Jason Colavito
2017
In medieval times, a particular myth cycle about the origins of the Egyptian pyramids developed in the Middle East from a set of Near Eastern apocalyptic traditions. The story told of how the demigod Hermes Trismegistus or else an ancient Egyptian king named Sūrīd had a prophetic warning about the coming of the Great Flood and built the monuments of Egypt to guard antediluvian science and wisdom from the coming disaster, testifying to the advanced technology and science of prehistoric people. This myth spread to Europe during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, where it formed the basis for the Hermetic and occult understanding of ancient history. In turn, these early modern ideas fed directly into the development of fringe claims about ancient history, the Pyramids, the occult, and a number of other esoteric traditions. The fallout from this legend continues today in modern-day versions of the story, including the ancient astronaut theory and the so-called “lost civilization” hypothesis of Graham Hancock.
Because this story is so complex, I thought it would be beneficial to outline the development of the myth cycle and the evidence used to understand its many changes. This page will attempt to lay it out chronologically with commentary.
Because this story is so complex, I thought it would be beneficial to outline the development of the myth cycle and the evidence used to understand its many changes. This page will attempt to lay it out chronologically with commentary.
Near Eastern Apocalyptic Prophecies
As far back as Babylon, there have been legends that knowledge survived the Flood. Gilgamesh was said to have inscribed it on stones (Epic of Gilgamesh 1.1-9) and kings like Ashurbanipal claimed to have read inscriptions from before Flood. According to Berossus, a Babylonian priest in Hellenistic times, when Xisuthrus was about to be saved from the Flood in an ark he was commanded to build by Kronos (Ea or Enki), the god told Xisuthrus to write down all of human history and preserve that knowledge from the Flood, knowledge that was later used to restart civilization.
He therefore enjoined him to write a history of the beginning, procedure, and conclusion of all things; and to bury it in the city of the Sun at Sippara... And when they returned to Babylon, and had found the writings at Sippara, they built cities, and erected temples: and Babylon was thus inhabited again. (George Syncellus, Chronicle 30-32 and Eusebius, Chronicle 31-37; trans. I. P. Cory)
Berossus also preserved a Babylonian prophecy of the destruction of the Earth by fire or flood:
All that the earth inherits will, he assures us, be consigned to flame when the planets, which now move in different orbits, all assemble in Cancer, so arranged in one row that a straight line may pass through their spheres. When the same gathering takes place in Capricorn, then we are in danger of the deluge. (Seneca, Natural Questions 3.29, trans. John Clarke)
These texts closely parallel Jewish legends of the Flood, specifically the preservation of texts of pre-flood knowledge (e.g. Jubilees 8:3), a story that was current among Christian in Egypt in the early centuries CE (St. John Cassian, Collationes 8.21). The specific prophecy of fire and flood found its fullest development in the Enochian literature that developed around the myth of the Sons of God from Genesis 6:4, originally interpreted as Fallen Angels, in the last centuries BCE. Symbolically, the prophecy was used in Judaism to contrast the Flood of Noah with a presumed future destruction of the Earth by its opposite, fire, a motif that survived into Christianity as the Apocalypse of Revelation. While this story belongs more properly to the Apocalyptic tradition and to the myth of the Watchers, the antediluvian writings of the Watchers feed directly into the story of the antediluvian pyramids. This prophecy was given in many forms and was associated with tablets or pillars of wisdom inscribed by Enoch, Seth, or an analogous virtuous Biblical figure. Flavius Josephus preserves the best known form of the legend, though after him it appeared in dozens of ancient texts:
68 … Now this Seth […] was himself of an excellent character, so did he leave children behind him who imitated his virtues. 69 All these proved to be of good dispositions. They also inhabited the same country without dissensions, and in a happy condition, without any misfortunes falling upon them, till they died. They also were the inventors of that peculiar sort of wisdom which is concerned with the heavenly bodies, and their order. 70 And that their inventions might not be lost before they were sufficiently known, upon Adam’s prediction that the world was to be destroyed at one time by the force of fire, and at another time by the violence and quantity of water, they made two pillars, the one of brick, the other of stone: they inscribed their discoveries on them both, 71 that in case the pillar of brick should be destroyed by the flood, the pillar of stone might remain, and exhibit those discoveries to mankind; and also inform them that there was another pillar of brick erected by them. Now this remains in the land of Siriad [i.e. Egypt] to this day. (Antiquities of the Jews 1.68-71, trans. William Whiston)
Josephus placed these pillars in Egypt, but no surviving documentation from Egypt in the first century CE suggests that such a story was known in the country at that time. However, by 300 CE, there is evidence of very similar stories circulating in Egypt. One of the best known is the prophecy in the Hermetic Asclepius describing destruction by fire and flood:
He, [our] Lord and Sire, God First in power, and Ruler of the One God [Visible], in check of crime, and calling error back from the corruption of all things unto good manners and to deeds spontaneous with His Will (that is to say God’s Goodness),—ending all ill, by either washing it away with water-flood, or burning it away with fire, or by the means of pestilent diseases, spread throughout all hostile lands,—God will recall the Cosmos to its ancient form... (26.1, trans. G. R. S. Mead)
While there may have been some borrowing between the Jewish and pagan apocalyptic visions, it was the coming of Christianity that imported the Enochian wisdom tradition into the native Egyptian Hermetic tradition.
The Ancient Writings of Hermes
In the early centuries CE, Greco-Roman inhabitants of Egypt had developed a complex Hermetic tradition around the practice of alchemy, and this tradition was centered on the city of Panopolis, also known as Akhmim, which had a thriving alchemical community. Among alchemists and pagan and Christian Gnostics, the figure of Hermes Trismegistus had come to represent the ancient knowledge tradition. Derived in part from the native Egyptian wisdom god Thoth, Hermes was widely believed to have written the secrets of science and magic in books dating back to the age of the gods. In the first century Greco-Egyptian Gnostic text Kore Kosmou, Hermes (the Greek god, not Trismegistus with whom he was conflated), here identified with Thoth, describes inscribing obelisks with sacred wisdom, and "Instructed by Hermes, they engraved upon hidden tables that the air is filled with genii" (trans. Anna Kingsford and Edward Maitland). Iambilcus, a Neoplatonic writer, was more explicit still and used the authority of the Egyptian priest Manetho to support his view:
Hence, as Seleukos describes, Hermes set forth the universal principles in two thousand scrolls, or as Manetho affirms, he explained them completely in thirty-six thousand five hundred and twenty-five treatises. (Theurgia 8.16, trans. Alexander Wilder)
Iambilcus, however, was probably referring to a Hermetic fabrication that passed under the name of Manetho, a brief summary of which is preserved in George Syncellus, Chronicle 41, though without the numbers. In the genuine texts of Manetho, we find reference to the claim that Suphis, his spelling of Khufu, built the Great Pyramid and wrote a sacred book, a reference to the Hellenistic attribution of books of magic to Khufu. The connection was strong enough that Diodorus Siculus called Khufu by the name Chemmis (Library 1.63.2), a name that is cognate with both the Greek words for alchemy and the Hermetic city of Panopolis / Akhmim (Chemmis). Syncellus also preserved in Chronicle 14 excerpts from the Hermetic writings of Zosimus of Panopolis (Imouth 9), who around 300 CE was the first to attribute to Hermes Trismegistus knowledge of the Enochian Fallen Angels, whom Zosimus says were the inventors of alchemy. This connection between Hermes, Enochian Watchers, and alchemy would be of extreme importance in the development of the medieval pyramid myth.
The Egyptian Evidence
In early centuries CE, knowledge of the purpose of hieroglyphs declined markedly, restricted to a dwindling elite of pagan priests. As a result, the Greeks and Romans invented stories to explain the texts. Diodorus thought them a form of picture representation, not true syllabic writing, but by the time of Plotinus (before 270 CE), the mysterious figures had already become seen as a strange repository of hidden knowledge, with each symbol capturing a wisdom concept:
Similarly, as it seems to me, the wise of Egypt--whether in precise knowledge or by a prompting of nature--indicated the truth where, in their effort towards philosophical statement, they left aside the writing-forms that take in the detail of words and sentences--those characters that represent sounds and convey the propositions of reasoning--and drew pictures instead, engraving in the temple-inscriptions a separate image for every separate item: thus they exhibited the mode in which the Supreme goes forth.
For each manifestation of knowledge and wisdom is a distinct image, an object in itself, an immediate unity, not as aggregate of discursive reasoning and detailed willing. Later from this wisdom in unity there appears, in another form of being, an image, already less compact, which announces the original in an outward stage and seeks the causes by which things are such that the wonder rises how a generated world can be so excellent. (Enneads V.8.6, trans. Stephen MacKenna and B. S. Page)
The Neo-Platonists followed this line of speculation in their writings, and it became the dominant view of hieroglyphs in Late Antiquity. This set the stage for the Hermetic belief that the hieroglyphs contained forbidden knowledge from Hermes and his ilk, as Zosimus of Panopolis implied in discussing the Egyptian Hermes.
There was, however, one element left to add. The story of Enoch and his pillars had not yet been translated to an Egyptian and specifically Christian context. The Greeks, as Diodorus testifies in Library 1.27, thought that Hermes was actually an enlightened mortal and that he left Egypt to inscribe secrets on stelae in Arabia, a claim that echoed quite closely the new belief in Jewish circles that the Watchers were actually mortal men, the offspring of Seth, whose piety earned them the name Sons of God and who inscribed pillars with their knowledge before falling into sexual sin (Josephus, Antiquities 1.68-72 and Africanus, quoted in Syncellus, Chronicle 19-20). As Zosimus demonstrates, Judeo-Christian mythology had permeated Egypt by 300 CE and had integrated with native stories. It is therefore unsurprising that in 391 CE we find Ammianus Marcellinus, a pagan Roman writer, giving the earliest surviving version of what would become the pyramid myth in his report on the sites of Egypt, one that has close echoes to the Judeo-Christian story:
There was, however, one element left to add. The story of Enoch and his pillars had not yet been translated to an Egyptian and specifically Christian context. The Greeks, as Diodorus testifies in Library 1.27, thought that Hermes was actually an enlightened mortal and that he left Egypt to inscribe secrets on stelae in Arabia, a claim that echoed quite closely the new belief in Jewish circles that the Watchers were actually mortal men, the offspring of Seth, whose piety earned them the name Sons of God and who inscribed pillars with their knowledge before falling into sexual sin (Josephus, Antiquities 1.68-72 and Africanus, quoted in Syncellus, Chronicle 19-20). As Zosimus demonstrates, Judeo-Christian mythology had permeated Egypt by 300 CE and had integrated with native stories. It is therefore unsurprising that in 391 CE we find Ammianus Marcellinus, a pagan Roman writer, giving the earliest surviving version of what would become the pyramid myth in his report on the sites of Egypt, one that has close echoes to the Judeo-Christian story:
There are also [in Egypt] subterranean passages, and winding retreats, which, it is said, men skilful, in the ancient mysteries, by means of which they divined the coming of a flood, constructed in different places lest the memory of all their sacred ceremonies should be lost. On the walls, as they cut them out, they have sculptured several kinds of birds and beasts, and countless other figures of animals, which they call hieroglyphics. (Roman History 22.15.30, trans. C. D. Yonge)
Here the story is attributed to underground tombs to help explain the images, spells, and hieroglyphs which contemporary Egyptians were no longer able to read. Ammianus referred to occult ceremonies rather than sciences, and it is unclear what type of Flood he refers to, but it is not hard to see how this story could have come assimilated with the very similar tale of the Pillars of Wisdom and the Flood of Noah. There is not enough evidence to know whether Ammianus recorded a story influenced by the Enochian myth, or whether this is a case of convergent evolution.
What we do know is that the Christian writers of the same period had begun to integrate the Enochian Watchers into the history of Egypt. Diodorus, in Library 1.26.6 wrote that the Egyptian temples contained images of men battling the Giants, and this belief (born of an incorrect understanding of hierarchical scale in art) undoubtedly led Christians to see the temples as preserving evidence of the Giants, the offspring of the Watchers, and their secret knowledge. Two writers of chronologies in Alexandria, Annianus and Panodorus, bucked the trend in the Christian world to downplay the Fallen Angels as the sons of Seth and instead promoted them as major players in world history and the originators of secret antediluvian knowledge. George Syncellus (Chronicle 42) preserves enough of Panodorus to show that he believed that the fall of the Watchers was the most important event between Creation and the Flood, and that the Watchers were the origin of science:
What we do know is that the Christian writers of the same period had begun to integrate the Enochian Watchers into the history of Egypt. Diodorus, in Library 1.26.6 wrote that the Egyptian temples contained images of men battling the Giants, and this belief (born of an incorrect understanding of hierarchical scale in art) undoubtedly led Christians to see the temples as preserving evidence of the Giants, the offspring of the Watchers, and their secret knowledge. Two writers of chronologies in Alexandria, Annianus and Panodorus, bucked the trend in the Christian world to downplay the Fallen Angels as the sons of Seth and instead promoted them as major players in world history and the originators of secret antediluvian knowledge. George Syncellus (Chronicle 42) preserves enough of Panodorus to show that he believed that the fall of the Watchers was the most important event between Creation and the Flood, and that the Watchers were the origin of science:
From the formation of Adam to Enoch, or to the Year of the World 1282, mankind was ignorant of the number of days both of the month and year. But the Egregori coming down upon Earth in the thousandth year of the world, and conversing with men, taught them that the periods of both the luminaries (the Sun and Moon) were completed in a their passing through twelve signs consisting of 360 degrees. But Men regarding chiefly the lesser and more observable lunar period round the Earth, agreed amongst themselves, that the lunar circle of thirty days should be the established year; for that the circle of the Sun was in like manner completed by his passing through twelve signs of 360 equal parts, or degrees. (trans. John Jackson, adapted)
While the Watchers connection brings in the pillars of wisdom to the story, we know from citations of Annianus in Bar Hebraeus, al-Biruni, and Abu Maʿshar al-Balkhi that Annianus also told the story of Hermes Trismegistus and seems to have recorded the stories of his inscribed pillars that we saw in the pseudo-Manetho and Diodorus Siculus. Similar accounts of the secret and buried inscribed stones of Hermes show up in other Hermetic texts, the most famous of which is the story told of the Emerald Tablet of Hermes, allegedly found in a cave by Balinas (Pseudo-Apollonius of Tyana). Eventually, European authors would turn the Islamic version of that story into the claim of the Liber de secretissimo philosophorum opere chemico that the tablet had been stored among antediluvian pillars of wisdom at the tomb of Adam in Hebron.
None of this would be important except that the Islamic writers picked up the older stories from Christian writers and turned them into something new.
None of this would be important except that the Islamic writers picked up the older stories from Christian writers and turned them into something new.
The Earliest Islamic Writers
When the first Muslims came to Egypt in the 670s, they found little memory of the history of the pyramids. Ibn ’Abd al-Hakam, the first Muslim historian of Egypt, reported that no one knew anything about them. Western Christians had little interest in Classical and Late Antique material because the fall of Rome had closed off the Greek East to them. They believed the pyramids to be the granaries of Joseph, as Julius Honorius (Cosmographia, c. 500 CE), Antoninus of Piacenza (Itinerary 43, c. 570 CE), and Geoffrey of Tours (History of the Franks 1.10, 594 CE), among others, all testify. The Eastern Christians who interacted with Islam had steadily moved away from the myth of the Fallen Angels toward that of the Sons of Seth, and as a result, the chronologies of Panodorus and Annianus seemed more like anomalies. Indeed, by the time of Bar Hebraeus (Chronography 1) and al-Juzjani (Tabaqat-i-Nasiri 1), the Sons of Seth had been identified with the antediluvian kings of Babylon from Berossus rather than fallen angels. Both of those writers, though, were working from the text of Abu Maʿshar al-Balkhi, a Persian astrologer who had taken a liking to the work of Annianus and had integrated a euhemerized version of the Watchers myth into his own chronology in The Thousands (c. 840-860 CE). It is not possible to determine whether the connection between the legend recorded by Ammianus Marcellinus and the myth of Hermes and the antediluvian tablets had been forged by Annianus or by Abu Maʿshar, but it survives first in an excerpt of The Thousands of Abu Maʿshar preserved a century later:
Abu Ma‘shar al-Balhi, the astrologer, said in the Book of Thousands: “There are three Hermeses. The first of these was the Hermes who lived before the Flood. The name ‘Hermes’ is a title like that of Caesar or Khusrau. The Persians name him Wiwanghan (i.e. Awanjhan), which is to say ‘the Just,’ in their accounts of the lives of the kings. The Harranians hold to his philosophy. They (the Persians) state that his father’s father was Gayumart, which is to say Adam. The Hebrews say that he is the same as Enoch, which is to say in Arabic, Idris.” Abu Ma‘shar said, “This Hermes was the first to ponder celestial events and the movement of the stars, and his grandfather Gayumart taught him to discern the hours of day and night. He was the first to build temples to exalt God therein. He was also the first to study and discuss medicine, and he wrote well-measured poems for his contemporaries about things terrestrial and celestial. It is also said that he was the first to predict the Flood and anticipate that a celestial cataclysm would befall the earth in the form of fire or water. He made his residence in Upper Egypt, and chose it to build pyramids and cities of clay. Fearing the destruction of knowledge and the disappearance of the arts in the Flood, he built the great temples; one is a veritable mountain called the Temple in Akhmim, in which he carved representations of the arts and instruments, including engraved explanations of science, in order to pass them on to those who would come after him, lest he see them disappear from the world.” (Ibn Juljul, Tabaqat al-atibbaʾ 5-10, my trans.)
Note two key elements: First, while Hermes is said to have built the pyramids, here it is the temples that are the safeguard of knowledge. This is likely due to a translation of the original story from underground tombs to temple sites that had become associated with magic and science in Late Antiquity. Second, note that the only temple given by name is the one in Panopolis / Akhmim, the ancient home of alchemy and Hermeticism, tied centuries earlier to the myth of the Watchers and the Enochian wisdom literature.
The near-contemporary Ibn Wahshiyya, writing in the Kitab Shawq al-Mustaham sometime between 863 and 930 CE, gives a highly truncated version of the same story, but how he learned of it cannot be determined. There are enough differences, however, that it looks like a separate derivative of a Hermetic story, possibly one as old as Annianus, or perhaps of more recent Dark Age origin, rather than a copy from The Thousands:
The near-contemporary Ibn Wahshiyya, writing in the Kitab Shawq al-Mustaham sometime between 863 and 930 CE, gives a highly truncated version of the same story, but how he learned of it cannot be determined. There are enough differences, however, that it looks like a separate derivative of a Hermetic story, possibly one as old as Annianus, or perhaps of more recent Dark Age origin, rather than a copy from The Thousands:
The alphabet of Hermes Abu Tat [i.e. father of Thoth] the philosopher. He wrote on the noble art (of philosophical secrets.) He constructed in upper Egypt treasure chambers, and set up stones containing magic inscriptions, which he locked, and guarded by the charm of this alphabet, extracted from the regions of darkness. (4.12, trans. Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, adapted)
On the other hand, when the great historian Al-Mas’udi tried to learn about the history of Egypt (c. 947-956 CE), he found little legend associated with the pyramids, but at Akhmim he heard a story of the temples that is clearly a close cousin to the one that Abu Maʿshar adapted for Hermes:
The people who built these temples had a taste for astrology, and they persistently probed the secrets of nature. They had learned from the study of the stars that a catastrophe threatened the land; but they were uncertain whether the world was to perish by fire, by a deluge, or if the sword were to exterminate its inhabitants. In fear lest the sciences should be annihilated with the people, they constructed these berabi (singular, berba) and disgorged their knowledge into the figures, the images, and the inscriptions which adorned them. They built them either of stone or of earth, separating these two kinds of constructions. If the foretold catastrophe, they said, is of fire, the edifices built of earth and clay will harden like stone, and our sciences will be preserved. If, on the contrary, it is a deluge, the water will carry away that which is built out of earth, but the stone will subsist. In the case of destruction by the saber, these two kinds of buildings will remain standing. According to the above, these temples were built before the Deluge. (Meadows of Gold 31, my trans.)
This legend allows us to imagine what Annianus must have said, what stories were current in Late Antique Egypt, and the innovation that Abu Maʿshar must have made in linking the temples to Hermes, likely through the Hermetic association of the temples with the demigod. Indeed, when the Muslims arrived, they were told that the images on the walls of the temples were records of the science of alchemy, and alchemists like Ibn Umail traveled to the temples to study the inscriptions for their alchemical secrets, or even to live among the ruins. Ibn Nadim, writing in his Al-Fihrist before 995 CE, confirms this:
These berabi [temples] have different forms. We see rooms for grinding and crushing, for condensing, for breaking down, and for filtering, which proves that they were intended for the practice of chemistry. In these monuments there are engravings and unknown writing, and hidden science formulas have been found drawn on sheets of gold and silver and on the stone carvings. (quoted in al-Maqrizi, Al-Khitat 1.10; my trans.)
Thus, it was the practice of alchemy that helped transform a legend of how tombs preserved records of prehistoric ceremonies into one of how temples guarded science from the Flood. We can see, too, that there was an Enochian version of the story centered on the Watchers and the fire and flood prophecy that must have been current among Christians and Copts in Egypt, and a Hermetic one based on Hermes that seems to be a literary development (perhaps out of Persia or Baghdad) layered on top of the Late Antique Christian myth. To an extent these two versions were harmonized by the Islamic equation of Enoch with the Muslim prophet Idris, who was also equated to Hermes:
This Hermes is the one the Hebrews named Enoch, son of Jared, son of Mahalalel, son of Kenan, son of Enos, son of Seth, son of Adam, peace be upon him. He is the same as the prophet Idris, peace be upon him. (Saʿid al-Andalusi, Al‐tarif bi-tabaqat al-umm 39.7-16; my trans.)
Even Coptic Christian writers eventually included the equation of Hermes with Enoch (Abu Al-Makarim, History of Churches and Monasteries 64b), and the equation made its way to the West through Arabic writings, appearing in Alfonso X’s General Estoria (1:35-37), apparently from the work of Ibrahim ibn Wasif Shah (a.k.a. al-Wasifi), who was to play a major role in developing the pyramid legend.
The Coming of Surid
The Hermetic version of the story was not the only one in circulation. Early Islamic writers also attributed the pyramids to Shaddād bin ’Ād, the legendary Arabian giant who was king of the ’Ādites (identified with the Nephilim) and the builder of the Iram of the Pillars. His story is not important here because it was superseded by a more dramatic one, that of Sūrīd, an antediluvian king and giant who had a vision of the coming of Noah’s Flood and built the pyramids in order to safeguard the ancient knowledge against the waters. Several hypotheses have been proposed to identify the origin of Sūrīd. The most convincing is that his name is a corruption of the Suphis of Manetho, who was Khufu or Chemmis, the king who built the Great Pyramid and was thought in Late Antiquity to have written books on magic. Additional stories, going back to ancient Egypt, associated Khufu with magic. Another hypothesis is that the name Sūrīd reverses the consonants of Idris, creating an opposition and a counter-narrative to the story of the Babylonian Hermes visiting Egypt that played better to the national pride of the Copts, a subject people who struggled to maintain their identity under Islamic occupation.
Whatever the source, the story of Sūrīd survives first in the Akhbār al-zamān, a book also known as the Book of Wonders, a medieval text composed sometime between 904 and 1140 CE. The best evidence suggests a date around 1000. The surviving text is clearly not the original of the story of Sūrīd since it breaks up and edits the narrative awkwardly to fit the book’s organizational scheme. However, the story cannot be much older than the book since it appears nowhere before this that history can prove. There are, however, two pieces of evidence of dubious quality against this notion. First, the thirteenth century writer Murtaḍā ibn al-ʻAfīf claims that Abu Maʿshar referenced the story of Sūrīd in The Thousands and another book, but no other writer agrees. Second, John Greaves, an English polymath, claimed in the 1600s in his influential Pyramidographia that Ibn ’Abd al-Hakam had written an account of Sūrīd in the ninth century, but the manuscript he consulted seems to have been mislabeled as it would disagree with all of the published statements of both al-Hakam and his brother (another al-Hakam) on the pyramids.
The author of the Akhbār al-zamān is unknown and was traditionally but wrongly attributed to Al-Mas’udi. Based on later citations in Al-Maqrizi and others, most now believe the book to be either the work of or a close copy of the mysterious Ibrahim ibn Wasif Shah, also known by the earlier name Al-Wasifi, who was said to have written a Book of Wonders on the history of Egypt. His account is lengthy, elaborate, and full of details that would spark the imagination of generations of writers. It begins with a prophetic dream:
Whatever the source, the story of Sūrīd survives first in the Akhbār al-zamān, a book also known as the Book of Wonders, a medieval text composed sometime between 904 and 1140 CE. The best evidence suggests a date around 1000. The surviving text is clearly not the original of the story of Sūrīd since it breaks up and edits the narrative awkwardly to fit the book’s organizational scheme. However, the story cannot be much older than the book since it appears nowhere before this that history can prove. There are, however, two pieces of evidence of dubious quality against this notion. First, the thirteenth century writer Murtaḍā ibn al-ʻAfīf claims that Abu Maʿshar referenced the story of Sūrīd in The Thousands and another book, but no other writer agrees. Second, John Greaves, an English polymath, claimed in the 1600s in his influential Pyramidographia that Ibn ’Abd al-Hakam had written an account of Sūrīd in the ninth century, but the manuscript he consulted seems to have been mislabeled as it would disagree with all of the published statements of both al-Hakam and his brother (another al-Hakam) on the pyramids.
The author of the Akhbār al-zamān is unknown and was traditionally but wrongly attributed to Al-Mas’udi. Based on later citations in Al-Maqrizi and others, most now believe the book to be either the work of or a close copy of the mysterious Ibrahim ibn Wasif Shah, also known by the earlier name Al-Wasifi, who was said to have written a Book of Wonders on the history of Egypt. His account is lengthy, elaborate, and full of details that would spark the imagination of generations of writers. It begins with a prophetic dream:
This king had a dream in which he felt as if the earth was overturned with all its inhabitants, the men fled in all directions, and the stars fell and clashed against each other with a terrible noise. He was moved by this dream and conceived a great fear; he nevertheless imparted his foreknowledge to no person, but he knew that some terrible event would happen in the world. Then he dreamed that the fixed stars descended on the earth in the form of white birds; these birds caught men in flight, and threw them between two high mountains which then closed over them; then the stars darkened and were eclipsed. This dream renewed his terrors. (2.1, my trans.)
After consulting with the priests of Egypt, who use astrology to foretell the time and severity of the Flood, Sūrīd decided to build temples and pyramids in order to guard knowledge:
Then the king ordered the construction of temples and great monuments, for himself and his family, in order to safeguard their bodies and all their riches, which they would deposit within. He inscribed on the ceilings, on the roofs, on the walls, and on columns, all the secrets of science, in which the Egyptians excelled more than any other nation; and he had painted a picture of the great stars and lesser stars, with signs that permitted their recognition. He also engraved the names of plants and their properties, how to construct talismans, their descriptions, and the rules of mathematics and geometry. All who know the books and the language of Egypt can make use of these images and inscriptions. [...] The king ordered the construction of tall monuments, the cleaving of huge slabs, the extraction of lead from the land of the West, and the rolling in of stones from the region of Aswan; these great black rocks were drawn on chariots. He laid the foundations of the three pyramids, Eastern, Western and Colored. [...] They decorated the pyramids with paintings, inscriptions, and figures capable of confounding the imagination. [...] He filled the western pyramid with emerald objects, images made with the substances of the stars, wonderful talismans, iron tools of outstanding quality, weapons that cannot rust, glass objects that can bend without breaking, all types of drugs (simple and compounded), deadly poisons, and a host of other things too numerous to describe. Into the eastern pyramid, he transported the idols of the stars, representations of the heavens, wonders built by his ancestors, incense to offer to the idols, books containing the history of ancient Egypt, an account of the lives of the kings and the dates of all the events that had transpired, still other books comprising a proclamation of all that would happen in Egypt until the end of time, with a description of the paths of the fixed stars and their influence at every moment. He also placed vessels containing drugs and other similar things. In the third pyramid, he deposited the bodies of the priests in black flint coffins, and with nearly every priest he placed books which recounted all that he had done and the story of his life.
[...] When all these things had been established, King Sūrīd entrusted surveillance to the invisible spirits and offered them sacrifices, so they would turn down anyone who would want to approach without providing the agreed-upon offerings and without performing the established rites in their honor.
The Copts say that the pyramids bear a painted inscription in Arabic whose interpretation is this: “I, Sūrīd, the king, built these pyramids at such and such a time. I completed the building in six years. Let anyone who would come after me and believe himself a king as great as I destroy them in six years, for all know that it is easier to destroy than to build. I also covered the pyramids in silk: Let those who come after me cover them in turn.” (2.2, my trans.)
There is much more to the account, and later writers embellished still further. At this point, the story is said to have survived the Flood because it was written in a book found with a mummy. Later writers added an elaborate frame story about how this book came to light in the reign of Philip of Macedon and how they had to search wide and far to find someone who could read the ancient letters. The story became so popular that nearly every later writer on the pyramids copied it, usually verbatim, though over time the references to the temples tended to drop out in favor of emphasizing the primary role of the pyramids in the story. Writers like Murtaḍā ibn al-ʻAfīf, Al-Maqrizi, and Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūṭi all composed lengthy works that incorporated most or all of the story from Al-Wasifi.
However, the story remained virtually unknown in the West until the modern era.
However, the story remained virtually unknown in the West until the modern era.
The Aftermath
The development of this unusual, albeit highly interesting, legend would be unimportant if it were not for the outsize influence it has had in the West. Athanasius Kircher, who founded the modern idea of Egyptology in the 1600s, used Arabic sources to describe Egypt, and he brought the story of Hermes Trismegistus (whom he identified with Enoch, Idris, and Osiris) building pyramids, or in his case obelisks, to Europe, albeit with an important change: Not wanting to contradict Classical and Biblical accounts, he alleged that all the obelisks built by Hermes washed away in the Flood. Kircher’s work is more important for the study of Nephilim myths than pyramid ones, but it was a starting point in Europe.
While a brief mention of Sūrīd occurs in the work of Kircher, the two most important Western sources for the story were Pierre Vattier’s 1666 publication of a French translation of Murtaḍā ibn al-ʻAfīf (followed by an English edition from John Davies in 1672) and John Greaves’s 1646 treatise Pyramidographia, which included a translation of an Arabic pyramid myth derived from that of Al-Wasifi, but wrongly attributed to one of the al-Hakam brothers. These two texts exposed generations to the Islamic pyramid myth, and references to it can be found throughout Enlightenment and Romantic literature, especially before the deciphering of hieroglyphics, when the stories were taken to have at least some historical resonance. Murtaḍā became so influential that vast amounts of Gothic literature, and much of the Romantic movement, could trace influence to his book. Percy Shelley famously read him so much that a friend threw the book out the window to make him stop. More directly, however, Murtaḍā contributed to occult and fringe history. His description of the wonders of Egypt led people like Marie Corelli to suggest that Egypt had a technologically advanced ancient society that included things like telephones and robots. She also used Murtaḍā to give spurious support to the so-called Curse of the Pharaohs after Lord Carnarvon died following the excavations of the tomb of King Tutankhamun.
The biggest influence of these books on fringe historiography occurred when Col. William Howard Vyse took inspiration from them and hired Alois Sprenger to summarize and translate the known Arabic sources on pyramid mythology for an appendix to his Operations Carried on at the Great Pyramid of Gizeh (1840). This set of summaries influenced countless fringe authors, who took from them evidence for a wide range of pyramid legends and lore. The story of Sūrīd gave support to claims that the pyramids were built before the Flood, including claims that the pyramids were built by people from Atlantis or a lost Ice Age super-civilization. It also gave support to those who claimed that the pyramids had divine messages encoded in them, or were connected to the stars, or even had been built on orders of space aliens. Richard Proctor used the story to support his influential belief that the pyramids were astrologically linked and observatories for studying the stars, a belief that directly filtered down into ancient astronaut lore and the Orion Correlation Theory. Writers like Erich von Däniken and Graham Hancock and Robert Schoch quote the story from Vyse, or Greaves, or other versions. Hancock and Andrew Collins both believe the story, which dates back only a thousand years, to reflect the sudden end of the last Ice Age, preserving memories of antediluvian times. The irony is that these late writers use the story as support for their own claims, which are rooted in Victorian theories that were themselves the direct or indirect offspring of the Islamic pyramid myth in the first place.
While a brief mention of Sūrīd occurs in the work of Kircher, the two most important Western sources for the story were Pierre Vattier’s 1666 publication of a French translation of Murtaḍā ibn al-ʻAfīf (followed by an English edition from John Davies in 1672) and John Greaves’s 1646 treatise Pyramidographia, which included a translation of an Arabic pyramid myth derived from that of Al-Wasifi, but wrongly attributed to one of the al-Hakam brothers. These two texts exposed generations to the Islamic pyramid myth, and references to it can be found throughout Enlightenment and Romantic literature, especially before the deciphering of hieroglyphics, when the stories were taken to have at least some historical resonance. Murtaḍā became so influential that vast amounts of Gothic literature, and much of the Romantic movement, could trace influence to his book. Percy Shelley famously read him so much that a friend threw the book out the window to make him stop. More directly, however, Murtaḍā contributed to occult and fringe history. His description of the wonders of Egypt led people like Marie Corelli to suggest that Egypt had a technologically advanced ancient society that included things like telephones and robots. She also used Murtaḍā to give spurious support to the so-called Curse of the Pharaohs after Lord Carnarvon died following the excavations of the tomb of King Tutankhamun.
The biggest influence of these books on fringe historiography occurred when Col. William Howard Vyse took inspiration from them and hired Alois Sprenger to summarize and translate the known Arabic sources on pyramid mythology for an appendix to his Operations Carried on at the Great Pyramid of Gizeh (1840). This set of summaries influenced countless fringe authors, who took from them evidence for a wide range of pyramid legends and lore. The story of Sūrīd gave support to claims that the pyramids were built before the Flood, including claims that the pyramids were built by people from Atlantis or a lost Ice Age super-civilization. It also gave support to those who claimed that the pyramids had divine messages encoded in them, or were connected to the stars, or even had been built on orders of space aliens. Richard Proctor used the story to support his influential belief that the pyramids were astrologically linked and observatories for studying the stars, a belief that directly filtered down into ancient astronaut lore and the Orion Correlation Theory. Writers like Erich von Däniken and Graham Hancock and Robert Schoch quote the story from Vyse, or Greaves, or other versions. Hancock and Andrew Collins both believe the story, which dates back only a thousand years, to reflect the sudden end of the last Ice Age, preserving memories of antediluvian times. The irony is that these late writers use the story as support for their own claims, which are rooted in Victorian theories that were themselves the direct or indirect offspring of the Islamic pyramid myth in the first place.