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36 answered, “Behold, the glory thereof cannot be seen, [but] Authority, Perception and Justice are with him.” Those ideal times, Ipu-Wer stated in his prophecy, will be preceded by their own messianic birth pangs: “Confusion will set throughout the land, in tumultuous noise one will kill the other, the many will kill the few.” People will ask: “Does the Shepherd desire death?” No, he answered, “it is the land that commands death,” but after years of strife, righ- teousness and proper worship will prevail. This, the papyrus concluded, was “What Ipu-Wer said when he responded to the majesty of the All-Lord.” If not just the description of events and the messianic prophecies, but also the choice of wording in that ancient Egyptian papyrus seem astounding, there is more to come. Scholars are aware of the existence of another prophetic/ messianic text that reached us from ancient Egypt, but be- lieve that it was really composed after the events and only pretends to be prophetic by dating itself to an earlier time. To be specific, while the text purports to relate prophecies made at the time of Sneferu, a Fourth Dynasty pharaoh (circa 2600 B.C.E.), Egyptologists believe that it was actually written in the time of Amenemhet I of the Twelfth Dynasty (circa 2000 B.C.E.)—after the events that it pretends to prophecy. Even so, the “prophecies” serve to confirm those prior occur- rences; and many details and the very wording of the predic- tions can best be described as chilling. The prophecies are purported to be told to King Sneferu by a “great seer-priest” named Nefer-Rohu, “a man of rank, a scribe competent with his fingers.” Summoned to the king to foretell the future, Nefer-Rohu “stretched forth his hand for the box of writing equipment, he drew forth a scroll of papy- rus,” and then began to write what he was envisioning, in a Nostradamus-like manner: Behold, there is something about which men speak; It is terrifying... What will be done was never done before. The Earth is completely perished. The land is damaged, no remainder exists. THE END OF DAYS