Free ebook with interactive pictographic dictionary in preparation (March 2026)

* (…) wonderful indeed her beauty, but more wonderful her skill in singing, from which art they called her Canens. The fascination of her voice would move the woods and rocks and tame wild beasts, and stay long rivers, and it even detained the wandering bird.

The Tiber saw her last, with grief and toil wearied and lying on his widespread bank. In tears she poured out words with a faint voice, lamenting her sad woe, as when the swan about to die sings a funereal dirge. Melting with grief at last she pined away; her flesh, her bones, her marrow liquified and vanished by degrees as formless air and yet the story lingers near that place, fitly named Canens by old-time Camenae!.’ (Ovid, Metamorphoses, Bk.14, lines 320-440, trans. Golding)

** Come, tell me, where have you proved yourself a seer? Why, when the watchful dog who wove dark song was here, did you say nothing to free the people? Yet the riddle, at least, was not for the first comer to read: there was need of a seer’s help, [395] and you were discovered not to have this art, either from birds, or known from some god. But rather I, Oedipus the ignorant, stopped her, having attained the answer through my wit alone, untaught by birds. (Sophocles, Oedipus Rex, lines 390-395, trans. Storr)

Hermes’ warning is encoded in stone (line 2); a reference to the singing sphinx (see quotes above), to the three pyramids of Giza and to other oracular stones.  

The sphinx was also known to have a voice in the myth of Oedipus and, according to Sophocles, it ‘wove dark song’. Greek Oedipus’ name has the meaning ‘swollen foot’. Why was the sphinx so closely linked to feet and to riddles? Line 40 of Maestro of a Lost World provides the answer from under its foot – in the form of a riddle.

Most of the known attributes of Egyptian Thoth and/or Greek Hermes are found in this text:

– god of boundaries and sailors, creator of divisions, messenger (line 1),

– scribe, inventor of writing (line 2)

– psychopomp, musician and trickster (lines 5 and 6),

– secretive (hermetic), ‘spy’ (line 7).

– merchant and diplomat, inspector of weights and measures (line 7)

– winged god (line 8)

– god of sailors and psychopomp (line 10).

Hermes is also present in the form of a herma (line 8), the armless and one-legged boundary stone still well attested in later times and usually carved with just a head and phallus. The herma has features in common with certain figures at Göbekli Tepe; the two legless humanoid stone pillars of Enclosure D and also the Urfa man discovered in the same region.

Kronos swallowed all of his children in the order of their birth with the exception of the last, Zeus, and then disgorged them in the opposite order; the youngest first (Homeric Hymn 5 to Aphrodite). Thus, Poseidon was re-born before his elder brother Hades, a detail perhaps reflected in the words of line 7.  This bears an amusing similarity to the erroneous criticism of Robert Bauval’s Orion correlation theory on the grounds that the three pyramids of Giza could not possibly reflect the positions of the three stars of Orion’s Belt.

In light of the ongoing controversy about the possibility of underground pillars at Giza, it’s interesting to note that the middle pyramid identified as that of Khafre (line 7) is shown by association with Poseidon to be linked to water and the notion of flooding. I noted in Maestro of a Lost World (notes to line 73) that Khafre’s pyramid possesses a Sothic calendar at the northwestern corner of its perimeter and that the rising of Sirius heralded the annual flooding of the Nile. Poseidon was known as Enesidaon, the ‘earth-shaker’ and Themeliouchos, ‘upholding the foundations’ among other epithets. What lies beneath?