Of the seven wonders of the ancient world, only one remains in existence today and that is the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt and, like the great monument itself, the debate which surrounds it is far from gone as well. Just the mere sight of the colossal, ancient structure alongside its two neighbours is enough to evoke high emotion and awe, and the more one looks at them in detail, the more questions one finds to be answered, not least of all about the people who built them, the ancient Egyptians.
The Egyptian civilisation lasted for around 3,000 years, far longer than our own has yet achieved, from around 3100 BC to around 300 BC, and a scholar-priest named Manetho divided it up into dynasties which are loosely based on families of ruling kings, known as Pharaohs. There are thirty two dynasties in all and they are divided into “kingdoms” which is not a geographical term but refers to a “unified state” with clear government. The periods in between these kingdoms (The Old Kingdom, The Middle Kingdom, The New Kingdom and The Late Period) are known as intermediate periods (The First, Second and Third).
Egyptologists believe that before the ancient Egyptians civilization the land was inhabited by Stone Age warriors who were positively primitive in comparison to these civilized Egyptians.
A lot is made of the religion of ancient Egypt and the Egyptians were a truly spiritual race who famously believed in the afterlife. Not only did they believe that once a person died they went on to the next world, but they went to great lengths to ensure that they were able to do so. This is why the rulers of the land, the Pharaohs, were mummified to preserve their bodies, and also why they took so many of their possessions with them, including works of art, religious texts and symbols and even slaves who apparently went with them willingly. The Pharaohs and their entourage were originally buried in squat, rectangular tombs known as mastabas but they soon changed to using pyramids, and one man who thinks he knows why is Karel Drbal.
The pyramid shape is believed by some to possess certain properties and Drbal, a Czech radio engineer, read in the 1940s the work of a Frenchman named Antoine Bovis who had built a model of the Cheops pyramid and used it to counteract decomposition and encourage mummification of food and dead animals by placing them beneath it. Drbal believed that the pyramid shape contains energy which could cause a razor blade placed beneath it, along the east-west line, to become a living entity and recover its sharp edge. Drbal claimed to have tested his theory and obtained successful results, but others who have since repeated his experiments have not had convincing results.
Another pyramidologist, Dr Carl Schleicher, of Mankind Research Unlimited in Washington DC also tested the power of the pyramid form by placing black eyed peas beneath a pyramid. He placed some more under a cube and more still in the open air. Schleicher claimed that those under the pyramid grew 1.5 times faster than those under nothing and 1.129 times faster than those under the cube, but again, similar experiments performed by others, this time the horticultural department of the University of Guelph in Canada, failed to achieve results and they concluded that pyramids have no effect on the growth of plants.
Another man thinks he has a far more practical reason for why the pyramid shape was used, and that man is Dr. Farouk El-Baz. El-Baz surveys the desert on behalf of the Egyptian government looking for water and he is convinced that the ancient Egyptians learned by trial and error that the only structure that will remain for any length of time in this hot and windy environment is a pyramid. El-Baz has been working in the desert for twenty years and he says that, as you look around parts of the desert, you see nothing but flat sand blown into the occasional dunes and then sticking out of this, you will see a pyramid. Some early pyramids here were built with stepped sides and then they tried to build one with smooth sides, but their gradient was too steep and they cracked. The ruined pyramid of Meidum has in it cedar beams which suggest that the builders knew it needed more support to stop it from collapsing, so they later incorporated these lessons they had learned into their future projects. El-Baz however, feels that they went from stepped sides to smooth sides so that they could decorate the outside walls and write on them.
There is evidence to support the fact that they wrote on the outsides as one of the Giza pyramids still has smooth limestone left clinging to it, and on this limestone are signs of red paint, but it is unlikely that this is the sole reason for a change of design. The Great Pyramids at Giza would appear, at first sight, to be the result of a learning curve, and are thought to have been built around 2500 BC. By the time the Egyptian civilization reached its third dynasty and through to its sixth dynasty (2686 BC – 2181 BC), the settled period known by Egyptologists as “The Old Kingdom,” there was a good standard of living under a well-run government and there was little or no threat from abroad, so they were now able to utilise their natural structure made from coarse rubble set with clay mortar and faced with a layer of fine grained white limestone from the quarries at Tura which was thirty kilometres away, across the river Nile.
Later, a 4m thick casing of limestone was added to all four sides which finished 60cm short of the top edges, and this formed a small step. Shafts were dug along the east side to lead to the Royal Family’s burial places and, in order to conceal them, an extra 8.5m was added to this east side, thus making the mastaba rectangular. It seems that as this point Imhotep decided on a different design and the height was increased with three accretion walls being added, each one lower that the next resulting in the first known stepped pyramid.
The pyramid itself is part of a complex of buildings and many doubt that such a level of architecture could be achieved with a development process but there are signs in the construction that it is part of a learning curve. Rather than the customary mud brick, they used stone blocks about the size of a house brick due probably to their ease of handling as they were so far unable to quarry or transport the huge blocks found in later structures. Supported or engaged columns were also used because of doubts about the strength and stability of free standing columns.
Next came the step pyramid at Meidum, 50km south of Sakkara, and this was probably intended for Humi (2637 BC – 2613 BC) the last king of the third dynasty and, like the king, it also marked a transitional stage between the third and fourth dynasties in the evolution of the pyramid.
The Meidum pyramid originally rose to a height of 93m with a base that was 145m square, and was built on a central core of masonry with accretion walls, each higher than the one outside it, thus forming a stepped pyramid. The steps were then filled in and the whole structure encased in Tura limestone to create a true pyramid. As in other third dynasty pyramids the blocks of the accretion walls were not bonded together but relied on friction for stability. This proved to be insufficient and at some point, probably during the New Kingdom (1550 BC – 1070 BC), it collapsed, and today it looks like a tower surrounded by a mound of rubble and is known locally as “The False Pyramid.”
What makes the Meidum site stand out in particular is that both the pyramid and the surrounding buildings were to become standard in their appearance and location. The pyramid has its entrance in its north face, there is a satellite pyramid, probably for a queen, and on the pyramid’s east side is a memorial temple from which a causeway leads to the edge of the site to valley temple in which the king’s body would be prepared for burial.
The valley temple is also connected by canal to the Nile, along which the king’s funeral procession would have sailed. Since mastabas had been replaced by pyramids for the kings themselves, mastabas would now be built around the pyramid for nobles, its proximity to the pyramid reflecting the status of its owner.
Huni was succeeded by his son Sneferu (2612 BC – 2589 BC). Sneferu was married to Hetepheres, the daughter of Huni and his chief queen, while he himself was the son of Huni and Meresankh, a secondary wife, and it is probably for this reason that he was named as the founder of the next dynasty, the fourth.
Sneferu chose Dahshur, 48km north of Meidum, for his pyramid site where he had two built. The first, the Red Pyramid, or the “Shining Pyramid” is the earliest known structure to have been designed and built as a true pyramid. Its angle of incline at 43° 40” is shallower than the later adopted 52° shows perhaps the caution taken on the part of its builders to ensure that it remained stable. The second pyramid, to the south, is the “Southern Shining Pyramid” and, like its counterpart, it was originally 104m high but it is unusual in the respect that its lower portion is inclined at 54° while its upper portion is inclined at 43° 22”.
The reason for this is not clear but it is thought to be so that the pyramid could have been finished in haste as it would have needed a smaller volume of stone to complete. Predictably this pyramid is known today as “The Bent Pyramid” and it was also cased in Tura limestone but, unlike others, it was not laid horizontally but at an angle sloping towards the structure’s centre, and this provided much better cohesion, and as such most of it is still in place, making it the best preserved of all the pyramids.
Sneferu’s son and successor was Khufu (2589 BC – 2566 BC) and his pyramid at Giza is the largest ever constructed, so impressive was its size that it was given the name “The Horizon” and it remained the world’s tallest building for almost 4,500 years when the so called temporary construction, the Eiffel Tower, was built in 1889.
Its original height was 146m (the top 9.5m are now missing) and it has a base area of 13 acres. Again it was originally encased in Tura limestone and is estimated to contain some 2,300,000 limestone blocks weighing between 2.5 tons and 15 tons. It contains three chambers, one cut into the bedrock beneath it and two built into the superstructure (the King’s Chamber and the Queen’s Chamber) the King’s Chamber being reached via the 46m long and 8m high gallery, and it is possible that there are other internal features yet to be discovered. Around the base of the pyramid are five pits, two of which were discovered in AD 1954 and AD 1987 and contained dismantled wooden boats. 651 components have been assembled to form a magnificent vessel measuring some 43.5m long, which was possibly used in the funeral procession. It is the oldest large boat found anywhere in the world.
Khufu was succeeded by his son Djedefre (2566 BC – 2558 BC) and he was in turn succeeded by another of Khufu’s sons, Khafre (2558 BC – 2532 BC), who also chose Giza for his pyramid. Its ancient name was “The Great Pyramid” though it was smaller than that of his father at 143m. It still retains a lot of its Tura limestone casing at the top and its granite casing at the bottom.
Khafre’s valley temple is devoid of decoration and its walls are made of granite blocks or limestone faced with granite which came from Aswan on papyrus rafts, a journey along the Nile of around 1,000km.
The third pyramid at Giza is that of Khafre’s successor Menkaure (2532 BC – 2504 BC) and is smaller by half than the other two at 70m tall. It was originally meant to be encased in costly Aswan granite but this is only the case with the lower sixteen courses, the rest being cased in limestone, despite it being thought that the twenty eight year reign of Menkaure should have been long enough to complete the full granite casing. Known as “The Divine Pyramid” it is possible that its smaller stature is due to the royal exchequer being depleted by the enormous projects that preceded it. These three pyramids were the last great pyramids to be built, and perhaps the fact that the fifth dynasty pyramids ranged between only 43m to 70m in height could be accounted for by the fact the enormous scale of their predecessors had not saved them from grave robbers, and if size couldn’t, perhaps magic could.
Userkaf (2498 BC – 2491 BC) chose his site as Sakkara but he placed his memorial temple on the south side of the pyramid rather than the east so that it would be bathed in sunlight all day long, great religious emphasis of course being placed in the sun. The last ruler of the fifth dynasty, Uas (2375 BC – 2345 BC) has made his pyramid a landmark as it is the first to have inscriptions on its inside. These inscriptions are the oldest religious writings in the world and are known as “The Pyramid Texts.”
The three Giza pyramids are perhaps the most enduring feature of Egypt, and they are generally known by the names of the Pharaohs they are associated with: Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure (Cheops, Chephren and Mycerinus in Greek) and there is much debate as to how these immense structures were built by such an ancient race.
The Greek historian, Herodotus, said that the Great Pyramid was built by 100,000 slaves working in three month shifts, but this is most likely to be the total number of men on the project during Khufu’s reign. A rate of roughly 5,000 per year for 23 years. It has been estimated that 4,000 of these could be accommodated at the site with another 1,000 for quarrying and transporting the blocks. One of the most often touted methods for the physical assembly of the pyramid blocks is that they were rolled on logs along huge ramps built up the side of the pyramid, but an American engineer, Robert G. Moores Jr, estimates that for a large pyramid made up of 1.8 million blocks, each weighing 2 tons, to be built in 20 years working 10 hours a day, 300 days a year, you would have to lay a block every 2 minutes, which would mean that the ramp theory is impossible. This is of course aside from the fact that building the ramps to the top of the pyramid would be almost as big a construction job as building the pyramid itself.
There is a surviving example of how pyramids were made and it comes from Heroditus who said that they were built using wooden machines. It is thought that a team of workers would use one to lift the blocks with ropes and pulleys from one step to the next and so on up to the top. Bob Lowdermilk has reconstructed one of the machines from the ancient description and it has eight levers (one in each hand for four men) and each lever gives a 20:1 advantage so the four men could lift a 5,000lb block up 2.25 feet (the average step height on the Great Pyramid) in about 20 to 25 minutes. As the block was lifted another man would insert wooden supports beneath it, and when it was at the right height it would be slid across off the supports and into place.
Though this method is described in ancient texts it isn’t without its flaws, and in truth nobody knows for certain how the pyramids were built. In 1987 Dr. Zahi Hawass found a cemetery within a mile of the pyramids and the graves in it are those of the men who built them. He even found the gateway through which they would have walked to work. In the cemetery are thousands of graves and well-kept tombs and it is known as “The Workmen’s Village.” The graves are marked with the worker’s position, such as “Director of Building Tombs” and “Overseer of Site of the Pyramid.” The six hundred bodies in the poorer tombs show just how difficult their task was as all of the skeletons show signs of stress in the spine, but Hawass says that the workers in the cemetery were not slaves, as slaves would not have had such valuable stones to use on their tombs and, more importantly, they would not have been allowed to be buried so close to the tomb of the Pharaoh.
Hawass also says that there are six types of tomb there, including step-sided and smooth sided pyramids, aping those of the Pharaohs, and it is said that up to ten thousand people had lived and died there, possibly the slaves being buried elsewhere, away from the Pharaoh. Similarly, the village of Deir el-Medina, close to the valley of the kings, was built in the eighteenth dynasty to house the workmen of the royal necropolis, and family documents from the village prove that these workers were not slaves either but they were skilled craftsmen who lived well by the standards of the time. Such was their position that they were apt to revolt when they felt it was justified, and during the twentieth dynasty there were instances where their supplies were either late or non-existent and when their complaints fell on deaf ears they went on strike.
Returning to Giza, the pyramids share the site with another enduring symbol of Egypt, and that is the Sphynx, Abu el-Hol (Father of Terror in Arabic). The word sphynx is derived from the Greek word shespankh meaning “Living Statue” which originally referred to human-headed lions that guarded the gates of the underworld. Made up of a huge lion’s body with a man’s head, the Sphynx is 240ft (73m) long, 66ft (20m) high (as high as a six storey building) and 46ft (14m) wide. If the purpose behind the pyramids is shrouded in mystery then that of the Sphynx certainly is, as it is fairly anonymous as far as references to it in the hieroglyphics go, be it about how it was built, why it was built or who it was built by. In ancient Egypt, sphynxes were guardians who protected sacred places like the entrances to tombs and temples, and the Great Sphynx sits as though guarding the pyramids of Giza. In ancient inscriptions the symbol of the sphynx served as the giver of life, the director of truth and the eternal leader of the upper and lower world.
Through the ages it has been thought to represent many things, the ancient Greeks thought it represented occult wisdom, the medieval Arabs thought it was the father of terror, but some say that it began as nothing more than an outcrop of rock that nobody knew what to do with. Lanny Bell, Associate Professor at the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, says that it is the remains of an old quarry which, rather than destroy, the Egyptians sculpted.
Mark Lehner, also of the Oriental Institute and the Harvard Semitic Museum, says that it not only has the power of the lion in its body but also the head of, not just any man, but the ultimate man (the Pharaoh) wearing the head scarf folded in the way that only the Pharaoh is allowed to wear it, as the sign of divine rule over the natural world. Lehner also says that it was built at the same time as the second pyramid, that of Khafre, possibly as a guardian to it.
Many think that its face was built to represent Khafre, and Rita Freed, Curator at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, says that there are many similarities between the face and that of the statue of Khafre. The square jaw, arched eyebrows and high cheek bones prompt many to think that it was built during the fourth dynasty (at the same time as the pyramids) and another to date it is to look at the rock from which it is carved. The bottom layer is hard limestone while the middle layer runs from hard to soft and the head is made from a strong building stone which is why it was weathered less than the body.
Mark Lehner says that it is obvious that the Sphynx and the pyramids were built at the same time and he says the evidence for that is found in the way that it is set out, the materials used and the architecture, which he says is fourth dynasty (the time of Khafre). He says that the Egyptians did not distinguish between art, writing and architecture, so the Sphynx could be considered a huge hieroglyph. The Egyptologists view of the ancient civilization is that the Old Kingdom when Giza was built, collapsed in 2100 BC, and with it died the grand pyramid constructions and the work on the Giza plateau.
The period known as the Middle Kingdom died out five hundred years later, in 1600 BC, and there then followed a period of neglect at Giza which saw a thousand years of sand blowing over the monuments and burying the Sphynx up to its neck. This also the period of the grave robbers who committed the most heinous crime imaginable, which went against the entire Egyptian belief system, as to raid a tomb was to kill the person in the afterlife, and yet people were robbing the tombs of their Pharaohs who were akin to gods.
The New Kingdom was born, and this became Egypt’s “Golden Age,” almost a thousand years after the construction of the Giza plateau, the Egyptians celebrated the re-emergence of a powerful monarchy. They erected monuments to the past and, to try and stop future grave robbers, they looked for a more secret site for tombs, and they found it 450 miles south along the Nile, opposite the then capital, Thebes, at the Valley of the Kings, where there was a natural mound.
The pyramid shape was still important to them however, and if you stand in the Valley of the Kings and look towards the end of the valley, you will see the top of the holy mountain, and this mountain peak serves as on giant pyramid to overlook all the tombs in the valley. It was at this time, during the New Kingdom, that restoration work was done on many of the works of the Old Kingdom, and there is a tale that Tutmoses was out hunting and stopped to rest in the shadow of the Sphynx’s head, and he heard a voice which told him to uncover the body of the Sphynx and he will gain his seat on the throne, which he duly did.
Tutmoses was not a crown prince so he would not naturally inherit the throne, but there is evidence to suggest that he killed his older brother in order to become king and then made up the prophecy to hide his crime. He did however fulfil the rest of the alleged prophecy and restore the landscape, and built walls to try and keep the sand off it in the future. He also had the face of the Spynx and its head dress painted, and traces of the paint can still be seen today.
In 525 BC the Persians invaded Egypt and in 332 BC Alexander the Great invaded and made Egypt a part of the Greek Empire, and for some time the Romans and the Greeks were agreeable to the Egyptian ways of worship and even carried out some repairs on the Sphynx. Though the statue itself was maintained, the foreign influences served to swamp the belief system and the Sphynx’s religious purpose became lost in time. By AD 2 it was all but gone, and the Sphynx became the creation of the gods. Under Christian influence the Sphynx again fell into decline, and in the fourth century AD, as the temples were closed or destroyed, and the last of the hieroglyphs carved in stone, the ancient Egyptian culture ended, and the Sphynx was again buried up to its neck in sand.
By AD 640 Egypt was an Arab nation and the Sphynx’s meaning, and that of the mummified Pharaohs was forgotten, not even the traces of paint still visible on the face of the Sphynx gave away its importance. One man, an Arab doctor named Abdul Latif, in AD 1200 wrote:
“A little more than a bow shot from these pyramids is a colossal figure of a head and neck projecting from the earth. The body to which the head belongs is said to be buried under the earth. On the face is a reddish tint and a red varnish. The face is remarkably beautiful, the mouth in particular has a charming expression. It seems to be smiling gently.”
Early in the fifteenth century another Arab, this time a historian, reported that someone, angry that people still believed and indulged in ancient Egyptian mysticism, smashed off the nose, though there are also reports that a sheik ordered that the “pagan smile” was wiped from its face by cannonballs. In 1798 Napoleon came to Egypt with not only an invading army but also a team of surveyors and scholars who reconnoitered the ancient monuments, and it is even rumoured that Napoleon himself took a few pot shots at the Sphinx’s face.
True or not, Napoleon did serve to open Egypt up to Europe and he also found the Rosetta Stone, a black rock on which many hieroglyphics told of ancient Egypt and its secrets. It wasn’t until relatively recently, 1925, that the Sphynx was once again uncovered by a French archaeologist named Emile Baraize. It took Baraize a full ten years just to remove the sand alone. Photographs of the Sphynx before this operation seem strange but they do allow one to gain some insight into what a mammoth task Baraize undertook.
In the last hundred years alone the neck has been eroded by several inches and today we continue to carry out repairs on one of the world’s most long lived structures. This is the popular belief about the Giza plateau and Egyptologists cling to it, but more recent theories are far more grandiose than this. The Royal Astronomer of Scotland, Charles Piazzi Smyth, made some discoveries in 1865, he found that the base of the Great Pyramid divided by the width of a casing stone equaled 365 (the number of days in a year). He also calculated that a pyramid inch (0.25 of a paving stone) was also one ten millionth of the earth’s polar radius. He applied the pyramid inch to every dimension of the Great Pyramid and made a spectacular supposition, he claimed that by counting each inch as one year, he could calculate all of the principal dates in the earth’s past and future.
Smyth’s calculations and theories appeared in a book, which sold quite well, but they were mocked and debunked by scholars who penned a new term to describe him, a “pyramidiot.” The ideas put forward by others however, are far more sensible than this, and if true, will change the way we think about not only the Egyptian civilization, but about civilization in general.
The idea is being put forward by construction engineer Robert Bauval and writer Graham Hancock, and they ask the question: If the three Giza pyramids were built for the same purpose as other pyramids (as tombs) why were there no mummies or treasures found in them? Why were there no inscriptions to say which Pharaoh they had belonged to? Bauval also has grave doubts about the Egyptologists’ opinion that the ancient Egyptians were preceded by primitive Stone Age man, and yet they were infinitely more skilled than their predecessors, and able to build perfect structures just to house a dead king.
There is debate, not only about the kind of civilization that preceded the Old Kingdom, but also about when the Egyptian civilization began. T.G.H. James, former keeper of Egyptian antiquities at the British Museum says that:
“The first truly historical period is that which begins with the invention of writing and it is generally known as the Dynastic Period. It is a period extending from about 3100 BC to 332 BC and it derives its name from the thirty one dynasties into which the successive kings of Egypt were divided in a scheme preserved in the work of Manetho, a priestly historian who lived during the third century BC.”
He says that those which flourished before this and displayed some of the characteristics of the early dynastic Egyptians are known as “Predynastic.” Those that date from before the Predynastic Period are usually referred to in the same terms used in European prehistory, i.e. Paleolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic. So there were the beginnings of Egyptian civilization in 3100 BC, before that were only “unlettered cultures” with some “civilized” characteristics, and before that was only “Stone Age” savages (Paleolithic meaning “Old Stone Age”).
Professor Walter Emery agrees with James by saying that the writings of Manetho are of “immense importance and form the framework on which Egyptian history has been built.” Manetho’s work continues to be relevant today because it is so accurate due to it being based on “much older documents, or king-lists, to which, as a learned priest he had access.” What’s more, other such lists have been discovered and translated and in general they support Manetho. From these works it is clear that there were “three distinct eras of kingship remembered:
They say that this evidence does exist and was published in 1986 by the Pyramids Carbon Dating Project directed by Mark Lehner. Lehner collected fifteen samples of mortar from the masonry of the Great Pyramid and these samples were chosen because they contained fragments of organic material which, unlike stone, can be carbon dated. Two of them were tested in Texas and the rest were tested in Zurich, and Lehner was surprised by the results. He said:
“The dates run from 3809 BC to 2689 BC. So generally the dates are …. Significantly earlier than the best Egyptological date for Khufu …. In short, the radio carbon dates, depending on which sample you note, suggest that the Egyptological chronology is anything from 200 to 1,200 years off. You can now look at this almost like a bell curve, and when you cut it down the middle you can summarise the results by saying our dates are 400 to 450 years too early for the Old Kingdom pyramids, especially those of the fourth dynasty …. Now this is really radical …. I mean it’ll make a big stink. The Giza pyramid is 400 years older than Egyptologists believe.”
Despite this, no stink has been caused as the results have been ignored by Egyptologists. There are roughly a hundred pyramids in Egypt, the last one to be discovered was that of third dynasty Pharaoh Sekhemkhet in 1950, and there are known to be two more lying buried beneath the desert sands, that of Mankauhor (The pyramid which is divine of places”) and that of Neferkare (“The enduring and living pyramid”) and perhaps there may yet be more still.
The Giza pyramids though are unlike any others in Egypt in that the ones preceding them in the third dynasty are mountains of crumbling brick, and those from the following fifth dynasty are piles of rubble. Hancock likens this to man building a Model T Ford, then a Porsche, then a Penny Farthing, and he says that “It really doesn’t make any kind of sense.” It had been said that they must have either lost their motivation or built them for a different purpose, and Hancock adds that if they were merely built to act as tombs, why were they constructed so precisely in both their locations and their dimensions? Surely there three particular pyramids, unlike those that preceded and succeeded them, served some higher purpose, and we can see the effort that went into their construction when we take a closer look.
The Giza plateau lies almost exactly a third of the way between the equator and the North Pole on the 30th parallel (Latitude 30°) and the pyramids are aligned north to south and east to west. In fact the Great Pyramid has its meridional (north-south) axis aligned to within 0.05° of true north-south (more accurate than the Meridian Building at the Greenwich Observatory, London) which is offset by 0.15°.
The base of the Great Pyramid covers an area of thirteen acres, enough to house the cathedrals of Florence, Milan, St. Peters in Rome, Westminster Abbey and St. Paul’s Cathedral. Its side measurements show incredible accuracy and consistency, the north side measures 755ft 4.9818in, the east side measures 755ft 10.4937in, the south side measures 756ft 0.9739in and the west side measures 755ft 9.1551in. The four corners of the base also show a miniscule margin of error, as the deviation from right angles is 0° 00’ 02” at the north west corner, 0° 03’ 02” at the northeast corner, 0° 03’ 33” at the south east corner and 0° 00’ 33” at the south west corner. The angle at which the sides of the pyramid slope even appears to be deliberate, and Bauval says that it shows a great mathematical knowledge, as to achieve these results the sides need to slope at a constant 52°.
The value of Pi (the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter) and its value to two decimal places (3.14) was originally thought to have been discovered in 3 BC by Archimedes, thousands of years after the pyramids were built, yet the pyramid incorporates it into its design. The designed height of the Great Pyramid at 481.3949ft bears the same relationship to its base perimeter at 3023.16ft, as does the circumference of a circle to its radius, i.e. 2xPi (481.3949ft x 2 x 3.14 = 3023.16ft).
The Great Pyramid is also a mathematical model of the Northern Hemisphere on a scale of 1:43,200, i.e. height at 481.3949ft x 43,200 = 3938.685 miles (11 miles less than the earth’s polar radius which is 3949 miles). Likewise, the pyramid’s perimeter at 3023.16ft x 43,200 = 24,724.94 miles (170 miles less than the equatorial circumference of the earth which is 24,902 miles). An error of only 0.75%.
Five hundred years ago our own civilization wasn’t even sure that the earth was round, and even today there are some that doubt it, namely the “Flat Earth Society,” and it wasn’t until three hundred years ago that we knew its true dimensions, yet this was pyramid was supposedly built 4,500 years ago. Curiously the pyramids built in Mexico also incorporate the value of Pi in their construction.
The Egyptologists don’t deny any of this, they merely say that it wasn’t done intentionally. What makes this unbelievable accuracy in construction all the more astounding is that the pyramid is not built on a level surface but is in fact built on top of a natural mound, which is estimated to be thirty feet tall (as tall as a two storey house) and is in the centre of the pyramid’s base, of which it occupies 70%.
The pyramid was not only built over the mound but incorporates it into its design as it contains a subterranean chamber and a well shaft. The subterranean chamber is 100ft below the plateau and precisely under the apex of the pyramid. The descending corridor connecting it to the original entrance in the north face is 350ft long and does not err from being perfectly straight by more than a quarter of an inch. Feats like these would surely test even modern day engineers and builders, so how on earth could it have been achieved by men just emerging from the Stone Age?
Inside the pyramid there are four main features, the underground corridor and chamber (which may pre-date the pyramid), a room called the Queen’s Chamber (which is built precisely on the centre line), the enormous 8m tall and 46m long “Grand Gallery” which leads up to the fourth feature, the King’s Chamber.
The walls of the King’s Chamber are made of granite from Aswan, which is a thousand miles away, and inside the chamber is a big sarcophagus, also made of granite, but the sarcophagus is one inch bigger than the chamber’s entrance. It is also so skillfully crafted that it too would test modern engineers and machinery, and drilling expert Chris Dunn says that it is an incredible piece of work.
The Egyptian method of drilling would be to use a bow tool drill, but to cut into granite with one of those would take far too long, and he says that they would have needed some kind of power tool, which of course they didn’t possess. Dunn goes on to say that if we were to do this today we would advance the drill by one five thousandth of an inch for every revolution of the bit, but by close examination of the granite he says that it was cut by a drill advancing much, much faster than this.
Bauval and Hancock admit that Dunn’s theory is controversial but they cannot explain how the granite was cut. Also in the King’s Chamber is another mystery which the two men feel has never been answered properly, until they came along that is. In the north and south walls of the King’s Chamber are identical, almost square holes which run in a straight line from the King’s Chamber to the outer walls of the pyramid. There are also two identical holes in the Queen’s Chamber, again one in the north wall and one in the south wall. Egyptologists say that these four shafts were for ventilation purposes but they are, like the rest of the pyramid, cut precisely, and Bauval and Hancock say that so much effort has gone into their construction that they must serve some higher purpose. In support of this argument is the fact that the two shafts in the Queen’s Chamber were closed at both ends.
The average cross section of the shafts is 23cm x 22cm and they range in length from the northern shaft of the Queen’s Chamber at 24m to the northern shaft of the King’s Chamber at 65m. To show the amount of effort that went into creating them, one needs only to note that they were not cut once the pyramid was built, but were made step by step as the pyramid was erected, incorporating them. What would have been a relatively simple operation had the shafts extended horizontally, was made immeasurably more difficult by the fact that they extend at a constant inclined angle. Those in the Queen’s Chamber were only discovered relatively recently when, in early 1872, Waynham Dixon was studying those in the King’s Chamber and decided to look for similar features in the Queen’s Chamber. It is said that Dixon found a crack in the southern wall where he thought the shaft might be and instructed his workman, Bill Grundy, to make a hole with a hammer and steel chisel, and soon he had broken through. Dixon then measured a similar position on the northern wall and again Grundy broke through with his hammer and chisel.
These two shafts are also closed at the other end, unlike those from the King’s Chamber which open at the exterior pyramid wall. It is also reported that Dixon probed the Queen’s Chamber shafts with a chimney sweep’s rod (part of which snapped off) and found three artefacts; a rough stone sphere, a small two pronged hook made of metal and a fine piece of cedar that was a foot long and had notches cut into it. These were then exported to England, later in 1872, but before the end of the century they had disappeared. Bauval and Hancock say that the purpose of the shafts is more symbolic or ritualistic than practical and, in order to find that purpose, we must turn to the world of astronomy.
It is often said that the Egyptians did not have a detailed knowledge of astronomy, but among the hieroglyphs is a chart which shows the stars of the night sky, including the twelve signs of the zodiac. Unfortunately the chart, painted on a ceiling, shows the stars and the constellations as animal forms in the sky, and the painter opted for artistry rather than astronomical accuracy, which makes it difficult to determine which animal represents which modern constellation. Nevertheless it does show a keen interest in the heavens, and in particular what form the stars took.
In 1963 an American astronomer, Virginia Trumble, was asked by a researcher from Egypt to see if the four shafts pointed at anything in the heavens, and she found that few things aligned with them, but the main one which did was Orion’s Belt. This lined up approximately with the shaft in the southern wall of the King’s Chamber. Bauval found it astonishing that nobody investigated this further so he used a computer to recreate the night sky as it would have appeared in 2500 BC when the pyramid was built.
To the ancient Egyptians the constellation of Orion represented their high god of resurrection, Osiris, and again using the computer, Bauval watched as the three stars of Orion’s Belt cross the north-south line and culminate at the meridian Circa 2500 BC. At the era known by Egyptologists as “The Pyramid Age” a number of alignments take place as each of the shafts is targeted at a star as it culminates at the meridian.
From the Queen’s Chamber the northern shaft is angled at 39° and points at Kochab (Beta Ursa Minor) in the Little Bear, a star associated with “cosmic regeneration” and immortality of the soul. The southern shaft is angled at 39° 30’ and is aimed at Sirius (Alpha Canis Major) in the Great Dog, a star that is associated with the goddess Isis. From the King’s Chamber the northern shaft is angled at 32° 28’ and is aimed at Thuban (Alpha Draconis) in the constellation of the Dragon (the ancient Pole Star) and a star associated with “cosmic prophecy and gestation.” The southern shaft is angled at 45° 14’ and is aimed at Alnitak (Zeta Orionis) the lowest star in Orion’s Belt which the Egyptians associated with Osiris.
These stars, and those around them, were afforded great importance because they were visible all year round and therefore never “died,” whereas other constellations would disappear below the horizon, notably Sirius (the star of Isis) which would disappear for a period of seventy days every year. This seventy day period of invisibility emphasizes the ancient Egyptian cult of rebirth and was seen as a cosmic preparation for astral rebirth and, naturally, was matched to the period of embalming and mummification. The great significance of this can be much better appreciated when one considers the Egyptian creation myth, to which Osiris and Isis were very much central.
Every civilization has its own creation myth and the Egyptians were no different. Theirs was very important to them and they repeated it in pyramid texts on the walls of pyramids and tombs and they saw each new Pharaoh re-enacting it.
In the beginning, the great sun god Ra looked down on the newly formed land, and he sent one of his grandsons, Osiris, to live among its people to teach them to be good and civilized, and so Osiris, both man and god, walked the land with his consort Isis, and it became a beautiful place. The brother of Osiris, Sett, became jealous of him and killed him, then cut his body into fourteen pieces and scattered them all around Egypt. The heartbroken Isis roamed the land and found all of the pieces, bound them together with muslin cloth and brought his body back to life just long enough for him to impregnate her. He then rose to the heavens and left Isis hiding in the bulrushes where she eventually bore a son, Horus, who grew up to avenge his father’s death. Isis, her earthly mission now complete, joined Osiris in the heavens, and so it turned out that the stars represented events on earth.
This story is also where the act of mummification has originated from, Orisirs (the god of resurrection) being wrapped in linen for his next life, the eternal life, in the stars.
Each mummification is a re-enactment of the original event performed by Isis, and each new Pharaoh saw themselves as a direct descendent of Osiris. Part of the mummification process is described in some of the oldest religious writings in the world, the Egyptian “Book Of The Dead” and this process is known as the “Opening Of The Mouth” ceremony. This is where the mummified Pharaoh would have life breathed into him so he could take his place among the stars. Bauval thinks that the opening of the mouth ceremony would be performed in the Queen’s Chamber, and during the proceedings the Pharaoh would be placed upright, and it would be his consort and his mortal son who would have to cause the new life to stir in him. It would be vital that this was done at precisely the right moment, at the dawn rising of Orion, thus the Pharaoh is reborn in the heavens at the same time as Osiris. The son and consort would perform the ritual with an iron implement in the shape of the Little bear, Ursa Minor, whose primary star is Polaris, and commonly it would be meteoritic iron. At the moment of the dawn rising, the son would use the iron tool to break the Pharaoh’s lips open and another one to open his mouth wide, and the new life is breathed into him and he takes his place in the heavens.
Bauval thinks that there may have been one final ritual for him to perform, that which Osiris had finally performed for Isis, to impregnate her, so that there will be a future Horus, an heir to the throne. He suggests that the Pharaoh would be stood upright, facing the shaft in the Queen’s Chamber’s southern wall, probably with an erect phallus attached, and his seed would follow the path of the shaft to Isis.
We can now see the importance of the seventy day invisibility of Sirius during which the events in the heavens mirror the events in the stars. During the seventy days the powers that were needed for the rebirth of the cosmic Horus king were building up in the “womb” of the goddess Isis. The beginning of the period marked the beginning of the journey of Horus into the underworld, and at this point the celestial Horus (the sun) would be near the head of Taurus (the Hyades) on the right bank of the milky way on its journey around the ecliptic, symbolizing Horus, embarking on his barge and sailing across the “winding waterway.”
As the solstice and the rebirth of Sirius (the heliacal rising of Sirius in the east) approaches, the sun continues along the ecliptic, depicting Horus nearing some goal. As the rising comes, the sun is now in the constellation of Leo, in between the “paws,” so the celestial journey of the sun and that of Horus end in between the paws of the Sphynx. Again this journey is referred to in the pyramid texts which Bauval says holds the key to the pyramid’s secret but he adds that they have been misunderstood by Egyptologists who interpret them as a sun religion, but Bauval says that they are not a religion of the day and the living but a religion of the night and the dead. He says that they tell us that the king becomes a star in the kingdom of Orion:
“The king shall go aboard the bark like Ra on the banks of the winding waterway …. The winding waterway is flooded …. You cross thereon to the horizon, to the place where the gods were born …. You may cross the winding waterway …. May you fall in the eastern side of the sky, may you sit in the …. Horizon …. Summons is made to me by Ra …. As Horus, as the horizon dweller …. The doors of the sky are thrown open for Horakhti …. The doors of the sky are thrown open at dawn for Horus at the east …. Go to …. Herakhti at the horizon …. On the eastern side of the sky where the gods are born.”
The ancient Egyptians believed that their creation myth, Zep Tepi (the first time), was an actual historical event and that it was re-enacted in the sky. They didn’t believe that the creation and the period immediately following it (the time of Osiris, Horus and Ra) took place in some mythological Garden of Eden, but in a real place, and that place was in the huge triangular region just south of the apex of the Nile delta, encompassing Heliopolis, Memphis and Giza. The point of this triangle sits as latitude 30°, the Giza necropolis.
Something puzzled Bauval about the layout of the three pyramids and that was that two of them are of a similar size and in precise alignment, but the third is much smaller and is not in alignment. Again he wondered why, amid all the effort and precision on the plateau, this pyramid should be offset to the left. Jean Kerisel, General Secretery of the France-Egypt Association, has studied the terrain around the site of the smaller pyramid and he says that there is no topographical reason for it to be offset. There is no structural reason why it could not be built in line with the other two either, so there must be some other reason for it, and he says that it may be astronomical.
The answer to the riddle came to Bauval quite unexpectedly one night when he was camping in the desert with an Egyptian yachtsman. The yachtsman was showing Bauval how to find the rising point of Sirius by using Orion’s Belt as a guide, when he casually mentioned that the belt was not actually a straight line, and as Bauval sat in the desert looking up at Orion’s Belt, he knew that he had the answer.
There are two bright stars in alignment and one smaller, fainter star offset to the left, just as with the three pyramids, but not exactly the same. The Book Of The Dead once again takes on great importance and, in particular the mention of the Milky Way (the Winding Waterway) which is a long band of stars both old and new which can be seen meandering its way across the night sky alongside Orion, just as the Nile meanders its way across the desert alongside the three pyramids in the formation of Orion’s Belt.
To add strength to his theory, Bauval also looked at the other two remaining fourth dynasty pyramids which are to be found some way from Giza, one to the north at Abu Ruwash and one three mile to the south at Zawyat-Al-Aryan. Astonishingly, these two pyramids, in conjunction with the three at Giza, form a more complete picture of the constellation of Orion. The pyramid at Abu Ruwash representing the star “Saiph” and the pyramid at Zawyat-Al-Aryan representing the star “Bellatrix.” So the Egyptians of the fourth dynasty were recreating the constellation of Orion at, and around, Giza, creating their own version of heaven on earth.
Once again though, there is a difference in the alignments, and once again Bauval enlists the help of the computer to see if he can find a time when the alignments did match. The stars and constellations that we see today are not in the same position in the sky as they were during “The Pyramid Age,” and this is due to a cycle known as procession. The earth spins on its axis which is inclined at 23°, and this axis is itself moving very slowly, at a rate of 1° over a human lifetime. For the axis to complete a full cycle and return to its starting point takes 25,920 years. From our observation point on the surface of the earth we see procession as a difference in a star’s altitude (declination). For example, it may begin its processional cycle at its nadir close to the horizon and over time rise higher and higher until, 13,000 years later, it reaches its zenith and then starts to slide back down again along its sliding scale.
We are able to identify a point in time by looking at a star’s position on its processional scale. Likewise if we were to list a star’s declination at the meridian today, then a future civilization could use this to identify our point in time, our epoch.
Bauval uses the computer to find a point in time where the alignments of the stars of Orion’s Belt and the three pyramids match up. He goes back to the time of 2500 BC when the pyramids were built, but still the alignments are wrong, so he decides to continue regressing in leaps of 500 years at a time, and he finally finds a match in 10500 BC, long before the Egyptian civilization began. Coincidentally the epoch of 10500 BC marks the nadir of Alnitak (Orion’s Belt), 12,960 years later, AD 2500, marking its zenith.
Graham Hancock believes that the Egyptians must have “inherited” the pyramid idea from another, earlier culture that existed in 10500 BC. He is not saying that the pyramids are 12,500 years old, he is merely saying that they are a legacy of that time, and he finds the Egyptologists’ idea that the Giza pyramids were built by a civilisation in its infancy crazy because there is an enormous amount of knowledge and wisdom gone into their design and construction. He says that they clearly mark the end of something and not the beginning of something, and he holds the same opinion about the Sphynx.
Egyptology claims that the Spynx was built 4,500 years ago, at the same time as the pryamids, but Bauval and Hancock, and now a growing number of assorted people, believe that it was built far, far earlier than this, 8,000 years earlier to be precise, but there is one fundamental flaw in their belief, and that is that in 10500 BC it has always been thought that there was no civilization sophisticated enough to have built it. Unfortunately the Sphynx is not able to be dated because the radio carbon dating technique cannot be used as it only works on organic materials and the Sphynx is carved out of rock.
In 1992 Mark Lehner contradicted himself at two different forums: At the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science he said “There is no direct way to date the Sphynx itself because the Sphynx is carved right out of natural rock.” and in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal he wrote: “Although we are certain that the Sphynx dates to the fourth dynasty, we are confronted by a complete absence of Old Kingdom texts which mention it."
This last observation is a crucial one as it means that we have an enormous, yet anonymous monument, about which the Egyptologist Selim Hassan wrote, in 1949: “No definite facts are known” Egyptology claims that the head and, in particular the face, of the Sphynx is that of Khafre and they use this “fact” to date the monument to his time (The Pyramid Age) but it has been said that “We do not attribute the building of London’s Trafalgar Square to Nelson just because his statue stands there.” So even if the Sphynx’s face is that of Khafre it certainly doesn’t mean that he built it, or had it built.
To try and unravel the mystery of the anonymous monument Professor Mark Lehner enlists the help of photogrammetric data and computer graphics and, in April of 1991, his article in National Geographic magazine read:
“Zahi Hawass, Director General of the Giza Pyramids, invited me to join his excavation (around) the Sphynx in 1978. During the next four years I led a project to map the Sphynx in details for the first time. We produced front and side views with photogrammetry, a technique using stereoscopic photography…. Computers have taken the records further. Maps were digitized to make a 3D wireframe model; some 2.6 million surface points were plotted to put “skin” on the skeleton view. We have constructed images of the Sphynx as it may have looked thousands of years ago. To create the face, I tried matching the views of other sphynxes and Pharaohs to our model. With the face of Khafre, the Sphynx came alive….”
This is countered by the fact that all this really means is that Lehner created a wireframe image of the Sphynx “as it may have looked thousands of years ago” not how it did look, and he then projected the face of Khafre onto it using the only known surviving statue of Khafre as a guide. However, it has been said that “The same computer technique could be used to ‘prove’ the Sphynx was really Elvis Presley.”
In 1993, in order to find their own answer, Bauval and Hancock combine forces with writer John A. West and Lieutenant Frank Domingo, a forensic artist with the New York Police Department, a man who works with faces every day of his working life and is an expert in identification. Domingo also compared the Sphynx to the statue of Khafre but he came to a very different conclusion. His report stated:
“After reviewing my various drawings, schematics and measurements, my final conclusion concurs with my initial reaction, i.e. that the two works represent two separate individuals. The proportions in the frontal view, and especially the angles and facial protrusion in the lateral views convinced me that the Sphynx is not Khafre.”
He goes on to say that this “facial protrusion in the lateral views” allow him to draw another, more astounding conclusion. He says that not only are they not from the same person but they are not even from the same race.
John A. West is not surprised by these results and he has some ideas of his own which he bases on the physical appearance of the Sphynx today. The head of the Sphynx is not in proportion to the body, it is much smaller, and it has been said that this is because of the many, many years that the body has been buried in the sand while the head has been above ground level and open to the elements. West says that the head is smaller than the body but is in much better condition, and even though it is made from a much harder limestone than the body, he still describes the difference in erosion as “extreme.” He concludes that this suggests that at some point in history the head has been recarved, and thus “is not original to the Sphynx.” This is certainly possible because the head has spent so long above ground that anybody could have worked on it at any time, so it could theoretically represent any Pharaoh from any time since its conception.
The likelihood that the head has been reworked is also shown in the “subtle discrepancy” which exists between the axis of the head and that of the face. The head being oriented due east but the facial features facing somewhat north of east. The gaze of the Sphynx as the positioning of the pyramids prompt Bauval and Hancock to continue with their theory that the whole Giza plateau is a kind of astronomical marker to the skies as they appeared in 10500 BC, and to do this they stand on the plateau looking out over the horizon.
From their vantage point the horizon is uninterrupted from 360°, and the rising points of the sun and the stars can clearly be seen. When the sun rises it does so with a constellation behind it and, in our own epoch, on the spring equinox it rises with the constellation of Pisces behind it, as it has done for approximately the last 2,000 years. However, the age of Pisces is now coming to an end and then we will enter the Age of Aquarius. It takes exactly 2,160 years for the equinoctial point to pass through one constellation or “house” of the zodiac, and we can trace back to a period of time and see what house of the zodiac the sun was in.
In 2500 BC, when other alignments on the plateau are not correct, the equinoctial sun rose in Taurus (the bull) but it would be ludicrous to think that a Pharaoh would build a marker to this event in the form of a lion in 2500 BC. So when did the spring equinox occur in front of the lion? When was the Age of Leo? Not surprisingly it began in 12960 BC and ended in 8800 BC. So, in 10500 BC on the vernal equinox, when the other alignments take place, the east gazing Sphynx would see the sun rising in front of its celestial counterpart, and in this epoch another spectacular conjunction takes place. As the sun breaks the horizon, another constellation is pinpointed in the south along the meridian, and that is Orion, in particular Alnitak of Orion’s Belt.
There is another question about the Giza plateau and the positioning of other features found there. There is a sloping causeway which leads from the central pyramid and alongside the Sphynx, but this causeway lies not along the east-west line, but just 14° south of it, so is this intentional or is it an error surrounded by perfection? If it is an error then it isn’t the only one as the causeway of the Great Pyramid is also 14° off the east-west line but to the north, and the causeway of Mekaure’s pyramid, and the Sphynx’s gaze, point due east.
So what could be the reason for these differences in alignment? On the spring equinox the sun rises due east, on the summer solstice it rises 28° north of due east and on the winter solstice it rises 28° south of due east, giving a total variation of 56°. The points midway between these solstices and the equinox are what astronomers call the Cross Quarters, so that one causeway and the Sphynx point at the equinox and the other two causeways point at the cross quarters. To say that all of these details is a coincidence is a nonsense, so what the Giza plateau is, is an astronomical pointer to an age, in 10500 BC, 8,000 years before the Egyptian civilization had begun.
Armed with this knowledge John A. West looks at the Sphynx to try to determine its age and history. In particular he looks at the erosion on the body, which is far greater than that on the head, and he says that it wasn’t caused by wind and sand but by water as it poured in sheets over the enclosure wall, leaving rounded contours.
The kind of erosion caused by wind and sand can be seen all around Giza, but that around the Sphynx is very different, and Egyptologists concluded that the flooding of the Nile had caused it, but West disagrees. He says that the regular Nile floods would fill the Sphynx’s enclosure from the bottom like an enormous bath tub and would leave a pattern of erosion with the more severe damage at the bottom of the monument and the top of the enclosure as the water seeps from the Nile and runs over the edges into the pit. The erosion on the Sphynx however is worst at the top. Here it is more rounded and takes the form of many rivulets which run down the sides of its body from top to bottom, so clearly, the water came from above.
West also looks at some of the earliest repairs done to the Sphynx and he finds that they needed some three feet of stone and brickwork to be repaired, and the Egyptologists claim that this was done when the Sphynx was only three hundred years old, but for the stone to have eroded by three feet in three hundred years is an absurdity because if this was the case and the Sphynx was built in 2500 BC as they claim, then at the erosion rate of one foot per century, the Sphynx would have disappeared by the sixteenth century AD.
For West to put his theory to the test we must find out when, if ever, there was a vast amount of water in the Nile valley. Quite predictably the answer is around 12,000 years ago, after the last ice age. During this time there had been millions of square miles of ice covering the northern hemisphere, and for some reason within 2,000 to 3,000 years it melted. The ice that covered America and northern Europe was two miles thick, and when it melted it caused flooding of cataclysmic proportions, and Egyptologist Tekra Hassan explains that at about 10500 BC exceptionally high waters covered the flood plain, the Nile delta and the Nile valley.
West has a theory about the history of the Sphynx and, like that of Bauval and Hancock, it does not accord very closely with the normally accepted facts. In the years before the Giza plateau became desert it was a fertile plain (this much we do know) and it contained a prominent outcrop of rock which the people of the time carved, possibly the head of a lion or of a god, and as the time passed, the shifting weather patterns brought torrential rain to the area signaling the end of the ice age, and the rain and torrential floods eroded the body into virtually what it is today.
When the rain finally stopped, the area dried up and became part of the Sahara Desert, and sandstorms buried the statue up to its neck, thus protecting its body and the signs of weathering for thousands of years while the head continued to be exposed to the elements and wear away. As the erosion of the head continued, it began to wear away its design and was possibly recarved. Certainly it was recarved by the fourth dynasty Egyptians who uncovered it body, but rather than recarve it in its original form they did it in their own image, so Khafre didn’t build the Sphynx, he racarved it, and this recarving of the head would account for it being on a much smaller scale than the body. It would also seem to account for Domingo’s theory that the Sphynx and Khafre are not of the same race, as man’s distant ancestors did indeed have a more laterally elongated face with a more prominent brow and jaw, Domingo’s conclusion being that “the angles and facial protrusion in the lateral views” allow him to conclude that the two are from different races.
To help West prove his theory, Bauval and Hancock look to another structure which they say may also date back to 10000 BC as it shows similar signs of erosion to the body of the Sphynx. It was discovered early in the twentieth century, buried under sand five hundred miles south of Giza at a place called Abidos. It sits fifty feet below the level of the surrounding temples, and Hancock describes it as an anonymous structure that seems to date to no known epoch, and he wonders if it is just one of many that lie buried deep beneath the desert sands, waiting to be discovered. The building’s walls were originally bare, but Pharaohs later came along and added hieroglyphics to them.
Bauval says that further proof of their claims can be found in the Egyptian creation myth, which holds that the earth was once covered with water and out of the water rose what they call a Primeval Mound upon which creation began, and it is as though the pyramids are a replacement of the primeval mound and the moment of creation, the time of the gods.
There are texts which tell us that Giza is the place of creation and so what better place to build a monument to it. Egyptologists say that these arguments put by Bauval, Hancock and West are not convincing enough and they raise too many problems, such as there being a civilization then nothing, then a new civilization again. They say show them an inscription or any other object that proves it, but West says that this is like telling Magellan, after he had sailed around the world, show us some other men that have sailed around the world, and he adds that what he is looking at is the line of civilization into history which may not necessarily have been a straight one from “stupid old cave men to smart old us with our hydrogen bombs and striped toothpaste.” It may turn out however, that there is indeed further evidence to support them that has yet to be discovered.
A number of ancient Egyptian inscriptions and papyri make reference to hidden chambers such as the Chamber of Archives and the Hall of Records, and legend tells us that “there exists a single subterranean chamber under the Sphynx with entrances to all three pyramids …. Each entrance is guarded by statues of amazing abilities.” Texts also tell us that the gods concealed a “great secret” at Giza, and one particular text in the Berlin Museum refers to the Egyptian god of wisdom, Thoth, who was said to have described the mysteries of heaven in his sacred books. Hancock refers to it as a treasure map that almost, but not quite, marks the spot.
The text also tells of how Khufu, the builder of the Great Pyramid, sought in Heliopolis a mysterious black box that contained the number of the secret chambers of the sanctuary of Thoth, but what was the mysterious black box? The Ark of Thoth? What was the wisdom that Khufu needed in order to construct his pyramid? If such a black box exists then where is it? Could it be hidden somewhere in the Great Pyramid or possibly beneath the Sphynx?
In 1977 the U.S. National Science Foundation funded a project at Giza to search for underground chambers around the Sphynx using ground penetrating radar, resistivity measurement, magnetometry, aerial photography and thermal infra-red image enhancing technologies. According to the S.R.I. (Stanford Research Institute) who were involved with the project:
“Several anomalies were observed as a result of our resistivity survey at the Sphynx …. Behind the rear paws (north west end) we ran two traverses. Both traverses indicate an anomaly that could possibly be due to a tunnel aligned north west to south east.”
Two further anomalies were also noted, deep in the bedrock “In front of the paws of the Sphynx.”
In 1978 the S.R.I. again provided funds for a more detailed survey of the Sphynx enclosure and the nearby Sphynx temple. They decided that should any anomalies be found they would cut holes into the bedrock and insert borescope cameras. Several holes were thus explored but proved to be just natural cavities. In 1980 Egyptian irrigation specialists were drilling close to the Sphynx and reached a depth of fifty feet before they hit something hard and massive. Once they had freed the drill and raised it they found that with it they had brought a lump of Aswan granite that is only found five hundred miles away to the south.
In the early 1990s, in a survey led by Professor Robert Schoch of Boston University, Thomas Dobecki, discovered a large rectangular chamber approximately 15m x 12m and about 5m below the surface in between the front paws of the Sphynx. However, this survey was brought to an abrupt halt in 1993 by Dr. Zahi Hawass, but it was not the only detailed survey of the area.
In 1986 two French architects, Gilles Dormion and Jean-Patrice Goidin obtained a scientific license to conduct an exploration inside the Great Pyramid after persuading senior officials at the Egyptian Antiquities Organization that there could be a “hidden chamber” behind the west wall of the corridor which leads to the Queen’s Chamber. The E.A.O. surprisingly gave permission for Dormion and Goidin to drill a series of small holes, and they found a large cavity filled with “unusually fine sand.” The Egyptologists were not happy and put a stop to the project. Then, in 1988, a Japanese scientific team led by Professor Sakuji Yoshimura used “non-destructive techniques” with electromagnetic waves and radar equipment, and they too found a cavity off the same passageway very close to where the two Frenchmen had drilled. They also found a large cavity behind the north west wall in the Queen’s Chamber and a “tunnel” outside and to the south of the pyramid which appeared to run underneath it. Again though, the Egyptian authorities intervened and the work was halted.
Egyptologists seemed to be uninterested in these findings and considered them to be features that were “abandoned” during construction. In particular they were most uninterested in the shafts, but one man who disagreed was a Munich based German engineer named Rudolf Gantenbrink who, in 1991, submitted a proposal for videoscopic surveying of the shafts to the German Archaeological Institute in Cairo. Before this, however, in August 1990 the E.A.O. commissioned the G.A.I. to install a ventilation system in the pyramid, a process that would involve cleaning the two shafts of the King’s Chamber which, unlike those in the Queen’s Chamber, emerge on the outside of the pyramid. After this cleaning they could install high powered fans to increase the air flow. Soon after he accepted the commission, Rainer Stadelman, Director of the G.A.I. received Gantenbrink’s proposal for an exploration of the Queen’s Chamber shafts using a high tech miniature robot which would be remotely controlled, have a high powered spotlight and a video camera which would relay images back to a monitor, and he handed the scheme over to him. However, before he began ventilating the King’s Chamber shafts, he set to work, in February 1992, on exploring the Queen’s Chamber shafts, and in particular the southern shaft. By mid May 1992 he had penetrated the shaft to a depth of seventy feet, a shaft which Egyptologists had said was only thirty feet long, but now, he was called away to work on the main project, to ventilate the King’s Chamber.
Since those shafts are open at both ends, this was a much simpler task and Gantenbrink was able to use a different device called “Upuaut 1” which was like a small sledge that could be hauled up and down using cables and pulleys at both ends of the shafts. This job finished, he now built a new robot that was better able to cope with the difficult task of exploring the Queen’s Chamber southern shaft.
While the new robot was being built he took a film crew to cover the start of the operation, but he hadn’t obtained the necessary permits, so first Stadelman and then Gantenbrink approached Dr. Zahi Hawass who granted them “verbal permission” to film, and then the exploration resumed.
By March 1993, everybody’s patience and money was running low and Stadelman withdrew his support but Gantenbrink forged ahead alone. On March 22nd, coincidentally the spring equinox, at about 10am, Upuaut 2 was 180ft up the “30ft” shaft when it reached a sharp settlement in the floor which took an hour to get past. At 11:05am and at a distance of 200ft into the shaft, the floor and walls became “polished” and the robot reached a “door.” It was made of stone and was complete with two corroded copper fittings which had allowed it to be slid into place, but would prevent it from being opened.
The G.A.I. made no announcement about their discovery, apparently because Stadelman was unable to decide what form such an announcement should take. Meanwhile Gantenbrink returned to Munich with his equipment and video tapes, and the story was broken by the British media, in particular the London Independent on April 16th, 1993, and the others soon followed and continued to run the story for weeks. There were two sides to the story though, and Dr Hawass at first said “In my opinion this is ‘the’ discovery in Egypt” and he expressed the hope that scrolls or other records to do with the “religion” of the builders and maybe the “stars” could be behind it.
On the other hand, Mrs. Christine Egoron, Rainer Stadelman’s secretary at the G.A.I., came out with a most damning statement when she said to the press that there was nothing behind the story, and no chamber at the end of the shaft. The “air channels” didn’t point at anything and Gantenbrink’s robot was only “to measure the humidity of the pyramid.”
Soon afterwards, Dr. Stadelman himself issued a statement which said “I don’t know how this story happened but I can tell you this is very annoying. There is surely no other chamber …. There is no room behind the stone.” Amid all this, Gantenbrink then made attempts to restart his work on the door but was prevented from doing so, namely by Dr. Hawass who was, by this time, singing a different tune and now saying “I think this is not a door and nothing is behind it.”
Gantenbrink has had numerous meetings and press conferences cancelled and he has even offered to train an Egyptian to operate the equipment but his offer was turned down, prompting him to say that “The search for truth is too important to be ruined by a silly political game. My only hope is that they will soon reach the same conclusions.” To try and diffuse the situation, Dr. Helen Whitehouse of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum said that “The team working on the door are waiting for better equipment. The days when Egyptologists went crashing into a room are long over.” She adds “Who knows what’s behind the door? It would be foolish to guess.”
Hancock says that we need to know what is hidden at Giza, be it in the pyramid or beneath the Sphynx because the ancient texts tell us that it is of enormous importance and it will be an astounding revelation about the origin of human civilization.
So, in time all of these mysteries may be answered for us, and not just those surrounding the Giza plateau but also possibly questions that we have about other ancient civilisations such as the Maya, the Aztecs and who knows, maybe even the Atlanteans?
What is for certain is that Egyptologists and other fields of study will need to reassess their opinions and views, and possibly sooner rather than later, because new technology is already being used to try and date the Sphynx. How does it work?
When a rock is cut, the newly exposed surface begins to accumulate upon it, chemicals which are made by cosmic rays hitting the earth, and by examining these chemicals we can see how old something is, and this technique can obviously be used on non-organic materials, unlike the carbon dating technique, and preliminary tests do show the Sphynx to be older than previously thought.
So what of West’s proposed earlier civilization, could it be true or not? The dynastic Egyptians certainly had a great understanding of astronomy, but did any preceding civilization have such a knowledge? If the dynastic Egyptians didn’t carve the leonine Sphynx, then a Neolithic race must have done, and so precisely that it looked upon the spring equinox taking place in front of its celestial counterpart.
The lowest point in the processional cycle of Orion’s Belt (the nadir) the “first time of Osiris” occurred in 10500 BC, and it is this point in time that is fixed on the ground at the Giza necropolis by the southern shaft of the King’s Chamber.
Bauval and Hancock felt that this, and the alignment of the Sphynx, could not be put down to chance. They have also come to the conclusion that the site was “completed” in 2500 BC, but may have been “established” physically 8,000 years earlier, perhaps in the form of low platforms where the pyramids now stand, or perhaps the mound that the Great Pyramid is built on. They also say that the knowledge may have been handed down to the astronomer-priests of Heliopolis by the followers of Horus, as the Egyptian astronomers were much revered by both the Greeks and the Romans, because as early as 5 BC, Herodotus (the “Father of History”) attributed to them the discovery of the solar year and the “invention” of the twelve signs of the zodiac which he says that the Greeks later borrowed. He wrote “In my opinion their method of calculation is better than that of the Greeks.”
In 4 BC Aristotle also recognized the knowledge and expertise of the Egyptian astronomers “whose observations have been kept for very many years past, and from whom much of our evidence about particular stars is derived.” The fact that there was this long established knowledge is shown by Plato who recounts how the Egyptians had obsessed over the stars “for 10,000 years or, so to speak, for an infinite time,” and by Diodorus of Sicily who visited Egypt in 60 BC and said that “The disposition of the stars as well as their movements have always been the subject of careful observations among the Egyptians” and that: “They have preserved to this day records concerning each of these stars over an incredible number of years.”
So if the knowledge was handed down, and possibly the Giza legacy as well, it must be possible that the Egyptians of the Old Kingdom might have seen their predecessors as gods and built, or completed, the Giza plateau as a testament to them and their creation myth with Osiris and Isis.
The fact that there is such precision all around the site shows that they were built for some supreme reason, but to this day nobody knows how. Graham Hancock believes that there is evidence, not only here but in other parts of the world as well, both physical evidence and written evidence, that there was once an ancient civilization with an advanced knowledge of technology that was wiped out, probably around the end of the last Ice Age, perhaps the most famous of all being the lost continent of Atlantis.
Whatever the truth of it, if one looks at the precise positioning and construction of the pyramids, one cannot help but wonder, with a smile and tongue placed firmly in cheek, whether or not Von Daniken could have been right when he said that the earth was visited by intelligent aliens in the distant past, who helped our civilization along and taught us many things, but he couldn’t have been right ….. could he?
The Egyptian civilisation lasted for around 3,000 years, far longer than our own has yet achieved, from around 3100 BC to around 300 BC, and a scholar-priest named Manetho divided it up into dynasties which are loosely based on families of ruling kings, known as Pharaohs. There are thirty two dynasties in all and they are divided into “kingdoms” which is not a geographical term but refers to a “unified state” with clear government. The periods in between these kingdoms (The Old Kingdom, The Middle Kingdom, The New Kingdom and The Late Period) are known as intermediate periods (The First, Second and Third).
Egyptologists believe that before the ancient Egyptians civilization the land was inhabited by Stone Age warriors who were positively primitive in comparison to these civilized Egyptians.
A lot is made of the religion of ancient Egypt and the Egyptians were a truly spiritual race who famously believed in the afterlife. Not only did they believe that once a person died they went on to the next world, but they went to great lengths to ensure that they were able to do so. This is why the rulers of the land, the Pharaohs, were mummified to preserve their bodies, and also why they took so many of their possessions with them, including works of art, religious texts and symbols and even slaves who apparently went with them willingly. The Pharaohs and their entourage were originally buried in squat, rectangular tombs known as mastabas but they soon changed to using pyramids, and one man who thinks he knows why is Karel Drbal.
The pyramid shape is believed by some to possess certain properties and Drbal, a Czech radio engineer, read in the 1940s the work of a Frenchman named Antoine Bovis who had built a model of the Cheops pyramid and used it to counteract decomposition and encourage mummification of food and dead animals by placing them beneath it. Drbal believed that the pyramid shape contains energy which could cause a razor blade placed beneath it, along the east-west line, to become a living entity and recover its sharp edge. Drbal claimed to have tested his theory and obtained successful results, but others who have since repeated his experiments have not had convincing results.
Another pyramidologist, Dr Carl Schleicher, of Mankind Research Unlimited in Washington DC also tested the power of the pyramid form by placing black eyed peas beneath a pyramid. He placed some more under a cube and more still in the open air. Schleicher claimed that those under the pyramid grew 1.5 times faster than those under nothing and 1.129 times faster than those under the cube, but again, similar experiments performed by others, this time the horticultural department of the University of Guelph in Canada, failed to achieve results and they concluded that pyramids have no effect on the growth of plants.
Another man thinks he has a far more practical reason for why the pyramid shape was used, and that man is Dr. Farouk El-Baz. El-Baz surveys the desert on behalf of the Egyptian government looking for water and he is convinced that the ancient Egyptians learned by trial and error that the only structure that will remain for any length of time in this hot and windy environment is a pyramid. El-Baz has been working in the desert for twenty years and he says that, as you look around parts of the desert, you see nothing but flat sand blown into the occasional dunes and then sticking out of this, you will see a pyramid. Some early pyramids here were built with stepped sides and then they tried to build one with smooth sides, but their gradient was too steep and they cracked. The ruined pyramid of Meidum has in it cedar beams which suggest that the builders knew it needed more support to stop it from collapsing, so they later incorporated these lessons they had learned into their future projects. El-Baz however, feels that they went from stepped sides to smooth sides so that they could decorate the outside walls and write on them.
There is evidence to support the fact that they wrote on the outsides as one of the Giza pyramids still has smooth limestone left clinging to it, and on this limestone are signs of red paint, but it is unlikely that this is the sole reason for a change of design. The Great Pyramids at Giza would appear, at first sight, to be the result of a learning curve, and are thought to have been built around 2500 BC. By the time the Egyptian civilization reached its third dynasty and through to its sixth dynasty (2686 BC – 2181 BC), the settled period known by Egyptologists as “The Old Kingdom,” there was a good standard of living under a well-run government and there was little or no threat from abroad, so they were now able to utilise their natural structure made from coarse rubble set with clay mortar and faced with a layer of fine grained white limestone from the quarries at Tura which was thirty kilometres away, across the river Nile.
Later, a 4m thick casing of limestone was added to all four sides which finished 60cm short of the top edges, and this formed a small step. Shafts were dug along the east side to lead to the Royal Family’s burial places and, in order to conceal them, an extra 8.5m was added to this east side, thus making the mastaba rectangular. It seems that as this point Imhotep decided on a different design and the height was increased with three accretion walls being added, each one lower that the next resulting in the first known stepped pyramid.
The pyramid itself is part of a complex of buildings and many doubt that such a level of architecture could be achieved with a development process but there are signs in the construction that it is part of a learning curve. Rather than the customary mud brick, they used stone blocks about the size of a house brick due probably to their ease of handling as they were so far unable to quarry or transport the huge blocks found in later structures. Supported or engaged columns were also used because of doubts about the strength and stability of free standing columns.
Next came the step pyramid at Meidum, 50km south of Sakkara, and this was probably intended for Humi (2637 BC – 2613 BC) the last king of the third dynasty and, like the king, it also marked a transitional stage between the third and fourth dynasties in the evolution of the pyramid.
The Meidum pyramid originally rose to a height of 93m with a base that was 145m square, and was built on a central core of masonry with accretion walls, each higher than the one outside it, thus forming a stepped pyramid. The steps were then filled in and the whole structure encased in Tura limestone to create a true pyramid. As in other third dynasty pyramids the blocks of the accretion walls were not bonded together but relied on friction for stability. This proved to be insufficient and at some point, probably during the New Kingdom (1550 BC – 1070 BC), it collapsed, and today it looks like a tower surrounded by a mound of rubble and is known locally as “The False Pyramid.”
What makes the Meidum site stand out in particular is that both the pyramid and the surrounding buildings were to become standard in their appearance and location. The pyramid has its entrance in its north face, there is a satellite pyramid, probably for a queen, and on the pyramid’s east side is a memorial temple from which a causeway leads to the edge of the site to valley temple in which the king’s body would be prepared for burial.
The valley temple is also connected by canal to the Nile, along which the king’s funeral procession would have sailed. Since mastabas had been replaced by pyramids for the kings themselves, mastabas would now be built around the pyramid for nobles, its proximity to the pyramid reflecting the status of its owner.
Huni was succeeded by his son Sneferu (2612 BC – 2589 BC). Sneferu was married to Hetepheres, the daughter of Huni and his chief queen, while he himself was the son of Huni and Meresankh, a secondary wife, and it is probably for this reason that he was named as the founder of the next dynasty, the fourth.
Sneferu chose Dahshur, 48km north of Meidum, for his pyramid site where he had two built. The first, the Red Pyramid, or the “Shining Pyramid” is the earliest known structure to have been designed and built as a true pyramid. Its angle of incline at 43° 40” is shallower than the later adopted 52° shows perhaps the caution taken on the part of its builders to ensure that it remained stable. The second pyramid, to the south, is the “Southern Shining Pyramid” and, like its counterpart, it was originally 104m high but it is unusual in the respect that its lower portion is inclined at 54° while its upper portion is inclined at 43° 22”.
The reason for this is not clear but it is thought to be so that the pyramid could have been finished in haste as it would have needed a smaller volume of stone to complete. Predictably this pyramid is known today as “The Bent Pyramid” and it was also cased in Tura limestone but, unlike others, it was not laid horizontally but at an angle sloping towards the structure’s centre, and this provided much better cohesion, and as such most of it is still in place, making it the best preserved of all the pyramids.
Sneferu’s son and successor was Khufu (2589 BC – 2566 BC) and his pyramid at Giza is the largest ever constructed, so impressive was its size that it was given the name “The Horizon” and it remained the world’s tallest building for almost 4,500 years when the so called temporary construction, the Eiffel Tower, was built in 1889.
Its original height was 146m (the top 9.5m are now missing) and it has a base area of 13 acres. Again it was originally encased in Tura limestone and is estimated to contain some 2,300,000 limestone blocks weighing between 2.5 tons and 15 tons. It contains three chambers, one cut into the bedrock beneath it and two built into the superstructure (the King’s Chamber and the Queen’s Chamber) the King’s Chamber being reached via the 46m long and 8m high gallery, and it is possible that there are other internal features yet to be discovered. Around the base of the pyramid are five pits, two of which were discovered in AD 1954 and AD 1987 and contained dismantled wooden boats. 651 components have been assembled to form a magnificent vessel measuring some 43.5m long, which was possibly used in the funeral procession. It is the oldest large boat found anywhere in the world.
Khufu was succeeded by his son Djedefre (2566 BC – 2558 BC) and he was in turn succeeded by another of Khufu’s sons, Khafre (2558 BC – 2532 BC), who also chose Giza for his pyramid. Its ancient name was “The Great Pyramid” though it was smaller than that of his father at 143m. It still retains a lot of its Tura limestone casing at the top and its granite casing at the bottom.
Khafre’s valley temple is devoid of decoration and its walls are made of granite blocks or limestone faced with granite which came from Aswan on papyrus rafts, a journey along the Nile of around 1,000km.
The third pyramid at Giza is that of Khafre’s successor Menkaure (2532 BC – 2504 BC) and is smaller by half than the other two at 70m tall. It was originally meant to be encased in costly Aswan granite but this is only the case with the lower sixteen courses, the rest being cased in limestone, despite it being thought that the twenty eight year reign of Menkaure should have been long enough to complete the full granite casing. Known as “The Divine Pyramid” it is possible that its smaller stature is due to the royal exchequer being depleted by the enormous projects that preceded it. These three pyramids were the last great pyramids to be built, and perhaps the fact that the fifth dynasty pyramids ranged between only 43m to 70m in height could be accounted for by the fact the enormous scale of their predecessors had not saved them from grave robbers, and if size couldn’t, perhaps magic could.
Userkaf (2498 BC – 2491 BC) chose his site as Sakkara but he placed his memorial temple on the south side of the pyramid rather than the east so that it would be bathed in sunlight all day long, great religious emphasis of course being placed in the sun. The last ruler of the fifth dynasty, Uas (2375 BC – 2345 BC) has made his pyramid a landmark as it is the first to have inscriptions on its inside. These inscriptions are the oldest religious writings in the world and are known as “The Pyramid Texts.”
The three Giza pyramids are perhaps the most enduring feature of Egypt, and they are generally known by the names of the Pharaohs they are associated with: Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure (Cheops, Chephren and Mycerinus in Greek) and there is much debate as to how these immense structures were built by such an ancient race.
The Greek historian, Herodotus, said that the Great Pyramid was built by 100,000 slaves working in three month shifts, but this is most likely to be the total number of men on the project during Khufu’s reign. A rate of roughly 5,000 per year for 23 years. It has been estimated that 4,000 of these could be accommodated at the site with another 1,000 for quarrying and transporting the blocks. One of the most often touted methods for the physical assembly of the pyramid blocks is that they were rolled on logs along huge ramps built up the side of the pyramid, but an American engineer, Robert G. Moores Jr, estimates that for a large pyramid made up of 1.8 million blocks, each weighing 2 tons, to be built in 20 years working 10 hours a day, 300 days a year, you would have to lay a block every 2 minutes, which would mean that the ramp theory is impossible. This is of course aside from the fact that building the ramps to the top of the pyramid would be almost as big a construction job as building the pyramid itself.
There is a surviving example of how pyramids were made and it comes from Heroditus who said that they were built using wooden machines. It is thought that a team of workers would use one to lift the blocks with ropes and pulleys from one step to the next and so on up to the top. Bob Lowdermilk has reconstructed one of the machines from the ancient description and it has eight levers (one in each hand for four men) and each lever gives a 20:1 advantage so the four men could lift a 5,000lb block up 2.25 feet (the average step height on the Great Pyramid) in about 20 to 25 minutes. As the block was lifted another man would insert wooden supports beneath it, and when it was at the right height it would be slid across off the supports and into place.
Though this method is described in ancient texts it isn’t without its flaws, and in truth nobody knows for certain how the pyramids were built. In 1987 Dr. Zahi Hawass found a cemetery within a mile of the pyramids and the graves in it are those of the men who built them. He even found the gateway through which they would have walked to work. In the cemetery are thousands of graves and well-kept tombs and it is known as “The Workmen’s Village.” The graves are marked with the worker’s position, such as “Director of Building Tombs” and “Overseer of Site of the Pyramid.” The six hundred bodies in the poorer tombs show just how difficult their task was as all of the skeletons show signs of stress in the spine, but Hawass says that the workers in the cemetery were not slaves, as slaves would not have had such valuable stones to use on their tombs and, more importantly, they would not have been allowed to be buried so close to the tomb of the Pharaoh.
Hawass also says that there are six types of tomb there, including step-sided and smooth sided pyramids, aping those of the Pharaohs, and it is said that up to ten thousand people had lived and died there, possibly the slaves being buried elsewhere, away from the Pharaoh. Similarly, the village of Deir el-Medina, close to the valley of the kings, was built in the eighteenth dynasty to house the workmen of the royal necropolis, and family documents from the village prove that these workers were not slaves either but they were skilled craftsmen who lived well by the standards of the time. Such was their position that they were apt to revolt when they felt it was justified, and during the twentieth dynasty there were instances where their supplies were either late or non-existent and when their complaints fell on deaf ears they went on strike.
Returning to Giza, the pyramids share the site with another enduring symbol of Egypt, and that is the Sphynx, Abu el-Hol (Father of Terror in Arabic). The word sphynx is derived from the Greek word shespankh meaning “Living Statue” which originally referred to human-headed lions that guarded the gates of the underworld. Made up of a huge lion’s body with a man’s head, the Sphynx is 240ft (73m) long, 66ft (20m) high (as high as a six storey building) and 46ft (14m) wide. If the purpose behind the pyramids is shrouded in mystery then that of the Sphynx certainly is, as it is fairly anonymous as far as references to it in the hieroglyphics go, be it about how it was built, why it was built or who it was built by. In ancient Egypt, sphynxes were guardians who protected sacred places like the entrances to tombs and temples, and the Great Sphynx sits as though guarding the pyramids of Giza. In ancient inscriptions the symbol of the sphynx served as the giver of life, the director of truth and the eternal leader of the upper and lower world.
Through the ages it has been thought to represent many things, the ancient Greeks thought it represented occult wisdom, the medieval Arabs thought it was the father of terror, but some say that it began as nothing more than an outcrop of rock that nobody knew what to do with. Lanny Bell, Associate Professor at the Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago, says that it is the remains of an old quarry which, rather than destroy, the Egyptians sculpted.
Mark Lehner, also of the Oriental Institute and the Harvard Semitic Museum, says that it not only has the power of the lion in its body but also the head of, not just any man, but the ultimate man (the Pharaoh) wearing the head scarf folded in the way that only the Pharaoh is allowed to wear it, as the sign of divine rule over the natural world. Lehner also says that it was built at the same time as the second pyramid, that of Khafre, possibly as a guardian to it.
Many think that its face was built to represent Khafre, and Rita Freed, Curator at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, says that there are many similarities between the face and that of the statue of Khafre. The square jaw, arched eyebrows and high cheek bones prompt many to think that it was built during the fourth dynasty (at the same time as the pyramids) and another to date it is to look at the rock from which it is carved. The bottom layer is hard limestone while the middle layer runs from hard to soft and the head is made from a strong building stone which is why it was weathered less than the body.
Mark Lehner says that it is obvious that the Sphynx and the pyramids were built at the same time and he says the evidence for that is found in the way that it is set out, the materials used and the architecture, which he says is fourth dynasty (the time of Khafre). He says that the Egyptians did not distinguish between art, writing and architecture, so the Sphynx could be considered a huge hieroglyph. The Egyptologists view of the ancient civilization is that the Old Kingdom when Giza was built, collapsed in 2100 BC, and with it died the grand pyramid constructions and the work on the Giza plateau.
The period known as the Middle Kingdom died out five hundred years later, in 1600 BC, and there then followed a period of neglect at Giza which saw a thousand years of sand blowing over the monuments and burying the Sphynx up to its neck. This also the period of the grave robbers who committed the most heinous crime imaginable, which went against the entire Egyptian belief system, as to raid a tomb was to kill the person in the afterlife, and yet people were robbing the tombs of their Pharaohs who were akin to gods.
The New Kingdom was born, and this became Egypt’s “Golden Age,” almost a thousand years after the construction of the Giza plateau, the Egyptians celebrated the re-emergence of a powerful monarchy. They erected monuments to the past and, to try and stop future grave robbers, they looked for a more secret site for tombs, and they found it 450 miles south along the Nile, opposite the then capital, Thebes, at the Valley of the Kings, where there was a natural mound.
The pyramid shape was still important to them however, and if you stand in the Valley of the Kings and look towards the end of the valley, you will see the top of the holy mountain, and this mountain peak serves as on giant pyramid to overlook all the tombs in the valley. It was at this time, during the New Kingdom, that restoration work was done on many of the works of the Old Kingdom, and there is a tale that Tutmoses was out hunting and stopped to rest in the shadow of the Sphynx’s head, and he heard a voice which told him to uncover the body of the Sphynx and he will gain his seat on the throne, which he duly did.
Tutmoses was not a crown prince so he would not naturally inherit the throne, but there is evidence to suggest that he killed his older brother in order to become king and then made up the prophecy to hide his crime. He did however fulfil the rest of the alleged prophecy and restore the landscape, and built walls to try and keep the sand off it in the future. He also had the face of the Spynx and its head dress painted, and traces of the paint can still be seen today.
In 525 BC the Persians invaded Egypt and in 332 BC Alexander the Great invaded and made Egypt a part of the Greek Empire, and for some time the Romans and the Greeks were agreeable to the Egyptian ways of worship and even carried out some repairs on the Sphynx. Though the statue itself was maintained, the foreign influences served to swamp the belief system and the Sphynx’s religious purpose became lost in time. By AD 2 it was all but gone, and the Sphynx became the creation of the gods. Under Christian influence the Sphynx again fell into decline, and in the fourth century AD, as the temples were closed or destroyed, and the last of the hieroglyphs carved in stone, the ancient Egyptian culture ended, and the Sphynx was again buried up to its neck in sand.
By AD 640 Egypt was an Arab nation and the Sphynx’s meaning, and that of the mummified Pharaohs was forgotten, not even the traces of paint still visible on the face of the Sphynx gave away its importance. One man, an Arab doctor named Abdul Latif, in AD 1200 wrote:
“A little more than a bow shot from these pyramids is a colossal figure of a head and neck projecting from the earth. The body to which the head belongs is said to be buried under the earth. On the face is a reddish tint and a red varnish. The face is remarkably beautiful, the mouth in particular has a charming expression. It seems to be smiling gently.”
Early in the fifteenth century another Arab, this time a historian, reported that someone, angry that people still believed and indulged in ancient Egyptian mysticism, smashed off the nose, though there are also reports that a sheik ordered that the “pagan smile” was wiped from its face by cannonballs. In 1798 Napoleon came to Egypt with not only an invading army but also a team of surveyors and scholars who reconnoitered the ancient monuments, and it is even rumoured that Napoleon himself took a few pot shots at the Sphinx’s face.
True or not, Napoleon did serve to open Egypt up to Europe and he also found the Rosetta Stone, a black rock on which many hieroglyphics told of ancient Egypt and its secrets. It wasn’t until relatively recently, 1925, that the Sphynx was once again uncovered by a French archaeologist named Emile Baraize. It took Baraize a full ten years just to remove the sand alone. Photographs of the Sphynx before this operation seem strange but they do allow one to gain some insight into what a mammoth task Baraize undertook.
In the last hundred years alone the neck has been eroded by several inches and today we continue to carry out repairs on one of the world’s most long lived structures. This is the popular belief about the Giza plateau and Egyptologists cling to it, but more recent theories are far more grandiose than this. The Royal Astronomer of Scotland, Charles Piazzi Smyth, made some discoveries in 1865, he found that the base of the Great Pyramid divided by the width of a casing stone equaled 365 (the number of days in a year). He also calculated that a pyramid inch (0.25 of a paving stone) was also one ten millionth of the earth’s polar radius. He applied the pyramid inch to every dimension of the Great Pyramid and made a spectacular supposition, he claimed that by counting each inch as one year, he could calculate all of the principal dates in the earth’s past and future.
Smyth’s calculations and theories appeared in a book, which sold quite well, but they were mocked and debunked by scholars who penned a new term to describe him, a “pyramidiot.” The ideas put forward by others however, are far more sensible than this, and if true, will change the way we think about not only the Egyptian civilization, but about civilization in general.
The idea is being put forward by construction engineer Robert Bauval and writer Graham Hancock, and they ask the question: If the three Giza pyramids were built for the same purpose as other pyramids (as tombs) why were there no mummies or treasures found in them? Why were there no inscriptions to say which Pharaoh they had belonged to? Bauval also has grave doubts about the Egyptologists’ opinion that the ancient Egyptians were preceded by primitive Stone Age man, and yet they were infinitely more skilled than their predecessors, and able to build perfect structures just to house a dead king.
There is debate, not only about the kind of civilization that preceded the Old Kingdom, but also about when the Egyptian civilization began. T.G.H. James, former keeper of Egyptian antiquities at the British Museum says that:
“The first truly historical period is that which begins with the invention of writing and it is generally known as the Dynastic Period. It is a period extending from about 3100 BC to 332 BC and it derives its name from the thirty one dynasties into which the successive kings of Egypt were divided in a scheme preserved in the work of Manetho, a priestly historian who lived during the third century BC.”
He says that those which flourished before this and displayed some of the characteristics of the early dynastic Egyptians are known as “Predynastic.” Those that date from before the Predynastic Period are usually referred to in the same terms used in European prehistory, i.e. Paleolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic. So there were the beginnings of Egyptian civilization in 3100 BC, before that were only “unlettered cultures” with some “civilized” characteristics, and before that was only “Stone Age” savages (Paleolithic meaning “Old Stone Age”).
Professor Walter Emery agrees with James by saying that the writings of Manetho are of “immense importance and form the framework on which Egyptian history has been built.” Manetho’s work continues to be relevant today because it is so accurate due to it being based on “much older documents, or king-lists, to which, as a learned priest he had access.” What’s more, other such lists have been discovered and translated and in general they support Manetho. From these works it is clear that there were “three distinct eras of kingship remembered:
- When Neteru (“Neteres” or “Gods”) ruled Egypt – an epoch that culminated with Horus, the son of Osiris and Isis.
- The era of the “followers of Horus,” the Shemsu Hor, who took the divine rule through to a human Pharaoh named Menes (Narmer) – the legendary “unifier of the two lands of Upper and Lower Egypt.”
- After Menes came the “dynastic” kings who were catalogued in the king-lists.
They say that this evidence does exist and was published in 1986 by the Pyramids Carbon Dating Project directed by Mark Lehner. Lehner collected fifteen samples of mortar from the masonry of the Great Pyramid and these samples were chosen because they contained fragments of organic material which, unlike stone, can be carbon dated. Two of them were tested in Texas and the rest were tested in Zurich, and Lehner was surprised by the results. He said:
“The dates run from 3809 BC to 2689 BC. So generally the dates are …. Significantly earlier than the best Egyptological date for Khufu …. In short, the radio carbon dates, depending on which sample you note, suggest that the Egyptological chronology is anything from 200 to 1,200 years off. You can now look at this almost like a bell curve, and when you cut it down the middle you can summarise the results by saying our dates are 400 to 450 years too early for the Old Kingdom pyramids, especially those of the fourth dynasty …. Now this is really radical …. I mean it’ll make a big stink. The Giza pyramid is 400 years older than Egyptologists believe.”
Despite this, no stink has been caused as the results have been ignored by Egyptologists. There are roughly a hundred pyramids in Egypt, the last one to be discovered was that of third dynasty Pharaoh Sekhemkhet in 1950, and there are known to be two more lying buried beneath the desert sands, that of Mankauhor (The pyramid which is divine of places”) and that of Neferkare (“The enduring and living pyramid”) and perhaps there may yet be more still.
The Giza pyramids though are unlike any others in Egypt in that the ones preceding them in the third dynasty are mountains of crumbling brick, and those from the following fifth dynasty are piles of rubble. Hancock likens this to man building a Model T Ford, then a Porsche, then a Penny Farthing, and he says that “It really doesn’t make any kind of sense.” It had been said that they must have either lost their motivation or built them for a different purpose, and Hancock adds that if they were merely built to act as tombs, why were they constructed so precisely in both their locations and their dimensions? Surely there three particular pyramids, unlike those that preceded and succeeded them, served some higher purpose, and we can see the effort that went into their construction when we take a closer look.
The Giza plateau lies almost exactly a third of the way between the equator and the North Pole on the 30th parallel (Latitude 30°) and the pyramids are aligned north to south and east to west. In fact the Great Pyramid has its meridional (north-south) axis aligned to within 0.05° of true north-south (more accurate than the Meridian Building at the Greenwich Observatory, London) which is offset by 0.15°.
The base of the Great Pyramid covers an area of thirteen acres, enough to house the cathedrals of Florence, Milan, St. Peters in Rome, Westminster Abbey and St. Paul’s Cathedral. Its side measurements show incredible accuracy and consistency, the north side measures 755ft 4.9818in, the east side measures 755ft 10.4937in, the south side measures 756ft 0.9739in and the west side measures 755ft 9.1551in. The four corners of the base also show a miniscule margin of error, as the deviation from right angles is 0° 00’ 02” at the north west corner, 0° 03’ 02” at the northeast corner, 0° 03’ 33” at the south east corner and 0° 00’ 33” at the south west corner. The angle at which the sides of the pyramid slope even appears to be deliberate, and Bauval says that it shows a great mathematical knowledge, as to achieve these results the sides need to slope at a constant 52°.
The value of Pi (the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter) and its value to two decimal places (3.14) was originally thought to have been discovered in 3 BC by Archimedes, thousands of years after the pyramids were built, yet the pyramid incorporates it into its design. The designed height of the Great Pyramid at 481.3949ft bears the same relationship to its base perimeter at 3023.16ft, as does the circumference of a circle to its radius, i.e. 2xPi (481.3949ft x 2 x 3.14 = 3023.16ft).
The Great Pyramid is also a mathematical model of the Northern Hemisphere on a scale of 1:43,200, i.e. height at 481.3949ft x 43,200 = 3938.685 miles (11 miles less than the earth’s polar radius which is 3949 miles). Likewise, the pyramid’s perimeter at 3023.16ft x 43,200 = 24,724.94 miles (170 miles less than the equatorial circumference of the earth which is 24,902 miles). An error of only 0.75%.
Five hundred years ago our own civilization wasn’t even sure that the earth was round, and even today there are some that doubt it, namely the “Flat Earth Society,” and it wasn’t until three hundred years ago that we knew its true dimensions, yet this was pyramid was supposedly built 4,500 years ago. Curiously the pyramids built in Mexico also incorporate the value of Pi in their construction.
The Egyptologists don’t deny any of this, they merely say that it wasn’t done intentionally. What makes this unbelievable accuracy in construction all the more astounding is that the pyramid is not built on a level surface but is in fact built on top of a natural mound, which is estimated to be thirty feet tall (as tall as a two storey house) and is in the centre of the pyramid’s base, of which it occupies 70%.
The pyramid was not only built over the mound but incorporates it into its design as it contains a subterranean chamber and a well shaft. The subterranean chamber is 100ft below the plateau and precisely under the apex of the pyramid. The descending corridor connecting it to the original entrance in the north face is 350ft long and does not err from being perfectly straight by more than a quarter of an inch. Feats like these would surely test even modern day engineers and builders, so how on earth could it have been achieved by men just emerging from the Stone Age?
Inside the pyramid there are four main features, the underground corridor and chamber (which may pre-date the pyramid), a room called the Queen’s Chamber (which is built precisely on the centre line), the enormous 8m tall and 46m long “Grand Gallery” which leads up to the fourth feature, the King’s Chamber.
The walls of the King’s Chamber are made of granite from Aswan, which is a thousand miles away, and inside the chamber is a big sarcophagus, also made of granite, but the sarcophagus is one inch bigger than the chamber’s entrance. It is also so skillfully crafted that it too would test modern engineers and machinery, and drilling expert Chris Dunn says that it is an incredible piece of work.
The Egyptian method of drilling would be to use a bow tool drill, but to cut into granite with one of those would take far too long, and he says that they would have needed some kind of power tool, which of course they didn’t possess. Dunn goes on to say that if we were to do this today we would advance the drill by one five thousandth of an inch for every revolution of the bit, but by close examination of the granite he says that it was cut by a drill advancing much, much faster than this.
Bauval and Hancock admit that Dunn’s theory is controversial but they cannot explain how the granite was cut. Also in the King’s Chamber is another mystery which the two men feel has never been answered properly, until they came along that is. In the north and south walls of the King’s Chamber are identical, almost square holes which run in a straight line from the King’s Chamber to the outer walls of the pyramid. There are also two identical holes in the Queen’s Chamber, again one in the north wall and one in the south wall. Egyptologists say that these four shafts were for ventilation purposes but they are, like the rest of the pyramid, cut precisely, and Bauval and Hancock say that so much effort has gone into their construction that they must serve some higher purpose. In support of this argument is the fact that the two shafts in the Queen’s Chamber were closed at both ends.
The average cross section of the shafts is 23cm x 22cm and they range in length from the northern shaft of the Queen’s Chamber at 24m to the northern shaft of the King’s Chamber at 65m. To show the amount of effort that went into creating them, one needs only to note that they were not cut once the pyramid was built, but were made step by step as the pyramid was erected, incorporating them. What would have been a relatively simple operation had the shafts extended horizontally, was made immeasurably more difficult by the fact that they extend at a constant inclined angle. Those in the Queen’s Chamber were only discovered relatively recently when, in early 1872, Waynham Dixon was studying those in the King’s Chamber and decided to look for similar features in the Queen’s Chamber. It is said that Dixon found a crack in the southern wall where he thought the shaft might be and instructed his workman, Bill Grundy, to make a hole with a hammer and steel chisel, and soon he had broken through. Dixon then measured a similar position on the northern wall and again Grundy broke through with his hammer and chisel.
These two shafts are also closed at the other end, unlike those from the King’s Chamber which open at the exterior pyramid wall. It is also reported that Dixon probed the Queen’s Chamber shafts with a chimney sweep’s rod (part of which snapped off) and found three artefacts; a rough stone sphere, a small two pronged hook made of metal and a fine piece of cedar that was a foot long and had notches cut into it. These were then exported to England, later in 1872, but before the end of the century they had disappeared. Bauval and Hancock say that the purpose of the shafts is more symbolic or ritualistic than practical and, in order to find that purpose, we must turn to the world of astronomy.
It is often said that the Egyptians did not have a detailed knowledge of astronomy, but among the hieroglyphs is a chart which shows the stars of the night sky, including the twelve signs of the zodiac. Unfortunately the chart, painted on a ceiling, shows the stars and the constellations as animal forms in the sky, and the painter opted for artistry rather than astronomical accuracy, which makes it difficult to determine which animal represents which modern constellation. Nevertheless it does show a keen interest in the heavens, and in particular what form the stars took.
In 1963 an American astronomer, Virginia Trumble, was asked by a researcher from Egypt to see if the four shafts pointed at anything in the heavens, and she found that few things aligned with them, but the main one which did was Orion’s Belt. This lined up approximately with the shaft in the southern wall of the King’s Chamber. Bauval found it astonishing that nobody investigated this further so he used a computer to recreate the night sky as it would have appeared in 2500 BC when the pyramid was built.
To the ancient Egyptians the constellation of Orion represented their high god of resurrection, Osiris, and again using the computer, Bauval watched as the three stars of Orion’s Belt cross the north-south line and culminate at the meridian Circa 2500 BC. At the era known by Egyptologists as “The Pyramid Age” a number of alignments take place as each of the shafts is targeted at a star as it culminates at the meridian.
From the Queen’s Chamber the northern shaft is angled at 39° and points at Kochab (Beta Ursa Minor) in the Little Bear, a star associated with “cosmic regeneration” and immortality of the soul. The southern shaft is angled at 39° 30’ and is aimed at Sirius (Alpha Canis Major) in the Great Dog, a star that is associated with the goddess Isis. From the King’s Chamber the northern shaft is angled at 32° 28’ and is aimed at Thuban (Alpha Draconis) in the constellation of the Dragon (the ancient Pole Star) and a star associated with “cosmic prophecy and gestation.” The southern shaft is angled at 45° 14’ and is aimed at Alnitak (Zeta Orionis) the lowest star in Orion’s Belt which the Egyptians associated with Osiris.
These stars, and those around them, were afforded great importance because they were visible all year round and therefore never “died,” whereas other constellations would disappear below the horizon, notably Sirius (the star of Isis) which would disappear for a period of seventy days every year. This seventy day period of invisibility emphasizes the ancient Egyptian cult of rebirth and was seen as a cosmic preparation for astral rebirth and, naturally, was matched to the period of embalming and mummification. The great significance of this can be much better appreciated when one considers the Egyptian creation myth, to which Osiris and Isis were very much central.
Every civilization has its own creation myth and the Egyptians were no different. Theirs was very important to them and they repeated it in pyramid texts on the walls of pyramids and tombs and they saw each new Pharaoh re-enacting it.
In the beginning, the great sun god Ra looked down on the newly formed land, and he sent one of his grandsons, Osiris, to live among its people to teach them to be good and civilized, and so Osiris, both man and god, walked the land with his consort Isis, and it became a beautiful place. The brother of Osiris, Sett, became jealous of him and killed him, then cut his body into fourteen pieces and scattered them all around Egypt. The heartbroken Isis roamed the land and found all of the pieces, bound them together with muslin cloth and brought his body back to life just long enough for him to impregnate her. He then rose to the heavens and left Isis hiding in the bulrushes where she eventually bore a son, Horus, who grew up to avenge his father’s death. Isis, her earthly mission now complete, joined Osiris in the heavens, and so it turned out that the stars represented events on earth.
This story is also where the act of mummification has originated from, Orisirs (the god of resurrection) being wrapped in linen for his next life, the eternal life, in the stars.
Each mummification is a re-enactment of the original event performed by Isis, and each new Pharaoh saw themselves as a direct descendent of Osiris. Part of the mummification process is described in some of the oldest religious writings in the world, the Egyptian “Book Of The Dead” and this process is known as the “Opening Of The Mouth” ceremony. This is where the mummified Pharaoh would have life breathed into him so he could take his place among the stars. Bauval thinks that the opening of the mouth ceremony would be performed in the Queen’s Chamber, and during the proceedings the Pharaoh would be placed upright, and it would be his consort and his mortal son who would have to cause the new life to stir in him. It would be vital that this was done at precisely the right moment, at the dawn rising of Orion, thus the Pharaoh is reborn in the heavens at the same time as Osiris. The son and consort would perform the ritual with an iron implement in the shape of the Little bear, Ursa Minor, whose primary star is Polaris, and commonly it would be meteoritic iron. At the moment of the dawn rising, the son would use the iron tool to break the Pharaoh’s lips open and another one to open his mouth wide, and the new life is breathed into him and he takes his place in the heavens.
Bauval thinks that there may have been one final ritual for him to perform, that which Osiris had finally performed for Isis, to impregnate her, so that there will be a future Horus, an heir to the throne. He suggests that the Pharaoh would be stood upright, facing the shaft in the Queen’s Chamber’s southern wall, probably with an erect phallus attached, and his seed would follow the path of the shaft to Isis.
We can now see the importance of the seventy day invisibility of Sirius during which the events in the heavens mirror the events in the stars. During the seventy days the powers that were needed for the rebirth of the cosmic Horus king were building up in the “womb” of the goddess Isis. The beginning of the period marked the beginning of the journey of Horus into the underworld, and at this point the celestial Horus (the sun) would be near the head of Taurus (the Hyades) on the right bank of the milky way on its journey around the ecliptic, symbolizing Horus, embarking on his barge and sailing across the “winding waterway.”
As the solstice and the rebirth of Sirius (the heliacal rising of Sirius in the east) approaches, the sun continues along the ecliptic, depicting Horus nearing some goal. As the rising comes, the sun is now in the constellation of Leo, in between the “paws,” so the celestial journey of the sun and that of Horus end in between the paws of the Sphynx. Again this journey is referred to in the pyramid texts which Bauval says holds the key to the pyramid’s secret but he adds that they have been misunderstood by Egyptologists who interpret them as a sun religion, but Bauval says that they are not a religion of the day and the living but a religion of the night and the dead. He says that they tell us that the king becomes a star in the kingdom of Orion:
“The king shall go aboard the bark like Ra on the banks of the winding waterway …. The winding waterway is flooded …. You cross thereon to the horizon, to the place where the gods were born …. You may cross the winding waterway …. May you fall in the eastern side of the sky, may you sit in the …. Horizon …. Summons is made to me by Ra …. As Horus, as the horizon dweller …. The doors of the sky are thrown open for Horakhti …. The doors of the sky are thrown open at dawn for Horus at the east …. Go to …. Herakhti at the horizon …. On the eastern side of the sky where the gods are born.”
The ancient Egyptians believed that their creation myth, Zep Tepi (the first time), was an actual historical event and that it was re-enacted in the sky. They didn’t believe that the creation and the period immediately following it (the time of Osiris, Horus and Ra) took place in some mythological Garden of Eden, but in a real place, and that place was in the huge triangular region just south of the apex of the Nile delta, encompassing Heliopolis, Memphis and Giza. The point of this triangle sits as latitude 30°, the Giza necropolis.
Something puzzled Bauval about the layout of the three pyramids and that was that two of them are of a similar size and in precise alignment, but the third is much smaller and is not in alignment. Again he wondered why, amid all the effort and precision on the plateau, this pyramid should be offset to the left. Jean Kerisel, General Secretery of the France-Egypt Association, has studied the terrain around the site of the smaller pyramid and he says that there is no topographical reason for it to be offset. There is no structural reason why it could not be built in line with the other two either, so there must be some other reason for it, and he says that it may be astronomical.
The answer to the riddle came to Bauval quite unexpectedly one night when he was camping in the desert with an Egyptian yachtsman. The yachtsman was showing Bauval how to find the rising point of Sirius by using Orion’s Belt as a guide, when he casually mentioned that the belt was not actually a straight line, and as Bauval sat in the desert looking up at Orion’s Belt, he knew that he had the answer.
There are two bright stars in alignment and one smaller, fainter star offset to the left, just as with the three pyramids, but not exactly the same. The Book Of The Dead once again takes on great importance and, in particular the mention of the Milky Way (the Winding Waterway) which is a long band of stars both old and new which can be seen meandering its way across the night sky alongside Orion, just as the Nile meanders its way across the desert alongside the three pyramids in the formation of Orion’s Belt.
To add strength to his theory, Bauval also looked at the other two remaining fourth dynasty pyramids which are to be found some way from Giza, one to the north at Abu Ruwash and one three mile to the south at Zawyat-Al-Aryan. Astonishingly, these two pyramids, in conjunction with the three at Giza, form a more complete picture of the constellation of Orion. The pyramid at Abu Ruwash representing the star “Saiph” and the pyramid at Zawyat-Al-Aryan representing the star “Bellatrix.” So the Egyptians of the fourth dynasty were recreating the constellation of Orion at, and around, Giza, creating their own version of heaven on earth.
Once again though, there is a difference in the alignments, and once again Bauval enlists the help of the computer to see if he can find a time when the alignments did match. The stars and constellations that we see today are not in the same position in the sky as they were during “The Pyramid Age,” and this is due to a cycle known as procession. The earth spins on its axis which is inclined at 23°, and this axis is itself moving very slowly, at a rate of 1° over a human lifetime. For the axis to complete a full cycle and return to its starting point takes 25,920 years. From our observation point on the surface of the earth we see procession as a difference in a star’s altitude (declination). For example, it may begin its processional cycle at its nadir close to the horizon and over time rise higher and higher until, 13,000 years later, it reaches its zenith and then starts to slide back down again along its sliding scale.
We are able to identify a point in time by looking at a star’s position on its processional scale. Likewise if we were to list a star’s declination at the meridian today, then a future civilization could use this to identify our point in time, our epoch.
Bauval uses the computer to find a point in time where the alignments of the stars of Orion’s Belt and the three pyramids match up. He goes back to the time of 2500 BC when the pyramids were built, but still the alignments are wrong, so he decides to continue regressing in leaps of 500 years at a time, and he finally finds a match in 10500 BC, long before the Egyptian civilization began. Coincidentally the epoch of 10500 BC marks the nadir of Alnitak (Orion’s Belt), 12,960 years later, AD 2500, marking its zenith.
Graham Hancock believes that the Egyptians must have “inherited” the pyramid idea from another, earlier culture that existed in 10500 BC. He is not saying that the pyramids are 12,500 years old, he is merely saying that they are a legacy of that time, and he finds the Egyptologists’ idea that the Giza pyramids were built by a civilisation in its infancy crazy because there is an enormous amount of knowledge and wisdom gone into their design and construction. He says that they clearly mark the end of something and not the beginning of something, and he holds the same opinion about the Sphynx.
Egyptology claims that the Spynx was built 4,500 years ago, at the same time as the pryamids, but Bauval and Hancock, and now a growing number of assorted people, believe that it was built far, far earlier than this, 8,000 years earlier to be precise, but there is one fundamental flaw in their belief, and that is that in 10500 BC it has always been thought that there was no civilization sophisticated enough to have built it. Unfortunately the Sphynx is not able to be dated because the radio carbon dating technique cannot be used as it only works on organic materials and the Sphynx is carved out of rock.
In 1992 Mark Lehner contradicted himself at two different forums: At the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science he said “There is no direct way to date the Sphynx itself because the Sphynx is carved right out of natural rock.” and in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal he wrote: “Although we are certain that the Sphynx dates to the fourth dynasty, we are confronted by a complete absence of Old Kingdom texts which mention it."
This last observation is a crucial one as it means that we have an enormous, yet anonymous monument, about which the Egyptologist Selim Hassan wrote, in 1949: “No definite facts are known” Egyptology claims that the head and, in particular the face, of the Sphynx is that of Khafre and they use this “fact” to date the monument to his time (The Pyramid Age) but it has been said that “We do not attribute the building of London’s Trafalgar Square to Nelson just because his statue stands there.” So even if the Sphynx’s face is that of Khafre it certainly doesn’t mean that he built it, or had it built.
To try and unravel the mystery of the anonymous monument Professor Mark Lehner enlists the help of photogrammetric data and computer graphics and, in April of 1991, his article in National Geographic magazine read:
“Zahi Hawass, Director General of the Giza Pyramids, invited me to join his excavation (around) the Sphynx in 1978. During the next four years I led a project to map the Sphynx in details for the first time. We produced front and side views with photogrammetry, a technique using stereoscopic photography…. Computers have taken the records further. Maps were digitized to make a 3D wireframe model; some 2.6 million surface points were plotted to put “skin” on the skeleton view. We have constructed images of the Sphynx as it may have looked thousands of years ago. To create the face, I tried matching the views of other sphynxes and Pharaohs to our model. With the face of Khafre, the Sphynx came alive….”
This is countered by the fact that all this really means is that Lehner created a wireframe image of the Sphynx “as it may have looked thousands of years ago” not how it did look, and he then projected the face of Khafre onto it using the only known surviving statue of Khafre as a guide. However, it has been said that “The same computer technique could be used to ‘prove’ the Sphynx was really Elvis Presley.”
In 1993, in order to find their own answer, Bauval and Hancock combine forces with writer John A. West and Lieutenant Frank Domingo, a forensic artist with the New York Police Department, a man who works with faces every day of his working life and is an expert in identification. Domingo also compared the Sphynx to the statue of Khafre but he came to a very different conclusion. His report stated:
“After reviewing my various drawings, schematics and measurements, my final conclusion concurs with my initial reaction, i.e. that the two works represent two separate individuals. The proportions in the frontal view, and especially the angles and facial protrusion in the lateral views convinced me that the Sphynx is not Khafre.”
He goes on to say that this “facial protrusion in the lateral views” allow him to draw another, more astounding conclusion. He says that not only are they not from the same person but they are not even from the same race.
John A. West is not surprised by these results and he has some ideas of his own which he bases on the physical appearance of the Sphynx today. The head of the Sphynx is not in proportion to the body, it is much smaller, and it has been said that this is because of the many, many years that the body has been buried in the sand while the head has been above ground level and open to the elements. West says that the head is smaller than the body but is in much better condition, and even though it is made from a much harder limestone than the body, he still describes the difference in erosion as “extreme.” He concludes that this suggests that at some point in history the head has been recarved, and thus “is not original to the Sphynx.” This is certainly possible because the head has spent so long above ground that anybody could have worked on it at any time, so it could theoretically represent any Pharaoh from any time since its conception.
The likelihood that the head has been reworked is also shown in the “subtle discrepancy” which exists between the axis of the head and that of the face. The head being oriented due east but the facial features facing somewhat north of east. The gaze of the Sphynx as the positioning of the pyramids prompt Bauval and Hancock to continue with their theory that the whole Giza plateau is a kind of astronomical marker to the skies as they appeared in 10500 BC, and to do this they stand on the plateau looking out over the horizon.
From their vantage point the horizon is uninterrupted from 360°, and the rising points of the sun and the stars can clearly be seen. When the sun rises it does so with a constellation behind it and, in our own epoch, on the spring equinox it rises with the constellation of Pisces behind it, as it has done for approximately the last 2,000 years. However, the age of Pisces is now coming to an end and then we will enter the Age of Aquarius. It takes exactly 2,160 years for the equinoctial point to pass through one constellation or “house” of the zodiac, and we can trace back to a period of time and see what house of the zodiac the sun was in.
In 2500 BC, when other alignments on the plateau are not correct, the equinoctial sun rose in Taurus (the bull) but it would be ludicrous to think that a Pharaoh would build a marker to this event in the form of a lion in 2500 BC. So when did the spring equinox occur in front of the lion? When was the Age of Leo? Not surprisingly it began in 12960 BC and ended in 8800 BC. So, in 10500 BC on the vernal equinox, when the other alignments take place, the east gazing Sphynx would see the sun rising in front of its celestial counterpart, and in this epoch another spectacular conjunction takes place. As the sun breaks the horizon, another constellation is pinpointed in the south along the meridian, and that is Orion, in particular Alnitak of Orion’s Belt.
There is another question about the Giza plateau and the positioning of other features found there. There is a sloping causeway which leads from the central pyramid and alongside the Sphynx, but this causeway lies not along the east-west line, but just 14° south of it, so is this intentional or is it an error surrounded by perfection? If it is an error then it isn’t the only one as the causeway of the Great Pyramid is also 14° off the east-west line but to the north, and the causeway of Mekaure’s pyramid, and the Sphynx’s gaze, point due east.
So what could be the reason for these differences in alignment? On the spring equinox the sun rises due east, on the summer solstice it rises 28° north of due east and on the winter solstice it rises 28° south of due east, giving a total variation of 56°. The points midway between these solstices and the equinox are what astronomers call the Cross Quarters, so that one causeway and the Sphynx point at the equinox and the other two causeways point at the cross quarters. To say that all of these details is a coincidence is a nonsense, so what the Giza plateau is, is an astronomical pointer to an age, in 10500 BC, 8,000 years before the Egyptian civilization had begun.
Armed with this knowledge John A. West looks at the Sphynx to try to determine its age and history. In particular he looks at the erosion on the body, which is far greater than that on the head, and he says that it wasn’t caused by wind and sand but by water as it poured in sheets over the enclosure wall, leaving rounded contours.
The kind of erosion caused by wind and sand can be seen all around Giza, but that around the Sphynx is very different, and Egyptologists concluded that the flooding of the Nile had caused it, but West disagrees. He says that the regular Nile floods would fill the Sphynx’s enclosure from the bottom like an enormous bath tub and would leave a pattern of erosion with the more severe damage at the bottom of the monument and the top of the enclosure as the water seeps from the Nile and runs over the edges into the pit. The erosion on the Sphynx however is worst at the top. Here it is more rounded and takes the form of many rivulets which run down the sides of its body from top to bottom, so clearly, the water came from above.
West also looks at some of the earliest repairs done to the Sphynx and he finds that they needed some three feet of stone and brickwork to be repaired, and the Egyptologists claim that this was done when the Sphynx was only three hundred years old, but for the stone to have eroded by three feet in three hundred years is an absurdity because if this was the case and the Sphynx was built in 2500 BC as they claim, then at the erosion rate of one foot per century, the Sphynx would have disappeared by the sixteenth century AD.
For West to put his theory to the test we must find out when, if ever, there was a vast amount of water in the Nile valley. Quite predictably the answer is around 12,000 years ago, after the last ice age. During this time there had been millions of square miles of ice covering the northern hemisphere, and for some reason within 2,000 to 3,000 years it melted. The ice that covered America and northern Europe was two miles thick, and when it melted it caused flooding of cataclysmic proportions, and Egyptologist Tekra Hassan explains that at about 10500 BC exceptionally high waters covered the flood plain, the Nile delta and the Nile valley.
West has a theory about the history of the Sphynx and, like that of Bauval and Hancock, it does not accord very closely with the normally accepted facts. In the years before the Giza plateau became desert it was a fertile plain (this much we do know) and it contained a prominent outcrop of rock which the people of the time carved, possibly the head of a lion or of a god, and as the time passed, the shifting weather patterns brought torrential rain to the area signaling the end of the ice age, and the rain and torrential floods eroded the body into virtually what it is today.
When the rain finally stopped, the area dried up and became part of the Sahara Desert, and sandstorms buried the statue up to its neck, thus protecting its body and the signs of weathering for thousands of years while the head continued to be exposed to the elements and wear away. As the erosion of the head continued, it began to wear away its design and was possibly recarved. Certainly it was recarved by the fourth dynasty Egyptians who uncovered it body, but rather than recarve it in its original form they did it in their own image, so Khafre didn’t build the Sphynx, he racarved it, and this recarving of the head would account for it being on a much smaller scale than the body. It would also seem to account for Domingo’s theory that the Sphynx and Khafre are not of the same race, as man’s distant ancestors did indeed have a more laterally elongated face with a more prominent brow and jaw, Domingo’s conclusion being that “the angles and facial protrusion in the lateral views” allow him to conclude that the two are from different races.
To help West prove his theory, Bauval and Hancock look to another structure which they say may also date back to 10000 BC as it shows similar signs of erosion to the body of the Sphynx. It was discovered early in the twentieth century, buried under sand five hundred miles south of Giza at a place called Abidos. It sits fifty feet below the level of the surrounding temples, and Hancock describes it as an anonymous structure that seems to date to no known epoch, and he wonders if it is just one of many that lie buried deep beneath the desert sands, waiting to be discovered. The building’s walls were originally bare, but Pharaohs later came along and added hieroglyphics to them.
Bauval says that further proof of their claims can be found in the Egyptian creation myth, which holds that the earth was once covered with water and out of the water rose what they call a Primeval Mound upon which creation began, and it is as though the pyramids are a replacement of the primeval mound and the moment of creation, the time of the gods.
There are texts which tell us that Giza is the place of creation and so what better place to build a monument to it. Egyptologists say that these arguments put by Bauval, Hancock and West are not convincing enough and they raise too many problems, such as there being a civilization then nothing, then a new civilization again. They say show them an inscription or any other object that proves it, but West says that this is like telling Magellan, after he had sailed around the world, show us some other men that have sailed around the world, and he adds that what he is looking at is the line of civilization into history which may not necessarily have been a straight one from “stupid old cave men to smart old us with our hydrogen bombs and striped toothpaste.” It may turn out however, that there is indeed further evidence to support them that has yet to be discovered.
A number of ancient Egyptian inscriptions and papyri make reference to hidden chambers such as the Chamber of Archives and the Hall of Records, and legend tells us that “there exists a single subterranean chamber under the Sphynx with entrances to all three pyramids …. Each entrance is guarded by statues of amazing abilities.” Texts also tell us that the gods concealed a “great secret” at Giza, and one particular text in the Berlin Museum refers to the Egyptian god of wisdom, Thoth, who was said to have described the mysteries of heaven in his sacred books. Hancock refers to it as a treasure map that almost, but not quite, marks the spot.
The text also tells of how Khufu, the builder of the Great Pyramid, sought in Heliopolis a mysterious black box that contained the number of the secret chambers of the sanctuary of Thoth, but what was the mysterious black box? The Ark of Thoth? What was the wisdom that Khufu needed in order to construct his pyramid? If such a black box exists then where is it? Could it be hidden somewhere in the Great Pyramid or possibly beneath the Sphynx?
In 1977 the U.S. National Science Foundation funded a project at Giza to search for underground chambers around the Sphynx using ground penetrating radar, resistivity measurement, magnetometry, aerial photography and thermal infra-red image enhancing technologies. According to the S.R.I. (Stanford Research Institute) who were involved with the project:
“Several anomalies were observed as a result of our resistivity survey at the Sphynx …. Behind the rear paws (north west end) we ran two traverses. Both traverses indicate an anomaly that could possibly be due to a tunnel aligned north west to south east.”
Two further anomalies were also noted, deep in the bedrock “In front of the paws of the Sphynx.”
In 1978 the S.R.I. again provided funds for a more detailed survey of the Sphynx enclosure and the nearby Sphynx temple. They decided that should any anomalies be found they would cut holes into the bedrock and insert borescope cameras. Several holes were thus explored but proved to be just natural cavities. In 1980 Egyptian irrigation specialists were drilling close to the Sphynx and reached a depth of fifty feet before they hit something hard and massive. Once they had freed the drill and raised it they found that with it they had brought a lump of Aswan granite that is only found five hundred miles away to the south.
In the early 1990s, in a survey led by Professor Robert Schoch of Boston University, Thomas Dobecki, discovered a large rectangular chamber approximately 15m x 12m and about 5m below the surface in between the front paws of the Sphynx. However, this survey was brought to an abrupt halt in 1993 by Dr. Zahi Hawass, but it was not the only detailed survey of the area.
In 1986 two French architects, Gilles Dormion and Jean-Patrice Goidin obtained a scientific license to conduct an exploration inside the Great Pyramid after persuading senior officials at the Egyptian Antiquities Organization that there could be a “hidden chamber” behind the west wall of the corridor which leads to the Queen’s Chamber. The E.A.O. surprisingly gave permission for Dormion and Goidin to drill a series of small holes, and they found a large cavity filled with “unusually fine sand.” The Egyptologists were not happy and put a stop to the project. Then, in 1988, a Japanese scientific team led by Professor Sakuji Yoshimura used “non-destructive techniques” with electromagnetic waves and radar equipment, and they too found a cavity off the same passageway very close to where the two Frenchmen had drilled. They also found a large cavity behind the north west wall in the Queen’s Chamber and a “tunnel” outside and to the south of the pyramid which appeared to run underneath it. Again though, the Egyptian authorities intervened and the work was halted.
Egyptologists seemed to be uninterested in these findings and considered them to be features that were “abandoned” during construction. In particular they were most uninterested in the shafts, but one man who disagreed was a Munich based German engineer named Rudolf Gantenbrink who, in 1991, submitted a proposal for videoscopic surveying of the shafts to the German Archaeological Institute in Cairo. Before this, however, in August 1990 the E.A.O. commissioned the G.A.I. to install a ventilation system in the pyramid, a process that would involve cleaning the two shafts of the King’s Chamber which, unlike those in the Queen’s Chamber, emerge on the outside of the pyramid. After this cleaning they could install high powered fans to increase the air flow. Soon after he accepted the commission, Rainer Stadelman, Director of the G.A.I. received Gantenbrink’s proposal for an exploration of the Queen’s Chamber shafts using a high tech miniature robot which would be remotely controlled, have a high powered spotlight and a video camera which would relay images back to a monitor, and he handed the scheme over to him. However, before he began ventilating the King’s Chamber shafts, he set to work, in February 1992, on exploring the Queen’s Chamber shafts, and in particular the southern shaft. By mid May 1992 he had penetrated the shaft to a depth of seventy feet, a shaft which Egyptologists had said was only thirty feet long, but now, he was called away to work on the main project, to ventilate the King’s Chamber.
Since those shafts are open at both ends, this was a much simpler task and Gantenbrink was able to use a different device called “Upuaut 1” which was like a small sledge that could be hauled up and down using cables and pulleys at both ends of the shafts. This job finished, he now built a new robot that was better able to cope with the difficult task of exploring the Queen’s Chamber southern shaft.
While the new robot was being built he took a film crew to cover the start of the operation, but he hadn’t obtained the necessary permits, so first Stadelman and then Gantenbrink approached Dr. Zahi Hawass who granted them “verbal permission” to film, and then the exploration resumed.
By March 1993, everybody’s patience and money was running low and Stadelman withdrew his support but Gantenbrink forged ahead alone. On March 22nd, coincidentally the spring equinox, at about 10am, Upuaut 2 was 180ft up the “30ft” shaft when it reached a sharp settlement in the floor which took an hour to get past. At 11:05am and at a distance of 200ft into the shaft, the floor and walls became “polished” and the robot reached a “door.” It was made of stone and was complete with two corroded copper fittings which had allowed it to be slid into place, but would prevent it from being opened.
The G.A.I. made no announcement about their discovery, apparently because Stadelman was unable to decide what form such an announcement should take. Meanwhile Gantenbrink returned to Munich with his equipment and video tapes, and the story was broken by the British media, in particular the London Independent on April 16th, 1993, and the others soon followed and continued to run the story for weeks. There were two sides to the story though, and Dr Hawass at first said “In my opinion this is ‘the’ discovery in Egypt” and he expressed the hope that scrolls or other records to do with the “religion” of the builders and maybe the “stars” could be behind it.
On the other hand, Mrs. Christine Egoron, Rainer Stadelman’s secretary at the G.A.I., came out with a most damning statement when she said to the press that there was nothing behind the story, and no chamber at the end of the shaft. The “air channels” didn’t point at anything and Gantenbrink’s robot was only “to measure the humidity of the pyramid.”
Soon afterwards, Dr. Stadelman himself issued a statement which said “I don’t know how this story happened but I can tell you this is very annoying. There is surely no other chamber …. There is no room behind the stone.” Amid all this, Gantenbrink then made attempts to restart his work on the door but was prevented from doing so, namely by Dr. Hawass who was, by this time, singing a different tune and now saying “I think this is not a door and nothing is behind it.”
Gantenbrink has had numerous meetings and press conferences cancelled and he has even offered to train an Egyptian to operate the equipment but his offer was turned down, prompting him to say that “The search for truth is too important to be ruined by a silly political game. My only hope is that they will soon reach the same conclusions.” To try and diffuse the situation, Dr. Helen Whitehouse of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum said that “The team working on the door are waiting for better equipment. The days when Egyptologists went crashing into a room are long over.” She adds “Who knows what’s behind the door? It would be foolish to guess.”
Hancock says that we need to know what is hidden at Giza, be it in the pyramid or beneath the Sphynx because the ancient texts tell us that it is of enormous importance and it will be an astounding revelation about the origin of human civilization.
So, in time all of these mysteries may be answered for us, and not just those surrounding the Giza plateau but also possibly questions that we have about other ancient civilisations such as the Maya, the Aztecs and who knows, maybe even the Atlanteans?
What is for certain is that Egyptologists and other fields of study will need to reassess their opinions and views, and possibly sooner rather than later, because new technology is already being used to try and date the Sphynx. How does it work?
When a rock is cut, the newly exposed surface begins to accumulate upon it, chemicals which are made by cosmic rays hitting the earth, and by examining these chemicals we can see how old something is, and this technique can obviously be used on non-organic materials, unlike the carbon dating technique, and preliminary tests do show the Sphynx to be older than previously thought.
So what of West’s proposed earlier civilization, could it be true or not? The dynastic Egyptians certainly had a great understanding of astronomy, but did any preceding civilization have such a knowledge? If the dynastic Egyptians didn’t carve the leonine Sphynx, then a Neolithic race must have done, and so precisely that it looked upon the spring equinox taking place in front of its celestial counterpart.
The lowest point in the processional cycle of Orion’s Belt (the nadir) the “first time of Osiris” occurred in 10500 BC, and it is this point in time that is fixed on the ground at the Giza necropolis by the southern shaft of the King’s Chamber.
Bauval and Hancock felt that this, and the alignment of the Sphynx, could not be put down to chance. They have also come to the conclusion that the site was “completed” in 2500 BC, but may have been “established” physically 8,000 years earlier, perhaps in the form of low platforms where the pyramids now stand, or perhaps the mound that the Great Pyramid is built on. They also say that the knowledge may have been handed down to the astronomer-priests of Heliopolis by the followers of Horus, as the Egyptian astronomers were much revered by both the Greeks and the Romans, because as early as 5 BC, Herodotus (the “Father of History”) attributed to them the discovery of the solar year and the “invention” of the twelve signs of the zodiac which he says that the Greeks later borrowed. He wrote “In my opinion their method of calculation is better than that of the Greeks.”
In 4 BC Aristotle also recognized the knowledge and expertise of the Egyptian astronomers “whose observations have been kept for very many years past, and from whom much of our evidence about particular stars is derived.” The fact that there was this long established knowledge is shown by Plato who recounts how the Egyptians had obsessed over the stars “for 10,000 years or, so to speak, for an infinite time,” and by Diodorus of Sicily who visited Egypt in 60 BC and said that “The disposition of the stars as well as their movements have always been the subject of careful observations among the Egyptians” and that: “They have preserved to this day records concerning each of these stars over an incredible number of years.”
So if the knowledge was handed down, and possibly the Giza legacy as well, it must be possible that the Egyptians of the Old Kingdom might have seen their predecessors as gods and built, or completed, the Giza plateau as a testament to them and their creation myth with Osiris and Isis.
The fact that there is such precision all around the site shows that they were built for some supreme reason, but to this day nobody knows how. Graham Hancock believes that there is evidence, not only here but in other parts of the world as well, both physical evidence and written evidence, that there was once an ancient civilization with an advanced knowledge of technology that was wiped out, probably around the end of the last Ice Age, perhaps the most famous of all being the lost continent of Atlantis.
Whatever the truth of it, if one looks at the precise positioning and construction of the pyramids, one cannot help but wonder, with a smile and tongue placed firmly in cheek, whether or not Von Daniken could have been right when he said that the earth was visited by intelligent aliens in the distant past, who helped our civilization along and taught us many things, but he couldn’t have been right ….. could he?
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