The Dendera lights
In the temple of Hator, build during the Ptolemaic dynasty, we can see strange carvings in bas-relief that are not found in any other temple or construction.
They depict a snake enclosed in a sort of elongated ampoule.
There are several of them inside the temple and they are all similar to this:
It was only at the end of the nineteenth century that Auguste Mairette, a French archaeologist, asked himself what they could serve. Until then were considered to be simple re-enactments of snakes enclosed in cages by the power of the God Atum-ra, which is depicted on the left in the photo above.
Still, he wondered ... they have something incredibly modern ... a light bulb ...
These were the last words he wrote down in his personal diary, the same night he was mysteriously murdered in a hotel in Cairo, where he was staying.
We have to wait until 1991 before someone else gets the urge to investigate deeper the case. It was a German man, Erichvon Daniken, who studied the bas-reliefs of the temple thoroughly and came to the conclusion (perhaps a little too sci-fi) that the Egyptians knew the electricity. On the other hand, how not to be stunned in front of this other bas-relief ?
Basically his convictions derive from some fundamental factors: all the Egyptian tombs, excavated underground for tens of meters, are decorated with drawings and engravings of a unique beauty. Official Egyptology tells us that the lighting needed to carry out the work was provided by torches.
But those torches would have in a very short time consumed all the oxygen present in the room, while that kind of work required a lot of time. The CICAP, the control committee of the claims on the paranormal, had to give up, saying that -in fact- it was right. And so they have advanced (and continue to support) the hypothesis that they used a system of mirrors to propagate the light in the tunnels. According to the CICAP, the Egyptians did not know the glass, and therefore the most they could do was to use a copper mirrors.
The discovery of the pile of Baghdad, suggests that perhaps ancient egyptians knew the electricity. And the strange box to which the "wire" is connected could be a generator, built with the same principle of the famous pile.
The snake depicted inside it (are we sure that they did not know the glass?) is always placed side by side, in the hieroglyphs. This symbol has been translated in the word "seref", ancient Egyptian word, which means "to illuminate".
At this point, however, there is one problem ... what do the people who are always drawn next to the lamp do?
Mystery !!
