.
Martin