New Kingdom of Egypt

The New Kingdom of Egypt is a historical period that becomes, in the novel, a small but revealing link in the fabricated logic of the Plan. A discussion of Egyptian religion treats the period’s beginning as evidence not for chronology alone but for an imagined Celtic origin of the cult of Ra.

The New Kingdom as a Premise

During an argument about ancient civilizations and supposed lost knowledge, Diotallevi cites a book claiming that the cult of Ra does not appear in Egyptian religion before the New Kingdom of Egypt. He then leaps from that chronological observation to the conclusion that the cult came from the Celts. The period’s historical placement is made to carry an origin theory that the cited premise does not establish.

Analogy and Escalation

The claim is part of a sequence that converts resemblance and chronology into apparent proof. The speaker next argues that the solar ship in prehistoric Egypt was a sleigh, and that, since Egypt had no snow, the sleigh must have a Nordic origin. Casaubon interrupts with the ordinary practical counterpoint that sledges can travel over sand, but Diotallevi appeals to the book’s method: identify analogies first, then find reasons for them.

The argument proceeds from these conjectures to claims that Egyptians knew electricity, that ancient batteries existed, and that the Ark of the Covenant functioned as an electrical device. In this progression, the New Kingdom of Egypt is not examined as a period in its own right; its name supplies a temporal foothold for a growing structure of conjecture.

Significance in the Plan

The episode dramatizes the Plan’s method of making scattered details appear mutually confirming. A statement about when a religious cult first appears is joined to imagined Celtic and Nordic origins, then to claims about ancient technology. Each analogy invites another, while the difference between a documented chronological claim and a speculative explanation disappears.

The New Kingdom of Egypt therefore matters here less as a developed historical setting than as a test of interpretation. The conversation shows how a real period can be recruited into a false historical system when a date is treated as proof of an unrelated connection.