The following is exerpted from Ancient Egypt; The Light of the World by Gerald Massey
The Egyptian record when correctly read will tell us plainly that the human birthplace was a land of the papyrus reed, the crocodile, and hippopotamus; a land of the great lakes in Karua, the Kolôe of Ptolemy, or in Apta at the horn point of the earth - that is, in Equatoria, from whence the sacred river ran to brim the valley of the Nile with plenty. It is in vain we judge of the race by the figures and faces of the rulers portrayed in monumental times. Primary data must be sought for amongst the Fellaheen and corroborated by the skulls. Captain Burton wrote to me in 1883, saying, “You are quite right about the African origin of the Egyptians, and I have sent home a hundred skulls to prove it” . (Does anyone know what became of these skulls ?) The African legends tell us that the Egyptians, Zulus, and others looked backward to a land of the papyrus reed as the primeval country of the human race. There is a widespread African tradition, especially preserved by the Kaffir tribes, that the primeval birthplace was a land of reeds. The Zulus told the missionary Callaway that men originally “came out of a bed of reeds” . This birthplace in the reeds was called “Uthlanga” , named from the reed. No one knew where it was, but all insisted that the natal reed-bed of the race was still extant. It was a sign of lofty lineage for the native aristocracy to claim descent from ancient Uthlanga, the primeval land of birth. The Basutos identify Uthlanga the human birthplace with a cavern in the earth that was surrounded by a morass of reeds. The Zulu birthplace in the bed of reeds was repeated and continued in the nest of reeds and the morass that were mythically represented as the birthplace of the child, which was constellated as the uranograph of Horus springing from the reed. What indeed is the typical reed of Egypt, first in the upper, next in the lower land, but a symbol of the birthplace in the African bed of reeds ? Lower Egypt, called Uat in the hieroglyphics, has the same name as the papyrus reed. Also Uati is a title of the great mother Isis who brought forth Child-Horus on her lap of the papyrus flower. Uat in Egyptian is the name of Lower Egypt; Uat is the oasis, Uat is the water, Uat is wet, fresh, evergreen Uat is the reed of Egypt, the papyrus reed, and a name of the most ancient mother in the Kamite mythology. [Page 256] Seb, the father of food, is clothed with papyrus reeds. The Mount of Earth was imaged as a papyrus-plant in the water of space. Lastly, the Mount of Amenta in the Ritual rises from a bed of papyrus reeds. Hor-Apollo says of the Egyptians, “To denote ancient descent they depict a roll of papyrus, and by this they signify primeval food” (B. I, 30). This is the same as with the Zulus.
The papyrus reed, Uat, was turned into a symbol of most ancient descent precisely because it had been the primeval food of the most ancient people, a totem of the most ancient mother of the race when called Uati in Egypt, and a type of the African paradise. As the symbolism shows, people were sometimes derived from and represented by the food on which they lived. Thus the papyrus reed that symbolizes ancient food and long descent would be the sign of the people who once lived on or who ate the shoots of the water plant. The Egyptians continued to be eaters of the lotus and papyrus shoots. Theirs was the land of the reed, and they, like the Zulus or the Japanese or the Pueblos, were the reed people in accordance with the primitive mode of heraldry, just as with the Arunta tribes the witchetty-grub people are those who live on the witchetty-grub as their special totemic food. In later times the papyrus plant was eaten by the Egyptians as a delicacy. Its shoots were gathered for that purpose annually. Bread made from the roots and the seed of the lotus was the gourmand's delight. Lily loaves are mentioned in the Papyrus Anastasi. It is said in the Hymn to the Nile that when food is abundant the poor man disdains to eat the lotus or papyrus plant, which shows that it had been his diet when other food was scarce. Uthlanga is not irrecoverable. We glean from other Zulu legends that this was the African birthplace in the bed of reeds, where the two children, black and white, were born of dark and day, and where the race of the reed people broke off in the beginning. This cradle of creation is repeated mythically with Child-Horus in his nest of reeds or bed of the papyrus plant, when the field of reeds was figured in the heavens as the primitive paradise of food and drink.
In the so-called “cosmogony” of the Japanese it is set forth that the first thing in which life appeared on earth at the beginning was the reed, and the earliest land or “country-place stand” (Kunitoko tachi) was the land of the reed. Japan was named as the central land of the reed expanse from the fields of reed, whether geographical on the earth or astronomical in the fields of heaven. The “great reed” of the Japanese mythos is identical with the papyrus reed that represented the Mount of Earth in Egypt or the lotus of Meru in India. Any country figured as being atop of the reed would be the midland of the world, as Japan is said to be, and the Kamite reed will explain why the land of the Kami should be called Ashi-hara, the plain of reeds, when the reed is identified with the papyrus plant. Ashi-hara no naka tsu Kuni, “the Middle Kingdom of the Reed Plain” , which [Page 257] lies upon the summit of the globe, is an ancient name for Japan. This, if mundane, corresponds to the land of the papyrus reed in equatorial Africa, the summit of our earth; or, if only mythical, i.e., astronomical, to the reed field of the Aarru paradise upon the summit of the mount in heaven. Again, the great reed standing up out of the water is identical with the typical mount of earth in the Navajo mythology. As the mount grew higher, higher grew the reed. At the time of the deluge all that lived took refuge there, and were rescued from the drowning waters by the reed. This is the papyrus reed which cradled Horus amid the waters, like the infant Moses in the ark of bulrush, applied in a folk-tale on a larger scale (Matthews).
It is now proposed to seek for the birthplace of the beginnings in Central Africa, the land of the papyrus reed, around the equatorial lakes, by the aid of the Egyptian astronomical mythology and the legendary lore. In the first place, the Kami of Egypt, like the Kami of Japan, identify themselves by name as the reed-people. And the goddess Uati is the African great mother in the bed of reeds. For it was thence, in the region of the two lakes and in the land of the papyrus reed, that souls in the germ first emanated as the soul of life from water. The Kaffir tradition thus appears to preserve the natural fact which the Egyptians rendered mythically by means of the reed plant as a symbol of the primeval birthplace on earth with Horus issuing from the waters on the reed, which became the lap of life, the cradle and the ark of the eternal child, who is also called the shoot of the papyrus, the primitive Natzer. A spring of water weIling from abysmal depths of earth, that furnished food in the papyrus reed and other edible plants, is the earliest form in which the source of life was figured by the Kamite mystery teachers. This is recorded in the Ritual (ch. 172). It was in the birthplace of the reeds and of the reed people in the region of the reeds that light first broke out of darkness in the beginning in the domain of Sut, and where the twin children of darkness and of light were born. The stands of the offerings presented to the gods in the Ritual are commonly crowned with papyrus plants, which commemorate the food that was primeval. Thus the doctrine of life issuing in and from the papyrus reed was Egyptian as well as Japanese. Naturally the earliest life thus emanating from the water was not human life, but this would be included sooner or later in the mythical representation. Hence the legend of the first man, or person who issued from a reed in the water of the deluge. In this American Indian version the reed is a figure of the birthplace instead of the Zulu bed of reeds, or Uthlanga, the land of reeds, but the typical origin is the same; and as Egyptian the mythos is to be explained. The origin of a saviour in the guise of a little child is traceable to Child-Horus, who brought new life to Egypt every year as the Messu of the inundation. This was Horus in his pre-solar and pre-human characters of the fish, the shoot of the papyrus, or the branch of endless years. In a later stage the image of Horus on his papyrus [Page 258] represented the young god as solar cause in creation. But in the primitive phase it was a soul of life or of food ascending from the water in vegetation, as he who climbs the stalk, ranging from Child- Horus to the Polynesian hero, and to Jack ascending heavenward by means of his bean-stalk. Now, of all the lands on earth there is no reed land to be compared with the land of the reeds round the equatorial lakes, where the papyrus grows about the waters in jungles and forests
so dense that a charging herd of hippopotami could hardly penetrate the bush, which stands out of the water full fifteen feet in height (Johnston, H. H.), and there if anywhere upon this earth Uthlanga, the original reed land or birth land in the reeds, will yet be found. That is the natural fact which underlies the mythical representation when the Egyptians show us Horus “on his papyrus” rising from his natal bed of the papyrus plant. Child-Horus on his papyrus is the reed-born in mythology who reflects the natural fact of the human birthplace in the field, the bed, or nest of reeds on earth or in heaven - that is, the African oasis of the beginning, whether the offspring represents food or other elemental force. Now the Egyptian Aarru or paradise, established by Ra, was “a field of reeds” in seven divisions, and these were papyrus reeds which sprang up from the marshes. Thus the Kamite paradise was a land of the papyrus plant repeated on the summit of the mount in heaven at the north celestial pole (Naville, Destruction of Mankind).
