Test 1:    How does what Joan said / wrote compare to what was known at that time ?

The best way to approach this test (each is different) seems to me to be to look for major inconsistencies.

It would seem redundant to analyse the entire book, but what I have done is to go through it and filter out those items which modern Egyptologist would find most objectionable or most surprising, and then explained why. In case anyone doubts my facts or analyses and wants to pursue this analysis further, I have put a brief reading list at the back for reference. It will be noted that some of the books are old and some modern. The reason for this is that excavation reports on old excavations are by definition old (although that does not affect what was found, or in many cases the validity of any extrapolations), but where discussing opinions I have where possible used more modern books so long as they have been written by experts on the subject(s).

In listing those items which appear to me particularly problematic, I have not put them in any hard-and-fast order, but as far as possible I have put the most unequivocally problematic issues at the top, and those where there might be a little more 'wriggle room' later.

In reading some of the items below, or in doing further readings, it may be useful to know to which Pharaohs Joan was referring.

Although she gives all but one different names to those with which we are familiar, Joan makes it easy. She recognised her father's 'Horus' name (Djer), and then her brother and her names and her daughter's name in illustrations in Petrie's History of Ancient Egypt, and she recognised from another illustration, of a bracelet coming from Djer's tomb, the bracelet she had given her mother. (See Time Out of Mind pp 238-9 and Winged Pharaoh pp50-51.).

Her kings therefore seem to correspond to the following kings, insofar as there is a correspondence:

That said, the hieroglyphs that Joan identified with 'her' Horus name (page 190) seem to be a romanticised version of the Horus name of Djet, and she puts the Horus name of King Djer in the wrong order (page 42). She also states (page 192) that her father had an alternate spelling of his name, and that she and her brother used the same name. Complicated, and I won't pursue this further because the essential thing is to establish the period we must look at to perform comparisons between what Joan writes and the archaeological record, and this gives us more than sufficient for this purpose.

Just as an aside though, Joan's account of the Kings who preceded these (pp84,98-104) also does not correspond to what is understood by modern archaeology.

1.1

   The scarab that Joan 'psychometrised'

Joan said (Time Out Of Mind' Part Five Chapter Two 'The Scarab'; and I do not doubt she believed her own account fully) that she accessed her life as Sekeeta by 'psychomertising' a turquoise scarab that her mother placed on her breast when she was taken for an initiation.

This is problematic because the First Dynasty was c 3,000 B.C. and at that time the Egyptians used 'cylinder seals' instead of scarabs, and the two are completely unmistakable one from the other. One looks like a small tube and the other like a beetle. Amuletic scarabs came into vogue in the 'First Intermediate Period' circa 2,100 B.C., and heart scarabs, the scarabs that were placed on the chest of the deceased, in the New Kingdom, circa 1,500 B.C.

Joan psychometrising a scarab and finding it came from the First Dynasty is therefore chronologically extremely problematic.

The whereabouts of the turquoise scarab are as far as I am aware currently unknown. If it ever comes to light, it should be quite readily datable, because scarabs evolved stylistically over the time they were used in Ancient Egypt.

1.2

   Joan's pharaohs believed in reincarnation, but their tombs (and everything else) shows their beliefs were completely different - much stranger and (to us) much more unpalatable

According to Joan's Far Memory, the Ancient Pharaohs believed in reincarnation (see the book's first line; the concept permeates the whole book) Specifically, they believed that when their spirit left their body for the last time, it went into a new incarnation in another time period and in a completely different body.

This concept would have been completely alien to the Ancient Egyptians, and is completely at odds with the voluminous archaeological record. The Ancient Egyptian royals of the period built huge pits into which their preserved bodies were lain with their favourite possessions and vast underground larders of beverages and foodstuffs, because they thought the deal soul would need these to keep going in the afterlife.

Furthermore, as well as the pit burials, these Pharaohs (or at least four of them, including Joan's alleged father) had vast above ground complexes associated with them nearer the floodplain, and these are not mentioned in Joan's Far Memories. Also, and this was not known at the time Joan was writing (so I stray into Test 2), a number of the kings of this era were buried with boats or large models of them.

In addition, and this was known at the time that Joan wrote, they were surrounded by the tombs of their retainers. In the case of 'Sekeeta's father', he was surrounded by many hundreds of them. When he excavated, Petrie found that some of their bodies were in what he regarded as un-natural poses, and the fact that the superstructure covered both the Pharaoh's tomb and many of the retainers' tombs strongly suggests that the retainers were slaughtered at the time of his death so they could accompany their master into the afterlife and render him uninterrupted service. This conclusion that the retainers met an un-natural death has recently been given further support from forensic analysis, which suggests strangulation as the cause of death. This is all somewhat similar to what the First Emperor of China was to do at his burial some three thousand years later.

Tomb archaeology (tombs as subterranean larders; which were incidentally topped up with fresh supplies in the years after the King was buried; the Kings had mortuary temples, and these temples owned land explicitly for this purpose - at least in later years when there is written record) is therefore saying something completely different to Winged Pharaoh on the subject of the Ancient Egyptian belief system, and the two are irreconcilable.

There is an interesting aside to this, and that is to note how Joan herself described the burials of her family in Winged Pharaoh.

Of Za Atet's burial she writes (pp 85-6):

'This great Pharaoh's tomb was not a sepulchre of sculptured stone (NB sepulchres of sculptured stone only become known later), but it was like the room in which he had set his seal ….No food or wine, no furniture, no swords; (NB also not present, I believe during this period; they used maces) no gold or ivory, no carven stone: and only the growing things that he had loved. And then the doors of cedarwood were sealed. (NB Presumably killing the plants he was so fond of - ?).

Of Za Atet's wife's burial she writes (page 287):

'Her body joined my father's at Abidwa. Beside her, as she had wished, was placed a painted wooden chest … we had given to her and our father when we were children; little slips of ivory difficult to scribe; pieces of limestone on which Neyah had practised carving … in her sarcophagus she still wore the bracelet that we had given her when I was nine.'

In other words Za Atet had taken with him nothing but plants, and his wife took her treasured mementos. His wife also took with her 'a little statuette of Shamba', her father's lioness. Kind when the real kings took the real animals (and people) they liked with them.

And of her own burial as Sekeeta she writes (pp299-300):

'I shall lie at Abidwa in the City of the Living Dead …With me in my tomb shall be those things that will show our followers in time the manner of people who once dwelt in Kam. There shall be the things that I have used during my life: the sandals and cloaks and head-dresses I have worn, and the chest wherein I have kept my necklaces; the furniture from my apartments, and the little vases that held my flowers when I lived in the temple.'

If this had been true, she would surely have been the only monarch in world history to plan the contents of her tomb with the intent that it would be opened at some unspecified time in the future and so that the people of the future could enjoy its contents.

Surely this stretches credulity too far. One may note that Leslie was taking all this down, had read at least parts of Petrie's History of Ancient Egypt, and had a couple of seasons at archaeological digs in the Near East under his belt; and archaeologists like nothing more than to 'talk shop' in the quiet of the evening. I cannot help but wonder if he and Joan divorced not simply because she decided to publish 'Winged Pharaoh', but because the more he thought about it (and perhaps he heard of, or even read about some of Emery's initial discoveries) the more he came to see an irreconcilable disparity between what he was taking down in dictation and the evidence of the physical record. Charles, of course, and Denys after him I daresay, was a believer …

Test 1.3

   Horses

Joan made much in her Author's Note of the fact that although horses appeared throughout the story, none had been found either physically or in depictions in Egypt before the 18th Dynasty, some 1,500 years later. Give or take a hundred years this remains the case, and if horses had been present in the First Dynasty and rare, one might have expected them to appear, like lions, in the Pharaonic burials. Of course only a little of what was buried in this period survives, but had horses existed then, one might have expected to find some trace of them in the ensuing 1,500 years before archaeologists actually find them.

Test 1.4

   Tribute

Part V of Winged Pharaoh contains a chapter (Chapter 5) on 'Tribute'.

Here Joan describes how 'Twice every year the people of Kam make a free gift of a twelfth part of what they have gathered during the past six months.'

Joan goes on to describe how it is used; for the welfare of the dwellers in the temples; to look after children who have no parents; for the maintenance of the armies and the garrisons; and lastly for public works such as roads, waterways, the planting of trees and the cleansing of cities.

She adds that 'In the order of tribute there was no degree of rank, for before Pharaoh all the people of Kam are equal. A farmer, with two little donkeys loaded with sacks of grain, was followed by a noble … by a merchant … by a little girl' etc.

There is no evidence of which I am aware that the populace at any stage gave 'free gifts' of this nature. Indeed I doubt they were even given the chance except at voluntary religious ceremonies, because they lived in what one might well now regard as something of a totalitarian state. The authority of the Pharaoh was total, and it was not exercised selflessly. Recent analyses show, very interestingly, that the grave goods the ordinary people took with them into their afterlives were far richer in the late pre-Pharaonic period than in the First and Second dynasties, when the archaeological record suggests that the Pharaohs diverted an increasing proportion of the country's GDP for their own enjoyment.

The idea that anything moved or took place without a careful consideration of rank is also a strange one, because Ancient Egypt was awash with ranks and titles, and was one of the most hierarchical countries the world has ever seen.

Test 1.5

   Atlantis / Athlanta

There are several references in Winged Pharaoh to the island of Athlanta, which was, according to Winged Pharaoh, destroyed in times ancient even to the Ancient Egyptians, by a flood because of the wickedness of its people.

I don't think there can be many archaeologists these days who actually believe in a lost ancient island (and race) in the middle of the Atlantic, although there are many who believe that an enormous volcanic eruption on the island of Santorini around 1,500 BC (i,e during the Egyptian New Kingdom, and around 1,500 years after the end of the First Dynasty) was the cause of the end of Minoan civilisation and the origin of the Atlantis legend, although this would have to mean that the early storytellers got their facts wrong in believing that Atlantis was to the west rather than the east of the mouth of the Mediterranean.

Joan is clearly referring to something similar but much earlier and unknown to us, and curiously giving it an almost identical name despite the word 'Atlantic' being a western one. Curious.

Just as an aside, there is a reference to the British Isles in Winged Pharaoh - see page 169 about the 'White Island' (presumably a reference to the White Cliffs of Dover) where there is a temple 'encircled by a great ditch, and the walls are of single stones, unhewn, joined to each other by wood and clay covered with white plaster'.

I am not aware of the Ancient Egyptians being aware of the British Isles at any period of their history.

Test 1.6

   'The Lookers'

In Section III Chapter 9, Joan talks about 'The Lookers'. These were people trained to leave their bodies and observe what was going on inside their area or outside the country, and then to communicate what they had seen telepathically through the use of symbols.

Even the CIA was unable (as far as we know) to achieve one hundredth of this during their researches during the 'Cold War', and I do not believe that any professional Egyptologist - or indeed anyone but the most dyed-in-the wool New Age enthusiast - would take this account of how things happened in Ancient Egypt seriously.

For the curious, this is a section worth reading in its entirety.