Tulli Papyrus

The Tulli Papyrus is an alleged ancient Egyptian papyrus, said to date from the reign of Thutmose III, that describes "circles of fire" coming from the sky for several days before the Pharaoh and his army, and that is known only through a translation by Prince Boris de Rachewiltz of a text said to have been found among the papers of the late Alberto Tulli, a former director of the Egyptian Museum at the Vatican. The text entered UFO writing in the 1950s, when a detail of it was printed in the Fortean Society's magazine Doubt (no. 41, 1953), a figure that Jacques Vallée and Chris Aubeck later reproduced in their survey of aerial reports from antiquity, and Brinsley Le Poer Trench presented it in 1966 as the earliest known record of a fleet of flying saucers, a claim carried through ancient astronaut writing. No one has produced the original: the Vatican Museum's Egyptian section told the Condon Committee in 1968 that the papyrus was not the museum's property and could no longer be traced, and its inspector Gianfranco Nolli suspected that Tulli had been taken in and that the papyrus is a fake. The writer Samuel Rosenberg found a dozen sequential similarities between the translation and the Book of Ezekiel and suggested that the "papyrus" might have been taken from the King James text, which would place its composition after that translation and leave its author unnamed. A later anonymous posting argues that every line is taken from the 1927 edition of Alan Gardiner's Egyptian Grammar and that the text is a forgery sold to Tulli in the 1930s. Trench presented the translation as Rachewiltz's rendering of part of the Annals of Thutmose III; on that reading the original's disappearance is the dispersal of a dead collector's belongings that Nolli described to Ramberg.

Provenance

According to an account published by the writer Theodoros Karasavvas, Tulli found the papyrus in a Cairo antiquities shop in 1933 and, unable to buy it, made a copy of the hieratic original, which was then recopied with the hieratic replaced by hieroglyphs. Rachewiltz is the only person on record who reports having seen the text among Tulli's papers, and he translated it as part of the Annals of Thutmose III even though the surviving text does not name the Pharaoh; a second translation, the more readable of the two, is the work of the anthropologist R. Cedric Leonard. Brinsley Le Poer Trench repeated the account in 1966, adding that the translation was made "irrespective of the many broken sections" of a damaged original with many gaps in the hieroglyphs. The Condon Committee's own enquiry had two steps. A cable to the Vatican on July 25, 1968, produced Nolli's reply, "Papyrus Tulli not propriety [sic] of Vatican Museum. Now it is dispersed and no more traceable." The committee's scientific director, Edward U. Condon, then wrote to Dr. Walter Ramberg, the scientific attaché at the United States embassy in Rome, who reported that Tulli had left all his belongings to a brother who was a priest at the Lateran Palace, that the priest had since died and his belongings had been dispersed among heirs who may have disposed of the papyrus as something of little value, and that Nolli "intimated that Prof. Tulli was only an amateur 'Egyptologist' and that Prince de Rachelwitz is no expert either."

The text

The translation, as quoted by Rosenberg from Trench, is dated to "the year 22, of the third month of winter, sixth hour of the day". It says that the scribes of the House of Life found "a circle of fire that was coming from the sky", with no head, a foul-smelling breath, a body one rod long and one rod wide, and no voice; that the men laid themselves on their bellies and went to report it to the Pharaoh; that after some days the circles became more numerous and "shone more in the sky than the brightness of the sun", extending "to the limits of the four supports of the heavens"; that the Pharaoh's army watched with him in their midst; that the fire circles rose higher in the sky to the south; and that fishes and volatiles fell from the sky. Rosenberg tabulated the parallels he found with Ezekiel's first chapter, among them the "House of Scribes" against "House of Israel", "a circle of fire" against the "wheel of fire", "it had no head" against faces and heads, "it had no voice" against "I heard a voice", the brightness of the Sun against "a brightness was about it", and the fishes that fall from the sky against Ezekiel 29, where the fishes and the Pharaoh of Egypt appear together, concluding that either the papyrus was taken from the King James Version of Ezekiel or, if genuine, Ezekiel was plagiarized from the Annals of Thutmose III. Rosenberg added that his finding did not make every ancient UFO report a fabrication, but that the authors of at least seven UFO books had built their arguments on "case histories" taken from secondary and tertiary sources without verifying the originals.

A separate source from the same reign is the inscription of Thutmose III that tells of a star shooting toward an enemy camp and killing the men of the night watch, whose horses bolted; Thomas E. Bullard treats it as an early example of an anomalous celestial event read as proof that the gods favoured the Pharaoh.

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