'Zep Tepi Exposed' : How Pseudo-Historians Hijacked Egypt’s ‘First Time’

The excellent 'World of Antiquity podcast' of David Miano has a very useful video on 'Zep Tepi Exposed' : How Pseudo-Historians Hijacked Egypt’s ‘First Time’ from Jul 30, 2025 that has had 38,475 views so far but deswerves more. He addresses whether or not this term ‘Zep Tepi’ in manuscripts and temple inscriptions proves the existence in the distant past of an ancient golden age? He breaks down all authentic hieroglyphic references in inscriptions, papyri, coffins and temple walls where Egyptians themselves used the phrase “First Time” and concludes (not surprisingly) that it’s mythic theology, not hidden history.

According to Miano, a search of the Egyptian textual corpus using the Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae shows that zp tpy (“first occasion” / “first time”) is a rare expression, appearing only about 75–80 times across roughly 3,000 years of recorded Egyptian history. Its earliest attestations, in 5th- and 6th-Dynasty quarry inscriptions, refer not to primordial history but to the “first occasion” of a king’s Sed festival—that is, a royal jubilee. In these Old Kingdom examples the phrase is entirely generic and event-specific. Even when the term begins to appear in more elevated or honorific contexts, it still functions descriptively rather than as the name of a mythic epoch.

References that clearly point to primordial creation begin to appear in the Middle Kingdom (e.g., Coffin Text Spell 640), where the phrase can denote the “first occasion” of creation. However, it remains grammatically qualified and not yet a fixed proper noun.

It is only in the New Kingdom that zp tpy increasingly appears on its own, standing unqualified in cosmological or mythological contexts, effectively becoming shorthand for the moment of creation. By the Ptolemaic period, this usage is firmly established in temple theology. Thus, the pattern visible in the TLA is a gradual semantic shift: from a generic expression meaning “first occurrence” (Old Kingdom), to occasional cosmological reference (Middle Kingdom), to a more solidified theological label for the primordial creation moment (New Kingdom onward)—but never a historically dated prehistoric civilization.

In tracing how zp tpy migrated from an obscure part of Egyptological terminology into populist alternative history, Miano argues that the decisive turning point was not ancient but modern. The earliest popular articulation of the term as the name of an “epoch” appears in 1960 in Robert Thomas Rundle Clark's Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt. Clark, a trained Egyptologist, used the spelling “Tep Zepi” (reflecting older German-influenced conventions) and described it as the primordial epoch stretching from creation to the enthronement of Horus and the vindication of Osiris. However, Clark’s framework was explicitly mythological and symbolic; he did not present this “first time” as a datable historical civilization. Nevertheless, Miano identifies Clark’s formulation as the first modern moment in which the phrase was elevated from a grammatical expression (“first occasion”) to the label of a distinct epoch, albeit still a mythic one. This, he suggests, provided the conceptual seed later writers would literalize.

The decisive shift from mythic epoch to supposed historical age came 34 years later, in 1994 with The Orion Mystery by Robert Bauval and Adrian Gilbert. Drawing explicitly on Clark, they adopted his spelling “Tep Zepe” but reinterpreted it as an actual prehistoric golden age in which gods ruled Egypt, a real historical phase preceding dynastic civilization and integrated into Bauval’s stellar-correlation theory. The following year, Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock altered the spelling to “Zep Tepi,” popularized the more Egyptologically accurate consonants, and cemented the term in bestselling alternative history as the name of a lost antediluvian civilization. In 1996, Bauval and Hancock reinforced this interpretation in Keeper of Genesis, silently standardizing Clark’s “Tep Zepi” to “Zep Tepi” in quotation and treating the mythic epoch as historical reality. Although John Anthony West had earlier argued for a lost prehistoric epoch in Serpent in the Sky (1979), Miano notes that West did not use the term itself there, nor in later works such as The Traveller's Key to Ancient Egypt. The term however passed into New Ager lore in about 2000, and is currently this rare theological expression has become transmutated into a cornerstone of alternative history narrative.

The video concludes with a telling confrontation of DunningKruger pseudoarchaeologists and senior egyptologist Zahi Hawass on the use of the term (here). 

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