Old Kingdom

In the eadiest known paintings, the primitive cave paintings, paint was appHed directly onto the cave wall, with tittle or no preparation. As early as the Old Kingdom in ancient Egypt, however, wall surfaces were specially prepared using a coating of plaster. In time, the refinement and complexity of the preparation layers increased until in the Renaissance several layers of different composition and fineness were superimposed. Other preparations used, especially in the Far East, consisted of a clay layer. 

U. Weser, Y. Kaup, H. Etspuler, J. Roller, U. Baumer, Embalming in the old kingdom of Pharaonic Egypt, Analytical Chemistry, 70, 511A 516A (1998). 

The cult of Isis was developed in ancient Egypt no later than the Third Dynasty of the Old Kingdom, approximately 2780 B.C., and represents one of the earliest formal articulations of the entropic and backward ideology of mother-worship. As known to the Priesthood of the Temple of Isis — true believers themselves — the Isis cult formalizes the elements of a capability for social control, exploitation, and destruction of creative free will in subject populations. The elements include ... 

The legendary founder of western alchemy, who is thought to have been a priest in Old Kingdom Egypt. The writings ascribed to him were later dated by Isaac Casaubon in 1614 to the first centuries after Christ, although the wisdom they contain may be much older. 

Below Unit B a silty sand layer (Unit C) was encountered in the cores taken between the mouth of the Great Wadi and the center of the Kom el Ahmr. Unit C contained a sequence of Old Kingdom to late Predynastic artifacts dating from about 2500 B.C. to 3200 B.C. Below Unit C, a very compact, well-sorted thick layer of Nile clay and sand was encountered (Unit N). No cores or trenches reached below this sedimentary deposit. Unit N contained occasional Predynastic ceramic and flint artifacts. Samples were collected from each 10-15-cm auger cut within each sedimentary unit in each core or trench. In addition, numerous samples of the Neonile deposits and other sediments from the nearby low desert and Great Wadi were taken for analysis. 

It was in Imhotep s day that the Heliopolian cult of Amun established the primary philosophies of Old Kingdom Egypt. They formalized these philosophies in the Pyramid Texts, so-called because pharaohs of the fifth and sixth dynasties wrote them in seven pyramids. These dynasties existed in the period 2800BCE to 2470BCE. 

In contrast, the Jews objectively documented their story through wide study of the Bible and candid writings of the great Jewish alchemists. Jewish alchemy seemed to start at the Hyksos invasion of Egypt in 1801BCE when the Israelites participated in the royal secrets of the Philosophers Stone, known to the Old Kingdom Pharaohs. 

As we saw in the last chapter, the Egyptians knew the true secret of the Philosophers Stone at the time of Imhotep, if not earlier. The annual rituals of Unas described in Chapter 16 used the Philosophers Stone to refresh the spirit of the Pharaoh and thereby to refresh the order and fertility of the land. The Egyptian king-making ceremonies were rites that introduced the Philosophers Stone to the new Pharaoh. They described how the Old Kingdom Pharaohs never died, but ascended a stairway to heaven. Strangely, true to the tradition, the bodies of the oldest Pharaohs and their high priests remain undiscovered. 

The texts of the Old Kingdom gave the Philosophers Stone many names. It was called the golden tear from the eye of Horus, that which issues from the mouth of the Creator (the Christian Word), and the spittle or the semen of the Father in Heaven. With the rise of the Heliopolian Amun, it later became the hidden Light, the unknowable name of the God whose title was Amun and whose symbol was the ram. 

Old Kingdom Pharaohs and priests knew of the Philosophers Stone in Egypt from at least the time of Imhotep around 2800BCE. The Israelites learnt of it in Egypt when they took part in the Hyksos invasion following provocation by the Pharaoh Sesostris I. 

The construction of the Old Kingdom Pyramids has been the subject of wide-ranging speculation shading off into the mysticism of pyramidology. Two notions worth examining are firstly, that their construction techniques evolved only very gradually in surroundings of almost immutable conservatism, hidebound by tradition and second, that they were carried out at an almost superhuman scale and accuracy. 

The Old Kingdom monuments have a curiously modern feel and their scale couples them to latter-day civil engineering solutions. However inappropriate it may be, it is impossible not to back-engineer our own concepts into the mindsets of the ancients so alien to us now. Simultaneously, some things unfathomable may be carried forward to us - conventions of construction and excavation that we maintain but that relate only to some requirement long since lost. Their resolution of the problems of stability must have stemmed from the close observations of slope failures, familiar from the bank collapses in the canal systems and the shifting sands of the Nile delta. They grasped patterns and projected them onto the unknown conditions that they wished to control and their built-up multi-cored forms weathered with veneers of polished stone have lasted millennia. 

Daniel (1987) Daniel, Floreal Les polychromes eg)rptiennes de I Ancien Empire du Musee du Louvre etude des pigments (Egyptian polychromes of the Old Kingdom in the Louvre study... 

Great social, political, and technical changes of the twentieth century have a common root in the most remarkable development that has affected humans since 1900 the unprecedented mnltiplication of our species. The world s population reached 10 million people by about 3000 b.c., the era just preceding the Old Kingdom s pyramid builders. Then it took it some 2,500 years to surpass 100 million around the time of the Athenian splendor, and the 1 billion mark was reached just a few years after the beginning of the nineteenth century, during the time of the Napoleonic expansion (fig. 10.1). Growth rates for the last two intervals translate, to a mere 0.09% and 0.18% per year, respectively. 

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