The Opet Festival of Ancient Egypt: Has it been derived from the Jagannatha Rathyatra of Puri, India? (cont.)
By Bibhu Dev Misra (IIT, IIM)
Interestingly, the
people of Egypt themselves claimed to have come from a land called
‘Puanit’ (corrupted to ‘Punt’) located on the
shores of the Indian Ocean. Punt can be reached leading off the Red
Sea, in a south-east direction, and is described by the scholar Dr.
Adolf Erman as ‘a distant country washed by the great seas,
full of valleys, incense, balsum, precious metals and stones; rich in
animals, cheetahs, panthers, dog-headed apes and long tailed monkeys,
winged creatures with strange feathers to fly up to the boughs of
wonderful trees, especially the incense tree and the coconut trees.’
Col.
Henry Steel Olcott, a former president of the
Theosophical Society, explained in the March, 1881 edition of The
Theosophist that, “by the pictorial hieroglyphic
inscription found on the walls of the temple of the Queen Haslitop
(Hatshepsut) at Der-el-babri, we see that this Punt can be no other
than India. For many ages the Egyptians traded with their old homes,
and the reference here made by them to the names of the Princes of
Punt and its fauna and flora, especially the nomenclature of
various precious woods to be found but in India, leave us
scarcely room for the smallest doubt that the old civilization of
Egypt is the direct outcome of that the older India."[3].
The expedition of Hatshepsut to the land of Punt was done primarily
with the objective of acquiring incense and a number of exotic goods,
which she dedicated to Amun, the presiding diety of Thebes. Does that
not indicate that ‘Punt’ and ‘Amun’ may
somehow be connected? Is it possible that Hatshepsut felt that by
bringing these items from the land of her forefathers, and from the
place where Amun himself had originated, she would be performing a
great service to her ‘father’, Amun, and thereby acquire
his blessings.
Many questions are
raised here. If Punt is India, then when did the ancient Egyptians
migrate to the shores of the Nile from Punt? If we assume that the
migration took place sometime around 3000 BC, at the beginning of the
‘Kali Yuga’, then who built the Giza Pyamids? Since the
Pyramid complex at Giza has now been dated to around 10,500 BC
(Hancock and Bauval), and since this magnificent pyramid complex is
entirely devoid of any hieroglyphic engravings or inscriptions, which
is very unlike the Egyptian pysche, it raises the question whether
the Giza Pyramid complex was built by the ancient Egyptians or by
others before them. Is it possible that was it built by a ‘race
of giants’ who built similar megalithic structures around the
world, including many of them in Mesoamerica? Maybe the arrival of
the ancient Egyptians to the shores of the Nile from the distant Punt
displaced this ‘race of giants’ and a new civilization
was initiated? Whatever be the truth about ancient Egypt, it is clear
that we are barely scratching the surface of it in the present times.
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