egabriel's blog

Even with the invention of printing

Yet, there was another reason for the loss of all those invaluable scrolls. Generally, papyrus scrolls don’t last more than a couple of centuries. Those scrolls that were chosen not to be copied on parchment  during the times of Christianity did not survive.

Even with the invention of printing European hand-written manuscript writing kept on going for another century. Printing was expensive and not accessible for everybody at those times.  Each time when a copy of a document was created more and more errors were introduced with each copy. That is why, specialists have to compare different versions of the same document to figure out the most authentic parts of a document.  As for private and governmental documents, they remained handwritten until the invention of the typewriter in the 19th century.

First ancient manuscripts

Originally, all documents and books were written by hand.  This type of manuscripts lasted until the invention of printing in China in the 7th century and later in Europe in about 1450.  The material used for hand-written ancient manuscripts differed depending on the geographical location.  The ones that were preserved till our days included papyrus, various parchments, and even palm leaves and birch bark documents.

First ancient manuscripts were discovered in Egyptian tombs and mausoleums. They were either located inside the sarcophagi or even reused as  mummy wrappings.  Archeologists and adventurers were discovering scrolls of manuscripts in bizarre places like dry caves, desert burials, or within the secretly buried jars.

The world of antiquity was famous for its large libraries, the most famous and largest of which was the  Library of Alexandria.  There is a certain irony that most of the scrolls that were kept in these huge storage all over the ancient world were lost forever. They were either burnt in fire or destroyed during wars and turmoil.

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Famous Book of the Dead

In the middle of 19th century European learned about very complex and sophisticated concept of afterlife that existed in ancient Egypt.  In 1842 when German Egyptologist Karl Richard Lepsius published the selection of texts that included Egyptian collection of funeral hymns, spells, and instructions to allow the deceased to pass through obstacles in the afterlife. The book became an instant bestseller and part of its fame belongs to the title that Lepsius gave to the selected manuscripts. He simply called them - "The Book of the Dead", deriving the name from the one of the most important spells in the ancient texts.

The original texts that were included in the book of the dead were most commonly found in the coffin or burial chamber of the deceased ancient Egyptian. There were written on the papyrus scrolls. Archeologists learned that these "prequels" of funeral poems were created in advance with with spaces being left for the name of the deceased to be written in later.

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Fans of conspiracy theories

It seems that everything Google has instant first love attraction. Sometimes we even see things that don’t exist because of that kind of trust we have in the number 1 search engine company.  I am talking about the recent "discovery" of Atlantis.

It all started when some Big Foot believer from United Kingdom was spending too much time on Google Earth.  Mind you, the guy, whose name is Bernie Bamford, is an aeronautical engineer.  While browsing the wondrous software, that recently added above and below ocean views, he observed a grid of lines near the coast of West Africa.

What would you do next? Probably, nothing.  Well, Bernie called tabloid Sun paper and proclaimed that he just discovered lost Atlantis! Why, Atlantis? Because wise Plato mentioned its location somewhere nearby a couple of thousand years ago.

 A number of other newspapers kept printing articles left and right about the discovery. Even after Google stated that the lines Bernie had seen, represented sonar data collected from boats.  That lade to a new salvo of articles hinting that Google "hides" something from general public.

You just can’t please them all. Say no to Lemuria searchers, and you immediately have to deal with the fans of conspiracy theories.  Why would Google hide Atlantis? After all, thanks to Google Earth, experts already discovered pristine forest in Mozambique and an ancient Roman villa.

 

Mysterious texts in Book of Gates

One of the sacred funerary texts found in the tombs and pyramids along with the Book of the Dead is the famous Book of Gates.  Overall, this secret and mysterious manuscipt appears in the times of the New Kingdom, somewhere between 16th and 11th centuries B.C. Book of Gates is accompanying the Book of the Dead which facilitates the passage of a newly deceased into the next world. It is also most famous for depiction of the human races. In fact, Book of Gates tells us what races are known to ancient Egyptians. They are presented as four men entering the next world and names them as  Syrians, Nubians, Lybians and Egyptians races.

There are some mysterious texts in Book of Gates that we still don’t fully understand.  In the Book of Gates a deceased soul is guided to follow the journey of the sun through the underworld during the night. The text explains that at different stages of the journey  the soul must pass through a series of gates.  Book of Gates tells us that each gate is guarded by a different goddess and that a soul has to recognize her and act according to the character of that goddess. If the soul does what it is supposed to do then it will pass unharmed. It it makes mistakes then it will wind up in a lake of fire and face eternal torment.

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All attempts ended in vain

I found an interesting story about another lost land while doing my web analytics research. This legend surfaced in Canada during French colonization in the the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. French colonists in North America learned from Algonquin Indians that somewhere in the north, there was a mythical kingdom which is inhabited by blond men rich with gold and furs. Algonquin Indians even had a name for this land - Kingdom of Saguenay. One of the Indian Chiefs named Donnacona also told a lot of stories about this kingdom while being imprisoned in France in the 30s of the sixteenth century. Donnaconna claimed that blond inhabitants of the kingdom also have in their posession great mines of silver and gold.

French colonists tried hard to find kingdom of Saguenay, but all their attempts ended in vain. Up until now, specialists speculate about the source of this legend. Some even say that it was an ancient pre-Colombian settlement of Europeans. They believe that Indian oral tradition referred to Viking settlements in America, although this has not been definitely proven.

Nevertheless the name Saguenay exists in many modern canadian placenames. One of the regions in Quebec even refers to itself as Kingdom of Saguenay trying to attract tourists and for other marketing purposes.

Ancient oral traditions

It is very interesting phenomenon: mostly all Austronesian people, Including Polynesian trace their origin to some mystical land that they call Hawaiki. While doing my research for web analytics company, I found something else. Polynesian cultures have ancient oral traditions that say that they migrated from their homeland Hawaiki to the islands in the Pacific Ocean in open canoes. Maori people of New Zealand also trace their ancestry to groups of people who traveled from Hawaiki in open canoes.

In the same oral traditions the legendary land of Hawaiki also serves like some kind of place where the spirits of Polynesian people return to after death. In New Zealand Maori people even give possible pointers to the direction in which Hawaiki may like.

Before the advent of DNA analysis many anthropologists doubted that a deliberate migration in open canoes ever happened. They preferred to believe that the migration occurred accidentally when seafarers became lost and drifted to uninhabited shores.

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Magnificent cities

While researching myths and legends of the Renaissance period in archives of local funeral home directory, I found a new one - about cities of Cibola and Quivra. According to the legend, around the year 1150 when the Moors conquered Merida, Spain, seven Cathlic bishops fled the city, not only to save their own lives but also to prevent the Muslims from capturing sacred religious relics.

Many years later rumor appeared, that in an unknown place these bishops found the cities of Cibola and Quivra. Then new details appeared in this newborn myth - these cities grew rich mainly from gold and precious stones. Myth kept on growing, and soon instead of 2 cities, there were seven - for each bishop who had left Merida. And all seven cities were magnificent and made of gold.

Surprisingly, this naive myth fueled many expeditions in the Old World in search of the mythical cities during the following centuries. In 1528 Spanish four survivors of unsuccessful expedition to Florida said that they had heard from Native Americans stories of cities with great riches somewhere in the north.

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The concept of a hidden land

Shambhala teachings inspired numerous educational, artistic, and spiritual institutions, including Naropa University, Shambhala Training, Shambhala Sun, the Shambhala School, Shambhala Institute, and many others.

Tibet was largely closed to outsiders until very recently, and so what information was available about the tradition of Shambhala was haphazard at best. The first information that reached western civilization about Shambhala came from the Portuguese Catholic missionaries Joao Cabral and Estevao Cacella who had heard about Shambala and thought it was another name for China. In 1627 they headed to Tashilhunpo, the seat of the Panchen Lama and, discovering their mistake, returned to India.

Later esoteric writers further emphasized and elaborated on the concept of a hidden land inhabited by a hidden mystic brotherhood whose members labor for the good of humanity. There were numerous Tibetan expeditions to discover Shambhala, but all in vain. 

Popular tourist attractions

It is getting funnier, though. As years rolled by, several locations in the Buddhist Himalaya between northern India and Tibet claimed to be the basis for Hilton’s legend, largely to attract tourism. A popularly believed inspiration for Shangri-La is the Hunza Valley in northern Pakistan, close to the Tibetan border, which Hilton visited a few years before Lost Horizon was published. Being an isolated green valley surrounded by mountains, enclosed on the western end of the Himalayas, it closely matches the description in the novel. A Shangri-La resort in the nearby Skardu valley is another popular tourist attraction.

A number of modern Shangri-La pseudo-legends have developed since 1933 in the wake of the novel and the film made from it. Even crazy Nazis had an enthusiasm for Shangri-La, where they hoped to find an ancient master race, similar to the Nordic race, unspoiled by Buddhism. They sent one understandably unsuccessful expedition to Tibet in 1938.

As of today, various places in China still claim the title, including the tourist destinations of Lijiang and Zhongdian. Sichuan and Tibet also claim the real Shangri-La was in its territory. In 2001, Tibet Autonomous Region proposed that the three regions optimise all Shangri-la tourism resources and promote them as one. Also in 2001, Zhongdian County in northwestern Yunnan officially renamed itself Shangri-La County. Country of Bhutan, which was until now isolated from outside world and has its unique form of Tibetan Buddhism, has been hailed as the last Shangri-La.