The quickest and easiest way to get there is via the Bambara Road Firetrail there is a car park next to the start of the trail. The Gosford Glyphs have become increasingly popular, so if you can avoid weekends – or pick a drizzly day – otherise you may find the carpark full when you arrive. There is also a carving of the ancient Egyptian god Anubis. The three hundred hieroglyphs depict boats, chickens, dogs, owls, stick men, a dog’s bone as well as two cartouches (an oval with a line at one end tangent to the oval, indicating that the text enclosed is a royal name) that appear to be the names of kings – one of them Khufu (second king of the Fourth Dynasty, 2637-2614 BC) and the other uncertain. Associate Professor Boyo Ockinga believes the engravings were made in the 1920s, when there was widespread interest in ancient Egypt (after the discovery of the Tomb of Tutankhamun). Another report states that the carvings were first formally reported in 1975 by Alan Dash, a local surveyor who was mapping a water easement for Gosford Council. The official National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) position is that the Gosford Glyphs were discovered in 1983 by staff, and that they had been recently carved based on the “lack of lichen growth in the grooves and the visual appearance of spalling chips around the symbols”. While there is no doubt the hieroglyphs are fairly recent, it’s less certain is when they were inscribed. Even if Egyptian travellers did somehow find their way in Australia a few thousand years ago, there is a chronological discrepancy: “Symbols from Egyptian eras thousands of years apart have been grouped together” (Associate Professor Boyo Ockinga, Macquarie University Department of Ancient History). You may wonder why there is no other evidence of Egyptian occupaton – that’s because they were caught stealing sacred stones from the desert and the “Aborigines tracked them all the way to Balmoral Beach in Sydney and killed them”. There has been a few conspiracy theories around the Gosford Glyphs, with one theory being that they were inscribed by Egyptian travellers who sailed to Australia 5000 years ago, becoming shipwrecked near Gosford.
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