(02-14-2025, 02:03 PM)KKLoco Wrote: This is HUGE - LITERALLY!!! The fabled Halls of Amenti beneath the Giza Plateau have been discovered! A vast underground city was discovered with SAR satellite data. She says in the video that they literally go kilometers beneath the surface of the earth. Encompassing structures, corridors, massive chambers, tunnels, and vertical shafts. These Halls of Amenti go back to the most ancient time period in Egypt, back to the time of Thoth.
There will be a conference on March 15th to unveil their discoveries. OMG, I geek out on Giza and anything ancient Egyptian!!! I want to go!!!
On a side not -- good riddance Zahi Hawass! We would have never heard about this if he was still the Head of Antiquities.
[Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuL3Fv-x3so]
[Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgYGhOQ45iY]
Nope.
If you'll forgive the rude term, a "nothing burger."
Firstly, there's no "fabled halls of Amenti"... or at least, the ancient Egyptians didn't know of any such thing. "Amenti" is the Greek word for the Duat, and the description of the Duat depended on what time in Egyptian history you're discussing (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duat)
There's no "hall of records" in ancient Egyptian belief. The Duat was sort of like the "happy hunting grounds" legends about native American afterlife beliefs. It was Egypt, only everyone who ever lived was alive. People would have food and drink and have servants (the usabti
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ushabti, if you could afford them) They would live there forever in peace and harmony and could do things they enjoyed like hunting and fishing and having parties and even visiting their living relatives or visiting famous festivals in Egypt.
The gods were also there, of course.
It's mentioned in the Pyramid Texts (written in the pyramids of the early kings) -- but it's not clear if it's only a space for the royal family. Tombs and coffins of nobles don't have these texts until after the end of the 6th Dynasty (
https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/30...E%2054.pdf)
Early on, it was one of two places that the king would visit in death... Duat and the Imperishable Stars in the north.
About the time of the New Kingdom, the Duat takes on a real landscape, with rivers and pools and dangerous places... and now Anubis shows up along with other gods to help the deceased. Once they pass the test in the Hall of Judgment (where Osiris sits and Anubis weighs the heart), they join the sun god on his nightly journey through the underworld, where they help him fight the forces of chaos and evil.
The "Halls of Amenti" comes from a "new version" of the first century "Emerald Tablets"; a Greek construct (not Egyptian) that's pretty much the Greek Mystery School idea (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emerald_Tablet). This NEW version of "The Emerald Tablets of Thoth" (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emerald_Ta..._Atlantean) is the first mention of the "Halls of Amenti" as a big city and underground and a remnant of Atlantis. It was ..."channeled"... by Maurice Doral, who has a history of Not Accurate Prophecies (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Doreal).
So... the breathless announcement that they've "found" something that only existed after a man with a history of inaccurate prophecies wrote about it in the 1930's... is ... not something to get excited about.
(and for whoever's howling about Hawass, he was involved in a fairly significant find within the past few years of the tomb of several of Egypt's most powerful New Kingdom priestesses.)