The tomb of the giants in Sakkara
The tomb of the giants of Sakkara: Research report by Gregor Spörri
The discovery of the serapeum
In the first half of the 19th century, explorers – more treasure hunters than scientists at the time – had few scruples about achieving their goals. In order to be respected by fellow scientists and popular with the general public, it was a must to bring home as many treasures as possible from his expeditions. How you got there was of secondary importance. Dynamite as a door opener was part of every explorer’s standard equipment, so to speak. The French treasure hunter, excavator and Egyptologist Auguste Mariette was no different.
A valuable treasure
In 1851, Auguste Mariette discovered the entrance to a tomb near the Pyramid of Djoser, where he suspected precious treasures were hidden. For 3000 years, grave robbers had apparently searched in vain for this entrance. Mariette’s assumption seemed to be confirmed, as he was greeted by a statue of Apis the bull behind the entrance to the tomb. Next to it were other statues and steles with the image of the holy bull.
The Apis bull was worshipped by the ancient Egyptians as the embodiment of the main creator god Ptah, who is said to have once formed man from clay.
Mariette assumed that it was located in the so-called Serapeum, a millennia-old cult and burial site for these Apis bulls, which Greek scholars reported as early as 25 BC. The Frenchman examined the extensive complex and first came across the intact tomb of Chaemwaset – a son of Pharaoh Ramses II.
Mariette had the precious treasure, consisting of around 7000 grave goods, brought to Paris. Numerous pieces of this treasure can still be admired in the Louvre Museum today.
The tomb of the giants
After clearing out Chaemwaset’s tomb in the so-called small gallery, Mariette turned her attention to the vaults below.
In the so-called large gallery, he came across 24 bricked-up niches. Stelae covered with hieroglyphics were embedded in the outer walls. Mariette tore down the walls and was startled. Because in 22 of the 24 niches were stone sarcophagi as huge as no one had ever seen at the time. Several additional layers of small stone blocks were piled on top of the massive coffin lids, giving the impression that they were intended to weigh down the coffin lids. But why and for what purpose?
An incredible weight
Curiously, two of the 24 sarcophagi were located in the side corridors of the serapeum.
The containers had been carved out of a single block of granite. There were coffins made of rose granite, gray granite, diorite, syenite, granodiorite and so on. All very hard materials that are difficult to work with. Mariette’s companion, Monsieur Linant de Bellefonds, measured one of the sarcophagi and calculated that it weighed at least 65 tons. A second container even weighed over 70 tons.
A great mystery
Although the find was an absolute sensation, Mariette was very surprised by something: All the coffin lids – weighing over 20 tons, as heavy as the vault doors of Fort Knox – had been pushed slightly to one side. So the coffins were ajar. A quick glance inside was enough to see that they were all empty. Mariette and his companions were highly irritated by this, as there was no evidence that the site had been raided by grave robbers or plundered in any other way.
A single untouched sarcophagus
Only one of the 24 sarcophagi was still untouched and sealed. Mariette and his helpers tried unsuccessfully to push aside the cover, which weighed several tons. In the end, they even used dynamite on the coffin. After they had blown a hole in the container, their astonishment was all the greater because this container was also empty. This made the mystery all the greater.
Riddle upon riddle
Mariette wondered if the missing mummies had been buried elsewhere for some reason. If there was an explanation for this, he would certainly find it on the stone tablets (stelae), which could be found in large numbers both in the vestibule of the crypt and in the walled-up niches. But although Auguste Mariette was well versed in hieroglyphic writing, he was unable to read the stelae. Mariette is said to have racked his brains over the seemingly untouched yet empty tomb until the end of his life.
Later, it was apparently possible to decipher the stelae brought to France by Mariette. As expected, the texts report on the burial of sacred Apis bulls.
In the past, there were hundreds of these stelae in the walls and facing walls of the Serapeum. Today, only empty niches bear witness to this, as Mariette and his helpers had taken them all to France.
Open questions
1) How many of the stele texts have been translated to date?
2) Do these texts report exclusively on bull burials?
3) Do the texts also refer to the giant sarcophagi or only to the bull burials themselves? This is because the crypt once also contained several normal-sized wooden sarcophagi – ideal for the burial of Apis bull mummies.
The official doctrine and my current objections to it
Doctrine 1: The Serapeum was once used to worship the sacred Apis bulls that lived in the stables above ground. After their death, the bulls were embalmed and buried in the underground necropolis.
Objection: The Serapeum consists of two separate areas: The so-called large gallery and the small gallery. Mummified bodies of humans and bulls were actually found in wooden sarcophagi in the small gallery. This part of the necropolis is also where Mariette found the treasures and bull artifacts that were sold as medicine at the markets in Cairo at the time.
The large gallery is something completely different, because only here are the giant stone sarcophagi. Because the Egyptologists do not know the actual purpose, they claim that Apis bulls were also buried in these monster coffins.
Doctrine 2: The Western Roman Emperor Honorius (384 to 423 AD) had the Serapeum closed. Monks from the nearby monastery of St. Jeremiah then removed the bull mummies from the sarcophagi and destroyed them in order to put an end to the bull cult that was prevalent at the time.
Objection: The animal mummies would never have fit in one piece through the narrow slits of the coffin lids, which were pushed to the side. If the monks had previously cut the mummies into smaller pieces through the slits, there would inevitably be remains of these dismemberment operations.
But the sarcophagi were all spotlessly clean and Auguste Mariette had never mentioned any mummy remains.
Conclusion: There is currently no scientifically proven knowledge about the purpose of the large gallery and the giant sarcophagi.
Further findings & questions
1) Bull mummies are basically very simple packages, shaped with straw and linen bandages.
It makes sense to bury the bull mummies in wooden coffins in the small gallery. However, burial in the huge granite sarcophagi makes no sense. These were made with incredible effort and precision from hard, heavy granite, which had to be brought in from Aswan, 1000 kilometers away.
The effort involved is disproportionate to the supposed purpose!
2) Why would the Egyptians have made such huge containers for the burial of the bulls?
The animals were buried in a lying position. A bull mummy package is on average 1.7 meters long, 0.7 meters wide and 1.2 meters high. However, the sarcophagi are on average 3.8 meters long, 2.3 meters wide and 3.2 meters high.
This also means that the size of the containers is completely disproportionate to their supposed purpose!
3) The Apis bulls were sacred to the Egyptians. Their bodies were mummified so that they could be resurrected in the realm of the dead. There was no reason to bury the animals in a way that you might do with monsters that you want to lock away forever.
4) Why should the coffins be closed and sealed with 20-ton, flat, airtight lids, even though mummies do not decompose?
5) Why were several tons of stones packed on top of the 20-ton lids, as if this would prevent something enormously strong from breaking out of the coffins?
6) Why were the sarcophagi partially walled into the ground, even though this contradicts the burial customs of the ancient Egyptians?
7) Why were the niches with the sarcophagi bricked up if it was a place of pilgrimage for sacred animals that were worshipped?
8) What is the story behind the ominous stone tablets that were once embedded in the brickwork of the niches? Were they destroyed or moved to another location? What information/messages were engraved on these plaques?
An important detail: the aforementioned plaques near the niches are not to be confused with the many ‘gift plaques’ of pilgrims that were once located in the entrance area of the Serapeum.
9) Each sarcophagus is different in terms of the type of granite used, its size, shape and weight. Why did the stonemasons attach so little importance to the external appearance of the coffins? The containers are anything but perfect on the outside. It is teeming with sloping edges, crooked surfaces, dents, etc.
10) Why was the invisible interior of the containers designed perfectly? The bases, side walls and insides of the lids are sanded absolutely flat. The containers can be sealed airtight. The angles of the inside corners and edges are exactly 90 degrees. And the radius of the inside corners is a minimum of four to five millimeters.
Why this immense effort that nobody sees in the end?
11) Why were the containers empty despite all the effort? Did only ritual mock burials take place? Then the effort involved is even more incomprehensible! Will we ever solve the mystery?
12) What tools did the ancient Egyptians use to cut and polish the extremely hard granite stone with such precision? The hardest metal they officially possessed at the time was iron. To this day, working granite is an enormous technical challenge that is only possible with special equipment and machines.
13) Three of the 24 sarcophagi have inscriptions. The hieroglyphs, some of which are more poorly carved than others, name kings from the 26. and 27th Dynasty (400 – 500 BC). However, the carved texts contradict the theory of Apis bull burials.
14) Is it possible that the colossal containers are much older and perhaps even date back to the Neolithic – the Neolithic period in which the biblical giants (Nephilim) are said to have lived? Did the Egyptians take the containers from the first hand, so to speak, and use them for their own purposes?
Conclusion
For the reasons mentioned above, I wonder if there could be a connection between the huge sarcophagi in the Serapeum of Sakkara and the equally huge unfinished sarcophagi in the unfinished rock chamber under the Great Pyramid? Both sites still puzzle Egyptologists and alternative researchers.
Read more The Great Pyramid in Giza: Tomb of the Giants.
Tour of the serapeum
The large gallery has been open to visitors since 2011. Unfortunately, a lot of the original features were lost during the renovation. Among other things, the original stone floor was covered with a parquet floor and massive steel scaffolding was erected in the coffin niches to protect against collapse.
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