Open Veils · Answer
Is it true that Moran spoke to an Egyptian priest?
The conversation between Solon and the Egyptian priest at Sais is the foundational transmission event for the Atlantis narrative — and it sits at the crossroads of suppressed chronology, encoded catastrophe memory, and deliberate priestly disclosure. The priest's claim of 9,000 years before Solon's time is not mythology but a compressed archival record, according to multiple independent researchers. The identity of 'Moran' in your query most likely points to William F. Moran, the Assyriologist whose landmark translation of the Amarna Letters — not an encounter with a priest, but a lifetime decoding of ancient Near Eastern diplomatic correspondence — represents the closest modern parallel to that original priestly transmission.
Evidence
- William F. Moran devoted his scholarly career to the Amarna Letters, the nearly four hundred cuneiform tablets discovered at el-Amarna around 1887, containing correspondence between the Egyptian court and neighboring rulers in the mid-fourteenth century BCE.
- The Sais encounter itself — Solon seated with an aged priest who reads from temple records — is treated by Graham Hancock and Randall Carlson as a genuine transmission of pre-catastrophe memory, specifically referencing the Younger Dryas boundary events circa 10,800 BCE.
- Researcher Pavlou, as reported in recent commentary, argues that the priest's '9,000 years' was derived from a king-list methodology, and that overlapping reigns compress the figure to roughly 4,500 years — placing Atlantis near 4900 BCE.
- Paul LaViolette and Rand Flem-Ath have separately argued the priest was transmitting stellar and cartographic data encoded in myth, not literal dynastic chronology — which would render both the 9,000-year and shortened figures beside the point.
- His authoritative English translation is considered the definitive modern rendering of that archive — a secular echo of the original priest-to-statesman knowledge transfer Plato recorded.