Facts & Ideas from A Stone's Throw

A Stone’s Throw is a book about stones and memory, about what we preserve and what we discard, about the claim of the past on the present. Stones are often the carriers of that past, and their influence is not limited to archaic mythologies. The foundation stone of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, the Washington Monument, and the sacred Kaaba stone in Mecca are examples of ancient symbols pressing their way into modern life. They lie at the heart of the world’s most troubling conflicts. Their gravity reaches across the ages we’ve tried to forget, peels back the facade of the present, and reveals the past still working out its unfinished dreams.

Stones inspire myths, which in turn create the histories of the human spirit. But myths are necessarily complex and contentious; their narratives interweave with the details of archaeology, anthropology, literature, religion, and many other fields of inquiry. Myths, which are impossible to untangle from the clamor of voices that would lay claim to truth, are never true to fact, as facts are never the whole truth. We craft persuasive tales from fragments of the past, from silhouettes, from footprints in the sand muddied by countless crossing tracks. We make interpretations, we reconstruct the old voices. And when we speak in those voices, which are also our own, the dialect of our discourse is mythological.

The scission between the mythic impulses of the heart and the intellectual imperatives of the mind lies at the crossroads of human history. The tension between them is the source of art, science, and politics. The structure of A Stone’s Throw is intended to mirror this tension: contextual and historical themes, artifacts of the intellectual quest — about a quarter of the book — appear in endnotes. These notes are a view from the shore, from the secure footing of the modern self seeking to understand the roots and conflicts of family and culture. The main narrative follows the path of my own creative process in finding and sculpting a single stone. Along the way, I re-tell some old stories from the Bible, the Qur’an and elsewhere, and I craft a few new tales of my own. I work in my shop, climb a mountain (twice), dream, work with tools, visit New York City the day before the World Trade Center attacks, confront a bear in the wilderness, make a trip with my family to an old ghost town, and do many other things to try to understand what the present owes to the past.

Why are Jews and Muslims fighting for control of the Western Wall in Jerusalem?

During Muhammad’s "Night Journey" (see A Stone’s Throw) the tying-place of the magical horse Buraq is commonly described as having been somewhere on the Western Wall, though records are by no means consistent on this point. Since as far back as the eleventh century, Islamic scholars have taken decidedly distinct points of view on the location of the hitching post. Proposed locations have included the foundation stone, the Mercy Gate, the Double Gate (also known as the Gate of Hulda the Prophetess), and a niche — with a ring, inside the Al-Buraq mosque — near the southern end of the Western Wall.

Today, the western edge of the Al-Aqsa mosque compound lies above the Western Wall (just south of the area used for Jewish prayers), on the Temple Mount (called the Noble Sanctuary by Muslims). The wall itself is called the Al-Buraq wall by Muslims. By way of this deliberate, overlapping architecture of devotion, Jewish and Islamic mythologies contest ownership of the area. This contest, which has persisted for more than a thousand years, involves advocates on both sides (including Christian advocates, sometimes supporting one side and sometimes the other) discounting and negating the religious and mythological claims of the other. For example, some Muslim groups assert that Jews have no claim to the Western Wall, and that their devotions in front of it are the footholds of a Zionist plot to wrest the entire area from Muslims, tear down the mosques and the Dome of the Rock, and establish a new Jewish temple. (Some Jews — and some Christians — believe that such an act would herald the arrival of the messiah.) Sovereignty-minded Jews, for their part, frequently insist that Islamic claims for the sanctity of the wall and the Noble Sanctuary above — based on the many elements of Muhammad’s night journey and on thirteen centuries of Islamic history — are simply modern political inventions aimed at foisting an Islamic presence onto a Jewish holy site, edging out the Jews, and eventually clearing Palestine of a Jewish presence. (Some Muslims believe that such actions would hasten the Day of Judgement.)

Many Muslims think of the entire Temple Mount as an extension of the Al-Aqsa mosque. Similarly, they consider the Western Wall, which is not on the Temple Mount but acts as one of its retaining structures, as the western foundation wall of the Al-Aqsa mosque. This architectural syncretism is faithful to the mythological reality: the Jewish tradition is the foundation of Islamic mythology.

With regard to documents concerning the Muslim-Jewish conflict over the Western Wall, it is surprisingly difficult to find accounts that are not freighted with religious hatred. Or, given the current situation in Israel, perhaps it’s not so surprising. For a reasonably neutral approach, see the United Nations Security Council investigation entitled "Report of the Commission appointed by His Majesty’s Government in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, with the approval of the Council of the League of Nations, to determine the rights and claims of Moslems and Jews in connection with the Western or Wailing Wall at Jerusalem." This report was commissioned after clashes at the wall in 1929, and was reissued in 1968 (as UN document A/7057/Add. 1) after further conflicts during the Six Day War. The report, which chronicles a tribunal on religious mythology, offers an insightful glimpse into the differing modes of consciousness that have contributed to ongoing strife in Palestine/Israel.

Why is the Summit of the Temple Mount a Focus of Conflict?

Jerusalem’s Temple Mount is the holiest place on earth. For Jews, it is the site of the First Temple (Solomon’s temple) and the religious centre of Israel. The stone that now lies beneath the Dome of the Rock is considered, by many Jews, to be the actual foundation of the First Temple and the site where the Celestial Kingdom will be revealed. (Some believe that the Celestial Kingdom will not manifest until all of Israel is inhabited by Jews only. See the Islamic corollary below.)

"The construction of the earth was begun at the centre," says Hebrew folklore, "with the foundation stone of the Temple, the Eben [or Even] Shetiyah, for the Holy Land is at the central point of the surface of the earth, Jerusalem is at the central point of Palestine, and the Temple is situated at the centre of the Holy City."

For Christians, the Temple Mount is believed to be where Jesus overturned the tables of the money-changers, thereby initiating a break from Jewish history and beginning the Christian tradition as a distinct movement. Some Christians believe that the Second Coming will be revealed upon the Temple Mount.

For Muslims (whose name for the Temple Mount is the Noble Sanctuary), the Temple Mount is believed to be the site from which Muhammad asecended to Heaven to speak with the Unnameable (Allah, in the Islamic tradition). It is the third-holiest site in Islam (after the Kaaba in Mecca and the mosque in Medina). Some Muslims believe that the Day of Judgement will arrive only when the Jewish presence on the Temple Mount (and in all of Israel) is removed.

The Temple Mount — in particular, the stone on its summit — is what makes the "Holy Land" holy. The claimed ownership of the site by both Muslims and Jews is the ancient origin of the contemporary political struggle in Israel. Eventual peace in Israel depends entirely on the manner in which the question of the Temple Mount is resolved.

Now cracked and worn, imprinted with the quarrying marks of Crusaders, still flat where the ark once stood, the foundation stone lies at the heart of the world’s most persistent conflict. The keeper of the stone is the guardian of the gate of heaven.

Was the World Trade Center based on Islamic architecture?

Yes indeed, and this fact possibly contributed to the World Trade Center being chosen as a target of terrorism. Minoru Yamasaki, lead architect of the World Trade Center project and a favorite of the Saudi royal family — he designed the Dhahran airport, among other projects — described his vision of the World Trade Center as "a mecca, a great relief from the narrow streets and sidewalks of the surrounding Wall Street area."

Yamasaki’s design was intended to reproduce, in proportion and symbol, the Kaaba sanctuary in Mecca, Islam’s holiest site. The buildings were based on the geometry of the cube, delineated by arches at the base and extruded heavenward. He provided a fountain to represent the sacred well of Mecca, and a radial circular pattern for the grounds, mimicking the enclosure surrounding the Kaaba. The office buildings were wrapped with steel filigree, as the Kaaba is wrapped in brocade embroidered with gold.

For Osama bin Laden, a profane and commercialized version of the Kaaba sanctuary may have represented an ultimate blasphemy, and it’s possible — though with bin Laden still at large, no one knows — that the World Trade Center was chosen as a target because of its perceived profanity.

Why are there Egyptian symbols (a pyramid and the "Eye of Horus")
on the American dollar bill?

The ancient Egyptians (the Kem) are gone. They became myths, drifting across the field of time, exerting a persistent and sometimes invisible influence. Their science and philosophy were passed to the Greeks, who freely acknowledged their debt. The sudden flowering of classical Greek culture, commonly thought to be the origin of Western civilization, was a legacy and not a unique development. The Greeks adapted much of the Kem wisdom: in geometry, art, mythology. And long after the Nile temples were left derelict by a world marching resolutely away from its past, the teachings of the Kem persisted; in hiding, traveling in disguise. They persist even today. The ancestral eye and the stone of origin, united into the single symbol of an eye atop a pyramid, are displayed on the most powerful economic symbol of our age: the American dollar. In the contemporary world, every financial transaction in American dollars owes a debt, in spirit if not in currency, to the ancient Egyptians.

The transmission of Egpytian symbols into American iconography is due to the Masonic tradition, to which many founders of the American state belonged. Freemasonry is a branch of Hermetic philosophy, which in turn is derived from the ancient Egyptians. The esoteric eye of Freemasonry, seated on the pyramid, is a renaissance adaptation of the Egyptian symbol known as the "eye of Horus." The pyramid iteslf is a representation of the Egyptian stone of origin, another version of which appears at the summit of the Washington Monument.

Masonic influences on the early development of the United States are well-established. See, for example, Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas, The Hiram Key. Samuel Adams, Paul Revere, Benjamin Franklin, John Hancock, and George Washington, among many others, were all Masons. Washington swore his oath of office on a Masonic bible.

What is the relationship between the
Washington Monument and Ancient Egypt?

Stones, particularly igneous stones — resistant to erosion, implacable and enduring as the gods themselves — were, for the ancient Egyptians, a means of embodying ancestral narratives, tales of beginning, chronicles of family and culture and individuality. Every stone sculpture was itself a hieroglyph, a rebus, a talisman imbued with esoteric meaning. During the reign of Khufu, Khafre, and their contemporaries (around 2500 BCE), the Egyptians transported millions of tons of stone, shaped it, carved it, rendered it the expression and lasting imprint of a culture discovering the soul. They brought stones from all over the Middle East and Africa: by boat, by sledge, by the power of words, if the old tales are to be believed. They transported blocks of seventy tons to Giza from as far away as Aswan, some five hundred miles. The ancient Egyptians’ devotion to stone was matched only by the Inca and the Maya, whose similar achievements in craftsmanship came thousands of years later. For them also, the sacred stone arose from the waters. The title of the Mayan book of origins, the Popol Vuh, means "the light that came from the sea."

In the ancient Egyptians society of the third millennium BCE, replicas of the mythological black stone of origin — the benben — were kept within temples and atop obelisks. They were also used as capstones for pyramids. The most famous of these, the capstone of Khufu’s pyramid (the Great Pyramid), has long vanished. The question of who walked off with it is not insignificant. How — not to mention why — did a band of marauders, or an invading army, remove a massive capstone, likely made of fifteen tons of meteoric iron, from a summit almost five hundred feet off the desert, without leaving a trace?

Khufu’s capstone, made of a metal the ancient Egyptians considered sacred, was taken from the Great Pyramid perhaps four thousand years ago. But its image has persisted through myth narratives and thrives even today. The Washington Monument, designed in the Masonic tradition (itself derived from the ancient Egyptians), was intended — like the Great Pyramid — to be the largest monument in the world. The Washington Monument is crowned by a 3,300-pound marble capstone at the summit of which sits a nine-inch-tall aluminum pyramid. During the period 1848 to 1885, when the monument was constructed in a series of halting stages, aluminum was a precious metal, and the small pyramid was the largest piece ever cast. The Washington Monument is still the tallest masonry structure in the world (about seventy-five feet taller than the Great Pyramid), and its role in American culture is identical to that of the benben stone of the ancient Egyptians: the Washington Monument symbolizes,in stone, a tale of origins.

What is the Kaaba?

The Kaaba sanctuary in Mecca is Islam’s holiest site: a flat-roofed building, fifty feet high, walls of mortared blue-grey stone on a foundation older than memory. Kaaba means "cube" (though two of the walls are forty feet long while the others are thirty-five). The building is empty, save for hanging votive lanterns and three pillars supporting the roof. There is a single door, seven feet above the ground, in the face of the northeastern wall. In modern times, the structure is draped with black brocade, made yearly in Egypt, embroidered in gold with passages from the Qur’an. (The Holy of Holies in Jerusalem, the shrine crafted by Hiram with the shamir, where the ark rested upon the foundation stone, was also a cube, of the same approximate dimensions.)

The Kaaba is older than Islam by a thousand years or more. It is a relic, perhaps of the three goddesses who were once venerated throughout the Arabian Peninsula. The Islamic guardians of the Kaaba sanctuary are still called Beni Shaybah, the sons of the Old Woman.

The Kaaba stone is a black meteoric stone about a foot wide, set into the southeast corner of the Kaaba sanctuary. No one knows its origin, though it is said to have once been a white pearl, gifted by God to Adam, cast out from the garden, as a sign of forgiveness (it has turned black, apparently, by its absorption of human experience).

Today, the black stone of the Kaaba and the foundation stone of the Hebrews are the last of the sacred stones. Their archaic companions — the benben stone of the Egyptians, the shamir of Solomon — are gone. Perhaps it’s true that the Kaaba stone, now broken and fragmented, held together by a silver ligature, is a fragment of the original benben stone that was said to have fallen from the sky in the time of the ancient Egyptians. No one knows. But the two persistent stones — one venerated in Mecca by Muslims, the other in Jerusalem and venerated by both Jews and Muslims — still lie at the center of devotion. Millions of Jews and well over a billion Muslims preserve and cherish these relics. Even the Christian tradition remembers them: the church is said to be founded upon a rock, and identifies Jesus as the cornerstone rejected by the builders of Solomon’s temple. In the modern age, so removed from ancient practices and symbols, the stone of origin remains.

What do you mean in A Stone’s Throw when you say that "there are no distinct peoples"?

There are no distinct peoples. Everyone is descended from everyone else. Everyone possesses two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents; the lineage of our direct ancestors spreads exponentially into the past. (Identifying those ancestors as a bloodline is difficult; DNA studies demonstrate that a quarter to a third of the children in every generation are not the progeny of their presumed fathers.) At some point in the fourteenth century CE — about twenty-eight generations ago — the number of direct ancestors of every person living today equaled the number of people living in the world at that time: roughly five-hundred million. These threads lead far back, weaving a myriad of linkages to the archaic past. We are, all of us — every person alive today — direct descendants of Muhammad and Abraham and Buddha, of every mythic character who populates the old tales. This is not limited by culture or geography: everyone today is descended directly from everyone who lived at that time (if they had children, and subsequently descendants).

Race, culture, ethnicity, nationalism are all mythologies, both true and untrue: they are fables of difference written in the narratives of conquest, war, and exile.

Similarly, there are no distinct myths: they intermingle and weave together, passing across generations and cultures, borrowing from each other. The Islamic myths are populated by characters from the Jewish tradition: Abraham, Moses, Ishmael. Even Jesus makes an appearance. Similarly, the Christian tales are based on Jewish and Egyptian sources. In turn, many Jewish myths bear a striking resemblance to Sumerian and Egyptian tales. The trail ends with the Egyptians, before whom there were no texts to preserve myths; but the myths themselves keep going, all the way back to the source of human consciousness.

The contested ownership of mythologies, such as between Christians, Jews, and Muslims, is the source of most of the world’s conflict.

Who Invented Monotheism, the Egyptians or the Hebrews?

The relationship between the Hebrews and the Egyptians has long been a matter of debate (since the first century CE, in the works of the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus; and in the modern popular mind since Sigmund Freud’s 1939 essay "Moses and Monotheism"). The Jewish cultural identity — a distinct people, rich in arts and learning, pursued and exiled through many centuries of travail — depends on the distinction between the Hebrews and all other peoples. Yet there exists a substantial body of evidence in support of (and some evidence against, to be fair) a Egyptians origin for Hebrew culture.

Most researchers have focused on the Amarna period of the Egyptians, during which the pharaoh Amenhotep IV changed his name to Akhenaten and attempted to revise the theology of Egypt under one god, the Aten. During his reign from 1353-36 BCE, Akhenaten founded the world’s first monotheistic religion. The most neutral study of this period, its characters, and its subsequent influence on history and culture is Dominic Montserrat’s Akhenaten: History, Fantasy and Ancient Egypt (New York: Routledge, 2000).

At his city Akhet-aten ("horizon of the Aten") in northern Egypt, Akhenaten abandoned the older model of megalithic temple construction, preferring instead to build with smaller stones. No image of the Aten was depicted inside the sanctuary, though external tableaus show the god as rays emanating from a disc resembling the sun.

Much has been made of Akhenaten’s hymn of blessings to the Aten:

Every lion is come forth from his den;
all creeping things, they sting.
Darkness is a shroud, and the earth is in stillness,
for he who made them rests in his horizon.
At daybreak, when thou arisest on the horizon,
when thou shinest as the Aton by day;
their arms are raised in praise at thy appearance.
All the world, they do their work.
All beasts are content with their pasturage;
trees and plants are flourishing;

The hymn is remarkably similar to psalm 104:

[Springs] give drink to every beast of the field:
the wild asses quench their thirst.
By them shall the fowls of the heaven have their habitation,
which sing among the branches.
He watereth the hills from his chambers:
the earth is satisfied with the fruit of thy works;
Thou makest darkness, and it is night:
wherein all the beasts of the forest do creep forth.
The young lions roar after their prey and seek their meat from God.
The sun ariseth, they gather themselves together, and lay them down in their dens.
Man goeth forth unto his work and to his labour until the evening.
O Lord, how manifold are thy works!
in wisdom hast thou made them all:
the earth is full of thy riches...

After Akhenaten’s death (his body has never been identified), the monarchy was likely taken up by Smenkhkare (possibly his son), then by Tutankhamun (possibly another, younger son, or son-in-law, or half-brother and son). This boy king, whose name is known today only because his was the only Pharaonic tomb to be discovered essentially intact, was forced by advisors to resume the old Egyptians theology. The religion of the Aten was suppressed; Akhenaten’s city was abandoned. The blocks of his temple and residence were used in many other subsequent Egyptians building sites.

About eighty-five years (in the traditional chronology) after Akhenaten’s death, the exodus of the Hebrews occurred. The mythopoetic chronicle of the Old Testament describes a people fleeing northern Egypt, devoted to one, aniconic god, whose divine name, YHWH, was too sacred to pronounce. Instead, wherever the written name appeared in the scriptures, high priests vocalized the name Adon, which translates in the English bible as "the Lord." When the exiled Hebrews settled in Palestine they utilized a sun disc, like the image of the Aten, as the royal seal of at least one of the kings of Judah (Hezekiah).

There are many such correlations. The cartouche of the Aten was inscribed with the name Imram; the bible refers to Moses as the son of Amram (Numbers 26:59), the Hebrew equivalent. Across the Nile from Akhenaten’s destroyed city, there is today an ancient village named Mal-lawi (Mallevi), "city of the Levites." The rod of Moses, crowned with the image of a serpent, was symbolically identical to the serpent scepter used to denote Egyptians royalty.

In his controversial book Pharaohs and Kings: A Biblical Quest, David Rohl makes a compelling case for the identification of major biblical characters (Joseph, Moses, Joshua, Saul, David, and Solomon) with figures of Egyptians Pharaonic history. Rohl’s research, which suggests a new chronology for the early biblical period, builds on the work of scholars such as Ahmed Osman, whose Moses and Akhenaten: The Secret History of Egypt at the Time of the Exodus re-evaluates many aspects of accepted archaeological theory.

The research conducted by Rohl, Osman and others is thorough and precise. It has also been the subject of tremendous conflict. Heavyweight scholars have taken both sides of the argument. In one recent incident, Kenneth Kitchen, an Egyptologist of substantial stature, penned a long letter vociferously attacking Rohl’s theories ("rubbish;sheer fantasy") and circulated it widely within the academic community. When the views of heretics within any tradition of knowledge become sufficiently irksome to traditionalists as to provoke strong censoring responses, it’s a sure sign that the heretics have something important to contribute.

Religions typically discount the contributions of their earliest sacerdotal ancestors: Christianity downplays its substantial debt to Judaism; the holiest relic in Islam, the Kaaba of Mecca, was a religious icon millennia before the prophet Muhammed. In the Hebrew tradition, the situation is intriguing but unclear. A persecuted Egyptians religion disappears from northern Egypt, its leader vanishes, its records are almost completely destroyed. Immediately (in historical terms) thereafter, a religious exile occurs, undertaken by people fleeing the same geographic area. These refugees employ an iconography similar to the persecuted faith. They worship a deity whose spoken name is identical. Their leader, as if to disguise his heritage, answers to a truncated royal Egyptian name (Moses, which means "son of"). If such a situation were to arise today — in a remote corner of Borneo, for example, or within the urban tangle of American religious diversity — anthropologists would undoubtedly assume a fundamental connection between the two traditions. In fact, it would be difficult to argue otherwise.

Did the Hebrews Build the Pyramids?

Although many modern books and films depict the enslaved Hebrews building the Giza pyramids, they were not involved in that endeavor. Teams of paid craftspeople, not slaves, built the pyramids. The archaeological record is definite about this, but less so regarding the question of whether some of those craftspeople belonged to the group that later evolved into the Jews. Originally, "Hebrew" was likely not an ethnic designation but an economic class named the Habiru (or Apiru),denoting one who sells a service. Scholars disagree about this term; possibly it connoted all Asian Semitic peoples, not simply the workers referred to in Pharaonic inscriptions. In either case, the Habiru were not subject to forced labor. However, inscriptions from around 1300 BCE — more than a thousand years after the Giza pyramids were constructed — show prisoners from Canaan and Syria working on the temple of Karnak. This is the only period in Egyptians history when forced labor was used, and the ancestors of the Jewish people may have been the subjects of that enforcement.

What About the Ark of the Covenant? Is it really in a box in a warehouse in the United States, like in the Indiana Jones movie?

The nature, contents and fate of the Ark of the Covenant is one of the most intriguing mysteries of the bible. Ceremonial chests from the age of Tutankhamun, almost identical to the biblical description of the Ark, can be seen in the Cairo museum today. Originally, the ark was placed upon the summit of foundation, the Shetiyah in Jerusalem; but it disappeared some time after construction of the First Temple. It was possibly destroyed by invaders or apostates, and perhaps hidden by priests.

The ark lay at the center of Hebrew religion. Its loss would have been the cause of monumental sorrow. How does one deal with the disappearance of gifts from the hand of god? But curiously, the ark vanished from later scriptures, without comment. A shift in Hebraic consciousness, away from idols and toward the abstract numinous, probably accounts for some of the ark’s obscurity. But its complete erasure from tradition is an enduring mystery. Possibly, the exiled Babylonian authors of the Old Testament, generations removed from the temple’s destruction in 587 BCE, had no idea where the ark had gone. They were faced with the difficult challenge of rebuilding a religion without its central, sacred symbol. But they had returned to the temple, at least, and this — a rebuilt stone structure with a foundation of bedrock at its heart — became the source of much subsequent Jewish mythology.

Aside from the foundation stone (which is claimed by both Jews and Muslims today and is basically the source of all contemporary conflicts in Israel), nothing is now left of the first temple (Solomon’s temple) on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. The second temple, rebuilt after the Babylonian exile, fared little better: it was plundered and desecrated by Antiochus Epiphanes in 169 and 167 BCE, and later, plundered again by the Roman Crassus in 54 BCE. The Jewish revolt against the former desecration is celebrated today in the rituals of Hannukah. The temple was renovated and enlarged by Herod the Great in a series of stages beginning in 20 BCE; but again, it was destroyed, by the Romans in AD 70.

All that remains today is the Western, or wailing, wall. No definitive archaeological evidence links this wall to the original structure of the first or second temples.

The ark is reputed to be in Axum, Ethiopia. It is kept from public scrutiny by devoted priests and protected by a garrison of the Ethiopian army. Without access to the relic, it has been difficult for scholars to establish the veracity of this claim.

What are the Origins of Islamic Mythology?

In Babylonian mythology, which in antiquity infused much of Arabic culture, the seven ancestral sages credited with the development of civilization are called the Sebettu. This designation is substantially identical to the Egyptians Shebtiw, and undoubtedly derives from the same mythological ground. Al-Uzza, Al-Lat, and Manat, the three divine sisters who appear in the so-called Satanic verses (Sura an Najm, 53: 19-22), are the mythological descendants of the sages. (In India, the seven sages are called the seven rishis. The motif of seven culture-bearers is persistent; it appears in the myths of cultures worldwide, and has been used by numerous researchers as evidence for cross-cultural linkages in the archaic world.)

Islamic tradition asserts that the Kaaba enclosure was first built by Adam, and then rebuilt by Abraham. The three sisters are thought to have entered the narrative later, after the descendants of Ishmael turned away from the religion of Abraham and worshipped idols. My narrative in A Stone’s Throw thus departs from tradition in two ways: by substituting the Shebtiw for Adam, and by providing a foundational role for the three sisters. My aim is to be consistent with the pre-Islamic mythologies of Saudi Arabia, in which Hebrew characters were probably not present until after about 500 BCE. The Hebrew tales, compiled after the Babylonian captivity, would have been delivered to the Arabian peninsula by exiles and travelers. Before that time, the mythos of the Arabian peoples would likely have been rooted in the local and regional tales of the Sebettu, the goddesses, and the Babylonian pantheon.

With the advent of Islam, which in principle accepts Judaism as a legitimate tradition, the Hebrew tales of origin were adopted and adapted, rewritten backward, so that polytheism and paganism were supplanted as the original devotions of antiquity.

In A Stone’s Throw, my version of the tale of the three sisters is a conflation of several fragmentary myths of the pre-Islamic era. Since Muhammad’s definitive act of casting out the idols in the Kaaba, in 630 CE, the pre-Islamic myths of the Arabian Peninsula have not been of general interest to Muslims (as the Egyptian foundation of Judaism is not of general interest to Jews). As a result, comparatively little is known about the authentic traditions of the Bedouin prior to about the sixth century CE.

F.E. Peters, in The Hajj: The Muslim Pilgrimage to Mecca and the Holy Places notes that "the age of idolatry is long past for those who study idol worshipers, and so we can only very tentatively impose our conceptual patterns on the pre-Islamic Arabs performing sacrifice and other ritual acts before stones" (365). The act of remembering the pre-Islamic tales is thus a mythological endeavor.

There is some disagreement among scholars as to the extent of Hebraic influence on the pre-Islamic cultures of the Arabian peninsula. It is known, at least, that in the centuries before Muhammad the Bedouin already claimed descent from Abraham. But much of the Hebraic context of Islamic mythology was clearly modified by the Qur’an and by later Muslim chroniclers. The Qur’an, for example, asserts that Abraham "was not a Jew nor a Christian but he was (an) upright (man), a Muslim, and he was not one of the polytheists" (The Family of Imram, 3:67). This is a classic, almost invariable, response to mythological adoption. The Hebraic corollary is in their treatment of the Egyptians and Sumerian tales — the flood, the stone of origin — in which the cultural heritage of the myths is reassigned to the adoptive culture. Scripture is the archetypal mythology.

Who Invented Individuality?

The fundamental orientation of every culture prior to the Egyptians, for seventy thousand years and more (the recent Blombos Cave discoveries have pushed back the cultural horizon by at least this far), was toward the rhythms of the divine in nature — the vegetal cycle, the wheel of time rolling toward the ancestors, a world suffused with regeneration and a universal, transcendent order. The earlier cultures lived within a sphere of eternal return, of the moon’s transformations and renewal, of humanity as a child of the goddess Nature. This consciousness, which carried humanity for the greater part, by far, of its development, was spun from the fabric of dreams. Gods walked in the garden. The turning of seasons was a manifest prayer lifted on the wind. Enclosed within a circle of emergence, nothing ever died. And yet, the cultures of the Stone Age also assumed the dark cast of a nightmare: human sacrifice, ritual entombment of the living, the absolute abrogation of personal identity. In the Neolithic cultures, the self was subsumed by the inviolable structure of a universe centered firmly on divine order. The edicts of gods and goddesses were absolute imperatives. The odyssey of individual awareness, defined by rebellion against divine edict, was not yet a possible myth. Humanity could not yet eat the forbidden fruit.

Written language appeared around 3000 BC — probably first in Egypt, then in Sumer — when tokens and symbolic signs were applied in novel ways. Soon thereafter, cuneiform and hieroglyphic scripts evolved to enable the projection of individual thoughts and images. And strangely, suddenly, a world illuminated by the light of first ages was ablaze with imagination. Within a few hundred years — by the time of Khafre, around 2500 BCE — it became possible for anyone to claim a destiny equivalent to godhood. And it was language, essentially, that proved the means of accomplishing this feat. "This is the word which is in darkness," say the Coffin Texts, "as for any spirit who knows it, he will live among the living; he will never perish; he will never die" (spell 1087).

Nurtured by the gift of written language, the individual self emerged, unmistakably, in the art of the Egyptians. The eternal halls, once reserved for the gods and the symbolic, sacrificial king, opened their doors. The gate of the garden closed. The gods began to move back along old roads, their vacant places claimed by heroes and warriors and sages of the mythopoetic age.

At an indistinct juncture in the third millennium BCE, a one-way bridge was constructed in the human mind. That bridge, which crosses into the field of the modern self but which will forever prohibit our return to the garden, was the most mysterious of all our creations. It leads, with the audacity of innocent beauty, from a world of cosmic order, whole and ruthless, to a horizon beyond which the gods themselves cannot trespass. Our collective migration across the one-way bridge, over the course of more than two millennia, yielded the consciousness of the West. By the time of Alexander, last of the god-kings, the old world had gone. The Egyptians were subsumed into the evolving meta-culture of the region — Greeks, Arabs, Jews, Turks. Their remaining traditions were driven underground, into the philosophy that would later come to be called Hermeticism, and later still, Freemasonry.

Did the Ancient Egptians Invent Postmodernism?

The relationship between medium and message, which we exalt as a quintessentially modern discovery, was exhaustively explored five thousand years ago. Richard Wilkinson, in his Symbol and Magic in Egyptian Art contends that Egyptian hieroglyphs "transcended the boundaries of most written scripts in successfully blending symbolic representation and the written word to a degree that no other system of writing has surpassed" (161). The integration of written language and symbol displays a level of virtuosity so profound that we can hardly grasp it. The interconnections of the internet, for example, in which objects are embedded within objects in almost infinite, nested sequences, would have seemed, to the ancient Egyptians, rudimentary indeed. The internet is, for all its complexity, a non-symbolic system: each of its elements (files, web pages, computer keyboards and monitors, cables, and so on) possesses a discrete and single-level meaning. A keyboard can be represented by an onscreen icon , but it cannot mean anything other than a keyboard — unless you give it further levels of meaning yourself (in which case other people may not understand you).

There are, in English, no shared multi-level meanings of a keyboard. But imagine what a hieroglyphic keyboard would have been like. Each key is shaped into a distinctive symbol, and the letter displayed upon it is an expression, in another form, of the same symbol. But not exactly the same: the letter is another flavor of the motif of the key. The placement of the keys is related to the fingers that touch them as you type, and the symbols of the keys relate to the symbolic functions of each finger. Moreover, the key placements are designed to evoke specific movements of the fingers as you type, the order of their action as well as the shapes they make. You animate animals and ideas and gods as you move your fingers. And you have a choice about what you animate, because every expression offers hundreds of ways to type it. You can write forwards or backwards, or vertically. You can change the order of letters, insert symbols that abstractly or concretely express the sense of your words. Your sentences can interlock like crossword puzzles. You can specify that your writing contain anywhere from two to twelve levels of meaning (but not one level, as in English). Every letter, every phrase, every passage you write is a hologram of your entire communication. From the simplest rebus to the most elaborate phonogram, every fragment is a map of the whole, and interconnects with every other fragment by way of a web of meanings so colossal no one can grasp all of it. Besides, the movements of your fingers evoke the gods in unfathomable ways, and they insert further meanings which you do not intend and do understand. The meaning of the text, finally — any text, from a household budget to a philosophical treatise — extends beyond the world, reaches toward the eternal. Your keyboard has five thousand keys.

The symbology of Egyptian hieroglyphic texts employs the dialect of dreams: nuanced, multi-faceted, holographic. The glyphs are woven with interlocking symbols and strands of meaning through which reading becomes a devotional act. Word or phrase reversals — palindromes — hide in every text, leading the reader forward and back along a spiraling track of understanding. Every textual path unfolds in at least two directions: two truths, two selves. Palindromes are hinges upon which the attention of the reader turns. Ben is the primordial stone; neb is gold, the symbol of conscious awareness (and the root of our modern word nebula). Ais is the brain, sia consciousness. Ab is the heart, ba the soul. These reflected and doubled pairs form a concealed language beneath the pragmatic. They turn awareness back on itself, back to the source.

Hieroglyphic passages can be strung from left to right, as in English, or in reverse, or even vertically (top down, though never bottom up). The intended direction for reading is denoted by the orientation of the ideograms: an animal or a god looks toward the beginning of the text. A palindromic glyph passage can be written forward in a section of reversed text, or backward in a section of forward-facing text. Such suppleness of linguistic structure has made decipherment a difficult task.

But the thorniest aspect of the language involves the absence of written vowels. For the ancient Egyptians, vowels were the keys to magic and power; to speak them in the glyphs was to be in possession of the means to create a world. Scribes were sufficiently convinced of the inherent power of the vocalized glyphs that they were careful to limit that power: many of the glyphs inscribed on the stone walls in the pyramid of Unas were modified to prevent them from coming to life unbidden. Ideographic glyphs of birds were carved with their feet intentionally defaced so the birds could not launch themselves from the stone. Glyphs depicting humans were often carved with missing arms or legs. Sometimes substitute glyphs were used in place of those thought more likely to animate themselves. For the Egyptians, The Book of Illumination (the Pyramid Texts) was, literally, a living document.

Nowhere in the thousands of columns of text comprising The Book of Illumination, nor, for that matter, in any of the early Egyptian sacred texts, is there hint of a single vowel. Our modern pronunciation of the lost language is a reconstruction, a best guess at where the vowels belong, but it’s not the language itself. The authentic voice of the words is gone. We are left to gather up the fragments of a library strewn across a debris field wide as history.

Who Invented the Modern Idea of Time?

The emergent myths crafted during the Hebrews’ captivity (around 600 BCE) in Babylon establish, perhaps for the first time in the history of the West, the conception of time as linear — as an arrow, a metaphor later popularized by the Greeks. In the Hebrew cosmology, the Egyptians’ rolling wheel of time is pierced by a stone at the crossroads, then unrolled into a single line that stretches toward the infinite. In this conception, each slice of time occupies a unique point on the line; there are no overlapping rhythms and overtones, no resonances from previous cycles. For the Hebrews, the bull’s-eye of this arrow of time is the celestial kingdom — far in the future, held aloft by prophecy and a covenant.

Time as a linear construct is so integral to the modern Western consciousness (though not to aboriginal societies) that it is impossible for most of us to conceive of it any other way. Of course time moves in one direction only; we are both its witnesses and protagonists. But linear time is a cognitive construct, not a physical law. It has developed, like every tale we tell, from a dream into a myth. The Egyptians invented individuality, but the Hebrews invented time.

What is the shamir?

In Hebrew folklore, the shamir is said to have been a small stone that Solomon used to build the First Temple in Jerusalem. The shamir was a magic stone, and later it disappeared (along with the ark), though the old tale of its origin persists:

At twilight on the sixth day of creation, five days after the foundation stone had risen from the ancestral waters, when the tasks of crafting mountains and iron and cedar had been completed, the virescent earth floated like spindrift in the sky. Fireflies gamboled across the quiet hills. In these final moments of unfolding, The Unnameable spoke words that flowed across the landscape and rendered the shapes of creation. The mouth of a well, its location now lost to us, was fashioned from the earth. The first and infinite rainbow was made. The words — recording the secrets, and that which must be remembered — were inscribed in tablets of stone. These are things we have forgotten.

The demons were also made during the peculiar twilight of the sixth day, as was the sepulcher of Moses (whose name denotes a son of the Egyptians).

Finally, there came the shamir, the radiant, living stone. Small — the size of a barleycorn — but bright, like a shard from a star. It is a tiny eye, a fragment of the foundation stone. The light it emits — its gaze, as the craftsmen will come to call it — slices through the hardest stone. The gaze of the shamir is terrible and wonderful; sharp enough to sunder the world, clean and smooth. Its cutting action leaves no flakes, no dust, no trace of its passage. The rock is simply cracked through.

The shamir cannot be kept in a container of iron or bronze; it will blaze through them. It must be wrapped in a woolen cloth, placed in a lead basket, and surrounded by barley bran.

The shamir was hidden in Paradise, secreted in its nested layers of protection, waiting for Solomon while the world spread outward from the garden.

What is the Stone of Scone?

The Stone of Scone in Scotland lies at the centre of much ancestral mythology. For seven hundred years, from 1296 to 1996, the Stone of Scone (or Destiny Stone) symbolized the conflict between the Scots and the English. It was used in coronation ceremonies in Ireland and Scotland from roughly 700 AD until 1296, when the English monarch Edward I took possession of it as war booty. Edward constructed the Coronation Throne, in Westminster Abbey, to house it. The stone was then used in the coronation ceremonies of every English monarch from Edward II, in 1308, to Elizabeth II, in 1953 (with the exceptions of Edward V and Edward VIII, neither of whom was crowned). Eventually, the pressure of Scottish nationalism resulted in the removal of the stone from the Coronation Throne on November 13, 1996 and its return to Edinburgh castle, where it now lies.

The Stone of Scone is a rectangular block of yellow sandstone weighing 336 pounds. It measures 26 inches by 16 inches by 11 inches, and is decorated with a Latin cross. Geological studies of the stone indicate that it originates almost undoubtedly from Scotland or England, though a myth surrounding it asserts that it was the stone the Hebrew patriarch Jacob used for a pillow during his dream and that he later erected ad Beth-El, the "house of God." (This is an example of the intermingling of myths, which is explored at length in A Stone’s Throw.)

Ross A. Laird

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