Nexus - 0602 - New Times Magazine-pages

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— STAR FIRE — THE GOLD OF THE GODS STAR FIRE — GOLD Gops THE THE The Egyptian Master Craftsmen produced white powder gold through eighteen Pharaonic dynasties out of a secret temple laboratory inside a mountain on the Sinai Peninsula. Part 3 of 3 y the 1880s, the governing establishments of Christendom were dreading the very word ‘archaeologist’. And so, archaeological digs were brought under strict control, and their funding and undertakings had to be approved by newly desig- nated authorities. One of these, the Egypt Exploration Fund, was established in Britain in 1891, and on the very first page of its Memorandum and Articles of Association it is stated that the Fund's objective is to promote excavation work "for the purpose of elucidating or illustrat- ing the Old Testament narrative". In short, this meant that if something was found which could be used to support the scriptural teaching, then we (the public) would be informed. Anything which did not support the Church interpretation of the Bible was not destined to see the light in the public domain. Now we are going to take a look at one of the monumental finds from that era—a dis- covery about which very little is known to people at large. In fact, it is probably the most important biblical discovery ever made and it has stunning implications far beyond the discovery itself, for this is the ultimate story of the Phoenix and the Fire-stone. Within the Book of Exodus, a significant biblical mountain is named. It sits in the extensive range of the Sinai Peninsula—the upturned triangular land-mass which lies above the Red Sea between the Gulf of Suez and the Gulf of Aqabah. In the Old Testament, the mountain is firstly called Mount Horeb, then it is called Mount Sinai, and is subsequently called Horeb again as the story progresses. The story, of course, is that of Moses and the Israelite exodus from Egypt. This was the mountain upon which, according to Exodus, Moses saw the burning bush; the mountain where he talked with Jehovah; and the place where he received the Ten Commandments and the Tables of Testimony. Something that we should recognise at this stage is that at the time of Moses (roughly 1350 BC) there was no mountain called Mount Sinai. There was no mountain by that name even in the days of Jesus, nor even for another 300 years. It should also be said that the Old Testament which is familiar to us today is a translation from a Hebrew text com- piled only 1,000 years ago, and it is therefore a few centuries younger even than the canonical New Testament. The mountain now generally known as Mount Sinai sits in the south of the peninsula, quite near to the bottom point of the upturned triangle. It was given its name in the 4th century AD by a mission of Greek Christian monks, 1,700 years after the time of Moses. It is now sometimes called Gebel Musa (or Mount of Moses), and a small Christian retreat, St Catherine's Monastery, still exists there. But, was this the Sinai mountain which the Bible calls Mount Horeb? Well, it transpires that it was not. The Book of Exodus goes into some detail to explain the route taken by Moses and the Israelites from the Nile Delta land of Goshen, down across Sinai, across the wilderness regions of Shur and Paran, to the land of Midian (which is to the north of present-day Jordan). From this route it becomes very easy to identify the location of Mount Horeb. It sits a good deal north of Gebel Musa. The word horeb simply means ‘desert’, and the great desert mountain which soars to over 2,600 feet within a high stone plateau above the Plain of Paran is today called Serabit—or, to be more precise, Serabit el-Khadim (the Prominence of the Khadim). In the late 1890s, the British Egyptologist Sir William Flinders Petrie, a professor at the University College, London, applied to the Egypt Exploration Fund to take an expedition into Sinai. By January 1904, he and his team were in Sinai, and in March of that year they From a lecture presented by Sir Laurence Gardner, Kt St Gm., KCD, KT St A. at the 1998 NEXUS Conference held in Sydney, 25-26 July Transcript © Sir Laurence Gardner 1998 From a lecture presented by Sir Laurence Gardner, Kt St Gm., KCD, KT St A. NEXUS - 55 FEBRUARY — MARCH 1999