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In his book Pre-Adamite Man (1863), Paschal Beverly Randolph gives special weight to the number 13,500 in the ancient history of Egypt. His main witness is Mr. Leonard Horner, who conducted geological research near Cairo, Egypt. Horner’s findings suggested that fragments of pottery found in Nile sediment layers dated back approximately 13,500 years. Randolph attributes this pottery to civilized men who lived in Egypt around that time.
Horner’s borings near Cairo
Horner published his results in the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions in 1858, in “An Account of Some Recent Researches near Cairo, Undertaken with the View of Throwing Light upon the Geological History of the Alluvial Land of Egypt”. The work was done at Memphis, around the colossal statue that Randolph names as Rameses II. Horner measured how fast the Nile sediment rose there. He put the rate at about 3½ inches per century.
In 1854 a boring at the statue went down (11.9 meters) through true Nile sediment, and at the bottom it brought up a small fragment of pottery. Randolph describes the mud as (9.75 meters) deep below the base of the statue. Horner worked out the age of the fragment from that depth and that rate:
“must be held to be a record of the existence of man 13,371 years before A.D. 1854”
He adds that this is 11,517 years before the Christian era. Randolph gives the figure as 13,500 years.
Further finds
Randolph also notes that pieces of carved stone and other human remains came up from the same depth of (11.9 meters). In other parts of the Nile delta similar remains were found at all depths down to (21.3 meters).
Why it matters to Randolph
For Randolph this evidence challenges the conventional biblical timeline, which places the creation of man much later. He uses the findings to argue that human civilization existed long before the biblical Adam, with a much older history of human activity and culture.
The findings push the existence of advanced human societies back by thousands of years, and Randolph calls for historical narratives to be re-evaluated. They are central to his Pre-Adamite theory: that human beings existed, and were civilized, long before the biblical figures.
Sources: Leonard Horner, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, vol. 148 (1858), pp. 53–92, PDF at Darwin Online. Paschal Beverly Randolph, Pre-Adamite Man (1863), Internet Archive.
