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It was Oscar Wilde who said “The true mystery of the world is the visible not the invisible”, what the great playwright is that he could have been talking about the mysterious Boy King with his golden death mask — the boy king, Tutankhamun.

Tutankhamun, who passed away at the young age of nineteen, was a living god to the Egyptian people, but virtually unknown to those outside Egypt, until his huge horde of golden treasures was discovered in an obscure tomb in a forgotten section of the Valley of the Kings, by the intrepid archaeologist Howard Carter and his aristocratic benefactor, Lord Carnarvon of Highclere Castle.

In order to connect the boy king with the mysterious enigma of the Mayan calendar and the year 2012 (the 21st December 2012 to be precise), we must first re-investigate what is the real significance of 2012, and why have so many have speculated why the ancient Mesoamericans chose the year 2012 as their end time. The evidence for 2012 is clearly displayed in inscriptions cut into the rock at the Mayan Tortuguero temple in southern Mexico, as well as more famously in the western panel of the pyramid Temple of Inscriptions of the boy king Pacal in Palenque, central Mexico..

The Jade Death Mask of the Mayan King Pacal Despite the efforts of myriad archaeologists and scientists, no evidence has been found for 2012 in any other civilisation or ancient culture. It seems that 2012 was exclusively the preserve of the Mayan and Olmec cultures, that is, until now…. If we examine the sacred wall murals of the magnificent burial tomb of Tutankhamun, we can find the hallowed secret of 2012 hiding in plain sight, like Oscar Wilde said, ” …the visible, not the invisible”.

In order to fully understand this mystery, we first need to understand something of the ancient Egyptian beliefs of the afterlife and their burial practices. The Egyptians based their afterlife on the twin constructs of the ka and ba. The ba was the soul which resided in every creature. It held a sacred function in death, which was to make it possible for the deceased to leave his tomb and rejoin his ka and live forever. As the dead physical body could no longer do this, the ba, or soul, transformed into a bird with a human head that would fly out of the tomb into the treacherous underworld and onward into the afterlife. The ka was the creative spirit of a person and was believed to have lived on after the physical body had passed away. The ka resided within the body of the individual and therefore needed that body after death to take flight with the ba. This is why the Egyptians mummified their dead. If the body decomposed, their spiritual ka would die and the deceased would lose their chance to attain eternal life. If the ka did not undergo elaborate funerary rituals and was not given protective magic spells, it might become lost in the underworld, unable to escape into the afterlife, trapped between two worlds like a ghost. The ka and ba were guided in the underworld by twelve “good†genies in the twelve hours of darkness. Today, these concepts are almost unknown. The last vestiges of the ka and ba formed the word for the kaballah, the suffix allah meaning “to ascend”.

If we look at the western wall of the tomb of Tutankhamun, we see the twelve genies as baboons, as magic guardians for the ka and ba on their journey through the underworld for each hour of darkness. Above them is the scarab beetle standing on its hind legs in a solar barge with two upright gods representing the setting sun. To the right of it are three more gods and two goddesses, as guides in the underworld. On the eastern wall opposite are funeral bearers hauling the boy king Tutankhamun’s sarcophagus to rest — there are twelve disciples hauling it. What we now understand is that the sarcophagus is lying prostrate or horizontal and is thus dead, devoid of the life spirit or ka. The boy king’s ka is portrayed on the northern wall, where it is meeting the god Osiris, lord of the underworld. In ancient Egypt, hieroglyphs of the living were pictured standing up or aloft, while inanimate or dead objects were pictured as horizontal. This is also evidenced in battle scenes where vanquished soldiers are shown as lying down.   Now we can see the deeper meaning in the wall paintings of Tut’s tomb.

On the western wall are 20 aloft figures and the eastern wall there are 12 figures forming the year 2012- the first time this sacred number has been discovered outside of Mayan temples, in the Valley of the Kings, in Egypt six thousand miles away. But is there any proof that the ancient Egyptians were connected to the meso-americans like the Olmecs ? The answer is a positive yes! we also find that there were considerable trading links between the two civilisations, so much so, that in 1998 the remains of cocaine were found in the wrappings of an Egyptian mummy.

Besides the sacred number of 2012, if we look further there are even more connections between the ancient Mayans and the Egyptians waiting to be revealed in Tutankhamun’s tomb, the other walls display an intriguing cosmic cycle, these secrets are also encoded into the exquisite golden Death Masks of Tutankhamun and King Pacal, but they also reveal the reason why 2012 is so significant, an astonishing truth and an important warning for the future of mankind. The unanswered question is how could the ancient Egyptians be using a calendar system which looked forward in time starting with the birth of Jesus? This question is answered in the novel by Tom Bane- Masks of the Lost Kings.

“Masks of  The  Lost  Kings” features Suzy da Silva, a beautiful Brazilian archaeologist. Snatched from the cloistered environs of Oxford University, Suzy is swept into a maelstrom of deception and intrigue. She joins forces with astrophysicist Tom Brooking, crossing four continents to decipher the hidden messages in Tutankhamun’s tomb, the Holy Sepulchre and the mysterious Mayan Temple of Inscriptions to reveal an ancient truth. Together they risk their lives when they find themselves pursued by martial arts assassins and renegade Special Forces, literally fighting evil to uncover hidden knowledge so masterfully concealed and so precious that it had lain dormant for over three thousand years.

www.tombane.com