The Flower of Life at Abydos: How Old Is It, Really?

The claim, and where it came from

You have probably seen the photograph. A faded red figure of interlocking circles, high on a grey granite pillar, in a building that looks older than anything around it.

The claims attached to it are large. That it is one of the oldest sacred symbols on earth. That it was not painted at all, but burned into the stone by a technology Egypt never had.

The circle matters to me personally. A version of it is printed on every Amenti Alchemy label, so I wanted to know exactly what stands behind the story before repeating any of it.

The modern name has a traceable origin. Several independent writers credit the New Age author Drunvalo Melchizedek, who described the Abydos pattern in lectures through the 1980s and 1990s and then in his book The Ancient Secret of the Flower of Life, whose first volume appeared in 1999.

The “burned into the rock” version came later and by a separate route. It was repeated in the 2011 documentary Thrive. According to a critic who followed the story at the time, the film’s own fact-check page was afterwards amended to allow that the mark might date to the first century AD and be an ochre stain.

What the Osireion is

The Osireion was dug out in two main campaigns. In 1902 and 1903 Margaret Murray copied its sculpture while Hilda Petrie ran the excavation, and Murray published it in 1904. Flinders Petrie’s preface records that the pavement of the hall they found lay forty-one feet under the surface.

The pillared central hall, the one in the famous photographs, was cleared later, by the Egypt Exploration Society in the 1920s and early 1930s under Henri Frankfort. His report came out in 1933.

That sequence matters, because Murray never saw the granite pillars. The hall she cleared, in her own description, had no pillars at all.

What the excavators actually wrote

I have read both reports at the pages that matter, from rendered images of the printed books rather than from searchable text.

Frankfort mentions markings on the central hall’s pillars once. It is one sentence, and it is not a description. It is an argument about sand.

He writes that no Coptic drawings were found in the western half of the hall, “but that they cover the three eastern pillars on the south side, while the middle pillar on the north side bears near its upper end a Greek inscription.”

His point was that the hall stood half filled with sand sloping down from west to east, so people could only reach the eastern pillars. He does not say what the drawings show. He uses no word like circle, geometric or flower anywhere in the volume. He cites no plate for them.

The plates I examined, the general views of the central hall, show no geometric figure on any pillar. That is a limited negative. Those photographs are taken from a distance at which a mark the size popular sources describe, about six inches across, would very probably not register.

Frankfort also records that the scholar who was to describe the Coptic material, Thomas Whittemore, had not delivered his manuscript when the book went to press. Whittemore was there. Dumbarton Oaks holds his 1931 photograph catalogued as a pillared hall with graffiti in the Osireion, naming the first and second pillars. The caption says graffiti, and nothing more.

One more detail from Frankfort is worth knowing. Coptic stone robbers worked in that hall, cracking the granite with wooden wedges, and on one block they outlined their wedge holes in red ink and marked it with a Coptic cross. People with red ink were working on that granite in the Coptic period. That does not identify the circles, and I am not claiming it does.

Three dates that cannot all be true

Every description of the pattern itself, its position, its pigment, its size and its date, comes from popular websites or from an encyclopedia article citing them. They agree that it is painted pigment, not carved and not burned. They do not agree on when.

A 2025 blog places it in the first century BC, possibly by Greek visitors. The encyclopedia article allows no earlier than 535 BC, probably the second to fourth centuries AD, and does not rule out a medieval or even modern origin. A study by Malcolm Stewart, hosted by the writer David Furlong, argues for the fifth or sixth century AD, because the Christian monogram ICXC appears above some of the circles.

None of the three rests on a peer-reviewed publication. They cannot all be right.

The coin evidence does not choose between them either. The coin report in Frankfort’s volume shows the site busy through the Ptolemaic period and the early first century AD, quiet afterwards, and still visited in the sixth century. Each of the three dates falls in a window when people were there.

The figure itself is genuinely ancient

None of this means the pattern is a modern invention. That would be the opposite mistake.

Overlapping circles drawn with a compass are a real ancient design, and one example comes from inside Egypt. A wooden panel from the intact tomb of the architect Kha at Deir el-Medina, found by Ernesto Schiaparelli in 1906 and now in the Museo Egizio in Turin, carries a grid of overlapping circles of equal size. It dates to roughly 1400 to 1350 BC.

That object is not in doubt. The argument that it proves a particular geometric technique comes from a 2016 paper posted as a preprint rather than published in an Egyptological journal, and I use the object, not the argument.

What the Kha panel does not do is date anything at Abydos. A design existing in one century does not date a mark on a wall in another.

And here is the part I find most interesting. No ancient source calls this figure a flower of life. But the Egyptians did have “flowers of life”. They were the blossoms of the ished tree, which the New Kingdom thought life-giving, and which were laid at funerals beside the lotus. Two unrelated things now share one English phrase.

The lotus that really is carved there

While reading Murray’s 1904 report for the geometry, I found something nobody on either side of the argument has mentioned.

She is in the Osireion. Carved. Published a hundred and twenty years ago.

On the west wall of the hall Murray cleared, in front of the enthroned Osiris, she describes “four little mummified figures standing on a lotus flower with two leaves”. These are the four children of Horus, the guardians of the dead, held up by the flower before the god of the underworld.

It is the same image that appears in the judgment scene of the Book of the Dead papyri, where a lotus rises from the water beneath Osiris’s throne. Here it is carved on a temple wall in a building made for Seti I. I have written about the papyrus version in the article on the Book of the Dead spell for becoming a lotus.

She appears a second time, in the north passage, where the Book of Gates is carved. A cat-headed god holds a sceptre in one hand and a lotus in the other. Murray notes that on Seti’s own alabaster sarcophagus, in the same scene, the god holds a serpent instead.

Neither carving says which of Egypt’s two water lilies is meant. There is no colour and no sunrise in the description, so the species cannot be determined. What the carvings show is that the flower stood at the threshold of the underworld in this building, and has been sitting there, unremarked, the whole time the circles were argued over.

For the wider picture of where she appears across Egypt’s temples and tombs, start with the complete guide to Blue Lotus.

What can honestly be said

A real building has real markings on real granite pillars, published in one sentence in 1933 and never described since in any excavation report or scholarly study I could find.

A modern claim describes a specific pattern on those pillars in detail, without a single primary citation.

The two have never been joined by evidence. The claim is not disproved. It is unsupported, which is a different and smaller thing.

The figure is ancient. The name is modern. The date of the Abydos circles is unknown. And the flower that really was carved into that building is still waiting for someone to look at her.

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