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It was only a few years ago that, while browsing through an out-of-state library, I came across a transcription of the famous Tulli Papyrus--the Egyptian text recording an event which occurred during the reign of Thutmose III of the 18th dynasty (circa. 1480 B.C.). After its original publication (de Rachewiltz, 1953), the transcript was reproduced in at least two UFO books; but until that day in the library, I had never seen a copy of the Egyptian text itself.
A number of websites depict a "doctored" copy (grayed-out text, edges made to look torn and weathered, etc.) of this same transcript. Even a glance reveals that it is simply an altered version of the transcription shown below. Responsible webmasters should recognize this for what it is, and replace such mutilated versions with an authentic depiction.
When writing his own contribution to the well-known "Condon Committee Report" (a UFO study funded by the U.S. government), Samuel Rosenberg notes the following problems when encoutering ancient UFO reports:
"Such compilations pose some serious problems for the reader not already convinced of the existence of UFOs . . . Does the alleged book or manuscript in which the report was found really exist? Where is it? Did the writer actually see the original document or is he quoting a secondary source? Is the version presented here a faithful copy of the original or an accurate translation? Is the 'report' in question a factual honest report of something actually seen, or is it a poetic, metaphorical. religious, symbolical, mythical, political fabrication made legitimately within its own social context, but one that is no longer viable to us now." (Rosenberg, 1968)
Good questions! Most UFO publications (with exceptions) are not scholarly productions, and therefore do not follow such strict guidlines. I have endeavored to comply with these familiar concepts as far as possible. In regard to the question of whether a given source is "poetic, metaphorical, religious," etc., many times it is impossible to tell, and so is often a matter of opinion. But here we will concentrate on the factors relating to the possible existence, or non-existence, of the writing in question. In short, is it real, or a hoax?
According to French author Brinsley Le Poer Trench (1960), the original Tulli Papyrus was found "damaged, with many gaps in the hieroglyphs, among the papers of the late Professor Alberto Tulli, former director of the Egyptian Museum at the Vatican . . . Prince Boris de Rachewiltz subsequently translated the papyrus. He stated that the original was part of the Annals of Thutmose III, circa. 1504-1450 B.C." Statements made by de Rachewiltz himself imply that he saw the original papyrus, and that his translation was made from it.
Upon translation the artifact revealed a startling event recorded during the reign of Thutmose III (de Rachewiltz, 1953). Unfortunately, it appears that this amazing artifact of ancient provenance has been mislocated after the deaths of its keepers, and remains lost at present. In an attempt to verify the existence of the original manuscript, Dr. Edward Condon, head of the Condon Committee, sent an inquiry to Dr. Walter Ramberg, Scientific Attache at the U.S. embassy in Rome, He replied:
". . . the current director of the Egyptian Section of the Vatican Museum, Dr. Nolli, said that Prof. Tulli had left all his belongings to a brother of his who was a priest in the Lateran Palace. Presumably the famous papyrus went to this priest. Unfortunately the priest died also in the meantime and his belongings were dispersed among heirs, who may have disposed of the papyrus as something of little value."
It should be noticed that upon receiving this enquiry, Vatican officials did not break out in laughter, but treated the request as if they were dealing with real facts, and answered informatively and truthfully to the best of their ability. In their reply the artifact in question was referred to as a "famous papyrus" as if it were a real object and not a figment of someones imagination.* (Note, however, that mere existence is not a guarantee of authenticity.)
Dr. Condon (who is certainly anything but unbiased when UFOs are involved) added that Vatican officials had "intimated" that both Prof. Tulli and Prince de Rachewiltz were only amateur Egyptologists, and that Prof. Tulli may have been duped. By so characterizing them, Condon inadvertently eliminated either of them as having created the text as a hoax. The text as we have it is good Egyptian--it would take a person extremely versed in the Egyptian of the period to have "created" it.
It is regrettable that the original artifact cannot be found. This indeed creates serious problems, since this precludes experts in epigraphy from examining the writing style, chemists from examining the ink, and any attempt at carbon-dating the papyrus itself. The absence of an original always raises the question of hoax (which thus remains a possibility).
However, the text itself is easy for an amateur such as myself to translate, and does not require an "expert"; although such a one has recently done just that. The major difference between the Egyptologist's translation and mine is the use of the sungod's name, "Re" in place of "sun". Also near the end the Egyptologist has "heart of Amun-Re" where I had "hearth of the gods"** and Rachewiltz has "hearth . . ." The differences between the three translations are minor.
It should also be noticed that the location of the item "among the papers" of Prof. Tulli would indicate that it was never the property of the Vatican Museum, and that Prof. Tulli (or a close friend) had purchased it--presumably from an antiquities dealer, which often happens. We will get to that story shortly; but for the moment let's get back to mine.
I immediately requested permission from the librarian to make a zerox copy, which was granted. My hope at the time was that I might identify the Egyptian glyphs which had been translated "Fire Circles". However, once I had the opportunity to look at the transcription thoroughly, I realized that I could easily recognize most of the Egyptian writing. So I got out my Egyptian grammar book by E. A. Wallis Budge, and sat down with it to seriously translate this fragment of Egyptian writing known as the Tulli Papyrus.
A transcription is a hand-written copy of the original made by the translator from which the rough translation is to be made. Typically this is the first step taken before the labor of translation begins. Existing lacunae are duly noted, along with any other problems. Such a step saves wear and tear on the often fragile original document. To the right is the hieroglyphic transcription made from the original hieratic text of the Tulli Papyrus.
Some inscriptions are on rock faces in places which would make it extremely uncomfortable to attempt a translation without this vital step. In some cases rubbings can be made, but in others transcription must be made because of the size of the original, its location, or other difficulties.
This is supposedly the origin of the transcription that I had before me. My next step was to re-copy the glyphs, spacing them to allow for the insertion of the English equivalents underneath (heiroglyphics are often "stacked," while English flows "horizontally"). This effort resulted in what might be termed an Interlinear Translation.
Displayed below is the resultant Interlinear Translation (displaying the literal English equivalents below each group of glyphs). The customary numbers, inserted because of differences in word order between the two languages, will not be used here. To elliminate the roughness of the literal, further below I am providing a more readable "free translation" of the hieroglyphic text.
An Interlinear Translation of the Tulli Papyrus Text
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The glyphs translated "Circle of Fire" are aa-xet in Egyptian. I'm not doing an in-depth analysis of the Egyptian text at this point, but I think it is interesting that the glyph which has traditionally been translated "circle" is the normal glyph for "island" (Budge, 1966). In such instances a determinative for water is usually included. Two such examples can be found in Chaps. XXIV and LXXXVI of The Book of the Dead (Egyptian text; Budge, 1960).
But these particular islands are consistantly located by the text "in the sky"--which precludes any idea of these being ordinary islands! In any case, a solid disk seems to be indicated, as opposed to a mere "circle" with nothing in the center. This being the case, I believe the rendering "disk" to be the more accurate. Moreover, the Egyptian "fire" determinative is telling us that these are indeed Fiery Disks; therefore I have decided to revise my previous translation.
Although the manuscript was damaged and contained several lacunae, Prince Boris de Rachewiltz, the translator who recognized the style, declared the papyrus to be "part of the Annals of Thutmose III". The following is my "free translation" of the Tulli Papyrus. It may differ slightly from Rachewiltz's translation (Trench, 1960, 1966; Rosenberg). Below is my revised (2007) translation:
In the year 22, of the third month of winter, sixth hour of the day [...] among the scribes of the House of Life it was found that a strange Fiery Disk was coming in the sky. It had no head. The breath of its mouth emitted a foul odor. Its body was one rod in length and one rod in width. It had no voice. It came toward His Majesty's house. Their heart became confused through it, and they fell upon their bellies. They [went] to the king, to report it. His Majesty [ordered that] the scrolls [located] in the House of Life be consulted. His Majesty meditated on all these events which were now going on.
After several days had passed, they became more numerous in the sky than ever. They shined in the sky more than the brightness of the sun, and extended to the limits of the four supports of heaven [...] Powerful was the position of the Fiery Disks.
The army of the King looked on, with His Majesty in their midst. It was after the evening meal when the Disks ascended even higher in the sky to the south. Fish and other volatiles rained down from the sky: a marvel never before known since the foundation of the country. And His Majesty caused incense to be brought to appease the heart of Amun-Re, the god of the Two Lands. And it was [ordered] that the event [be recorded for] His Majesty in the annals of the House of Life [to be remembered] for ever."
An alternate story has surfaced on the internet that Prof. Tulli originally found the papyrus in 1934, belonging to an antiquities dealer in Cairo named Tano. (Incidentally, this was more than two decades before UFOs were ever heard of.) The original document, it is said, was written in hieratic script--likely at the time of the New Kingdom. (Re-transcribing into traditional hieroglyphs before attempting translation is a common procedure.)
Prof. Tulli could not meet the asking price, so he requested permission to copy it. Permission was granted, and the Egyptologist Etienne Drioton of the Cairo Museum was called upon to re-copy the hieratic text into standard hieroglyphics. If this version is correct, the Vatican never possessed the papyrus itself; Rachewiltz' claim that the deceased Tulli's brother, Gustavo, allowed him to translated it has the ring of truth (Gustavo was still alive in 1953).
I have since learned that Phocion J. Tano, once proprietor of the Cairo Antiquities Gallary (55 al-Jumhuriyah Street, Cairo) was a licensed and reputable antiquities dealer with whom Cairo's Egyptologists had long dealt (e.g., E. Drioton and the now-famous Nag Hammadi papyri; Robinson, 1984). Having spent years dealing with the Egyptian government and the Museums at Cairo, Tano would have never committed a faux pas like attempting to foist a forgery on veteran, experienced clients, risking his entire future as an antiquities dealer.
Skeptics make a lot of noise without knowing of whom they speak. Everyone involved--Tulli, Tano, Drioton, Rachewiltz--all have proven reputations, and to dishonor any of them with the label of "fakery" or "hoaxing" is totally unmerited. The Italian scholar Franco Brussino has implied fakery by claiming to have found identical "Tulli-like" sentences in Gardiner's book "Egyptian Grammar" (1927), as if whole sentences had been lifted therefrom and simply pasted together to make up the Tulli story.
Gardiner used actual Egyptian sources for his "example" sentences; and if he has found Egyptian sources about squadrons of "Fire Circles" maneuvering around the heavens scaring the wits out of priests and scribes, I should like to see them: vis, actual hieroglyphic sentences along with the page numbers where they are found in his book (contact can be established via the "comments" feature of this web site).
Re-copying from hieract into hieroglyphics is no big thing. Since there is a one-to-one correspondence between hieratic characters and hieroglyphics, this presents no problem. I make it a practise to re-transcribe ancient Greek texts (written in all capital letters without spaces between words) into the cursive (adding spaces) with which I am more comfortable, before beginning my translation. Nothing is lost in this process. Hieratic vs. hieroglyphic characters have basically the same relationship as does our own cursive vs. printed letters.
The fact that Prof. Tulli has been dubbed an "amateur Egyptologist" by modern day skeptics has absolutely no bearing on the subject--it wasn't Prof. Tulli who did the translating, but rather Rachewiltz, who was certainly familiar enough with Egyptian to translate it. If Tulli was duped, who created the aged-looking manuscript that could have fooled Tano, Drioton and Rachewiltz, all of whom were experienced veterans in such matters? (Further, since UFOs were not yet a popular "item", who would want to?)
Boris de Rachewiltz's credentials appear to be somewhat more impressive than skeptics would lead people to believe. In fact, he authored several specialised publications that are still used in universities today. Rachewiltz was a respected academician with a reputation to uphold, and there is little doubt as to his expertise in ancient Egyptian texts.
And, what about the Egyptologist Etienne Drioton? Dr. Drioton was not only on staff at the Cairo Museum in 1934, only two years later he was promoted to Director General of the Department of Egyptian Antiquities. He is a reputable Egyptologist, authoring numerous works on ancient Egypt (e.g., Drioton, 1922), and is routinely referenced as an authority by others in the field (Emery, 1961; Tompkins, 1971; West, 1979, et al.).
The Tulli text exhibits numerous parallels to other documents of the Thutmoses III era, which would be extremely difficult to fake. According to several Egyptologists, judging by the style of the language and grammar it uses, the papyrus is either genuine, or has been forged by someone very knowledgeable in Egyptian scripts, vocabulary and syntax. It's difficult for me to believe a respected nobleman such as Prince Rachewiltz would be a deliberate perpetrator of such a hoax, especially since a handwritten hieroglyphic transcript of the original papyrus survives. §
A POSSIBLE EXPLANATION
Before launching into this aspect of the Fire Circle story, I think it fair to point out that whether or not there is any reality to the existence of extraterrestrial visitors to this planet, the opinion (however firmly based on our present state of knowledge) of the scientific community has absolutely no bearing (or influence) on reality. Having said that, I am going to offer a possible explanation for the event as reported.
The appearence of fiery objects in the sky is not the only material in the Egyptian document involving inherent strangeness. The rain of volatile objects (birds and fishes?) from the sky strikes one as exceedingly strange also; and that very strangeness is expressed in the text itself. So, what could be behind such an event? In order to give any credibility to the report in question, we must look for an answer.
Occurances of fish, frogs, snails, caterpillars, eels, and other living creatures falling from the sky, although unusual, is actually more common than generally believed. Such instances are well known to meteorologists and can be easily found on the internet (most recent occurence: 18 June 2007). One may call up some examples by entering "falling fish" into your favorite search engine (or click on The Anomalist).
It is well-known among specialists that thunderstorms, tornadoes, waterspouts, and violent meteorological phenomena induced by massive volcanic eruptions, can be responsible (Lane, 1965). On this basis I am offering a suggestion which might be considered as one possibility. First of all, it must be realized that the actual date of the record in question cannot be pinpointed. Although the style of writing indicates the time of Thutmose III generally, it could have easily been written during the time of Thutmose I or II. Let's consider another significant event which took place in the Mediterranean area within this same time period.
The most glaring event is the cataclysmic vulcanism which destroyed the Minoan civilization (Leonard, 1975). Only recently the history of the eruptions of the Stronghyle volcano on the Aegean island of Santorini, and its subsequent caldera formation has been re-evaluated. It is now held that the collapse of the volcano occurred in two phases: the first accompanied the end of the first eruption, whenever it happened (circa. 1500 B.C. in the traditional chronology); the second took place several hundred years afterward. It is the first of these events that arouses our interest at this point.
This was an event so tremendous in scope that it could easily have been observed from outer space (such intelligences may have been well aware of conditions leading up to it). Since this catastrophe had a major impact on several civilizations in existence at the time, it is not out of the range of possibility that a flotilla of space ships were dispatched to observe the event and the extent of its consequences--thus the appearence of the Fiery Disks in the skies over Egypt (the general flow of smoke and debris--to say nothing of the accompanying tsunami--was to the southeast across the Mediterranean towards Egypt).
The report says that at first a single object was observed. Then, within a few days the sky was full of them from horizon to horizon. Then inexplicibly, they soared higher into the heaven and positioned themselves to the south--the smoke and debris from the Stronghyle vocano would have approached from the northwest. At this point, the volatiles began raining down from the sky. In view of these circumstances, the maneuvers and events as described in the Tulli Ms. make perfect sense. The above is offered as just one possible explanation.
NOTES
* Scientific artifacts are sometimes lost for no apparent reason. A collection of fossilized skulls, known generically as Peking Man, was put on a train leaving Peking and bound for the port of Chinwangtao on 5 December 1941. Nine marines accompanied the shipment as guards, but when the train arrived at its destination the bones had all disappeared. The incident was investigated by Chinese, Japanese and American authorities for several years afterwards, but the fossils were never found. All we have to show for the original discovery are replicas that were made before their loss. (Get the connection?) No one in the field of anthropology doubts that the Peking Man fossils once existed, although they are now lost to us forever. (vide Howells, 1967) [Back]
** I inadvertantly mistook the "heart" glyph for a similar one meaning "on" and then failed to recognize "Amun-Re" as the "god" in the next group of glyphs--the Egyptologist's translation made this mistake obvious. I've corrected this, and several other minor mistakes both in the "free" translation and the Interlinear. [Back]
§ In favor of its authenticity is the use of un-dn, Egyptian particles (usually left untranslated in English). Hoaxers would not be inclined to use such peculiarities when "making up" a phony text. To illustrate, certain Jewish authors of the New Testament (e.g., II Peter), not knowing Greek as their "first language," often failed to include common Greek particles in their compositions (in other words, they were not althogether familiar with the use of such niceties, and so did not make use of them). [Back]
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Budge, E. A. Wallace, "An Egyptian Hieroglyphic Dictionary" (2 volumes), John Murray, London, 1920.
Budge, E. A. Wallace, "Book of the Dead: The Hieroglyphic Transcript of the Papyrus of ANI," University Books, New York, 1960.
Budge, E. A. Wallace, "Egyptian Language: Easy Lessons in Egyptian Hieroglyphics," Routledge & Kegan Limited., London, 1966.
de Rachewiltz, Boris, "The Tulli Papyrus" in the magazine Doubt, No. 41, official magazine of the Fortean Society, 1953.
Drioton, Etienne, Cours de grammaire égyptienne, Le Musee du Caire, Cairo, 1922.
Emery, Walter, B., "Archaic Egypt: Culture and Civilization in Egypt Five Thousand Years Ago," Edinburgh, 1961.
Gardiner, Alan. H., "Egyptian Grammar," (3rd Edition, 1957) Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1927.
Howells, William, "Mankind in the Making," Doubleday & Co., Garden City, 1967.
Lane, Frank W., "The Elements Rage," Chilton Books, Philadelphia & New York, 1965.
Leonard, R. Cedric, "The Thera Volcano: With emphasis on the Bronze Age eruption," European Geography class paper, University of Oklahoma, 1975.
Robinson, James M., "The Facsimile Edition of the Nag Hammadi Codices," Department of Antiquities, Cairo, 1984.
Rosenberg, Samuel, “UFOs in History” in Edward U. Condon's, Final Report of the Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects, Conducted by the University of Colorado, Bantam Books, New York, 1968.
Tompkins, Peter, "Secrets of the Great Pyramid," Harper & Row Publishers Inc., New York & London, 1971.
Trench, Brinsley Le Poer, "The Sky People," Neville Spearman Limited, London, 1960.
Trench, Brinsley Le Poer, "The Flying Saucer Story," Neville Spearman Limited, London, 1966.
West, John A., "Serpent in the Sky: The high wisdom of Ancient Egypt," Harper & Row, Publ., New York & London, 1979.
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