The Straight and Narrow Way

Examining the straitjacket of academic orthodoxy in Egyptology

Imagine Egyptology as a grand, ancient city enclosed by towering walls and guarded by an exclusive, narrow gate. This gate represents the academic orthodoxy of the field, a realm accessible only to those who adhere to stringent rules and traditions. It's like the biblical directive to 'enter through the strait gate and the narrow way'—a demanding, restrictive path open only to those who meet a certain standard. This exclusivity, while maintaining the discipline's integrity, also limits the diversity of perspectives and voices within the field.

For years, this narrow gate has been the sole arbiter of who gains entry into the Egyptological community. At the beginning of the 21st century, what I call the leaders of the 'isms'—feminism, Marxism, and Decolonialism—started to man, or should I say person, the gate. In their eyes, they were making the gate wider and more accessible to those previously excluded, but it is just as narrow as it ever was. It's just the passwords that have changed; no matter who the gatekeepers are, any discussion of sacred numbers is forbidden. It's a taboo topic.

Like all intellectual taboos, this taboo is unwritten but very effective. There is an astonishing reluctance to explore ideas that challenge established norms about the use of numbers in ancient Egypt. Of course, there are reasons for this reluctance. In this article, I will outline the main ones.

1. The Dual Nature of Numbers

For modern archaeologists and Egyptologists, who adhere to the straight and narrow path of orthodoxy, numbers are merely quantifiers, practical tools of everyday life, and facilitators of trade and taxes. Numbers are connected to the scientific method and are used as descriptors for scientific verification. Buildings are now measured to the nanometre, but still, no one knows what their dimensions and layout mean.

Sacred numbers are those identified by Kurt Sethe in 1916 – 1,2,3,4,5,7,8,9,10 and 12.

Modern Egyptologists exhibit a range of attitudes towards sacred numbers in ancient Egyptian culture, often balancing between respect for ancient traditions and critical academic scepticism. Sacred numbers, such as 3, 7, and 12, frequently appear in ancient Egyptian texts and monuments, suggesting that these numbers held significant symbolic or religious meaning. For instance, the number 3 often represented plurality, while seven was associated with perfection and completeness, as seen in the seven sacred oils used in rituals or the seven scorpions that protected the goddess Isis.

However, many contemporary scholars approach these ideas with caution. They recognise the symbolic importance of numbers in Egyptian religious and cultural contexts but are wary of attributing too much esoteric significance without concrete evidence. For example, Egyptologist Dr Toby Wilkinson discussed how numbers in Egyptian texts were sometimes used more for practical purposes, such as architectural design, than purely mystical reasons.

Some Egyptologists like Dr. Mark Lehner argue that the emphasis on sacred numbers might reflect more about modern interpretations than ancient beliefs. They suggest that while numbers certainly played a role in Egyptian thought, the focus should be on understanding their practical applications within the culture, such as in measurements and calendrical systems, rather than projecting modern numerological theories onto the ancient past.

So, while the idea of sacred numbers is acknowledged, modern Egyptologists often prioritise a grounded understanding of ancient Egyptian use of numbers, emphasising practicality over mysticism.

2. The Abrahamic Faiths and Jewish Number Mysticism

All the Abrahamic faiths include the Bible Old Testament in their religious canon, and the Old Testament is full of numbers; there is even a book called Numbers. The book of Numbers is probably the least well-researched and least understood of the first five books of the Old Testament, the Pentateuch. The book, which follows from the book of Exodus's description of the Israelites leaving Egypt, is a combination of narrative and laws that takes place while Moses and his people wander in the wilderness. Scholar Calam Carmichael says that the Book of Numbers is part of the Israelis' creation of a separate and new identity from their Egyptian masters, particularly the pharaoh.

Take the instructions for the creation of the Tabernacle, for instance, the tent that was the forerunner of the temple that would eventually be built in Jerusalem. The list of instructions for building is well known for its numerical detail. According to the Book of Exodus, it was to be constructed of ten curtains, each twenty-eight cubits long and four cubits wide, each made from finely twisted linen and blue, purple and scarlet yarn, and each curtain was to have fifty loops of blue material along the edge which in turn was to be secured with fifty golden clasps. Five of these curtains were to be joined to make the north side of the tent, and five were to be joined to make the south side of the tent. The east and west sides of the tent were to be constructed of eleven curtains, each thirty cubits long and four cubits wide and made of goat hair. Each curtain was to have fifty loops secured with fifty bronze clasps. The upright frames were made of acacia wood; each was to be ten cubits long and a half wide. Twenty frames were required for the south side, with forty silver bases under them, two bases for each frame, and another twenty more for the north side. There were to be six frames for the west end and six for the east; two were to be doubled and fitted with a single ring, making eight frames and sixteen silver bases. Ten cross frames were to be added to these frames, five to the West and five to the east, with a central frame overlaid with gold. Inside the tent, the inner shrine, the Holy of Holies, which housed the Ark of the Covenant, there was to be a veil suspended by four pillars and in the outer chamber, the "Holy Place," there was to be a lamp-stand made of four almond-shaped bowls with six branches, each holding three almond-shaped bowls making twenty bowls in all.

These dimensions and materials were of the utmost importance to those who built the Tabernacle and wrote down its instructions. The fact that we do not understand their significance does not make their carefully thought out and executed plans bizarre or an act of ignorant superstition. If we could understand the meaning they placed on these precise dimensions and materials, we would gain a powerful insight into their beliefs. However, we can be sure that the measurements were based on the belief that the tent would acquire some desired supernatural quality or power by following the required plan.

Another but different type of example is the famous first chapter of the Book of Ezekiel, which begins with Ezekiel's vision of the open heavens with four creatures carrying God's throne. Ezekiel sees four human creatures in the vision, each with four faces and four wings. The beasts had legs with a calf's hooves and human hands underneath their wings. Their wings were joined together so that the creatures moved forward in Unison. The face to the front was that of a man, and the face to the right was that of a lion. The face to the left was that of a bull; to the back was that of an eagle. This scene establishes a fourfold relationship between the heavens and the earth and is the beginning of a long and inventive history of number symbolism in the Jewish tradition, which in turn led to the development of the Kabbalah, Tarot and what has become known as sacred geometry which ascribes symbolic and sacred meanings to specific geometric shapes and certain geometric proportions in religious structures.

These ancient Judaeo-Christian beliefs concerning the importance or number symbolism and, indeed, the magical power of specific numbers are the origins of Judeao-Christian occult tradition that goes back at least to Renaissance times when Marsilio Ficino developed a Christian Hermeticism and Pico della Mirandola developed a Christian form of Kabbalism.

3. The Occultist Tradition

The occultist tradition, as we have already seen, comes out of the religious texts of the Abrahamic faiths. The oldest occultist belief system in the West is Jewish esotericism, which led to the development of the Kabala and Hermeticism. Religious authorities have battled against occultism and heresy from their foundation, but the modern trend in number mysticism and the belief in sacred geometry, the belief that ascribes symbolic and sacred meanings to specific geometric shapes and certain geometric proportions, could be said to have started by accident, and by a scientist of all people.

When Sir Isaac Newton (1643-1727) was trying to find the exact length of the earth's circumference for his work on gravity, he turned to the work of John Greaves (1602– 1652), an English mathematician, astronomer and antiquary who measured the Great Pyramid in 1638. Professor Greaves, an Oxford scholar, was the first to suggest that the pyramid was measured in what he called 'pyramid inches' in his book Pyramidographia, and the rest, as they say, is history; Newton eventually used the work of the French astronomer Jean Piccard to complete his work on gravity but the 'pyramid inch' lived on and developed a life of its own.

4. Number Mysticism and the Great Pyramid

The real expansion of the number of mischief started with John Taylor (1781-1864). He was a man fascinated by all things pyramid. In 1859, he published The Great Pyramid: Why and who built it? - a sound enough premise for any book on the pyramids, but unfortunately, this book was the source of all sorts of monkey business regarding numbers. Taylor was the first to introduce the idea that the pyramid's dimensions, both interior and exterior, enshrined some form of Egyptian higher wisdom. This wisdom, he said, was geometrical, astronomical, and geographical. The idea that the pyramid contained hidden treasures was not his, however. Taylor probably picked them up from two stories in Vyse's Operations Carried on at the Pyramids of Gizeh (1840), in which Vyse sets out the 10th-century tale of an Arab scholar called Masoudi. Whether the story is authentic is immaterial to our purpose; the important thing is that thanks to Vyse and Taylor, the story was written into the antiquarian canon and is still believed today.

Driven by these stories and fascinated by mathematics, Taylor asked himself why the ancient Egyptians had chosen to slope the sides of the great pyramid at roughly 51°, a slightly steeper angle than the 60° of a standard equilateral triangle. For some reason known only to him, he divided the baseline perimeter of the pyramid by twice the pyramid's height and came up with a figure close to the Greek fraction Pi (3.14159). Taylor was so convinced he had found something important he took another creative leap and concluded that the length of the pyramid base was meant to represent the circumference of the earth at the Equator, and the pyramid's height, the distance from the earth's centre to the pole. You might think that was enough creating, but Taylor did not stop there. Taylor now turned his creative powers to the unit of measurement used by the ancient Egyptians. He decided they would have expressed the pi ratio, which, if you remember from school, goes on and on, with a whole number fraction. Trial and error led him to the ratio 366: 116.5. He liked the look of the number 366 because it was a pretty decent approximation of the number of days in the solar year (365.25), and he knew the ancient Egyptians worshipped the sun. So, thinking he was onto something meaningful again, he played around with the figures and found that if he used standard British inches as his unit, then the pyramid's perimeter was not perfect, but pretty close to 366 x 100 inches.

These findings, he thought, chimed almost precisely with the thoughts of the great astronomer William Herschel, who had only recently proposed a unit of measurement fractionally larger than the standard British inch for expressing the dimensions of the earth. Herschel had rejected the French metre (now the standard scientific unit of measure of length, defined in 1790 as equal to one ten-millionth of the distance between the North Pole and the Equator) because it ignored the fact that the earth is not a perfect sphere and therefore must be wrong. Taylor was delighted by the correspondence of his ideas with the great astronomer and equally pleased by Newton's postulation that an ancient Egyptian cubit was equal to 25 British inches. This proved to him and his followers that the British inch was almost as ancient as the measures used by the ancient Egyptians and was linked in some mysterious way to the dimensions of the earth.

With all these connections, Taylor was feeling pretty satisfied with himself, but his deductions created a problem, and the problem was that, like many educated men of his class, he believed that every word in the Bible was true. This meant he believed the earth was only 4000 years old. If the Great Pyramid had been built around 2100 BC, as it was thought to be in the 19th century, it would have been built only 300 years after the world's greatest catastrophe, the Biblical Flood. However, as a first-order pragmatist, Taylor did not wrestle with the dilemma for long. Once again, his imagination came to the rescue; he decided that the Great Pyramid of Giza must have been built with God's aid but not the ancient Egyptians' gods. He chose to attribute the building of this incredible pharaonic tomb to the God of Israel.

Understandably, the British Scientific community did not agree with him; the Royal Society, whose members were Britain's most eminent men of science, politely declined his offer to address them on the subject of the pyramid, and Taylor's book was pretty much rejected, but just as the 'pyramid inch' along with all of Taylor's creative nonsense was about to die Taylor got lucky and found someone willing to believe him – the Scottish Astronomer Royal, Charles Piazzi-Symth.

4. British Isrealism

In the last weeks of his life, Taylor began an intense correspondence with the eminent Scottish scientist Charles Piazzi-Smyth. Piazzi-Smyth, a devout Christian himself, had studied Taylor's calculations and thought there was something in them. At Taylor's death, Smyth resolved to go to Egypt to confirm or disprove his new friend's theory.

Raising money for his expedition was difficult; the scientific community were suspicious of Smyth's religious motivations, so Smyth set off for Egypt with his wife in December 1864 with less money than he would have liked. Smyth was one of Britain's leading scientists and a personal friend of the Petries, who, like him, were devout Christians, fascinated by all things ancient and highly competent scientists.

By late January 1865, Smyth's team had cleaned up the interior and passages of the pyramid and set to work. The equipment Smyth used was the latest and the best money could buy. He also brought a camera of his own devising and exposed 80 plates using a magnesium flare system. Mrs Smyth, who assisted him in all his fieldwork in Egypt, was the first woman ever to be photographed inside the King's Chamber. Struggling to fulfil his brief, he called on the services of two fellow Scots engineers who happened to be passing to help him uncover the sockets at the corners of the pyramid so that he could measure the base with his cords, sextant and telescope. To calculate the latitude accurately, he climbed to the top of the pyramid with his plumb line and stayed there with his plucky wife for several nights to obtain the correct number of readings.

With their four-month permit up and money running out, the Smyths were forced back to Scotland, where Smyth worked at collating all his measurements, augmenting them with figures sent to him by his new engineer friends who had stayed behind in Egypt and writing up his findings.

Amazingly, Smyth improved the accuracy of Taylor's original estimation of pi. This convinced Smyth that Taylor was right that the Great Pyramid incorporated a scale model of the earth and that its base perimeter corresponded with the number of days in the solar year. Smyth was awarded a gold medal for his efforts from the Edinburgh Royal Society, but when he published his results to the wider world in 1865, they received a very mixed reception. The problem for Smyth's readers was not the accuracy of his measurements nor the correctness of his mathematics; Smyth made the only block-by-block study of the interior of the pyramid, and his measurements were deemed accurate by W.M.Flinders Petrie when he surveyed the pyramid in 1882; the problem was the purpose to which the results were put.

Smyth, like Taylor, was a Bible literalist, but by the second half of the nineteenth century, this view of the world was fast becoming extinct. The publication of Charles Darwin's 'On The Origin of Species' six years earlier and the work of geologists Charles Lyle and James Hutton changed the intellectual climate for good. The earth was no longer considered 4000 years old and the Bible was no longer taken literally by scientists and lay people alike. Unperturbed, Smyth continued to use the pyramid measurements to calculate the approximate distance of the earth from the sun, a figure which still crops up with regularity on many 'alternative' archaeology websites. Ultimately, Smyth died scientifically discredited but devout in his beliefs.

The demise of Taylor and Smyth did not end the flow of new pyramid theories. David Davidson, a structural engineer from Leeds, claimed that if the ancient Egyptians knew the exact length of the solar year and the sun's distance from the earth, they must have understood the forces of gravity on the planet and the speed of light. In other words, they had superior knowledge to even the scientist of his day.

Unfortunately, the school of wacky pyramid mathematics started by Taylor is still very much alive. Pi and Phi, intersecting circles and triangles, are drawn willy-nilly all over ancient monuments to make spurious claims about their origin and function, producing brigades of books lined up neatly on the shelves of the world's leading book shops and multiplying like rabbits on the internet.

6. Borchardt's Prohibition

In 1922, one man stood up against this torrent of numerical nonsense. In the months before the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun, the eminent German Egyptologist Ludwig Borchardt presented a lecture in Berlin that would set the archaeological world on its present course of number scepticism. The lecture was based on his new book, "Against the Numerical Mysticism at the Great Pyramid near Giza." It was a response to the torrid history of pyramid numerology and the stream of books flooding onto the market at the time claiming numerical divination based on the measurements from the Great Pyramid of Giza could predict everything from the atomic weights of elements to the length of pregnancy in mammals.

7. The New Age Writers and Alternatives

Pseudo-archaeology, particularly in Egyptology, refers to speculative theories and interpretations about ancient civilisations that lack credible scientific support. Often driven by sensationalism rather than evidence, pseudo-Egyptology typically involves claims about lost advanced civilisations, hidden codes, or alien involvement in ancient construction projects like the pyramids. Proponents, such as Graham Hancock and Erich von Däniken, argue that structures like the Great Pyramid of Giza reflect knowledge or technology that ancient Egyptians could not have possessed, suggesting instead the influence of forgotten super-civilisations or extraterrestrial beings.

These theories often rely on cherry-picked data and whole strings of numbers and mathematical symbols, misinterpretations of archaeological evidence, and a tendency to view ancient achievements as beyond the capabilities of early human societies. For instance, pseudo-archaeologists might argue that the precision of the pyramids or the alignment of ancient structures with celestial bodies is too advanced for the time, ignoring the extensive evidence of the Egyptians' sophisticated knowledge of mathematics, astronomy, and engineering.

While pseudo-archaeology often captivates the public imagination with its fantastical narratives, it ultimately detracts from the rigorous study of history and the remarkable achievements of ancient peoples like the Egyptians.

Once Bitten Twice Shy

The saying "once bitten, twice shy" refers to the idea that after experiencing something harmful, a person becomes more cautious of similar situations in the future. This phrase aptly describes many Egyptologists' cautious stance towards speculative theories following their experiences with 19th-century occultism, pyramidology, and the rise of modern pseudo-archaeology.

In the 19th century, as Western interest in ancient Egypt grew, so did fascination with the mystical and the esoteric. Pyramidology, the belief that the Great Pyramid of Giza encoded hidden messages or divine knowledge, flourished alongside various occult movements. These ideas often lacked rigorous evidence and were rooted more in imagination than in fact, leading to widespread misconceptions about ancient Egyptian culture and history.

Understandably, due to these early experiences, Egyptologists became increasingly sceptical of unscientific claims, recognising the need for a more disciplined approach to studying the past.

But, this caution has become a taboo, a prohibition that kerbs new work in the area of sacred numbers.

The time is right for breaking this taboo. Join me as I challenge the academic consensus, floor the 'isms' that dominate Egyptology today, and break through the prevailing cultural malaise.