The Genius Joseph (as Imhotep) Great Historian and Antiquarian

Taken from Robert Temple's Egyptian Dawn. Exposing Real Truth Behind ancient Egypt (Century 2010).

Pp. 246-248:

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As for the Redford book, it also lacks completely an important dimen­sion to the king list issue, which is actually dealt with at length by O'Mara, and which I would have mentioned anyway, even if Olivia had not brought it up. I am referring to the extensive attempts made by Imhotep, the vizier of King Zoser (first king of the Third Dynasty) to construct some kind of 'historv' of the First and Second Dvnasty kings. Imhotep was one of the most famous intellectuals in the history of Egypt. We know that he wrote books on medicine and architecture, as well as designing and building the Step Pyramid of Saqqara. He was also Vizier of Egypt, High Priest of Heliopolis, and High Priest of Ptah at Memphis. There seemed to be nothing that he could not or did not do. Among other things he appeared to do, which are less frequently discussed, were to reform the calendar by creating what is called the 'Civil Year', and commence the traditions of creating annals and king lists (called in Egyptian by the name of genut). The really interesting part of the latter project was his collection of vast quantities - more than 40,000 - of stone bowls and vases, many of which bore the names of early kings incised upon them, and all of which probably came from royal tombs. Two of these actually bear a succession of the names of four kings who followed one another and, strangely, this king list is not noticed by Redford in his book on king lists, though O'Mara makes much of it. …. He calls it the 'Roval Block of Four', and it is indeed priceless archaeological evidence of the accurate succession of four early kings. This evidence was initially published by Jean-Philippe I.auer and Pierre I.acau in 1959, in Volume Four of the mammoth series of volumes about the Step Pyramid of Saqqara, La Pyramide à Degrés: Inscriptions Gravées sur les Vases [The Step Pyramid: Inscriptions Engraved on the Vases]. The relevant inscriptions are shown in Plate 4 of that volume…. I reproduce that photo on this book's website. Lauer is the man who reconstructed a section of the Step Pyramid complex at Saqqara, which is admired by all tourists today for the breathtaking beauty of its design. Lauer was a heroic figure, inspired by a vision and determined to realise it.

It is from his vast collection of stone bowls and vases that Imhotep clearly gathered much of his information and tried to piece together a chronology of the past, due to the paucity of other suitable written records. These bowls were all meticulously gathered and stored under­neath the Step Pyramid as a gigantic hoard. It is very unfortunate that most of them were smashed after a few thousand years, when some of the subterranean ceilings collapsed on to them. The majority of the pieces are in storehouses or sheds at the Saqqara site, as I was able to discover after a considerable amount of enquiry. Many of the choice and unbroken pieces are of course in museums. But the bulk of the 40,000 bowls and vases are still at Saqqara. I was told that I might, if proper reasons were given, be allowed access to these objects to study them, but of course application is a long process, and it is not at all clear that there are proper facilities available to study tens of thousands of pieces of bowls and vases in what might be very cramped storage conditions. One would need to spread numerous examples out on big surfaces, and probably there are no such surfaces, and the lighting might not be terribly good, and the storehouses would undoubtedly be very hot to work in for hours at a time. So, guess what, I never got around to it. Which is not to say that I have given up on the idea, but it might be the dream that never happens.

I have more reasons than mere chronology to want to study the bowls and vases. Apart from the alabaster ones, which are made of an extremely soft material and were easy to fashion, the objects tend to be made of very hard stones in ways that seem technologically impossible. Some of them have curled lips, as if they had been shaped from clay; many of the hardest stones have hollow spaces which extend and curve upwards on the inside in such a way that no one can imagine any drill tool that could conceivably have created them, or could do so even today. The ones made of the hardest stones would have required diamond drills in order for them to have been hollowed out. (In fact, in my earlier book, The Crystal Sun, I dealt with this issue and presented the evidence that the ancient Egyptians had the use of what we call industrial diamonds. They did not have diamonds as gems, and they had no idea that the hard black stones that we call industrial diamonds had any gem qualities. But they were able to use them for drill tips.)

The technology used to create those stone bowls and vases not carved from soft alabaster is a remarkable technology, the true details of which are known to very few people. The answer to the riddle is that they were probably cast, not carved or ground. The reason why lips could be curled as if they had been made of clay, despite being of solid stone, is because those lips were curled while the material was still soft. (See ­Plates 37a and 37b and Figure 44 for an example of one made of schist, with 'folded lips', which was excavated by Walter Emery at Saqqara.) At a very early stage, even before the so-called 'First Dvnasty', there was a secret, rovally controlled technology to manufacture these mirac­ulous bowls from liquid stone, which was then cast in moulds made from clay, or otherwise was moulded on potters' wheels while wet and soft, before it went hard. This technology was under the protection of the god Khnum, which is why his image appears on some of the bowls…. Khnum is often portrayed operating a potter's wheel. The same technology was sometimes used for statues made of diorite and other ­hard stone materials. This technology has been rediscovered in modern ­times by the French chemist, Joseph Davidovits. He has named it 'geopolymeric' chemistry. That is because an inorganic polymeric reaction takes place while the material is wet. The Egyptians used weathered rock particles, which could be easily disaggregated, formed a very fine aggregate, then added the necessary catalyst with water, and this formed a kind of polymeric concrete which sets hard. It is impossible to tell the difference between carved stone and cast stone with any chemical ­analysis or by X-ray diffraction analysis, as the results are identical. Davidovits began his professional life as an organic polymer chemist ­(his PhD thesis was on polyurethane), but he decided he would invent an inorganic polymer. Everybody thought that was impossible, and was a contradiction in terms, the word 'polymer' being, they thought, partially defined by the necessity of its being organic. However, Davidovits went on to invent a series of inorganic polymers. And by ^­doing so, he was able to recreate some of the lost technology of early Egyptian stone bowl and vase manufacture. ….