Zahi Hawass Stumbles Through a Discussion of Occult Egyptology on Joe Rogan

This week, famed Egyptologist Zahi Hawass was Joe Rogan’s guest on his podcast, and the two spent two hours discussing the history of ancient Egypt and various conspiracy theories that Rogan had heard about Egypt from his friends in the fringe history community. It was Rogan’s first episode with an archaeologist as the sole guest, more than 2,320 episodes and dozens if not hundreds of “alternative” thinker interviews into his run. Unfortunately, it was not the most successful outing for archaeology, as Rogan asked combative questions about conspiracies and Hawass stumbled over some areas he should have recognized after all these years.

​The majority of the two hours featured Hawass giving detailed (and boring) descriptions of the pyramids, the Sphinx, and the various lines of evidence that explain how we know what we know about their purpose and construction. There isn’t much to say about that, other than to note that Rogan frequently interjected to ask about various fringe ideas, including Robert Schoch’s claim of an Ice Age Sphinx, the Italian claim of a vast megalithic underground city, the “first time” (Zep Tepi) of mythology 36,000 years ago, and other nonsense.
 
When talking of stones and bones, Hawass was unobjectionably accurate and made a clear and direct case that the fringe thinkers have no real evidence to match the accumulated knowledge of centuries of archaeology. When it came to the softer side, particularly myths and legends, Hawass’s knowledge was much shakier, and it tended to undermine his case.
 
In one bizarre section of the interview, Hawass discussed magic at length, focusing on the Westcar Papyrus story “Khufu and the Magicians,” composed in the Middle Kingdom, long after Khufu’s time. I think his point was supposed to be that the claims of high technology or magic associated with Egypt were misunderstood illusions and tricks and that fringe writers appeal to ancient texts that are often fictitious. But his discussion was quite confusing and made it seem as though he were saying there is literary evidence of magic.
 
Hawass also dismissed medieval Arabic material about ancient Egypt as worthless (“crazy things”). He’s write that the stories as written are not accurate accounts of ancient Egyptian life, but as I have pointed out, they are valuable sources for the reception of Classical myths and legends about Egypt and for the preservation of Late Antique ideas about Egypt. While the stories are wildly exaggerated and filled with much romantic fiction, it is possible to trace the substrata of these stories back to Manetho’s books of Egyptian history and the various Christian and Hermetic forgeries that passed under Manetho’s name. In some cases, as Gaston Maspero argued, the stories are heavily distorted reflections of actual Egyptian myths, legends, and histories—but, I would add, heavily of the late period rather than the Old Kingdom. After all, it only makes sense that the most recent stories would be best remembered and represented in memory.
 
Hawass’s blind spot there led to one of his worst stumbles. When asked about Zep Tepi 36,000 years ago and the Egyptian king lists that claim rulers dating back tens of thousands of years, Hawass dismissed not just the “First Time” mythology but denied any such Egyptian king list exists:

What’s Zep Tepi? What’s this? […] Who said that? […] It’s not in hieroglyphs. This is not true. No, this is a speculation from people who knows nothing about history. There is nothing, [no] king list dated back 30,000 years ago at all. The first keep saying that because they don't know speculation. Give me one evidence of that. The only, the first king list dated back to Dynasty 5 only. […] I am an Egyptologist working in Egypt for the last 57 years. I never heard of this king list at all. Never. Never.

​Here, Hawass managed to be both right and wrong and the same time. Technically, he is correct that there is no hieroglyphic king list with reigns dating back 36,000 years. The most famous king list, the Turin Royal Canon, is incomplete and written in hieratic, but it is possible to deduce that it listed the names and reigns of the gods and demigods before the first historical dynasty and that many of these were quite lengthy.
 
However, what Rogan was referring to and Hawass omitted is that Manetho, an Egyptian priest of the Ptolemaic era, did indeed record lengthy reigns for the pharaohs in his widely disseminated Greek-language work Aegyptiaca, a foundational text that influenced Antique, Late Antique, and medieval writers and which served as the foundational text for reconstructing the history of ancient Egypt. Now, it is true that the surviving fragments of Manetho, preserved largely by Christian writers, do not ascribe 36,000 years to the reigns of the gods and demigods—Christians had rationalized the “years” as lunar months or even days to cut them down to fit the chronology of the Bible. But the 36,000-year chronology does exist in an ancient king list.
 
The Old Egyptian Chronicle is a Late Antique forgery of uncertain origin, believed to originate in older Hermetic and possibly Egyptian sources, and which became confused with and conflated with Manetho’s king lists in Late Antiquity. A summary is preserved in George Syncellus’s Chronicle, written around 800 CE, and it begins thus: “There is an old Chronicle current among the Egyptians, which I think misled Manetho, containing 30 dynasties, during 113 generations, for the immense number of 36,525 years” (trans. John Jackson). Obviously, the number is symbolic rather than literal—it’s most likely connected to the solar year or the return of Sirius. There is also a second list given by Syncellus, likely from the Book of Sothis, a Christian forgery of Manetho, that also gives reigns adding up to 30-something-thousand years, though the exact original total is hard to tell because Syncellus gives us the “reduced” value, in which the lengthy originals were cut down to months of 29.5 days for gods or “seasons” for demigods, by Syncellus’s source, the chronographer Panodorus.
 
Now, I will grant you that the Old Chronicle is a fairly obscure Greek text, but I would have thought that Zahi Hawass, after decades of studying Egyptian mysteries, might have come across it, as it is one of the handful of Greco-Roman testimonia on Egyptian history.
 
Interestingly, though, the phrase “Zep Tepi” isn’t one that occurs with any regularity outside of fringe literature. The oldest reference I can find is from the 1990s, when Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval began making reference to it, the latter citing Paul Jordan’s 1998 book Riddles of the Sphinx. However, while Jordan uses the phrase “the sacred place of the first time,” though to mean the sanctuary of the Sphinx (p. 197), he does not use the words “Zep Tepi.” He calls it the “Setepet,” taking the term from the Dream Stela. Hancock cites Egyptologist R. T. Rundle Clark’s 1959 book Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt in Fingerprints of the Gods, where Clark writes of “Tep zepi,” the period from creation to Horus. That, however, is as far as I can trace the specific phrase.
 
Hawass is therefore right that “Zep Tepi” seems to be Hancock’s and Bauval’s mistake for Clark’s phrase, which I gather is his own transliteration. Hawass, though, is wrong to claim no knowledge of the First Time, since it is a standard part of Egyptian mythology.
 
“Never heard of that,” Hawass said. “It’s a New Age theory.”

Flint Dibble produced a point-by-point reaction to the Rogan interview. I am embedding it here, but I did not listen yet because I did not want to be influenced before I wrote my evaluation.