EVER since 1975, a claim has emerged on occasion that ancient Egyptians landed in what is now Kariong in the Australian state of New South Wales – something cited as fact by even certain documentaries, with video footage of rock carvings that appear to resemble Egyptian hieroglyphs.
However, is this true?
Verdict:
FALSE
The "Gosford Glyphs" - as they have been called – have been thoroughly debunked.
As cited in an Australian Geographic article from March 2021, a New South Wales National Parks and Wildlife Service spokesman was quoted saying that there was "no substance" to support the theory that the hieroglyphs were indeed carved by ancient Egyptians.
"The engravings are something we became aware of in the early 1980s, which is around the time the majority were thought to have been made," said the spokesman.
Additionally, Macquarie University Egyptologist Boyo Ockinga has also debunked the claim that it could have been done by shipwrecked Egyptians from millennia ago.
In a report by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), he said that there were both chronological and structural errors in the way the "hieroglyphs" were carved.
"First of all the way they're cut is not the way ancient Egyptian rock inscriptions are produced, they're very disorganised," he said.
"There's also a problem with the actual shapes of the signs that are used. There's no way people would've been inscribing texts from the time of Cheops from the signs that weren't invented until 2,500 years later. That's a chronological discrepancy," he said.
Basically, this meant that symbols from different periods of Egypt's history – periods thousands of years apart – had been grouped together and made to appear as if they're done by the same person or group of people.
So, who did them? As cited in the ABC article, Dr Ockinga thinks they're most likely from a more recent period in Australia's history.
He thinks the carvings were most likely made in the 1920s, when ancient Egypt saw a burst of popularity following the discovery of King Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922.
"We have other instances of Australian soldiers having carved, Egyptianising objects in the Ku-ring-gai National Park near Sydney," he said.
"It wouldn't be at all surprising for someone who'd had this fascination for Egypt to have done the same thing up there,” he added.
References:
1. https://www.
2. https://www.abc.net.au/news/
