Looking into "The Face of Isis"

There has been a long tradition of what is now known as pseudoarcheology, archeological theories based on wishful thinking rather than actual evidence. Cyril G. Wates' 1928 science fiction story "The Face of Isis" gives us a good example with the theories of Professor Myron B. Wadsworth, a chemistry professor with a hyperdiffusionist theory that Mesoamerica was settled by ancient Egyptians, an idea that was first advanced by the Australian-British anatomist Grafton Elliot Smith in 1911.

Professor Wadsworth is a pretty good example of a typical pseudoarcheologist. He is not an archeologist by profession; instead, he is a chemist who has taken up archeology as a hobby, and who has devoted his life to advancing a crackpot idea. Although Smith believed that the Egyptians sailed to Mesoamerica, Wadsworth takes his crackpottery to another level by insisting that the Egyptians would have traveled overland from Egypt to Morocco, and only set sail from there. Wadsworth regards his discovery of the temple of Isis in southern Morocco as confirmation of his theory; he is so set on it that he never realizes that Osrah's inscription on the casket directly contradicts his belief. Osrah flatly states that the whole point of setting up the temple in Morocco was to provide the Pharaoh with a secret launch site for his planned trip to the moon.

Mind you, it's hard to say whether Wates meant for the reader to view Wadsworth as a crackpot. It's true that Wadsworth's refusal to consult with an expert in Egyptian hieroglyphics dooms his planned voyage to the moon to failure, but it may be that Wates regards this as a normal reaction rather than, as the reader would, a sign of Wadsworth's crackpottery. Likewise, Wadsworth's bizarre ideas about the chronology of Egyptian history, putting the Fifth Dynasty around the year 1000 BCE, or even 31 BCE, may simply be a reflection of Wates' own confusion on the matter, rather than evidence of Wadsworth's poor scholarship.

The Fifth Dynasty actually ruled Egypt from 2494 to 2345 BCE. There were nine pharaohs from this dynasty, none of them named Kut-Amen-Pash; he was an invention of Wates'. The sun-and-horns symbol ascribed to Isis was actually associated with another Egyptian goddess, Hathor, whose worship went back to Egyptian prehistory. It was only late in the second millenium BCE that Hathor merged with Isis, a goddess from Heliopolis who was considered the wife of Osiris, the god of the underworld. And despite what Wadsworth says in the story, Isis was not the goddess of the moon; the ancient Egyptians called the moon Iah, and it was associated with the god Khonsu.

The temple of Isis at Philae that is mentioned in the story does not predate the Fifth Dynasty; in fact, the temple was built during the final Thirtieth Dynasty between 380 and 362 BCE. This error is almost certainly Wates' rather than Wadsworth's. The temple at Philae was inundated by the construction of the Aswan Low Dam in 1902. During the construction of the Aswan High Dam in the 1960s, the temple of Isis was dismantled and moved to Agilkia Island.