Did Atlantis leave us a library?

by J. Douglas Kenyon, author of Ghosts of Atlantis

When director Stanley Kubrick presented 2001: A Space Odyssey in the late 1960s, many saw the film as a remarkably prophetic vision daring to deal with themes untouched by the popular culture. Here, it seemed, was a larger vision of humanity’s origins and destiny than the big screen (even super wide Cinerama) had ever attempted. Certainly the notion that ancient progenitors from the stars had left behind mysterious clues intended to guide a fledgling human race toward the ultimate recognition of its true identity was a stimulating one.

Oddly, the critics saw all that, but they ignored or dismissed the possibility that something very much like the film’s enigmatic obelisk might actually exist.

Is it possible that our forebears left us such a marker, but that it points toward a more transcendent and spiritual destiny than the secular establishment is prepared to consider, challenging many of the assumptions underlying the existing order? What ancient artifact still confounds our understanding of its very shape and proportions, whose origins and method of construction remain a mystery, but whose pervasive influence as a symbol draws us onward to some more profound and transcendent awareness?

What better answer than the Great Pyramid of Giza? This was the view of esoteric brotherhoods throughout history, from the builders of the Gothic cathedrals to the founders of America (see, for example, the Great Seal).

In the 1990s, sensational discoveries on the Giza plateau in Egypt led millions to wonder whether ancient forebears—maybe even Atlanteans—had left behind a virtual hall of records, which might soon be discovered.

The Clues of History

While the idea of a lost fountainhead of civilization remains controversial, the suggestion that civilization’s origins are much older than previously supposed remains intriguing, and many wonder whether we may yet find some previously undiscovered record of an earlier high culture. Is it possible that a very ancient yet advanced civilization foresaw a coming dark age of many thousands of years and took measures to leave a kind of time capsule that could survive the dark millennia between their age and another of parallel advancement? After all, as we have learned from the fate of the Library of Alexandria, the knowledge from one age is not always easy to convey to another.

Could the original builders of the monuments of Giza have left behind such records but have hidden them so well that they could elude detection for millennia? Some researchers, like Robert Schoch and Robert Bauval, think the answer is yes, and that a hall of records is destined to be discovered. Such a discovery would, hopefully, help us understand who we are, in a much deeper way than ever before, and, perhaps, lead us to the stars. For evidence, they point to many ancient and modern sources, including the ancient Egyptians, who left many texts referring to a remote golden age preceding their own era that they called Zep Tepi, or the First Time. Zep Tepi apparently ushered in the age of Leo around 10,500 BCE.

At the spring equinox in the age of Leo, the Lion constellation would have risen just before the sun. It would have been seen due east and in alignment with the Great Sphinx of Egypt. So it could be argued that the Sphinx was built to behold its own image, which appeared in 10,500 BCE on the horizon.

If Plato is to be believed, there was a civilization much older than Egypt, indeed many thousands of years older. Could references in ancient texts to secret rooms and passageways under and in close proximity to the Sphinx and the Giza plateau be clues to the legacy of an even earlier age? Here are a few of the intriguing references from antiquity:

• On the walls of the Temple of Edfu are allusions to the “Sacred Book of Temples,” which tell of objects kept in a secret hall, and then hidden still further to protect their secrets.
• The Westcar Papyrus, dating to the Fourth Dynasty, tells of a sage named Djeda who knew of “the secret chambers of the books of Thoth.” The papyrus instructed the pharaoh Khufu, later credited by some with building the Great Pyramid, with keys that would someday open the “hidden place,” a library room where scrolls were kept. Djeda also made prophesies indicating when the hall would one day be discovered.
• Engravings on the Dream Stele of Thutmose IV, located between the paws of the Sphinx, actually appear to reveal an understructure of some kind below the the body of the Sphinx. Some researchers think their meaning could have been literal.
• The Greek historian Herodotus, writing in 443 BCE, said that hidden under the Giza plateau was a vast labyrinth of tunnels extending in all directions far beyond the pyramid, “whereon great figures are graven,” and the way into it is to be found “underground.”
• The Corpus Hermeticum (written early in the Christian era, if not sooner) tells how Hermes (the Greek equivalent of Thoth) hid the “secrets of Osiris” and put a spell on them to preserve them from being seen by the unworthy.
• The Roman Marcellinus wrote in the fourth century that there are winding subterranean galleries and passages beneath the pyramids in which, he said, the ancient priests (knowing the flood was coming, and fearing that memory of their sacred ceremonies would be obliterated) constructed vaults in various places. Such a vault, said Marcellinus, would be found between the paws of a feline monument.
• Several of the quatrains of Nostradamus are interpreted by some as referring to a “hall of records.”
• Edgar Cayce said that such a chamber housing a storehouse of records existed beneath the Sphinx and prophesied that it would be discovered around the end of the twentieth century.

A Message from the Age of Leo

In a 2017 article for Atlantis Rising titled “The Sphinx Breaks Its Silence,” Robert Schoch explained the origins of the paper he wrote with Manu Seyfzadeh and Robert Bauval, “A New Interpretation of a Rare Old Kingdom Dual Title: The King’s Chief Librarian and Guardian of the Royal Archives of Mehit.” In May 2017, Dr. Schoch and Bauval had participated in successive conferences in California and Arizona. One of the attendees was their colleague and friend, Dr. Seyfzadeh (a dermatologist with a passion for ancient Egypt), who privately revealed a personal discovery he had made: hieroglyphic evidence dating back to earliest dynastic times that refers not just to the Sphinx but also to an archive under the Sphinx, corresponding to an underground chamber in the vicinity of the Sphinx’s left paw. At Seyfzadeh’s invitation, Schoch and Bauval joined as coauthors on the paper describing the discovery.

Dr. Seyfzadeh had pointed out that on the base of a statue of Hemiunu—vizier of the pharaoh Khufu, who is conventionally credited as the builder of the Great Pyramid—there is a dual/tandem title that has eluded full translation by Egyptologists. The title, the authors believe, goes back in time to well before Khufu, as it is also found on wooden panels of Hesy-Re, an official in the court of the pharaoh Djoser who would have lived before 2500 BCE, the date usually ascribed to the Sphinx. It consists of seven distinct symbols: 1) axe; 2) reed and inkwell, forming a single symbol; 3) sedge (a plant found in Egypt); 4) bread loaf; 5) axe; 6) bent rod (a mysterious, previously undeciphered sign); and 7) recumbent lioness.

The axe symbol usually denotes an overseer, master, architect, or some sort of high official in charge of something important. Two axes indicate a dual title. The reed and inkwell, sedge, and bread loaf generally mean that the official was overseer of the royal scribes and/or architects—an extremely important position.

But what could the second title represent? The axe of the second title is identical to and, presumably, has the same meaning as the first. But what is the apparent “bent rod,” and what does the lioness represent? The lioness of the second title appears to be the same lioness represented elsewhere on the Wepemnefret stele. (Wepemnefret was the son of Khufu. Archaeologists led by George A. Reisner found the stele on the wall of his tomb in 1905.)

Egyptologist William Stevenson Smith (1907–1969) translated the hieroglyphic title as “Craftsman of Mehit.” But the meaning of the bent rod protruding from, or entering into, the back of the lioness has eluded Egyptologists, in part due to its extreme rarity.

Dr. Seyfzadeh’s suggestion was that the bent rod represents a physical key used to open a physical lock. By the time of the Middle Kingdom (circa early second millennium BCE), the Egyptians had developed simple lock-and-key devices, and now there is evidence that such devices actually go back to a much earlier period. Most likely, however, at such a very early date locks and keys were familiar only to the elite, and thus references to such devices appeared rarely.

Sticking a key in the back of a lioness would make no sense, say the paper’s authors, unless the lioness represents something else, such as a building or statue, protecting a locked chamber or vault. Was the physical structure securing or protecting a locked vault in the shape of a lioness? Immediately the Great Sphinx comes to mind. The Sphinx today has a lion’s body with a human head, but the head was recarved in dynastic times. Schoch has long argued that the Sphinx was a recumbent lion. And during seismic work carried out around the Great Sphinx in the early 1990s, as described in Origins of the Sphinx (see pages 70–86), Schoch and geophysicist Thomas Dobecki identified a chamber of some kind under the Sphinx in the vicinity of the left paw.

We can interpret the second part of the dual title as a reference to an overseer, master, guardian, or possessor of a key that opened a vault that was, based on the first part of the dual title (referring to scribes and records), an archive, a hall of records guarded by a lioness. In the real, physical world, that archive could have been located in the chamber under the Great Sphinx, and prior to the recarving of its head the Sphinx would have represented the lioness Mehit. The dual title could thus be translated concretely as “Overseer of the Scribes of the King and Master of the Key to the Lioness” or, more fluently, as “The King’s Chief Librarian and Guardian of the Royal Archives of Mehit.”

With all this in mind, Schoch believes, there is a strong case to be made that as early as the First Dynasty (when some of the first written records in Egypt were kept), the Sphinx—which at that time was a lioness named Mehit—existed on the Giza plateau and guarded a locked chamber where archives were stored.

The Search for the Hall of Records

Efforts to find a chamber beneath the Sphinx were actively pursued as late as 2009 but produced little in the way of visible results. Dr. Joseph Schor, under the auspices of Florida State University, obtained permission in 1996 from then Egyptian director of antiquities Zahi Hawass to investigate the area. Schor and his partner Joe Jahoda, a representative of the Association for Research and Enlightenment (A.R.E.), the Edgar Cayce organization, planned to map the entire Giza plateau—with the aid of ground-penetrating radar—and to excavate any resulting discoveries. Unfortunately, all of that came to an abrupt end when the Egyptian antiquities authorities inexplicably called a halt to Schor’s efforts.

Schor was reluctant to discuss his findings, but at a conference held by A.R.E. in 1998 he did comment. His group, he said, had pinpointed an anomalous area about 35 feet beneath the Sphinx, which he described as a chamber in the bedrock about 25 wide and 40 feet long, with parallel walls and a height of up to 45 feet. The Cayce readings refer to such a chamber as an antechamber to the hall of records, and it was said to be off the right front paw of the Sphinx.

In 2009, Zahi Hawass stated that he planned to drill under the Great Sphinx. The report of his intention was published in the February/March edition of Ancient Mysteries, the A.R.E. newsletter. Joe Jahoda, a longtime A.R.E. member, had convinced Hawass to drill for a chamber under the Sphinx, and Hawass told A.R.E. representatives that soon after the drill arrived, he would get his team together and begin the drilling.

The newsletter reported that Jahoda had asked whether A.R.E. would purchase the special drill necessary to drill at an angle into the limestone bedrock. Kevin Todeschi, CEO of A.R.E., approved, and A.R.E. patron Don Dickinson agreed to help with the purchase. Thus, the drill was obtained, crated, and shipped to Egypt.

Very little further information has been forthcoming, but also in 2009, Philip Coppens reported in Atlantis Rising that Egyptian authorities had been pursuing ground-penetrating radar surveys of the Giza plateau on their own. Nothing definitive on the subject has emerged, though many attribute this fact to chaotic conditions in Egyptian politics, as well as to visceral objections to the introduction of any evidence of advanced prediluvian origins for the monument of the Giza plateau.

Could a hall of records be the link between our world and another—perhaps similar—one that might have existed before the deluge, accompanying the end of the last ice age? Some investigators believe that a highly evolved civilization would want to tell its story to posterity, just as we like to do by planting “time capsules.” If they are right, we may yet learn, directly from the participants, the truth of what happened to Atlantis. Proof that civilization has risen and fallen on Earth, not once, but many times, not only would corroborate Plato but could well change much more.