Fingerprints of the Gods

When he had set everything in order, he handed over the control of the kingdom to Isis, quit Egypt for many years, and roamed about the world with the sole intention, Diodorus Siculus was told,
of visiting all the inhabited earth and teaching the race of men how to cultivate the vine and sow wheat and barley; for he supposed that if he made men give up their savagery and adopt a gentle manner of life he would receive immortal honours because of the magnitude of his benefactions

Osiris travelled first to Ethiopia, where he taught tillage and husbandry to the primitive hunter-gatherers he encountered. He also undertook a number of large-scale engineering and hydraulics works: ‘He built canals, with flood gates and regulators … he raised the river banks and took precautions to prevent the Nile from overflowing …’29 Later he made his way to Arabia and thence to India, where he established many cities. Moving on to Thrace he killed a barbarian king for refusing to adopt his system of government. This

It is tempting to wonder whether what we are confronted by here might not be a garbled account of a malfunctioning man-made device: a confused, awe-stricken recollection of a monstrous instrument devised by the scientists of a lost civilization. Weight is added to such extreme speculations when we remember that this is by no means the only golden box in the ancient world that functioned like a deadly and unpredictable machine. It has a number of quite unmissable similarities to the Hebrews’ enigmatic Ark of the Covenant (which also struck innocent people dead with bolts of fiery energy, which also was ‘overlaid round about with gold’, and which was said to have contained not only the two tablets of the Ten Commandments but ‘the golden pot that had manna,