Issue No. 602
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5 - 11 September 2002 Issue No. 602 Heritage |
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Dig days: Meeting Mark Lehner
You can sometimes have a brother who is not of your blood. I would like you to meet my brother, Mark Lehner, the famous American archaeologist who has been excavating at Giza for the past 20 years. His specialty is pyramids, and his contributions have been many. We met as young men, and in many ways one could say we grew up together, excavating, working and lecturing all over the world.
We first met at a party at the house of a mutual friend in 1974. He had come all the way from his home state of North Dakota to study for a year at the American University in Cairo (AUC). He was a quiet person; he told me only that he was interested in Egyptology, and I invited him to my office at the Pyramids. I was then a young archaeologist, 27 years old, and my hair was black, not white as it is now.
Mark responded to my invitation. He told me he was studying anthropology at AUC, but he said that before we could become friends he had to tell me a story. This, he said, concerned a man named Edgar Cayce, known in the United States as the "sleeping prophet". Cayce was a poor photographer, but he had another talent: he used to close his eyes, undo his necktie, enter into a trance and give medical prescriptions to people who were sick and suffering from various ailments. These prescriptions were sometimes accepted by physicians in America despite the fact that Cayce was a psychic and not a doctor.
When Edgar's son Hugh Lynn sadly became blind, Cayce took him to every available specialist. All was in vain -- no cure could be found. But Cayce succeeded where the doctors had failed. He asked his son to open his eyes, and by a miracle he could see.
Mark continued his story, telling me that on one occasion when he was asked about the past Cayce closed his eyes and related that he had been living in Egypt at the time when the legendary Atlantis was destroyed. He said that his name had been Ra-Ta, and that the people of that time collected all the knowledge and technology from the lost continent and placed it in a Hall of Records under the Sphinx. Cayce said this knowledge was used to build the Great Pyramid at Giza, and that the plans were then buried under the Sphinx's right paw.
"I came to Egypt at the expense of the Cayce Foundation to investigate this story," Mark said. "The first thing I did was to enroll at the American University to study Anthropology."
How could someone from North Dakota come to Egypt to explore a legend and end up as a professor at the University of Chicago and a respected authority on Pyramids? This is part of our adventure together in archaeology.
I told Mark that no one could possibly believe this story because it had no scientific bases. He said that nevertheless thousands of people in America did believe it, and he told me about the foundation at Virginia Beach headed by Hugh Lynn Cayce. I had recently graduated from the Greek and Roman department at the Faculty of Fine Arts at Alexandria University, and as a young archaeologist I naturally received the story with scepticism. It was an American hallucination, I thought.
In 1975 Hugh Lynn Cayce arrived in Egypt, and Mark introduced us. He firmly believed what his father said about the past. Mark, though, admitted that his beliefs about the past were changing as a result of his experience with history and archaeology at Giza and his studies of ancient Egypt as a whole, but he was under pressure from the Cayce Foundation. I witnessed a night when Hugh Lynn and more than 300 supporters were given permission to meditate inside the Great Pyramid. We organised a conference attended by such scholars as Ahmed El-Sawi and the late Nasif Hassan, who gave talks on Egyptology and Egyptian history. Of course, we did not succeed in changing their minds. The whole group still believed that the Hall of Records was located under the right paw of the Sphinx.
Later members of the Stanford Research Institute from Menlo Park, California, looked under the right paw of the Sphinx with remote sensing equipment. They claimed there was an anomaly, and asked the Egyptian Antiquities Organisation for permission to drill into the paw. Their mission was unsuccessful: no Hall of Records was found.
I thought that was the end of the story, but the Cayce group did not lose hope. They still believed that the secrets of Atlantis were somewhere near the Sphinx. Two years later Mark and I went on a lecture tour of 10 or so sites in the United States. The tour was interesting because Mark had been studying Egyptology and had come to believe the Cayce story was a myth. I provided evidence that the Sphinx dated from the reign of Khafre and said there was no evidence at all of a lost civilisation.
The Sphinx still provokes powerful legends. With the strong face of a Pharaoh and the body of a lion, a cobra on his forehead and wearing the nemes head dress, it represents the power of kingship. In ancient Egypt the Sphinx was a symbol of the nation.
Mark and I continued our respective careers in archaeology. First I went for my PhD at the University of Pennsylvania, and later Mark studied for his PhD under Williams Kelly Simpson at Yale. We continued to lecture and discuss ancient Egypt -- especially the Sphinx and the Pyramids -- with all kinds of people, both large audiences and small groups of close friends. Mark has become a hardened sceptic and critic of so-called "New Age" ideas.
In Santa Barbara, California, I heard a whole range of weird ideas about Egypt. And I met another American prophet.
To be continued...
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