Egyptomania Timeline
Robert M. Place
c. 6000 BCE: Nile River Valley first inhabited.
c. 3200 BCE: Hieroglyphs developed.
3150 BCE – 2613 BCE: The Reign of King Djoser builder of the first pyramid.
c. 2560 BCE: The Great Pyramid of Gisa is constructed by Pharaoh (a term meaning Great House) Khufu (or Cheops in Greek).
c. 2500 BCE: The Great Sphinx is built.
2613–2494 BCE: The first mention of the goddess Hathor, who is the mother, consort, and daughter of the sun god Ra, and later, the mother and consort of Horus. She is first depicted as a cow, and later as a woman with cow horns and ears and a solar disk between her horns.
c. 2494–2345 BCE: Isis was first mentioned as one of the main characters of the Osiris myth, in which she resurrects her slain brother and husband, the divine king Osiris, with the Help of the god Thoth and his Words of Power. She gives birth to her son, Horus. Her original name was Aset (meaning throne) and she wore a throne on her head.
c. 1550 – c. 1070 BCE: As Isis took on traits that originally belonged to Hathor, the preeminent goddess of earlier times, Isis was portrayed wearing Hathor’s headdress: a sun disk between horns
1353 BCE – c. 1336 BCE: Reign of Akhenaten, Tutankhamun’s father. He was the ‘Heretic King’ who introduced the worship of Aten as the sole god of Egypt.
c.1332 BCE – 1323 BCE: The reign of Tutankhamun, who restored the traditional worship of the gods.
c.1000 BCE: Isis and Osiris became the most widely worshiped Egyptian deities. Isis absorbed traits from many other goddesses.
c. 398 BCE – c. 380 BCE: Plato travels in Egypt.
336 BCE – 330 BCE: The Persian king Darius III rules Egypt.
331 BCE: Egypt is conquered by Alexander the Great without resistance. He founds Alexandria at the port town of Rhakotis.
323 BCE: After the death of Alexander, his general Ptolemy I Sotor rules Egypt and the Hellenistic Age begins, in which Greek philosophy and culture is infused with the indigenous culture. Isis was worshiped by Greeks and Egyptians, along with her husband Serapis (a new version of Osiris) and her son, now named Harpocrates instead of Horus. Their worship spread into the wider Mediterranean world. Isis’s Greek devotees ascribed to her traits taken from Greek deities, such as Demeter and Venus.
247 BCE: The Lighthouse of Alexandria (Pharos) is completed
c. 69 BCE – 12 Aug 30 BCE: The Life of Cleopatra VII, the last Ptolemaic ruler. She presents herself as the goddess Isis.
30 BCE – 476 CE: Egypt is a province of the Roman Empire. The cult of Isis spread through the Roman Empire. Her devotees were a small proportion of the population but were found all across its territory. Her following developed distinctive festivals such as the Navigium Isidis, as well as Initiation rites that resembled Greco-Roman Mystery Cults. Some of her devotees said she encompassed all feminine divine powers in the world.
c. 100 – c. 300 CE: Mystic authors wrote books on alchemy, astrology, and philosophy (the Hermetica) and signed their works Hermes Trismegistus a Greek version of the Egyptian god Thoth.
c. 158 – 180 CE: Apuleius authors The Golden Ass, the only ancient Roman novel to survive in its entirety. It contains the only ancient description of the mysteries of Isis.
306 to 337 CE: the reign of Constantine the Great, the first Roman Emperor to convert to Christianity.
c. 527 CE – 646 CE: The Byzantine Empire controls Egypt
646 CE: The Arab Muslims conquer Egypt under Caliph Umar.
1410-1425: The Tarot is created in Northern Italy.
1419: Horapollon’s Hieroglyphica, was discovered and translated into Latin. The Hieroglyphica created a fad for symbolic imagery that influenced the arts as well as alchemical imagery.
1433–1499: the life of the Italian Humanist Marsilil Ficino who translated the Hermetica into Latin.
1499: Louis XII of France invades Milan and the Tarot is introduced to France.
11731: Jean Terrasson authors the six-volume novel Life of Sethos in French. The author claimed to have translated the book from ancient Greek, but it was actually his own invention. In the novel, Egypt’s priests run a European style university, and the main character, Sethos, undergoes an initiation presided over by Isis, taking place in a hidden chamber beneath the Great Pyramid.
1738 – 1741: William Warburton authors The Divine Legation of Moses which, included an analysis of ancient mystery rites that drew upon Sethos and assumed that all mystery rites derived from Egypt.
c.1780: Count Alessandro di Cagliostro founded the rite of Egyptian High Masonry.
1781: Antoine Court de Gébelin publishes the eighth volume of his encyclopedia, Monde Primitif, in which he idealized ancient Egypt as a golden age of wisdom and the source of magic and mysticism. It contained two essays, one by de Gébelin and one by the Comte de Mellet, both claiming the Tarot was first created in ancient Egypt, and that it contained an ancient mystery that would function as an initiation into the mysteries.
1789: The occultist Etteilla published the first Tarot deck designed explicitly for divination, called The Grand Etteilla.
1798: Napoleon invaded Egypt. Besides bringing his army he brought a group of 167 artists and scientists, called “savants,” to study and document this ancient culture.
1799: Napolian’s men discovered the Rosetta Stone, the key to deciphering hieroglyphs,
1822: Jean-François Champollion deciphered the Rosetta Stone and was able to read Hieroglyphs. his discovery ushered in a period of fascination with all things Egyptian, called Egyptomania.
1854 and 1855: The French occultist, Eliphes Levi wrote two books on magic, The Doctrine of High Magic and The Ritual of High Magic, in which he attempted to marry the Tarot to the Kabbalah combined with Egyptian themes.
1863 and 1870: Jean-Baptiste Pitois (who wrote under the pen name Paul Christian) authoredThe Little Red Man of the Tuileries, and The History of Magic, In which he claimed that the Ancient Egyptian Magi had engraved the Tarot trumps on gold plates, and that the 3rd century Neoplatonic author Iamblichus in his book, On the Mysteries, had described stages in an initiation into the Mysteries that took place under the Great Pyramid and that corresponded to the Tarot trumps. He said that there were 22 paintings between columns in the temple that illustrated the initiation.
1877: H.P. Blavatsky wrote Isis Unveiled.
1896: R. Falconnier published a Tarot deck based on Paul Christian’s description of an ancient Egyptian deck.
1904: The famous occultist Alister Crowley arrived in Cairo where he attempted to communicate with the ancient Egyptian gods and wrote The Book of the Law.
1909: The Waite Smith Tarot is published.
1913: P. D. Ouspenskyin Symbolism of the Tarot restates that the Tarot trumps are derived from painting in an ancient Egyptian Temple of initiation.
1922: Howard Carter discovered King Tutankhamun’s tomb, initiating a fad called Tutmania.
2023: Robert M. Place creates The First Occult Tarot, based on the descriptions of the Comte de Mellet.
